Wealth – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Government: Killing You With Their Compassion

“I warned you about compassion, Bruce.” – Batman Begins

The people who were pro-vaxx say that our jokes about being right are getting old. Unlike their kids.

It has long been a theme here at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise that compassion and charity are wonderful things. For me as an individual, there is something fundamentally uplifting about giving of my time, talent, or treasures to those that I can help. If done properly, this compassion and charity are amazing at lifting people up when they need it.

But the dark side is when someone is compassionate for you, with none of your involvement. This is a hallmark of the GloboLeftElite: they want to take your resources to give to other people. They then call that compassionate, and tell me I’m evil if I don’t buy into the concept.

In fact, if you look at people on the TradRight, we are far, far more compassionate with our actual time, talent and treasure than people on the GloboLeft. Donation statistics show it, and if you look at the people involved in actual charities and volunteer organizations (that don’t depend on other people’s money) they are overwhelmingly on the TradRight.

They don’t have blook banks in England, but they do have a liver pool.

But let’s talk about the Leech Class, a faction of the GloboLeftElite, who suck the cash and resources from all of us to support their “charitable” goals.

FEMA comes to mind due to the recent incident where DHS spokes-scrotum Alejandro Mayorkas. Only in the corrupt stages of a failing nation could a paperwork American (Majerkas) who was born of a Turkish father and a Romanian mother and who was born in Cuba be put in charge of immigration. Oh, and an anchor baby running for president.

But here we are.

This week, Madorkas said there wasn’t any money to help hurricane refugees. It turns out that under border-Czar Harris, the Biden/Harris Junta declared, proudly, that they were diverting FEMA funding to give to American “Blue” cities to support the teeming hordes of illegal aliens that they had invited and, in some cases, had flown into the United States (this is true, by the hundreds of thousands).

Is a short dog from New Mexico an Albu-corgi?

Yes. Biden/Harris created the crisis. Then, they pulled the cash from FEMA to give to their cronies to pay for these illegals. Where did the money go? In New York, shiftless illegals are living in four-star hotels with turndown service. They’re being provided with food at no cost.

And veterans have to fight for surgery. And the people of North Carolina are told that there’s no money for them.

But illegals, many criminal, and many not even remotely vetted, are living in luxury hotels.

This causes the prices of hotels to go up – FEMA is even paying for empty beds in these hotels. This causes the price of food to go up, you can’t add 10% population to a system and not expect inflation as more people fight for the same resources.

My urine is crystal clear. It’s 1080 pee.

But it’s compassionate. Compassionate to bring 20,000 Haitians into Springfield, Ohio. The Haitians have zero experience living in a civilized society, having been brought up in a country (that they created) where a good day is there’s enough mud to eat.

Springfield didn’t add 5,000 houses, so where are these aliens living?

One rumor has it that a local politician/landlord booted out his American tenants who were paying $1,000 or $1,500 a month in a house, and replaced them with 20 Haitians who pay $250 a month for a cot.

Hey, profit, right?

And housing costs go up in Springfield. I guess they can make it up since the dogcatcher no longer is needed to round up stray pets.

But I’m probably not considered compassionate when I bring this up.

Why have one man, when you can have 80 cats?

Today, I saw some brain-dead GloboLeftist X® (formerly known as a Tweet®) that we should be happy, because illegals keep the prices of vegetables down.

First, no, they eat them, too. Second, if the base value of your philosophy is to bring in cheap labor to pick strawberries, you might have the morals of a slaveholder, but just with other hands holding the whip.

The final insidious nature of what we’re seeing is that this is the year that our national deficit is equal to the size of our economy in the United States. The last time this happened was in World War II, and at least we got lots of tanks, fighters, bombers, aircraft carriers, nuclear bombs, and other cool stuff that I can’t buy on E-Bay®. Again, ATF should be a convenience store, not a place for LGBTQ people to scheme to take away guns owned by honest people.

No, we’re spending all this cash on . . . the acceptable compassion and charity based on the values of the GloboLeft. I saw part of a presentation today (on YouTube®) that FEMA put together so that the needs of people with non-standard sexual preferences were prioritized in the event of a disaster.

Prioritized. “Hey, that 10-year-old boy is hungry, but he’s white and was born male, so let’s focus on the thirty-year-old dude who thinks he’s a girl and wants to have sex with cats.” Yes. Emergencies don’t know skin color or sexual fetish, but FEMA sure does.

I stopped drinking, but then I bought a motivational poster and decided Wayne Gretzky was right: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

That’s bad enough, but they’re spending so much money on the groups that the GloboLeftElite want to shower with charity that it’s turning whatever capitalism that was left in the United States into a joke. Yes, people are still using cash to buy things, but the government is now buying more than the economy creates.

Mainly on charity. For people who are not me, and not you.

The final piece is that studies have shown that people who get this unearned charity often resent those who have more, and want the charity to give them the life of a Bill Gates, rather than just guaranteed food, housing, education, and medical care.

It’s so unfair! I still remember one woman who was a part of the first The Caravan of 10,000 people (what a dream, only 10,000!) was filmed after getting food aid consisting of refried beans, tortillas, vegetables, and a drink.

“This food isn’t fit for my dog!”

She was overweight.

Yup, that’s what governmental charity and compassion to the undeserving creates. Oh, and as a bonus it wrecks the currency and makes you and I poorer.

Wonder how that’ll turn out?

Economics Of War, 2024 Edition

“Well, it seems to me, sir, that God made me a fine instrument of warfare.” – Saving Private Ryan

I guess that there’s no thyme to tell all his stories.

War is one of the natural states of humanity. Although we don’t have records back before when Grug was living in Switzerland before hot cocoa was invented, we do have Ötzi, a guy who died about 5,300 years ago.

What we can tell about Ötzi is that, first, he’s dead. Secondly, we can tell that he was almost certainly murdered. By who? Don’t know, but it’s a pretty good bet that they guy who inflicted the wound died, too. Unless he was killed by Keith Richards, who we should probably put on a space ship because only he could live long enough to travel to another star.

Why would I say that the murderer was dead (unless it was Keith Richards)? The Yanomami people of the jungles of South America are as close as we have to “pre-civilization” people, and they killed themselves in at an astonishing rate. About half of their men died in combat until fairly recently.

Do your part to keep him immortal.

The economics of the Yanomami violence are pretty simple – a bow, an arrow, a stone knife, and an enemy. Heck, they don’t even have money, so I have no idea how they can get a rental car.

In one sense, we are the opposite of the Yanomami and Ötzi. We have been fortunate enough to live in the Good Times, when the horror of nuclear weapons has thus far lowered the percentage of combat deaths since 1945 to what I think could be a historic low. Why?

War is like football. Everyone comes out of the huddle, and then lines up. What the team on the offense is going to do? Who knows. It’s the job of the defense to respond and stop them, though using snipers is considered to be unsportsmanlike. Creating surprise is now pretty difficult, especially surprise on a large scale.

My buddy said he made a voodoo doll of me. I think he’s pulling my leg.

Let’s look at the Ukraine Conflict.

It started out as a grand, strategic move like a great World War II battle with tanks and bombs and planes. That did surprise the West (me included) because it seemed so out of place given the safe world we live in – as /pol/ would say: “nothing ever happens”. The initial gains of the Russians were large, but by the time the Ukrainians got their feet under them, the Russians had a logistical snarl and found out that rubber tires rot if you just leave them in the garage for thirty or forty years.

Oops.

The war went from swooping strategy to what exists now: a series of mainly small-scale actions where when an infantry squad breaks through, it sometimes makes the news even though a gain of 500 yards is a big deal. Why? Because large troop concentrations are visible from space. And anything visible from space is a target. Neither side can effectively generate the schwerpunkt or focal point of forces required to break through and create a war of movement.

Are doctors who graduate online called Google® Docs?

Nope. The latest development is that small squads of Russians are now using small, cheap ($2500 or less) dirt bikes to get to the opposing trenches fast, disposing of them as they storm the trenches. This helps them avoid the ever-present drone swarms. It’s like The Road Warrior, but with fewer shoulder pads.

And tank warfare? For now, at least, it’s gone. Just like bat is the “chicken of the cave” so is the tank now the “aircraft carrier of the land”. They’re mainly just expensive targets, and a variety of cope cages, turtle shells, and electronic jamming have been field-innovated to try to protect them.

But when you lose a tank, you lose a pretty big investment. Russia can only make (depending on your definition of tanks) about 1,500 a year, along with 3,000 other sorts of armored vehicles. A big chunk of those tanks are modernized and rebuilt Soviet-era tanks.

A Russian T-90 tank costs about $4.5 million. A drone with bomb costs less than a thousand dollars. One economist estimated that the Russian tank losses alone was about an $11 billion dollar hit.

You do the math.

Remember when the Biden/Harris administration shot down the Chinese balloon? At least they tried to stop some inflation.

Likewise, aircraft have had to stay well back because of surface to air missiles, of which the Russians produce a pretty good variety. The Russians claim (heavy emphasis on the word claim) their radars can easily see the F-35 and F-22. Claim. An F-35 costs about $109,000,000 per aircraft. An F-22 cannot be replaced – we lost the tooling. Fun fact: $109,000,000 in quarters would weigh five and a half million pounds, or the equivalent of the weight of pre-printed Biden ballots the Democrats had to dispose of discreetly after Joe dropped out.

As of January, 2024, we have 234 operational F-35s. We have 187 F-22s. And, yes, those babies can unleash a lot of havoc in short order, but missiles are cheap, and if it takes dozens to knock one of our fighters down, it’s dollars ahead. And, let’s be clear: they’re not always flying. The US response to the Me-262 wasn’t to try to dogfight a German jet with a Yankee prop, nope, our aces hung around the German air bases and shot them as they had to land.

Is a boomerang their weapon of choice?

Every weapon has a weakness, and rarely can those weaknesses be overcome by papering them over with hundred-dollar bills. But just as the object of making weapons has gotten bigger and bigger, our ability to fight a World War II style war has gone to zero. One anecdote is that a captured German fighter pilot was bragging about shooting up a large quantity of American planes on the ground at an airbase. Being at the airbase, the US officer took him outside and noted, “They’ve already been replaced.”

The German reportedly said, after a heavy sigh, “And that is why we are losing.” That, and my great-grandfather, Johan von Wilder, who was responsible for downing five German fighters by himself. Worst mechanic in the Luftwaffe.

The trend, though, is less $100 million fighters, but now seems to be looking towards large numbers of inexpensive, nearly disposable weapons that are cheap, lots of missiles that cost a few million bucks, and fewer “so expensive it’s silly” systems, except for those that give the really important part of the battle: information – satellites and radar and the like.

But for all of that, the goal in war seems to have changed. Rather than breaking stuff and killing people, the goal is more based on long-term fights whose goal is to cause the enemy to become unstable to topple their own leadership for someone more favorable. I’m betting this is really a legacy of the Cold War.

I put my desk in the elevator. I hope it takes my career to a whole new level.

I don’t think that we’re in any shape to fight an actual war against a determined opponent in a conventional sense for longer than a month or two, and wholly incapable of fighting in an area where we don’t have uncontested air dominance. From an industrial standpoint, our ability to make more stuff isn’t serious: outside of small arms and helmet and clothing, I’m not sure that there’s a weapons system that we could make without the help of overseas firms for critical items.

We just don’t make it here anymore, and building the basic industries to allow us to do so will take decades and trillions of dollars in capital invested. I think we’ve reached the point where our primary weapon is financial. There’s a precedent that situation can last a long time – the Byzantine Empire lasted in one form or another for over 1,000 years.

The Byzantine Empire had a gold stash that would make Scrooge McDuck® do whatever it is that ducks do when they’re happy, however. We don’t. Our wealth is based on paper and mathematics, and can move across borders in milliseconds (megafarads if you want an SI unit).

What would Ötzi’s people think about that? I don’t really know. I guess we’ll have to ask Keith Richards.

Alaska, Reparations, Bad Economics, And Football

“If nobody comes down and buys a car from me in the next hour, I’m gonna club this baby seal.” – UHF

Karl Marx never finished college, either. It was a class conflict.

When we lived in Alaska, one of the nicest things about living there was that we unplugged. Essentially, in Alaska we tuned out things that were happening “Outside”.

While Outside might conjure up images of John Wilder shivering in a cold car as the heater slowly went from blowing negative 55°F (8,321 Kelvin) air to 20°F (2.54 centimeters) air, you’d be right. But to an Alaskan, Outside meant any place that wasn’t Alaska.

The consequences of this mindset were very relaxing. National politics down in the lower 48 is a constant buzz in the background, but in Alaska, almost all of the news was local news – who had seen a brown bear, when the cat show was, and where the burning of Ronald McDonald™ in effigy to celebrate Midwinter’s Eve was scheduled to be. The only time national politics showed up in the news was when it had a direct impact on Alaskans, like drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

I hear this grizzly got fired – he was only doing the bear minimum.

ANWR has been a controversy since the 1970s, but it certainly isn’t much of a controversy with Alaskans – they’re in favor of it since oil drilling in the state literally put money into the pockets of local citizens. The only people who had much opposition were the native tribes that didn’t benefit directly and a very small minority of granola crunching hippies who we’d stake out as bear and mosquito bait in summer. Remember Alaska’s motto: “Step off of the tour bus, and into the food chain”.

As I recall, drilling in ANWR was so popular in Alaska that the movement against drilling in ANWR was based in Seattle so the activists weren’t sacrificed to the wolves.

Yup, almost all of the opposition to drilling was from people from Outside.

The perspective I got from living in Alaska, though, was that ANWR was just a political football. The GloboLeftElite loved ANWR because they used it as a perennial fundraising tool: give us money or evil people will cover this baby seal in oil and then not let the Haitians eat it, which is their right as Haitians and is perfectly normal, you know.

But I didn’t do it on porpoise.

It’s still that way to this day. No, not Haitians eating crude-covered seals, but drilling in ANWR.

The answer, despite being approved in 2017 or so?

No, not today. The GloboLeft keeps putting the ball down, and as Charlie Brown (AKA, Conoco©) gets ready to drill, the GloboLeft pulls the football out of the way at the last minute. It’s not exaggeration to say that this has happened literally fifty times since I’ve been alive. People in Alaska already know the score. Conoco™ is never gonna be allowed to kick that football.

The same thing is true with reparations.

Reparations are a really hideous joke on the black community, because they play off of the very worst of emotions – greed and victimhood. First, who doesn’t want someone else to provide them with all the money they could ever want? I mean, my hand would be among the first up, though I do know that there’s something corrosive to the soul about taking money I haven’t earned from people who haven’t wronged me, but, hey, free money.

The inventor of autocorrect died. The funnel will be helped tomato.

The more pernicious part of the reparations deal is that it establishes a narrative of victimhood and implies helplessness. Be a single mother with six kids by five different baby daddies? It’s the fault of slavery. Be convicted of seventeen felonies, be released, and then finally have to go to jail for life because no one stopped you from killing someone? It’s the fault of 300 years of systemic oppression.

Yup, and this isn’t an exaggeration. And, I guess they’ve got a point. Look at how oppressed Barack Obama was in being forced to be president. It even turned his hair white!

But reparations will solve literally everything, every problem. And let’s ignore pesky and inconvenient facts like the crime rates among blacks, and the relative success of nearly every other minority group in the nation except blacks. Oh, and we should look at how wonderful it has been for native Americans, because we gave them reparations in the form of reservations and unlimited Bureau of Indian Affairs welfare. Like communism, I’m sure it would work next time.

But, for a second, let’s pretend that if we gave out reparations, people would finally shut up. Think that would work?

No. I recall one ludicrous proposal (California, I believe) that would have given black people something like $3,000,000 each. The response? “It’s a good start, but it’s not enough.”

This is Dr. Evil level of economic understanding . . . .

What’s enough? Nothing is enough. There is absolutely no amount that will ever be seen to be enough, because there has been a force-feeding of victimhood for decades into the black community, and to say, “Okay, white guys, we’re even now,” would be contradictory to every bit of victimhood that they rely on to get them through the day. From personal experience in dealing with victims, they relish the pity, and will do absolutely anything to hold on to their victim status.

Also, there is no way that black people will ever get the sky-high sorts of compensation that they’re looking for (millions of dollars in cash, freedom from taxes, a free house, and $70,000 a year for 80 years was one proposal). Perhaps they might get another MLK, Jr. Street or a George Floyd Square, but they’ve already got two national holidays plus Kwanza.

Whatever Kwanza is.

Teach your children about Kwanza in a responsible manner.

No, just like ANWR was a football to money-farm GloboLeft-leaning women with too much disposable income who wanted to virtue signal that Haitians should be allowed to eat all the seal meat they wanted, reparations are a mechanism to vote-farm the black community for whoever promises them the best package that they’re never going to get.

And even that won’t eliminate the “economic understanding gap”.

I’d make a comment here about the ludicrousness of printing another few trillion dollars and then just giving it away as a cure to inflation, but since we’ve long since ceased being a serious nation in any respect, I’ll skip it. Perhaps we’re hoping to spend ourselves into the relative economic prosperity of, say, Spain or Mauritania, where they still have tens of thousands of slaves.

Dang, I shouldn’t have mentioned that, since now the Mauritanians will want reparations from the United States for slavery since I’m sure that somehow the United States is responsible for blacks enslaving blacks 4,017 miles (16 kilograms) away from the United States.

ANWR will likely never be drilled, and black people will likely never get more than a token sort of reparations. And that’s fair, because no living black person was ever subject to legal slavery in the United States, though now we do have unpaid internships. At charities. That don’t want us to drill in ANWR.

I guess you could say the drilling system is rigged.

Volcanoes, The Global Warming Scam, And Energy

“Remember when you could just throw a girl into a volcano?” – The Cabin in the Woods

Did you know that you can put molten lava in your mouth? I mean, only once, but still.

I know we there is a lot of fretting about the current political situation, which may well lead to a dictatorship in the United States (at least temporarily) and that bothers some people, I guess, but thrills others. As Elon Musk noted, “’When did Rage Against The Machine’ become ‘Rage For The Machine’?”

Outside of the impending dictatorship, which, I know, is like saying, “But aside from not knowing where you were, how did the debate go, Mr. Biden?” I think an even bigger problem faced by humanity is that of energy.

Since the Industrial Revolution, humanity has become more and more dependent upon vast amounts of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels. Even if you’re an abiotic oil enjoyer, the problem is resource replenishment time, which is certainly at least in the thousands of years timeframe except in certain cases that would be dependent on very specific conditions. If it’s all dead plants and stuff, that puts recharge rates in the millions of years timeframe.

This is important because, no matter how you slice it, energy is freedom.

And another scientist came up with a unified theory of seatbelts. He said, “It just clicked.”

The attack on freedom through energy has been ongoing for decades. I think, deep down, those of the GloboLeftElite who love control (which is all of them) aren’t happy when people have freedom. Since I’ve observed an inverse relationship between the amount of freedom in the world and the price of energy, the powers that be love Global Warming®.

No, they aren’t really excited about Global Warming™, they’re excited about the amount of control that it allows them to wield over people. How Dare You Herself admits (see below) that her goal is to destroy all of capitalism. Now, if that’s her goal, why is she funded by capitalist George Soros? It’s odd that Global Warming gets so much of the attention of huge power users like Microsoft® and that those that tout the solution create more sweet, sweet carbon dioxide than Poland.

If Greta Thunberg could rearrange all the letters in her name, that would be great. (Meme as found.)

The concern about Global Warming® isn’t because the GloboLeftistElite love humanity, in fact it’s quite the opposite: they despise humanity and want to watch it suffer.

That being said, even an old, crusty skeptic like myself noted that it was pretty warm in 2023, so I wondered why that would be. Of course, the answer was right in front of my face the whole time, but it took a reminder in the form of a story emailed by Ricky to me to jar the old grey matter enough to recall.

In January of 2022, the volcano Tonga erupted. Now, if you’re going to have a volcano, a good name for it is in order, one that implies that when it erupts it destroyed an entire ancient alien civilization. Mount St. Helens does not fit the bill – it’s “meh” tier at best. Mount Pinatubo is better. But better yet? Tonga, which is more formally known as Hunga Tonga-Hunga, meets that criteria since you could yell “Hunga Tonga-Hunga” at anyone in an elevator and they’d know you were one serious dude. Try it, you’ll see what I mean.

When Godzilla® isn’t destroying cities, I hear he has a business flipping houses.

Regardless, in August of 2022, NASA opined that Tonga’s eruption had launched enough water high into the stratosphere to increase the volume of water there by 10%. Water is, of course, the most potent greenhouse gas by volume. This excludes my deodorant, which is specifically designed to keep me covered in baby oil and smelling like hydrocarbons and also eliminate pesky ozone in the upper atmosphere. It’s a three-in-one product.

Hunga Tonga-Hunga shot the largest amount of water vapor added to the stratosphere that men who record such things have ever recorded. To double the impact, when a volcano normally blows, in addition to water vapor, it often blasts particulates into the atmosphere that block and reflect part of the Sun’s light back into space, leading to a wee bit of net cooling.

I was shocked to find out that six out of seven dwarves aren’t Happy®.

But not Hunga Tonga-Hunga. It was, in fact, perfectly situated to maximize water output and minimize particulate output. And it was just shallow enough to zap out all that water, but not so deep so that the water would be absorbed by the deep water above it. Thus? A warm year.

And, unless Dr. Evil caused this via volcano an unsanctioned experiment in Evil Science®, mankind was 100% off the hook for this, as mankind has likewise done very little during our lifetimes to make the climate warmer. Yes, all the agriculture has an impact, but people gotta eat.

But this is still very, very different than the alarmists indicate. There will be more hurricanes. Oops, did we say more? We meant there will be fewer hurricanes. And it might cause things to get cooler.

In short, Global Warming™ is whatever will make you scared and turn you to full autocratic communism.

The problem with Global Warming® is that it’s distracting us from the real problem: we need energy.

Yes, I’m in favor of Clean™ energy, but it has to make thermodynamic sense – we have to get more energy out of the system than we spend making the energy, which is not the case with most renewables (ethanol, biodiesel, I’m looking at you). Global Warming© is a distraction, and is moving capital needed to create an energy secure future into corrupt projects that loot tax dollars to give to political cronies that are net energy sinks.

I guess it’s a Nguyen-Nguyen situation.

But, hey, I said energy is freedom, and if they don’t want energy, they don’t want us to have freedom.

At least they’re making George Soros happy.

Cold AC, Hot Showers, And Bad Economics

“Baseball. Cold showers. Margaret Thatcher naked on a cold day.” – Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery

Also, a home DNA testing kit is apparently a poor baby shower gift.

It has been years since The Mrs. and I fought over setting the thermostat. In summer, we both like it cold, and in winter, we both like it cold.

However, it has been much more of a recent battle on the thermostat with the kids. Partially this is because they fundamentally didn’t know how the heater or air conditioner worked: at our house, the unit is either on, or it’s off.

That’s probably the case at your house, too unless you have a fancy system. The way most air conditioners work is that, when turned on, they’re at their maximum output. Which is also their minimum output. My air conditioner is never partly on – it’s either on or it’s off. Period.

What this means is that if I want the room to be 70°F (3 milli-Coulombs) and you turn it to 62°F, it won’t get colder faster. Instead, it’ll keep plowing down until it reaches 62°F (1.2 picoparsecs/square meter) if that’s a temperature that it can possibly reach. Some days it gets hot here in Modern Mayberry, and the AC does just stay on, cooling as best as it can.

If I started an air conditioning repair business for congress, I’d call it AC/DC.

Regardless, when that would happen I would walk into a room on a day where it was 98°F (33mega electron Volts) outside and see my family huddled under blankets while frost began to form on the inside of the house because Pugsley wanted it colder, faster and set the thermostat to “freezer”.

The reason this happens is because of the timing of the feedback – the temperature of the house doesn’t immediately change, so the reaction of someone who doesn’t understand the system and wants immediate gratification is to keep cranking the dial downward. As a dad, all I can think is, “Man, that isn’t cool.”

After the first brush with a too hot or too cold shower, we quickly absorb the feedback loop that after turning the shower in, we have to wait for the water to change, and if we move the lever too far to the “hot” side because the water is cold at the start, unpleasant things will happen.

That’s a fairly quick loop and sudden cold or hot is a fairly quick teacher.

I think step five is the hardest.

But a much longer loop would be certain parts of our economy. Sure, if the Fed® changes the interest rate, immediately interest rates change across the country because the Fed™ artificially drives those rates. So, that’s like your shower, except the Fed© asks us to assume the position so it can use that interest rate to compound us.

Other things, though, by nature have a much longer response time. Sure, the price of oil cratering can immediately send ten thousand fracking workers to the unemployment line, which is an immediate response. But soaring oil prices?

Responding to those requires time and investment. First, suitable land for drilling has to be acquired, along with permits and leases. After that, a rig has to be found, and a crew has to be found for the rig, and half of the people that used to be on it won’t go back because they’re tired of the 120 hours this week and zero hours a week for months after the price of oil goes to $40 a barrel.

Then, pipe is needed. And to move it, trucks, truck drivers, pipelines, et cetera. This takes years to build – Exxon® once noted that their projects are built on multi-decade scales. That’s a slow change, and often Exxon™ plods along in down years because they know that prices will eventually head back up.

The reason Saudi Arabia has so much money isn’t the crude oil sales, they just don’t let their women spend it.

Politicians, however are impatient, since voters are impatient, and so politicians want results. Now. Explaining that having a fracking ban will decrease the amount of oil available which, in turn, will raise prices is beyond the understanding of the average GloboLeftist politician.

The reason is that they have no fundamental understanding of how our economy works and where those segments of the economy with a time delay are located. They simply think, “We’ll mandate that cars get 250 miles per gallon and are so safe that a fusion bomb ignited next to one will only scratch the paint.”

I mean, it’s worth it if it saves even one life, right?

The fact that these mandates are beyond the bounds of thermodynamics doesn’t matter to them. They don’t understand what thermodynamics is, and I can barely imagine trying to explain it to a GloboLeftist politician:

John Wilder: “Okay, we’re going to discuss entropy, which is the idea that systems go from a state of order to a state of disorder. With me?”

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez: “Huh? Why are you in my house at midnight?”

JW: “Let me try a different approach. How many pairs of shoes do you have, Ms. Cortez?”

AOC: “Oh, like 40 or 50?”

JW: “Good. Now, what’s the worst thing about having 40 or 50 pairs of shoes?”

AOC: “I don’t know? That they smell like my feet?”

JW: “Well . . . . okay. But is it hard to keep them organized?”

AOC: “OH! Totally! I mean, l generally just keep them in a pile in the guest bedroom, but that makes them hard to find when I need to go to work.”

JW: “Right! The amount of disorder increases!”

AOC: “Oh, I get it!!! Beer must be really bad for entropy, because when I was a bartender people would get drunk and disorderly all the time!”

JW: “And let’s not talk about your shower, because I’m pretty sure that with your housekeeping skills and the length of your hair, the drain probably looks like you shave wookies® in there. Besides do you know how an air conditioner works?”

AOC: “In this house, we’re environmentally conscious – no air conditioner. Instead? Only Fans®.”

I hear wookie® steaks are often Chewie.

Politicians make decisions on a regular basis that have very few short-term impacts, but that may have economically disastrous long-term impacts.

Longer term decisions include:

tax policy which drives investment decisions and can kill industries,
Social Security and Medicare, in which cash is taken, spent, and then the next generation is saddled with the repayment obligations,
immigration policy, which changes the population and workforce over decades,
tariffs, which determine winners and losers, and
many other things that you or I could name if we just spent 10 minutes thinking about it.

Each of these has a feedback loop that’s measured in decades. The demise of tariffs and replacement with income tax, for instance, gradually resulted in the industrial might of the United States being dismantled and shipped overseas where labor was cheaper.

I’d make a joke about offshore drilling, but many of those are crude.

Now, we don’t know how to make those things anymore, all because of long feedback loops.

But since I’ve learned about Global Warming, I’ve decided to keep my air conditioning on all the time. I know I can’t save the planet all by myself, but I’ll do my best.

How Invaders Are Looting Your 401k

“The French have just invaded.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I guess the Mongol Empire had its pros and Khans.

On Monday’s post I gave an example of propaganda, and how it is used to manipulate public opinion. The example I chose was the phrase “Diversity is our Strength™” which, when viewed from the standpoint of what diversity really gives us, is Orwellian doublespeak. Diversity causes problems, so much so that journalist Michael Yon has started calling them what might be more apt: invaders.

One of the problems it causes is related to resources. While not every invader (legal or illegal) is a net cost to the country, most are. A recent study by the House Homeland Security Commission (LINK) showed that immigrants (just the illegal variety) cost taxpayers at least $720 billion since Biden took office, and have contributed no more than $120 billion in taxes at all levels, for a net loss of $600 billion dollars.

That’s a huge tax burden, because it assumes that they individual taxpayer is picking up the cost. So, what kind of costs are in this number?

Housing
Welfare
Schools
Police
Transport
Impacts on Private Property on the Border

If you assume only 10,000,000 invaders, well, that’s a stunning $60,000 per invader, or for a familia of four, nearly a quarter million dollars. This gives the term “Anchor Baby” a new meaning, since they are literally anchors on our economy, each one holding us back to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a net negative lifetime cost that could be in the millions.

If you pronounced her name as “Pamela with a K” would that mean we’d have to call her Pamalak?

But we know the answer of how many invaders are devastating our country is higher, and the cost is much higher than the $720,000,000,000 over four years. On one side, this money is going to support the invaders. But this is money that should have been spent on our elderly, our veterans, our infrastructure, and our children. Nearly every single invader, man, woman, or child, is making the Unites States a poorer nation and is taking from those heritage Americans who have the greatest needs.

Of course, you’re saying, John Wilder, what happened to your compassion for your fellow man? It’s not compassion at all when all of this is being done against the consent of the vast majority of Americans. How mad are Americans at this? Kamala Harris is now saying she wants to build a wall.

I’m afraid to visit Turkey or China. Too many red flags.

As I have maintained again and again, it is not charity if it is forced, rather, it is GloboLeftists using the resources of the country to pay for this invasion. As James O’Keefe found out, most of the “private” funds used to assist invaders are actually recycled government grants from places like the Department of State, so even the “private” funds are actually resources looted from you and I. With no input, with no choice.

What’s Ukraine’s biggest import? Russian artillery shells.

That’s not charity, or if it is charity, it’s surprise charity like a mugging is a surprise donation or rape is surprise sex.

Here are more costs that the invaders force upon Americans:

Increased Housing Cost: Pop quiz – if 20,000,000 invaders cross a border, how many houses will they consume? If they live 18 to a house, does that lower or raise housing cost? If we build 3,000,000 more houses for them, does that raise or lower the cost of building supplies?
Lowered Wages: Supply and demand figures in again here. The derivation of this proof is left to the reader.
Increased Crime: It costs $1.6 billion just for federal costs to house invaders in prison annually. States house even more, so who knows what the overall total is. This total isn’t included in the report’s number, and doesn’t include the value of stolen property and destroyed lives caused by invaders.
School Resource Increase: The 5.1 million children of the invaders cost more than heritage Americans. Why? They often speak little English, and that costs, at least, 15% more. But what about the social friction from invaders with American students? What about the lost learning opportunities?

In the above list, again, there are missing externalities that are caused by a significant invader class – like needs for new laws, the impact of a large law evading class (48% of New York City transit riders don’t pay any fare), and the loss of societal cohesion. As Sadiq Khan, invader anchor baby mayor of London said: terror attacks are “part and parcel of living in a big city.”

I guess terrorism is part of the strength that diversity brings us?

Does it bother anyone besides me that hundreds of thousands of “other” people are invading?

In 2019 the Wilder family was taking a long trip through the Great American West. It was probably around 1AM. We were in the space where there might have been two FM channels on the entire dial. One was an NPR®/college station, so I tuned to that one.

The program was about people from other countries and cultures coming to America and the difficulties that they had in assimilation. Okay, I’ll listen. It turned out that on this particular episode, the focus was on invaders with really heavy accents. What I learned that if you, a heritage American, had difficulty understanding someone speaking broken English in a very heavy accent, the problem, citizen, is that you’re a bad person. You’re the problem.

Yes. I’m not making this up. They actually put this on the air. Now, I don’t know about you, but if not being able to comprehend someone whose grasp of the English language is as crisp as Kamala Harris’ grasp on sobriety is racist, well, I’m a racist. And so, then, are you.

I hear summer in Finland is the best day of the year.

That’s the other facet of the loss of social cohesion: in every instance, the culture of the Americans who built the country is supposed to give way to every other culture. If it’s culturally allowed for people to be rude, pushy, and insulting in their country, well, take your Midwestern manners and deal with it. But if you’re rude, pushy, and insulting, well, that makes you a bigot.

It’s a no-win situation.

Like the invaders. What’s the real cost? I’d guess no less than double the official number, and possibly triple when you look at the inflationary pressures put on our systems by the invaders. But what’s $2 trillion when you’re trying to “fundamentally transform America” like Obama promised?

I personally wish the invaders no ill will. Given the nearly trillion-dollar basket of free stuff, almost anyone would come from the places they live, yet as they cross the border, they carried the flags of their homes, because the only reason they’re here is for the stuff. For the most part, they hold no allegiance to the United States. This is the opposite of previous waves of immigrants, who either contributed or died, since fed.gov didn’t pour out trillions to help Uncle Hans from the Netherlands.

The cumulative economic impact of the collapse of our immigration system may be devastating at a time when the economic situation of the United States in particular and the West in general can least absorb it.

But at least we know that peace is war, and diversity is our strength.

Will Great Britain Rise Again?

“They chose to murder and steal.” – The Dark Knight

Notes: All memes are as found, and no podcast tomorrow – The Mrs. has to catch some sleep.

Alice Smith is a reciprocal follow on X®. She’s the great-great-great-granddaughter of Scottish economist Adam Smith, and is a good person to follow (@TheAliceSmith) if you’re already following the most important account on X™, @wilderbyfar. She’s from the UK, and had the absolutely best post I’ve seen on the current sickness that’s destroying the West:

Doesn’t that say it all?

Immigration to the West (Europe plus the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) has nothing to do with freedom or our culture for most immigrants. It’s merely about the stuff.

The sickness?

It’s from the GloboLeftElite attempting to brainwash the world into thinking that:

There is no difference between a man and a woman,
Anyone can be a man or a woman,
There are no intrinsic differences between races and ethnicities,
No one can pretend to be a different race unless it’s been okayed in advance even though all races are the same,
White people should somehow feel shame for their race even though all races are the same,
There is no difference between people of differing I.Q.,
People who are wealthy merely “won a lottery”, and,
Every culture is valid.

It’s the last one that we should talk about right now.

I’m not particularly interested in going on a culture jihad, so, perhaps all cultures are “valid.” I suppose, if cannibal, rape-y, stone age tribes are your thing, I guess you could call it valid.

But all cultures are certainly not equal in things like freedom, justice, morality, and economic output.

Here, for centuries, the West has been far ahead of the world. Europe was free-ish (feudalistically speaking) since the Black Death, which greatly changed the relationship between serf and local lord.

And in a continent that was freer than any in the world, there was a place that was freer yet: Great Britain. Great Britain had a really big advantage: after the year 1066, it really was never invaded by a external enemy army. Sure, you could make a case the culture has been subverted by outside forces (and I will below) but not by force of arms.

This isolation as an island nestled right next to Europe allowed a strange development – yeoman farmers who were encouraged to take up the longbow and become soldiers so that while the English lost land in France, there was never a doubt about them losing England. The Scotts in the north were much the same, being hard-headed independent herders, they had to be strong, and were used to fighting both against and with other Scotts as well as the English. And, yes, that’s a complement. (I’m partially Scot myself).

This isolation of individually armed individuals set up an independent society with no safety nets. If you were too poor, stupid, or drunk to make enough money to live, you died. If your lord decided he wanted something out of line, well, your +3 longbow could outrank his +1 armor at a distance. As a result, Britain’s I.Q. rose over the course of centuries because the culture itself winnowed out stupid people, yet the strong, stubborn sense of independence remained.

Even the song “Rule, Britannia!” has the following lyrics:

“Rule, Britannia! rule the waves;
“Britons never will be slaves.”

This is a very, very different culture than that of the current people who opened the floodgates to Great Britain – they were unabashedly Globalist and Leftist, hated everything that Great Britain stood for, and were more than willing to start the migration into Great Britain. I’d be lying to say that none of them pulled their weight – in some cases Britain got some of the best from their home countries, hence the term “brain drain”, but this was the exception rather than the norm. Most of the immigrants to the UK have been a net negative to the country.

But no outside army ever conquered Britain. Except the army of beggars that have invaded it have done something that no one thought possible – united the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland – against the onslaught. What does it take to get people who have been fighting each other for centuries to hold hands, literally, and march together?

Whatever it is, it sounds Evil to me.

And it is. Evil. Brought directly to the shores of Great Britain by GloboLeftists in misguided altruism and the GloboLeftistElite out of a calculated bid to displace inconvenient people who don’t want to be replaced.

There reaches a point where something so awful happens that a culture revolts: it says, “That’s enough.” In the United States for transgender acceptance, it was the murder of six children by a trans killer so crazed that they still won’t release her manifesto. That was enough. The GloboLeftistElite wanted to try to hide it (see how autocomplete will try to take you to murders of transgenders, but not murders by transgenders). These murders is why Bud Light™ is Bud Deadtome© for so many consumers.

It appears that the United Kingdom (Great Britain plus Northern Ireland) has had enough of murderous vultures in their society. The cause? The murder of three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9 at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in a town called Southport. By knife. By a 17-year-old that had no place being in the United Kingdom in the first place.

English people had watched as rape gangs of organized sexual assault on at minimum 1400 young women that was denied to even exist in Rotherham because the victims were mainly white and the perpetrators were of privileged minority status – Pakistani, mostly.

This was covered up at a national level. Filing cabinets full of the data on the case mysteriously disappeared. That was never solved.

But would it matter? Probably not:

Some of those convicted (many weren’t even tried) got as little as 2 years. Britons can get more time for being mean with words.

Oh, and the last one? She was posting Bible verses.

That set the situation, along with other, repeated, ongoing murders and rapes by people not fit to live in any sort of civilized society. These three final murders were enough.

The response of the Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, was exactly what you would expect from a member of the GloboLeftElite: he blamed the people pushing back against unrestrained and unrestricted illegals swarming the United Kingdom. And if you complained online, even if you were more likely to be arrested than the illegals swarming the streets with swords and machetes.

They’re now calling him “two-tier Keir”, since his justice has two tiers: a harsh one for actual English, Scots, Welsh, and Irish and one where all acts by any minority are ignored. Probably because Starmer hates his own people, because he hates himself.

I guess that’s easier.

The United Kingdom has found a point where they say, No More.

This is coming soon to a country near you.

Oh, and if they offer the type of deal below? We should take it. Because it’s not about the stuff.

At all.

Incompetence Can Be Fatal, But It’s Always Expensive

“You know what doesn’t look good? A story about gross incompetence.” – American Hustle

My garden shears will never be obsolete, after all, it’s cutting-hedge technology.

My science teacher in high school, who I’ll call “Mr. Johnson” (not his real name except that was totally his real name) often lectured us on things entirely unrelated to science. It wasn’t a doctrine he was trying to instill us with, it was merely that he was old enough and close enough to retirement that he really didn’t give a damn about 90% of the class. I don’t think that he even cared if we listened, since he was only talking to 10% of us anyway.

You either got him or you didn’t.

One of his random asides was about the word “crisis”. Mr. Johnson hated the use of the word crisis except to refer to a single moment in time. His definition was that the crisis was a moment – the Cuban Missile Crisis when everyone was poised to push the button, and yet backed away from world condemning us to live in a world where The View exists.

Regardless of Mr. Johnson’s definition, I think we’re in the midst of a crisis.

Why do I think this stage would smell of old kitty litter and stale chardonnay?

Datapoint:

Crowdstrike™

The Crowdstrike© software incident from just two weeks ago brought down at least 8.5 million computer systems, and brought them down in such a way that they couldn’t restart. To make it even better, once a fix was found, it had to be fixed computer by computer. Why? Because they didn’t test the patch.

Right now, the estimate is that this caused at least $10 billion in financial losses, though a communist would tell you that it was a good thing since all of those computer techs had something to do other than play Tetris™ and Minesweeper© while listening to Dan Fogelberg.

I think Boeing® should adopt a “no slippers” policy.

Datapoint:

The Starliner® is anything but, more resembling a large orbiting bucket filled with cash than a spacecraft, it sits, useless, stuck against the side of the ISS. If it were the only failure to Boeing’s©, name, that would be one thing, but it’s not. Their planes regularly either fall from the sky due to poor programming kludges, or have random spontaneous partial disassembly of their planes in flight due to spotty manufacturing quality control.

Boeing™ had a pretty good reputation for decades as a company that took engineering seriously – the name of the Boeing® 707 was rumored to be an engineering joke – it’s one over the square root of two. It kept showing up in their calculations, so they decided that was a good omen for naming their (then) flagship airliner. In reality, it sounds like it was just a product number, with the 7 series being jets, and they liked the sound of the end 7.

Regardless, they didn’t call it a “Dreamliner™”.

NASA refuses to send a giant duck into outer space – they say the bill would be astronomical.

Datapoint:

NASA

I loved NASA when I was a kid. They were generally seen as a triumph of competence and coolness under pressure. They did real engineering, and also were great at managing the integration of multiple complex systems in a manner where they worked pretty well, Apollos 1 and 13 notwithstanding.

They literally wrote the book on getting man to the Moon using the very limits of known technology at the time. Getting to the Moon was so hard that it was barely in our grasp, yet they did it, time and time again. They even managed to get the ISS built.

But now? Barrack Obama stated that the primary goal of NASA was Moslem outreach. During the eclipse of 2017, they even spent NASA resources to make a Braille book about eclipses. What was that meant to do, taunt the blind kids? And, yes, the Webb Space Telescope has been pretty cool. But the Space Launch System costs about $4.1 billion per launch, and each launch takes about six months.

I was okay after I figured out alcohol could kill COVID.

Datapoint:

COVID-19

Every aspect of the response to COVID-19 was horrific from an economic and medical standpoint. From an economic standpoint, the government response was to blindly throw as much cash in as many places as possible as quickly as that could. This was a bipartisan effort.

The panic and hypocrisy weren’t limited to the economic response, no. The medical response was just as inept, as Fauci now admits he just made things up as some sort of medical theater. Ventilators appear to have killed more people than they saved. The abomination of the “Vaxx” has led to an excess mortality that many reckon has a body count higher than COVID itself. I, for one, really hope that everyone who took the Vaxx® recovers, but can we forget a government and its accomplices who tried (and in many cases, succeeded in forcing people to take it?

I can’t, though the GloboLeftElite surely hope you forget. But remember, there are no refunds.

I was wondering if this was going to be too dark, but then I realized it’s all under two and a half miles of water, so of course it’s going to be dark.

Datapoint:

The Titan Submersible

In one sense, I certainly admire the guts that it took to build a submarine from a pressure hull and off-the-shelf parts like an X-Box™ controller, but the hubris of the owner remains: the CEO didn’t “hire 50-year-old white guys” because they weren’t “inspirational”. I wonder if we would have made it to orbit if Von Braun had a similar philosophy?

Well, I guess he paid the ultimate price for his hubris and disregarding competence in favor of the “inspirational” stories. Most CEOs just lose their shareholder’s money, like Disney™, which I could write an entire post on.

The crisis we face is one where we’ve lost the capacity for competence and will to achieve that we had as recently as the 1960s even as our systems grow far more complex. Again, one software update cost $10,000,000,000, NASA doesn’t produce spaceships that can fly with any reliability, and Boeing™ went from making some of the most reliable airplanes in the world by the thousands to a company that survives on government contracts, accounting errors, and inertia.

Maybe, though, this crisis will do what the Cuban Missile Crisis couldn’t do:

Free us from The View. Wonder if they’d like a trip to the Titanic?

Gen X, Gen Z, And The Crisis Of The Soul

“And then we’ll all have a Christening for Rosemary’s baby.” – Last Action Hero

They call me “The Exorcist” at the liquor store. After I leave, all the spirits are gone.

The kids today have a lot of challenges. Generation Z and Generation Alpha have had a very significantly different childhood than most people reading this post.

For me growing up as a Gen X kid, we were very, very free. I regularly came home to an empty house when I was in kindergarten. The first time I let myself into my house with my own key, I was in third grade. The first time I stayed overnight by myself (in winter, no less) I was in fourth or fifth grade. By the time I was in high school I didn’t even see a parent three or four nights a week most weeks since I was going to school in an apartment about fifty miles from Wilder Mountain.

I certainly didn’t raise myself, but Gen X was pretty free range. We left the house when we got up, and got home, dirty, muddy, and sunburned when the photodetector turned the yard light on because that was Ma Wilder’s definition of ‘dark’ in the ‘be home by dark’ direction.

Life is like a warranty – it runs out at the worst time possible.

I certainly used several of my free hours to do things that were things my warning label said not to do, and certainly would have voided my manufacturer’s warranty had I goofed up.

We were also pretty awful to each other, at least in middle school. I have long maintained that kids in middle school are the worst people on the planet: they have learned how to bully people by digging at their deepest insecurities, but they haven’t learned enough empathy to not do that. See? Absolute worst people on the planet. I know, I was one of them.

I won’t dwell much on my specifics for this post – this isn’t about me, but about a generation that was given great independence from the start. Many, many generations had it far worse than Gen X, since at no point when I was 8 did Pa Wilder seriously mention selling me off to the mines to move explosives so that valuable miners wouldn’t be injured. Again, he may have mentioned it, but not seriously.

You’d think that being the first generation born after the pill was invented and abortion was entered into the sacraments of the Left, that Gen X would have been the most wanted generation in history.

No, not really.

What’s Gump’s password? 1Forest1.

Many parents that were often more interested in themselves during the “Me” decade of the 1970s. In fact, Gen X was born at the intersection on a great societal upheaval of Woman’s Lib convincing women they didn’t want to be mothers. Or wives. That was also the beginning of the cult of the no-fault divorce as well.

Society’s feelings are often transmitted in the media, and let’s look at the roster of Gen X villains:

The baby from Rosemary’s Baby was a Gen X baby.
So was Damien from The Omen
So was Regan The Exorcist.
Although Michael Myers from Halloween was technically a Boomer, when he first appears he’s a kid, the same age as Gen X at the time. Same with Jason Voorhees.
Who opens the door in Poltergeist? Gen X.
The vampires in The Lost Boys? Gen X.
Everybody in Scream.
Oh, and when we grew up? The Faculty.
I think the shark from Jaws was a Boomer, so we’re off the hook on that one.

I started downloading Jaws the other day, but my computer keeps dying after one megabyte.

I don’t know what it was about Gen X that made people think of Satan when they thought about us. I’m pretty sure that other kids weren’t quite as bad as I was. Except Damien.

I can’t speak for other generations, but I’m not going to complain about my experience being a part of Gen X. Yes, I was bullied, but I got tougher. Yes, my parents gave me a lot of freedom, but Pa Wilder missed very few wrestling matches and rarely missed a varsity football game, even when a three-hour drive was involved. I knew I was loved.

Coming out of high school, I felt (and still feel) that the limiting factor to my life is . . . me. I feel the ball is in my hands.

From observation, kids today (on average) don’t have near the opportunity to be free range that we as Gen X did. And, at least around Modern Mayberry, they aren’t bullied. People are nice. The kids are nice.

Maybe . . . too nice?

The best thing about taking money by bullying kids is you can buy yourself something nice.

We have created a fundamentally different generation with Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Heck, what’s the best way to ground a member of Gen Alpha? To make him go outside and hang with his friends in real life, away from his electronics.

I sense (and I could be wrong) that a lot of Gen Z and Gen Alpha has never had to face real adversity. Instead, they’ve lived their lives with a sense of impending dread and massive confusion amidst the greatest material and information wealth the world has ever seen. Starvation in the United States, and, for the first time ever, in the world, is virtually unknown.

World hunger?

It’s a solved problem. There is more than enough food for everyone in the world right now, and the only starvation that occurs happens in war zones or is politically motivated.

Yet the GloboLeftElite has put into the minds of the kids today that the world is doomed. They’re feeling higher levels of depression than kids from the Great Depression. Suicide is their second highest cause of death.

Gen X had “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin’”, while Gen Z and Gen Alpha have “All Good Girls Go To Hell”.

Yet, my generation had Mutually Assured Destruction while Gen Z and Gen Alpha have Climate Change. At least the Soviets were the bad guys in MAD, but in Climate Change? Every human is the villain, oh, and we’re deeply in debt, robots and immigrants are going to take their jobs.

Gen X is so old our Social Security number is in Roman numerals.

Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been taught to hate themselves and humanity, and it’s so bad that they don’t want to have kids.

More than anything, this is a crisis of the spirit. My generation was vilified as the Anti-Christ incarnate, and we responded by getting married and having children and getting by in life.

Did we make it? Yes, I think we did. Will they make it? I think so, though, for many, their road is tougher than ours. Weak men make hard times, and I think that’s where we’re at.

But, hey, think of all the great memes they’ll make!

It’s Joever. What next?

“And after your glorious coup, what then?” – Gladiator

I hadn’t planned on tackling the Fall of the House of Biden today, but, hey, an opportunity is an opportunity. As it is, I think that the world has provided a rich set of memetic information that will more than cover the situation. All of these are “as found”.

First, do you think Joe knew he’d be stepping down today? Here’s the foreshadowing:

That brings us up to the end of the campaign. How did that go?

The results seemed to catch even those close to Biden by surprise:

Lots of folks seem to think the nomination is a done deal for Kamala. Obama, pointedly, did not endorse her.

Why did Obama not endorse Kamala? Well, reasons, probably including that she is likely the stupidest person to ever run for Washington, with more baggage than the Lusitania, all combined with all of the charisma of ¡Jeb!:

I think she thinks the quote above is profound, because she keeps repeating it.

The pain . . . !

But what are the other complications?

Not gonna lie, it would be funny to start this program:

What if Joe doesn’t remember?

And what if Darth Clinton returns? I’d say never get involved in a land war in Asia or play a game against a Clinton when power is on the line. That does leave me with one question: