Category: Weimerica

Predictions – What Won’t Happen in 2023

“In that time, I have something to say. How long before the Halkan prediction of galactic revolt is realized?” – Star Trek, TOS

I just read that it’s the law that if it’s raining in Sweden you have to have your headlights on.  How am I going to know if it’s raining in Sweden?

This is the first post of the year.  That feels like so much responsibility.  It feels like I have the weight of the fate of 2023 on my shoulders.  Of course, 2020, 2021, and 2022 have been Godzilla-level disasters, except that whoever does the lip-syncing didn’t get Joe Biden quite right.

But just before I started writing, I had an epiphany.  Many writers write about things that will happen, but here’s a list of things that I think won’t happen.  Of course, I can’t guarantee any of this, but I’m feeling pretty good about this list.  Remember, of course, I thought Zeppelins were a good idea.  Oh, sure, you’re expecting me to make a Led Zeppelin pun, but I’m just going to Ramble On instead.

Here’s the first thing:

Western Civilization isn’t done.  At all.  The construct and values of Western Civilization are under attack, but the roots turn very, very deep.  How deep?  They run deep before Christianity (I am a Christian), and deep as Greece and Troy and the Yamnaya people before them.  This is not the last time the song of Achilles will be sung, nor is it the last time that Caesar will be praised.

It’s not even close.  The medieval cathedrals may cease to exist, but the spirit that created them is not done.  The blood that created them still pulses in the veins of many on Earth.

No, Western Civilization isn’t done.  And it won’t be done for a very, very long time.

I downloaded a copy of the Iliad, but had to delete it.  It was full of Trojans.

This is, perhaps, the most important message that I can ever send.  The blood of my father and his father, and so on, goes back into time.  I do know this:  the reason there is a phrase, “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree” exists is because, a son is like his father.  There are many sons who are out there, who are not happy with the situation.  The idea of the Left is that they’ll be pushed over.

They won’t.  Push other cultures too far?  Cities burn.  Push Western Civilization too far?

Continents burn.  The fight necessary to extinguish Western Civilization will make World War II look like a garden party.

Here’s the second thing:

We haven’t yet hit peak Elon Musk amusement.  He’s the first person to “lose” $200 billion in a year without missing a beat, and he’s simply not done stirring the pot.

Here’s the third thing:

There is only so long that the Federal Reserve® can print cash and pretend it’s money.  It has been nearly fifty years, which is a really, really long time in dog years that Nixon quit pretending that the dollar was backed by gold.  The dollar immediately shrank in value, but remains relatively strong when compared to most currencies around the world even though I’d prefer to have a dollar’s worth of gold from 1973 than a dollar printed in 1973.

The strength of the dollar won’t end in 2023.  But it’s closer to free fall every year.  Right now, the confetti that the Federal Reserve™ presents as money is still good.  But when the people in Ethiopia and Zimbabwe and Senegal and Laos won’t take it?  The dollar will be toast.

My go-to on Asian currency is a local Spanish language show.  I guess it takes Juan to know Yuan.

And yet, the world hasn’t stopped taking the dollar that we print from paper.  Why?  The United States has a wicked large navy and about a zillion nuclear bombs.  I’ll note:  Iraq decided to take Euros for oil.

Oops.  Guess we need to replace Saddam.

Libya decides to take gold for oil.

Oops.  Guess we need to replace Ghaddafi.

Since Russia will take gold for oil, and China will swap their money for oil…?

The good news?

The dollar won’t end in 2023.

The bad news?

In 2023.  No promises after that.  And I might be wrong, so keep some silver, gold and lead around.

Here’s the fourth thing:

The Beatles won’t reunite.  Unless Paul starts eating bacon and Ringo takes up alligator wrestling.

Who is the drummer for the Australian Beatles cover band?  ɹɐʇs oƃuᴉp

Here’s the fifth thing:

Biden won’t get any smarter.  And neither will Hunter, though I’m sure tons of the cash shipped to the Ukraine will get recycled back into Hunter’s drug habit.  Good news!  It won’t be long until he loses another laptop.

Here’s the sixth thing: 

Movies won’t get any better in 2023.  The best movie in 2022 was approximately the same movie as the best-grossing movie of 1986.  Yup.  Top Gun:  Maverick was a good movie.  Nearly exactly the same level of good as Top Gun.  Avatar:  The Way Of Ego was from the same person who brought you Aliens. Which was the fifth best-grossing movie in 1986.  It isn’t getting any better in 2023.

What do they call James Cameron when he’s not working?  James Cameroff.

I am somewhat amused.  The very, very best movies of 2022 were a faithful remake and a pale imitation of two of the best movies of 1986.

Wow.

1986 was, observably, and quantifiably better than 2022 in every way possible.  If you’re thinking that in 2023 Disney® will stop putting out movies that show why kid-touching is a good thing or feature a Disney® princess played by some 372-pound guy named Todd?  Not happening.

Yeah.  Mass media is really dead.  And in 2023 it will be a dead cat bounce.  Maybe.  It depends only on how many Tom Cruise movies are coming out.  Who could have predicted that Scientologists would be more sane than Leftists?

Sure, there will be some movies that will be okay.  If one movie in 2023 is better than any movie I’ve ever seen?  I’ll cover my nipples in opossum grease and sandpaper my eyebrows.

The Opossum Sanitation Company had a unique concept on recycling.

Here’s the seventh thing:

We’re not done.  This isn’t over.

I’ve been using this as an irregular tagline for years.  And I mean it.

We’re not done.

Wilder’s Black Friday Meme Sale, 90% Off!!!

“A present for my friends . . . at Thanksgiving.” – A Scanner Darkly

I guess she and Harry Potter never had a dry spell.

Tonight was a wonderful Thanksgiving, even though everyone has the same virus at the same time.  I’ve already had leftovers, and my wonderful family has learned one of the oldest lessons:  don’t engage Dad in a strategy game on a major holiday.  It is a cardinal rule, such as, “don’t get involved in a land war in Asia” which is (it turns out) exactly what they did.

So, tonight, we’re watching a movie, and I’ll probably be goofing with the family for the rest of the night.  As such, I’ve prepared a low-effort treat.

I collect memes throughout the year.  Some of them I batch into categories, and they form the backbone of posts about a specific subject.  Here, though is the Wilder Black Friday special:  memes that are on sale.  They are memes I collected but just haven’t used, and probably won’t use.

That isn’t to say that they don’t amuse me for one reason or another.  So, here it is, at nearly 90% off – the first-ever Wilder Black Friday Meme Sale.  Also, if you’re avoiding the malls and stores like we are, here’s our latest podcast.

Everyone, enjoy!

And here are the memes – starting with someone who didn’t get the memo:

 

The Potemkin Economy

“By noon, the submarines Ranger and Potemkin will have reached their designated firing positions. Within minutes, New York City and Moscow will cease to exist. Global devastation will follow, and a new era will begin.” – The Spy Who Loved Me

What do you call a reality show about people with lobotomies?  Mindless entertainment.

Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tauricheski is famous mostly for what he didn’t do, but more about that in a minute.  What Potemkin did do, starting in 1774, was conquer most of what is southern Ukraine, the Crimea, Moldova, and Catherine the Great a bunch of times.  The land he mostly took from the Ottoman Empire, but Catherine seems to have invited the conquest.  And apparently, Grigory didn’t do it right, because she made him do it again.  And again.

I mean a bunch of times.  Catherine had a succession of lovers that would put Kamala’s body count in 1992 to shame.  Okay, the summer of 1992.  Okay.  August of 1992.  Okay, August 11, 1992.  By noon

But when Potemkin wasn’t kicking Ottoman butt or . . . well, the other thing, what he did do was found city after city along the Black Sea coast.  You just might have heard of Kherson?  Yup.  Potemkin founded and named that city.  He was even buried there until Putin dug him up and took him back to Russia recently.  It’s certain he wasn’t the last Russian to retreat.

But mostly, we remember Potemkin for the phrase Potemkin Village.  Where did that phrase come from?

Why did the old lady fall in that well?  She didn’t see that well.

Catherine the Great, somewhere between lovers, decided to have a Lord of the Rings-type trip to go see what Potemkin was up to down south, and maybe have Potemkin put something in Mount Doom, if you know what I mean.

That was based on the idea that Potemkin had a lot of the Novorossiyan (approximately the southern area that Putin held before the Russians began advancing to the rear last month) villages built and rebuilt so that he could fool Catherine about how prosperous the area was.

Well, not really.  First of all, Potemkin didn’t have to impress Catherine, they’d known each other forever by this point, and she really liked him even though whenever they weren’t together they were boffing enough other people to make Paris Hilton blush.  What everyone does agree on is that Potemkin had folks paint some of the village buildings, and they did build a few fake ones, but those were mainly to show Catherine what the area would look like.

So, despite personal bravery, solid administration, building an entire fleet, and being a diplomat worthy of any of today’s age, we remember Potemkin for something he really didn’t do.  To be fair Potemkin was the guy that conquered most of the area that Russia and Ukraine are fighting for right now, so there’s a good argument that they should just give it all back to Turkey and be done with it.

Well, at least it’s a seasonal joke.

But it came to my mind when I started thinking about the economy we find ourselves in today – in many ways, it’s a Potemkin economy.  FTX®, that wonderful stealer of money and funder of Democrats?  It was a financial Potemkin Village.  There was nothing really there, ever.  A smelly-looking Millenial with his autistic girlfriend who is so homely that she makes Greta Thunberg look like an 8.5 and the rest of the crew literally printed their own virtual currency, and then grifted their way through piles of cash from nations and celebrities and even their own employees.

A Potemkin Village?  Sure.

And now Elon Musk is finding that his $44 billion toy, Twitter™ is filled with fraud.  First, there are fraudulent users.  We don’t have the full number of bots that Tweeted™, but it wasn’t a small number.

Second, there was an algorithm that was built to push the Leftist agenda by artificially drawing people’s attention to things they weren’t organically interested in.  As soon as Musk stopped the algorithm in Japan, for instance, politics stopped trending and anime and Godzilla© and sushi topped the list of things that Japanese people were actually interested in.

Third, the advertisers weren’t all they were cracked up to be.  Rather than being advertisers that were interested in, oh, say, advertising to customers, they’re fleeing the platform.  Why?  Because they weren’t interested in selling products, they were really interested in social posturing.  They’re leaving in droves – the economic engine of Twitter® appears to have been built on corporate virtue signaling.

Burgers.  Right.  That’s what they’re selling.

Fourth, the employees themselves seemed to be, at a ratio of at least 75%, useless people with a huge sense of entitlement.  How bad are these people?  They’re upset that they won’t have free food from in-house chefs.  They’ll have to pay for lunch.  Maybe they’ll have burgers?

As Potemkin himself might have said, “North Crimean Canal”.  Oh, sorry.  Potemkin might have told those disappointed Twitterites©, “Crimea River.”

There are more examples out there.  By definition, these Potemkin Companies look fine to casual observation until something breaks down.  Facebook© started as the darling of the Internet.  Then Zuckerberg decided that he’d spend the rest of his life staring out of the world through virtual reality, and spent $36 billion dollars on “the Internet, but with stupid goggles”.

Facebook® discovered a man was building a bomb.  The dilemma:  inform the FBI, or send him ads for digital timers?

Sure it makes sense to Mark who took the movie The Matrix as a how-to manual, but pretty much everyone else thinks it is . . . stupid.  But the scary thing for Mark is it’s making people look at what he really owns.  Some folks think it’s just the next version of MySpace©, because the teens have abandoned it and it now consists of businesses trying to sell stuff, mothers trading recipes for what to do with their children’s Adderall© for a quick buzz, and the NSA desperately trying to track everyone.

I guess Facebook© has a lot of servers and stuff, but is their model a Potemkin Company?

And how many other Potemkin Companies are sitting out there, in plain sight, but just not yet recognized?  My bet is that there are a lot, especially in the financial sector and tech sectors.  One principle that I’ve seen apply again and again is Wilder’s Rule #32:  what can be built really quickly can collapse a lot quicker.  If Zuck can make $100 billion in four years, he can lose it in four weeks.

The valuation of almost everything in our economy is subjective – it has value because we give it value.  Amazon™ was worth $180 last year at this time.  It was worth $99 yesterday.  It has gone down by half.  Amazon© has also announced that they’re going to lay off 10,000 employees in the next month.

Oops.  And what else might be a sign of a Potemkin Economy?

I’m sure it’s all legit, right?  Thankfully for the Ukraine, Russia sucks at war.

Valuations are built on emotion, and emotion is defined on how pretty something is.  Well, at least if we lose the Potemkin Companies and the Potemkin Dollar, we still have our relationship with Catherine the Great Kamala.

Oh, crap.  We’re in even worse condition than I thought.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About: Money. Sex. Football. Corruption. Oh, And War.

“No respected psychic will come on this show. They all think you’re a fraud.” – Ghostbusters II

On one side, we have a liar that preys on unsuspecting youth, and on the other, his son Hunter.

It starts with an election.

I know that I was a bit surprised by Pennsylvania.  The candidates weren’t great.  The Republicans tossed a greasy TV fraud who, until he started running, believed in everything Woke.  Ugh.

His opponent?  Sling Blade™, an actually mentally impaired man who had a stroke.  Before Sling Blade© had a stroke, though, he was as socialist as Trotsky on the day rent was due.

So, who gets the win?  Uhhh-humn.

Can’t you see him on a ticket with Biden? 

One little win like that, and sure, it makes sense.  People like idiots better than frauds.  But it wasn’t one little win.  It was everywhere that mail-in or bulk ballot boxes exist and where the Left needed to win elections in order to keep control.

I had done the math after a discussion with a friend.  In 2020, mail-in votes were tracked in most places by the party affiliation of who had requested them.  Leftists had certainly requested them more frequently, so often made up more than 50% of the total.

Fine.  More people on the Right vote on the day of the election, so that makes sense.  But when you looked how those mail-in ballots voted in Pennsylvania, Biden got all of the Democrat ballots, plus almost all of the independent vote, plus a chunk of those registered as Republican.

I did these numbers based on NBC© and Newsweek™ data and if the mail-in ballots behaved like other places, Trump was cheated out of around 120,000 votes, more than twice what was required for him to win Pennsylvania.

I was thinking that the Democrats might have been interested in having the Republicans have control of the House in 2023, because then the Left could blame them in 2024 for not having all the answers.  Nope.  They apparently drank their own Kool-Aid® that this was the biggest and most important election, ever.  They cheated.  How can we tell?

Everywhere the vote didn’t matter, the Left didn’t spend the time and money to shift the election.  Look at New York . . . the last time a Republican won as Governor his name was Pataki, and he was last elected 20 years ago.  Before him?  Nelson Rockefeller.  Yup.  New York could be called Blue York.  So, letting it shift to the Right was fine.  But Michigan?  They had to get their governor, Waddles Whitmer re-elected.

Why did they have to get Waddles back in the chair?  So that they could keep the voting laws favorable to the Left.  That’s it.  From the standpoint of the Left, it is literally her only job.  In Illinois?  The Left didn’t need it, so people could vote however.  Besides, Chicago is so corrupt that they could generate however many votes they needed in an afternoon with a bored school secretary and a mimeograph machine.

Even in races that were virtual locks for the Right (which historically underpolls) you ended up with blatant theft.  What does Washington have?  Mail-in voting.

And they don’t even bother to hide it at times, or, rather, hide it in full view:

So, we have the “What” and the When” – a stolen election in 2022.  Again.  We have the “How” and the “Where” – mainly mail-in and drop-off ballots.  We have the “Why” – to change voting laws so that the Left can maintain power, forever.  What about the “Who”?

That’s simple.  And you may not like it.

Bert knows.  Consider this a warning.

Upfront, this is a developing story, and the following is the best version that I can source right now.  Take everything here with a big helping of allegedly, because I can’t independently verify lots of bits.

Let’s go back in time.  On April 25, 2019, Biden announces he’s running for President.  Thirteen days later, on May 8, 2019 Sam Bankman-Fried launches the FTX crypto exchange.  Oh, and his mother?  She’s a Leftist political fundraiser and organizer when not teaching law.  Sam Bankman-Fried is 27 at this time.  FTX makes Sam a multi-billionaire a few months later.

What a coincidence!  Leftist needs money to fund Democrats, and immediately becomes a billionaire.

Sam becomes the number two Democrat donor to aid Biden in becoming elected.  And Bankman-Fried has donated (according to some sources) over $100 million dollars to the Democrats during the last two election cycles.

How did he make his money?  Well, in a lot of cases, he just printed it.  In others, he used the deposits of people in (what appears to be) a Ponzi scheme.  He got high-profile people to invest big bucks in to his firm, and even pressured employees to invest in his company.  This is Sam Bankman-Fried:

I hear his favorite sport is phishing.  Also, that’s my grandma’s hairstyle.

So, Bankman-Fried did the usual, by begging for money from famous people.  And, he was amazingly good at that.  He convinced Tom and Gisele (by some accounts) to give him hundreds of millions of dollars to invest.  Want proof?

Is it just me, or does he give off a creepy vibe?

And the rich and powerful are now paying the price.  Tom Brady and his ex-squeeze Gisele?  They were worth hundreds of millions of dollars.  I wonder how much they trusted Bankman?

That’s a pretty good hairline for 65.

But Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t date supermodels.  Nope.  He dated his CTO(?), a 28 year-old Harry Potter® fan.  Here’s her picture:

Her name is Caroline Ellison and she’s the reason for Bert’s earlier warning.  She manages to simultaneously look like a 12-year-old and also an 80-year-old grandmother which is an odd choice for the girlfriend of a billionaire.  Or anyone.

Not gonna lie, I’m hoping both of these kids hit prison so neither of them can take a dip in the gene pool.  Me?  If I ever get to the tres comma club, I’m gonna follow this man’s example:

But why settle for that, when you can go international?  Reports coming in today indicate that tens of billions of dollars were laundered from US government funds sent to the Ukraine.  Yup.  Money sent to Ukraine was sent, by Ukraine, to FTX, where Sam Bankman-Fried, son of hardcore Leftist operatives, funneled the cash back into the Democratic coffers.

Or, graphically:

If you’re not mad by this point, your name isn’t Tom Brady (hi, Tom!) or you’re not dedicated to the actual rule of law in this country.  This is a scandal of global proportions.  Again, rumor has it that Sam Bankman-Fried is trying to figure out how to escape the Bahamas to join up with his creepy girlfriend in Hong Kong so they can move to someplace that doesn’t have extradition back to the United States so he can avoid ending up like Bernie Madoff, or, more likely, Jeffery Epstein.

So, if you wanted additional proof of Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement (given the equal likelihood of two events occurring, the most amusing event will happen) here it is.  This event has everything.

Mathematically provable corruption and stolen elections.  Senile, likely incontinent usurper presidents, Tom Brady, the theft of billions, a brewing world war, the ugliest girl to ever date a “billionaire”, and an actual supermodel.  If this was a movie plot, there are exactly zero people that would believe it.

What could make it more amusing?

Okay, that’s close.  But, hear me out.  What if Sam Bankman-Fried escapes to Venezuela, and Tom Brady joins with a group of Navy Seals to sneak in and take revenge?  And Fetterman was really Tom Brady’s brother, who had a pet mouse named George?  And then Tom was elected President?

I’d buy that for a dollar.

Election? Worry About This Instead.

“We pay off the debt in buying the company with cash from its ongoing operation and by selling off pieces of the business.” – Barbarians at the Gate

Why do windmills love hard rock?  They’re huge metal fans.

Two characters were talking to each other in a Hemingway novel (The Sun Also Rises):

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said.  “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Irrespective of who has been in the White House, the debt of the United States keeps growing.  Gradually.  Okay, not gradually.  For the most part, the national debt has been doubling every eight years as Presidents keep spending money we don’t have to get re-elected.  Wait, why does this keep giving me flashbacks to my first marriage?

To be fair, it’s never fun to be the President who says, “Alright guys, I know the party has been awesome, but it’s time to stop spiking the punch with grain alcohol, I mean, look at Nancy – her liver must be 143 years old now and her husband is hammered.  So, let’s go home before we all have hangovers that will last for a decade.”

I found a twenty on the street, so I decided to do what Jesus would do:  I turned it into wine.

Debt is funny.  A little is hard to notice.  When I was first married with The Mrs., we bought a new car.  As in, a seriously new car, from a dealership and everything.  The monthly payment was okay.  So, a few months later, we bought a second one.  These weren’t expensive cars, perhaps (total cost) less than 1/3 of what we made in a year.  So, not Porsches™ and Lambos©.  Think:  small Nissan™ truck.

Ouch.  We weren’t bankrupt, but we were having to watch all our expenses each month.

When I paid the last payment for the last car?  Life was so wonderful.  And as debt dropped, we decided to not get into debt anymore (except for houses).  It was amazing.  That short-term pain and the little hangover that went with a debt moratorium only lasted a little bit.  Life was so much better afterward, and all it cost was half a dozen years of discipline.  And those were the last “new” cars we ever bought.

Did you hear about the guy in Mexico who drove his Audi® into a lake?  Quattro Sinko.

But on a national level, debt has been piling up.  It will destroy the country.  Some folks (Vox Day, for instance) has long pegged 2032 as the date when it all cracks up.  Me?  I called 2026 back in 2018.  I mean the United States?  Everyone could see the U.S.S.R. breaking up, heck, their flag only gave them a one-star rating.

I might be overly pessimistic, since inertia is powerful and the United States has trillions of dollars in inertia.  The first of the two factors that led me to that conclusion were the rising medical costs.  Eventually, if they keep rising, an aspirin at a hospital will cost $5,382 after insurance.

I wish that were a joke or an exaggeration.  The Mrs. went into the hospital earlier this year, and her COVID test was (allowed cost) $1,000.  It was negative.

What’s the difference between an art student and a large pizza?  The pizza can feed a family.

Yup.  Eventually, the costs of medical care – private, Medicare, and Medicaid are going to eat the entire budget.  We’ll become like a country that works all day for Band-Aids™ and Neosporin©.  Of course, that’s a ridiculous outcome.  People will stop going to doctors first.  And they are.  And our medical system is a mess (from a financial standpoint).

That, as I said, was the first problem.

The second one can’t be escaped – it’s the interest rate trap.  The problem is that the United States has been carrying huge chunks of its debt on short-term rates, having to roll it over every few years (on average).

I bought some dirt at high-interest rates.  I guess I should have avoided the loam shark.

The United States gets, generally, pretty favorable interest rates – at least when inflation isn’t running at near-record levels.  But what happens when, instead of 1% or less, the payments are 4% or more?

Interest on the debt doubles.  Take all of the soldiers, stealth fighters, rifles, artillery, missiles, MREs, and aircraft carriers, not to mention all the crayons that the military eats in a year?  The interest payments on the debt will be more than that.

As much as I’d love to blame the Leftists, this isn’t a Left-Right thing, mostly.  The healthcare crisis was started by Ted Kennedy (can’t turn away people who can’t pay) in the 1980s, but the Right has had plenty of time to fix it.  And they’ve only made “compassionate conservatism” while trying to make a “kinder, gentler country” their watchword while expanding medical programs and creating the worst Frankenstein monster yet – a non-private, non-public healthcare system.

Ted was an awful golf player.  He couldn’t drive over water.

And the spending?  The Right has spent as much (if not more) than the Left.  The biggest stop to that in my lifetime was when the Republicans in Congress pushed Clinton into not spending all the cash, and he agreed so he could get re-elected.

In the end, there are more things than just financial that are tearing the country apart, but financial is enough.  Angry, hungry people don’t really care who caused the hangover, they just want the pain to go away.  Regardless of how it’s done.

That’s how it ends.  Gradually, and then suddenly.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Midterms Edition

“$10,000. Is that all it takes to be elected senator these days?” – Used Cars

If you’re eighteen, you’re old enough to vote, but not to drink.  But if an eighteen year old looks at the candidates, they’ll understand why the adults are drinking.

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same, though tensions may very well spike after this election.  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 – Election 2022 – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – You Vs. The Deep State – 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 over 730 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.  Most of today’s memes are free-range, and not originals.  The crop was really good again this month.

Election 2022, Part II

The hype machine is up on the Left and in full swing.  I’m actually surprised at the amazing levels of hyperbole that are in swing.  Here are some examples:

Rob Reiner seems frightfully unhinged, like he might hurt himself.  As do the TV talking heads:

Bill Maher disappoints me.  I had thought that he was actually getting to the point where he was not the reflexive Leftist he was back in 2000.  Nope.  He occasionally talks more reasonably, but he’s as committed as any other Leftist.  Aesop (LINK), you were right.

How insane is the Left?  They’re running John Fetterman, a person slightly more capable of holding a conversation than a bologna sandwich for Senate.  When Fetterman was (rightly) attacked for not knowing the difference between a noun and a shoelace, the Left tried to paint Republicans as “able-ist” as in wanting someone who was able to say his own name without drooling.

He also looks like a Goomba® from the 1993 movie Super Mario Brothers.

Luckily, he has a growth on his neck so he can appeal to both Eagle® fans as well as Steeler® fans.

At least he helps Biden look good.

Because Biden looks like you know, the thing:

But Biden is all about scaring people, too, and so is his Chief of Staff.

The Left, though, is setting us up for more ballot shenanigans:

If you spend a few moments looking at the picture above, you’ll see that in most states, the independents break a little for the Right, and a little for the Left.  But if you look closely at Michigan and Pennsylvania, all of the independents plus some of the Republicans “voted” for Biden.  This is 100% certainty of the fraud that mail voting brings.  Will they cook the books this election?

Why wouldn’t they.  And, you’ll note, fences are going up in Washington D.C.  You can tell that a country is close to Civil War when the politicians live in abject fear of the citizens.

Violence And Censorship Update

Again, organized political violence has been fairly muted this month.  That’s good.  But the .GOV folks are scared – fences are going up all over Washington, D.C.  Even the FED has been surrounded.

In case there is rioting, Ron Paul has been busy.

Stephen Crowder, who broadcasts from a position on the Right, has been banned from his primary outlet, YouTube™, just in time for the election.  Why?  Don’t know.  YouTube©’s rules are vague, so you don’t know why they banned you even after they banned you.  This has a negative effect on free speech since people have no idea where the boundaries are, they stay as far back as they can.  This, in effect, allows even more speech to be banned.

Another person banned is David Icke.  He, however, is a British citizen that’s banned from visiting Europe.  Why?  He is listed as a terrorist.  What does he talk about?  How the elite are literal lizard people.  From watching him in a few videos, I think he sincerely believes that.  But he won’t be visiting any European countries anytime soon.

Reporter James Gordon Meek had his house raided in April.  He hadn’t been seen for months after resigning from his job.  He even skipped going to get an award for his reporting of the pullout from Afghanistan.  He was seen recently, though.  Why did the FBI raid a reporter and cause him to quit?

And there has been some good (potentially) good news with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter™.  If rumors are correct, it really has twisted a lot of knickers on the Left.  I don’t think Musk is on the Right, but he sure is messing with the Left, which might be enough.

How upset are they?  They want to see if they can keep him from running his toy.

The Usual Suspects are upset.  The “blue check mark” was the sign of an elite.  Now, anyone can have it.  The first price point was $20, but Elon quickly dropped it to $8.  This was hilarious, because people on the Left like, well, like Dick Durbin, who has no self-awareness, Tweeted® the below:

AOC was upset by all this, so much so that she quickly became the butt of jokes:

The ADL®, long known for tolerance of viewpoints they don’t agree with (yes, this is sarcasm), was quick to jump in with the Orwellian idea that, to have diversity of opinions, Twitter™ must ban all speech ADL© doesn’t agree with.

And, represented as a meme:

So, Musk started fact-checking.  The Left was upset that one of the first persons fact-checked was . . . The White House.  The White House was so embarrassed that they deleted the Tweet©.  Official Records Act violation, anyone?

And Kathy Griffin was permanently suspended for pretending to be Elon Musk.  Ha!

I guess we know how some people feel about that . . .

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again.  I wonder if his new shipment from ACME will come in soon?

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 ticked slightly downward this month and the abortion backlash subsided.   Will November be spicy due to elections?  A cold front is coming through, so I’m betting not.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a bit – will November cause a spike?

Economic:

Economic indicators did a dead cat bounce this month.  Inflation has caught up with the Market.

Illegal Aliens:

Illegals are eight (8!) times more this time of year than any time measured during the same month during Trump’s time in office, and close to an all-time record.

You vs. The Deep State

You are being lied to and controlled.  Not (only) by Google™ and Twitter© and Facebook®, but by all of those folks at the request of the government.  Yup, the DHS, the child of the drunken meetup between George Bush and every congressman except for Ron Paul, has decided that they will be the group that decides what information you are allowed to hear on the big social media platforms.  This is not me making this up:

This is how this shows up in a meme:

Sure, they’re private companies.  But being leaned on by .GOV to shut you up?  I have felt it.  I can tell you the month that this page was downranked (not a misprint) by Google™ leading to a major dropoff in traffic from search engines.  The biggest months of attack?  On the months I made the most fun of Joe.  But after a while, it no longer looks like a mistake:

It looks like they’ve been planning it. And thanks to Snowden, we know how deeply they’re hooked in with electronic communications:

They want it all:  to spy on anyone, at any time, and to control what information you are allowed to see and hear.  They’re willing to go to great lengths:

And if you wonder what they value, look at who gets sent to jail:

Oddly enough, we are winning.  There is no reason that the DHS would need to enlist the aid of companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars to have them restrict the flow of information to over hundreds of millions of people if we weren’t winning.  Yeah, I know they own the majority of the institutions in the United States, but they’re proving they know they don’t own our minds.  They’re scared.

Remember, this is in our hands, not theirs.  And that’s what scares them.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

Huh.  Pre-Musk Twitter 404ed almost all of my Bad Guy links from private citizens by the end of October…

It’s almost like there’s suddenly a crime wave coverup ahead of an election or something…

These two are still up (for now – because they are from Blue Check TV news reporters?)…
https://twitter.com/i/status/1582472383910117377
https://twitter.com/KeeleyFox29/status/1585595820077977600

Good Guys
https://youtu.be/akXJ_yuE-Ek
https://youtu.be/XRkpMhuXmZU
https://twitter.com/BornAKang/status/1584054864178339840

One Guy
Firefighter tries to be a good guy at a convenience store…
https://twitter.com/KcDiscover/status/1582552334994796547
https://www.kmbc.com/article/independence-missouri-shooting-kcmo-firefighter-anthony-santi-charges/41693134

Body Count
https://ijvtpr.com/index.php/IJVTPR/article/view/47/95
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/19/daniel-bobinski-interview-embalmer-says-blood-has-changed/
https://icandecide.org/v-safe-data/
https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/the-mortality-rate-is-up-17-across
https://chaosnavigator.substack.com/p/80-young-canadian-doctors-died-suddenly
https://thepostmillennial.com/florida-surgeon-general-covid-mrna-vaccine-found-to-cause-84-increase-in-death-for-men-ages-18-39?utm_campaign=64483
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/ob-gyn-laments-covid-jabs-massive-unprecedented-side-effects-for-pregnant-women-babies/
https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/25-percent-people-received-covid-19-vaccination-missed-work-serious-event-cdc
https://nypost.com/2022/10/22/san-diego-er-seeing-up-to-37-marijuana-cases-a-day/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fborder%2F2022%2F10%2F12%2Fgraphic-mexican-cartel-gunmen-dump-4-human-heads-near-texas-border%2F
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/glock-switch-epidemic-may-be-rippling-through-americas-inner-cities
https://www.unz.com/isteve/fbi-blacks-made-up-60-4-of-known-murder-offenders-in-2021/
https://www.foxnews.com/us/fbi-undercounts-number-times-armed-citizens-thwarted-active-shooting-incidents-report?intcmp=tw_fnc

Vote Count
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/republicans-trump-election-fraud/
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/10/06/bxwz-o06.html
https://citizenfreepress.com/breaking/jawdropping-fraud-systemic-ballot-harvesting-in-orlando-black-neighborhoods/
https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.americanthinker.com%2Farticles%2F2022%2F10%2Fdemocrats_are_aboard_the_big_data_emtitanicem.html
https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2022/11/03/mayor-says-milwaukee-election-worker-fired-over-ballot-fraud/69616108007/
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/mail-in-pennsylvania-ballots-with-incorrect-dates-will-be-saved-not-counted-2022-11-02/
https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/new-york-has-more-3-million-voters-lacking-proof-identity-analysis
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/17/election-oversight-complaint-error-pair-causes-undercount-in-elections/
https://www.uncoverdc.com/2022/10/17/election-oversight-complaint-error-pair-causes-undercount-in-elections/
https://thefederalist.com/2022/10/03/bombshell-texts-show-milwaukee-mayor-colluding-with-democrats-to-rig-2022-election/
https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-voting-voter-registration-delaware-constitutions-da8ac023e52da4a78c2ccb110750f8aa
https://whowhatwhy.org/deep-state/what-donald-trump-got-right-about-voting-machines/

Civil War
https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1588262127105703936
https://resavager.substack.com/p/are-americans-still-a-people
https://unherd.com/2022/10/how-turbo-wokism-broke-america/
https://niccolo.substack.com/p/no-the-usa-is-not-headed-towards
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jordan-klepper-civil-war_n_63574553e4b051268c57fda3
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/08/26/civil-war-mar-a-lago-violent-extremism/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/civil-wars-are-too-easy-to-start-just-ask-the-spaniards
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/08/oath-keepers-trial-evidence-civil-war
https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/10/14/donie-osullivan-civil-war-threats-extremism-zw-orig-contd.cnn-business
https://www.foxnews.com/media/bill-maher-paul-pelosi-attack-latest-cold-civil-war
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/07/podcasts/civil-war-belle-sebastian-narrated-articles.html
https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/is-another-american-civil-war-possible/
https://currentpub.com/2022/10/31/how-to-avert-a-partisan-civil-war/
https://www.niskanencenter.org/americas-unfinished-civil-war-with-jeremi-suri/
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202210/1278293.shtml
https://www.gulftoday.ae/opinion/2022/10/23/a-chronic-civil-war-is-raging-on-in-us
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/12/politics/jan-6-civil-war-violence-what-matters/index.html
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/10/13/no-we-arent-headed-to-civil-war-00061696
https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/civil-war-isnt-on-the-horizon-the-original-battle-never-ended/
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2022/10/dixon-democrats-destroying-america-in-revenge-for-civil-war.html
https://americanmind.org/salvo/become-undraftable/

Groundhog Day, But It’s The Economy

“You like Japanese sake, Mr. Bond, or would you prefer a vodka martini?” – You Only Live Twice

The economy also depresses me.  That’s why I drink a gallon of water before bed each night – so I have a reason to get up.

First, I want to pop a signal flare on behalf of Big Country Expat.  He was bananated off of blogspot®, and now has a new home here (LINK).  So, if you were looking for BCE, he’s surfaced.  Expect more of these flares in the future, because more folks will be kicked off of platforms as time goes on.

Okay, back to the blogging.

Back in 2018, 2019, there were few reasons to post contemporary economic posts.  I could do what I like to do best, sit back, research, think, and give a few strategic thoughts on what I thought the future would bring.  There weren’t a lot of stories of an immediate nature.  That had been true (more or less) going back to 2010.  The motions in the markets were longer, and we could take the time to post the waves, print bikini-girl graphs, and talk about the problems that were coming.

Why is our economy like a strapless bikini?  It looks like there’s nothing holding it up.

Now?

It’s that damn movie Groundhog Day.  I have folders of graphs on economic doom that, in a normal year, where each would be the biggest story in months.  In 2022, those stories are coming out every week.  Germany collapsing and all of their people are going to be cold in the 2022-2023 winter?  Check.  Britain collapsing and the latest prime minister wants to (spins wheel) import 50 million illiterate immigrants that marry their first cousins because that’s what will fix Britain’s problem?  People literally saying, “Global thermonuclear war?  Bah, that’s not as bad as COVID®.

I’m not even making the above three stories up or exaggerating it in any way.  The Babylon Bee in 2022 has become non-fiction.  I’m expecting Joe Biden to pull a rubbery mask off his face and reveal himself as the old man who ran the carnival.  He would have gotten away with it, if not for those pesky kids.

So, this week I’m just going to rant.  On (spins wheel) vodka.  “Vodka, it’s not just for breakfast anymore®.”

Our economic system before the Federal Reserve™ was a mess.  Why, people had to have actual gold to back money.  And if a bank got sideways?  It failed.  Talk about incentives.

Gold wasn’t the biggest of the pre-Fed© sins, though.  Regional banking centers outside of New York were taking a larger and larger percentage of the banking market. That, my friends was a sin.  If there’s money to be made off of charging people interest, and a New Yorker isn’t involved, that’s treason.

The Federal Reserve™ Act essentially stopped the growth of banking outside of New York like Kanye West would be stopped from attending a Soros-family bar mitzvah.  But that pesky gold remained.  So, FDR confiscated it.  All of it.

What did Obama use for birth control?  His personality.

Why?  So he could immediately make the dollar worth less.  It was a con.  But one he sold because (smoke and mirrors) I have no idea.  Seriously.  Maybe it was the equivalent of the COVID® panic back then.  If the American public had stormed the White House when FDR stole their money, lynched him, and then placed statues of Eleanor Roosevelt’s face on each coast to ward off evil spirits I think we’d be a better country.

But we didn’t.

I’ll skip ahead to 1971.  There are plenty of things I could complain about in the decades between the 1930s and 1971, but I don’t think there’s enough vodka in the house (only a few gallons) and my liver has indicated that it can only take these utter financial rants about once a year unless I switch to wine or beer.

But, I tell my liver, we already drank the wine and we’re saving the beer for . . . hmmm.  Why are we saving the beer?  Shut up, liver.

Regardless of my weak organs, in 1971 Nixon booted the dollar off of any convertibility to gold.  That was because the French had figured out the game:  they saw how many dollars that we were printing and wanted us to give them gold instead of dollars.  Nixon saw right through that (thank you, vodka!) and just said, “We’ll print all the damn money we want to, or I’ll send G. Gordon Liddy to eat France.”

If you ever feel useless, remember this:  France has an army.

Of course, inflation followed.  Jimmy Carter was an awful president, mainly because he wasn’t aware of what happened, why it was happening, what he could do about it, or  . . . wait, this is sounding like Biden, but Carter was actually smart and relatively virtuous.

Then we sailed.  Interest rates were raised, stopped inflation, and after two decades of high interest rates the currency stabilized to the point gold prices dropped and the biggest problems the country had were Hillary killing people and Bill Clinton having sex with anyone else besides Hillary.

Ahhh, brings back memories of a sillier time.

Pressure though, was there to inflate the currency.  That was built in.  Social Security and Medicare

Hang on.  Need more vodka for this.  Be right back.

Social Security and Medicare require a growing economy.  They require more people working than those that are receiving benefits.  But tax policy and birth control and Hillary Clinton’s Abortion Clinic® (Motto:  No human is too old to abort©!) made it important to import people to pay for this stuff, especially if they’d vote (D) in elections.

That made the economy less stable, rather than more.  But the Federal Reserve© retained two controls:  printing money, and interest rates.  Heck, the Fed© should call it, “This One Weird Trick Allows Us To Print Money Without Printing Money.”

That one weird trick is low interest rates.  When people borrow money, it actually is inflationary.  I could go into detail, but each $100 you have in a bank can be loaned out.  So, if you put $100 in a bank, you think it’s there.  In reality, it has been loaned out, so you think you have your $100 at the same time someone else is spending it.  There’s more to it than that, but I’m running low on vodka and, last time I checked, you have the whole Internet.  I mean, none of it is as funny as this place, but, you know, I have to leave room for other folks.

If you ever try to do yoga drunk, that can put you in an awkward position.

But that brings us to the Great Recession.  The Fed™ and Congress wanted everyone to own a home, so they created massive amounts of money through the magic of low interest rates.  Poof.  Then everyone wanted to buy six or a dozen houses because they never go down in value.

Then it collapsed.

The problem with a debt deflation as the loans collapse is that the cash supply collapses even faster than the Fed© can print it.  That’s the Great Recession.  So, the Fed™ tried to smooth things out by “dropping money from a helicopter” – which is a direct quote from the Fed© chairman.

It worked.  Sort of.  When you do things like that, it distorts the economy in a big way.  You bail out banks, but cause other people to fail.  But those people aren’t congressmen, so, who cares, right?

Again, it worked.  Sort of.  The problems with Social Security and Medicare remain, and are getting bigger.  We’re pretending that those things aren’t happening, just like I’m pretending that having Kamala within a heartbeat of the presidency is something that Jefferson, Adams, or Washington would be cool with.

Then, COVID.  Solution?  Print money.  Now, we’re back to inflation.  The solution is simple:  raise interest rates to the point where they’re larger than Barron Trump.  But we can’t!  Back in the 1970s when we played this game the first time, we had functional manufacturing and the undisputed strongest economy in the world.  It still almost wrecked the place.

At least Barron will never have microaggressions.

We’ve run out of places to hide.  Admittedly, this nonsense has gone on far longer than I expected it could already.  We are living in a time and place where we’ll see more changes in a year than we normally see in a decade.  Heck, we might see weeks in the near future where we see more economic changes in a week than in a decade.

I’ll admit, I do miss boring at this point.  But, I still have you, vodka.

Feminism: The God That Failed

“Now, I know you’re a feminist, and I think that’s adorable, but this is grown-up time and I’m the man.” – Family Guy

My friend was a manager and hired a woman.  He told her that her first job was to make him a sandwich.  She quit.  Subway® is so sexist! (FYI, most memes today are, “as-found”)

Feminism.  It sounds so, well, reasonable from the start.  “Women just want equal rights.”  Sure, it sounds reasonable until you recall that the rise of feminism was the rise of the temperance movement, which made having a beer after work, umm, complicated.  But it was women who were at the lead of that absolute failure, too.

The result was two atrocities:  women got the vote, and you couldn’t get a beer.  All they missed was a Constitutional Amendment mandating Fran Drescher’s voice doing every public announcement and commercial and sports play-by-play and the world would have been an absolute hell.  Yes, it would have been worse than actual 2020.  But not by a lot.

How much beer does it take to get an astronomer drunk?  At least 4.5 light beers.

Again, it sounds reasonable.  Don’t drink.  Oh, wait, your humble purveyor of dank memes and attempted witticisms is maybe two glasses of wine in and I’m enjoying that.  I’m not arguing that not drinking is better for you than drinking.  Mormons and other people that don’t drink live until they’re essentially dust connected to other bits of dust by regret, but, hey, I’m not judging.

Mark Twain, though, had a few choice words:  “Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink – under any circumstances.”  But we’re not talking about booze here, we’re talking about feminism.

Again, I’ll reference Twain:  “A woman springs a sudden reproach upon you which provokes a hot retort, and then she will presently ask you to apologize.”  I honestly think that’s the history of feminism.

What’s the difference between a Sumo wrestler and a radical feminist?  The Sumo wrestlers shave their legs.

I’ve attacked feminism several times in this post so far without any sort of backing.  What sort of backing do I need?  I mean, should we start all the way back at the 19th Amendment, which granted women “universal sufferage” – which I would have thought would have been a bad idea.  I mean, The Mrs. suffers a lot, but that’s just because I’m me.

The difficult part of feminism is that it attempts to first create a division between women and men.  And, the fair part of that is that women and men are fundamentally different.  They’re different biologically down to the genetic level.  When studies were done of the brains of women and men, it was found that those brains were fundamentally different.  The Mrs. can see about 175,083 colors.  I see seven or so.  The Mrs. likes to be warm and comfy on a campout.  I realize that discomfort is a transient condition and if the tent leaks, it might be irritating.

If you love someone, let her go.  Hopefully, she won’t call the FBI.

But “science” assumed for decades that the brain of a dude was the same as the brain of a broad.  It’s simply not so.  It’s actually 100% provable that dudes and broads have different brains.  When studying babies, baby boys like men toys – wheels, cars, machines.  Baby girls like plush toys and fuzzy warm girl things.

Science had (and still has) a weird egalitarian streak that assumes that any baby created from any combination of parents on Earth might be shorter or taller, fatter or skinnier, browner or paler, and yet still has exactly the same brain.

Let’s pretend that utter fiction was true (it’s not).  If so, what happens when those kids get flooded with the white-hot hormones of puberty, estrogen and testosterone?

Yeah.

This is your brain on feminism.

Men and women are different, and they’re born different, and develop differently.  Dress a man up like a woman?  That’s the same as turning a classic Pizza Hut™ into a bank.  We all know that whatever color you paint it, or what sign you put on it, it’s still a Pizza Hut®.

Even worse?  Men and women have utterly different motivations when it comes to mating.  Why?  Men are involved, but women are committed.  A man can have nearly unlimited offspring in a lifetime (as Genghis Khan can attest, 35% – not a typo, 35% of Mongolian people today are his descendants) but women can only have a few kids so they are choosy and choose the best dude they can find.  The result?

35% of Mongolian people are the descendants of Genghis Khan.

When women aren’t constrained by society, they’ll have the kids of the most macho dude they can find.  Women practice hypergamy – they try to marry up in either social caste or intelligence or whatever floats their boat.  Men practice, well, “Dude, did you see her?  She’s hot.”

Hint:  having a majority of young males that have no interest in the future of society isn’t a good thing.

I am a result of such hypergamy.  As many of you know, I’m adopted.  Unlike many adopted kids, I have a lot of data about my biological parents.  My biological mother was at college and decided, “Whoa, that dude is really smart.  I want to have his baby.”

Yes.  This happened.  The dude was a freshman.  My biological mother was a senior.  The poor guy never had a chance, and, thus, I exist, entirely due to hypergamy.

I say “the poor guy” because it was true.  He was a mark in her game.  She wanted his genetics in her child.  That was it.  There wasn’t a plan, there wasn’t love.  Hypergamy isn’t about those things, it’s a transaction.  For him, it was her saying, “Hey, baby, I like the way you fill out those genes.”  The long-term result for her from this strategy is pictured below:

And  . . .

But, when it came time to take care of me, my biological mom was not up to it.  I assure you, that given the combinatory genetics of her willful and cunning plotting and his intelligence, I was probably the most capably evil baby born that year.  Seriously.  I was the most awful child in stunning ways.  I could list them, but you’d be shocked.  I mean, how many other seven-year-olds have convinced their grandmothers to buy them magazines with actual boobage in them?

Yeah.  And that doesn’t include . . . . oh, so many things.

Hypergamy is a less-than-zero-sum game, though.  Whereas conventional morals would indicate that a married couple should really try to stick it out unless it was a morally untenable relationship (see:  my first marriage, which would have been dissolvable in any Christian year since ever) now the woman is encouraged to blow it all up for games and prizes.  And demonize men in the process.  Why?  Because they’re there.

Also?  Feminism.  The laws used to be if you were the reason that the marriage didn’t work, you suffered.  Later?  Not so much.  Now, women have the upper hand in nearly all facets, and in fact, start most of the divorces (70-80%) in the country.  Why?

The laws are stacked in their favor, even more so if there are children.

This is a result of feminism.  But beyond that has been the impact on society as a whole.  What would the result of the 2020 election have been (even after the shenanigans) if only men voted?

Left for you:  show how the federal deficit, abortion rate, divorce rate, rate of church attendance, number of single mothers, increase in welfare, and a dozen other things increased after women got to vote.

I want to make something clear:  I really, really love women.  I think they’re awesome and respect The Mrs. highly, and I think she’d trust me to cast a ballot she’d believe in, because we think alike.  I also think that woman’s suffrage has only resulted in suffering and believe it can be shown mathematically (shhhhh, most of them aren’t so good at math).  So, let’s put out a petition to end woman’s suffrage!  I think we can get 70% of women to sign it . . . .

It Takes A Village To Raise Darrell Brooks

“You are not on trial for being a dwarf.” – Game of Thrones

I bet if I did a video about that, it would never get more than 665 likes.  Oh, and all memes today are “as-found”.

As I noted in the last post, The Mrs. and I have been listening to the trial of Darrell Brooks, the alleged murderer of six and injurer of 60 when he drove an SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  It is, in one sense, informative.

Brooks is defending himself.  So, the judge in the case is going slowly, and making every accommodation possible.  For non-lawyers like The Mrs. and me, it’s a quick tutorial on the “how and why” the justice system works.  To watch Brooks defending himself, is, well, cringe-inducing.  But the judge very calmly and very patiently explains the procedures to the petulant child who never grew up and seems offended that the system would even consider locking up such a wonderful person such as him.

During the trial, one thing that The Mrs. and I have noted is that every single point is an argument with him.  Every.  Single.  Point.  He objects to every question the prosecution asks – I think his objection count is over 1,000 now.

This is the meme I found that best describes Mr. Brooks’ relationship with the legal system.

When the prosecution team asked to skip a portion of a video, he objected.  “Show the whole thing,” was his response.  Showing the whole thing, in this case, would allow the jury to hear his long litany of felony offenses, which included sexual contact with minors (felony), trying to run someone over (he was out on $1,000 bail when he drove the SUV through the parade), (shooting at people, out on $7,500 bail) and many others.  His arrest and conviction record is so long and convoluted, I’m sure I’ve got some inaccuracies and omissions above, but it doesn’t matter.

Darrell Brooks is a dirtbag.

And he’s been committing felony after felony for twenty years.  Lose your right to own a gun after getting a felony?  I don’t see how that’s relevant if Darrell can get arrested for SHOOTING AT PEOPLE AS A FELON IN POSSESSION OF A GUN and be out and about on bail.

Twenty years.

Now six people are dead, and dozens of people have been injured, some with multiple surgeries.

And only now do we take it seriously.

This trial gives me vision problems.  I don’t see Brooks not being guilty.

When I was in high school, I was the editor of the school paper.  It was a glamorous job, and our April Fools edition was amazeballs, you can bet, and my goofy horoscope page was (seriously) the most read part of the paper.  But I actually got some state-level awards for editorials, too.  One of them was about rules.

This was the phase of scholastic America where rule after rule was being added, and the phrase, “zero-tolerance” was being added to everything, because memes hadn’t been invented yet.  To summarize my editorial, “Keep it simple, have a few rules that are actually necessary, and enforce the hell out of those.”

I stand by that.  Darrell Brooks could have benefited from it.  This week I wrote about pathological altruism – the idea that being kind was actually cruel.  Darrell Brooks is the poster child for that.  In his actions as his own retard-level defense attorney, Brooks shows that he actually thinks that some of his arguments (the first witness he called for his defense was “The State of Wisconsin” – seriously) are going to keep him from being locked up until the Sun is a cold, dead cinder in the sky.

Maybe his motto was “it takes a village idiot to raise children”?

They won’t.  The system let him do crime after crime after crime with little to no punishment or consequences to his actions.  He thinks this is the same.  The only actual time I saw any emotion out of him was during the point in the trial where he gave his opening statement for his defense.  “You have to understand, there are two sides to every story.”  This is true.  One side is that there are the Waukesha Dancing Grannies being run over by Darrell Brooks, and the other is . . . Darrell Brooks didn’t get his way.

At no point has he shown even the slightest sign of remorse.  He is, I am sure, in his mind the victim of an unfair and “biast” (his word, not mine) conspiracy between the prosecutor and the judge.  What world created the mindset in a person that they could drive an SUV through a parade and be a victim?

Ours did.

The solution for parents is obvious – the system as it exists is so corrupt that you really cannot count at all on any external help in creating children that turn into virtuous adults.  When Hillary Clinton “wrote” her book It Takes a Village (to raise a child), Darrell Brooks was that child.  This is the result of parental dereliction of duty.  Sure, there are some kids that are just bad.  Heck, even when I was growing up, I recall one set of parents who legally disowned their sixteen-year-old because they couldn’t manage him.  But most of the issues can be contained with a unified parental front.

January 6th gets a Congressional investigation.  Jeffrey Epstein dying gets a collective sigh of relief from Congress.

It doesn’t take a village.  It takes parents.  It takes them intervening early and often and many times with terrible wrath because there is no help from the schools.  Kid failing?  They’ll pass the kid anyway – holding a kid back is not allowed, even in Modern Mayberry.  The judicial system is (at this point) so unrelated to actual justice that it deters essentially only people who are unlikely ever to become criminals from committing crimes.

I think that in any possible universe, Darrell Brooks was going to be a dirtbag who is absolutely unaware of anything existing but him and his feelings.  But, maybe, just maybe, his parents working to raise a decent human being could have stopped it.

Or maybe a judicial system that actually functioned.

I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing ‘til they got ahold of me . . .

This status cannot and will not stand, since society is actively breaking down at a rapid pace.  Is this intentional?  The results are clear, and people like Soros keep funding (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) the election of Woke district attorneys that refuse to prosecute favored groups, encouraging crime, and encouraging the inevitable backlash.

So, yeah, it’s intentional.

And my horoscope for Darrell Brooks?  Don’t make any plans for the next six or so lifetimes.

How Did We Get Here?

“Dividing and mutating at the same time?” – The Andromeda Strain

Two guys stole a calendar and divided it equally. They each got six months.

I think it’s fair to look around and ask a very simple question:

How did we get here?

Certainly, the United States is in a heck of a mess in almost any way one can look at it. When it comes to cohesion, half of the country is like dad sitting on his easy chair after a hard day working at the PEZ® mines. The other half just wants to pester him because he doesn’t care enough about The Current Thing. They have been careful to not make dad put the paper down. Yet. Because that’s when the spanking hand comes out.

The ability of our economy to manufacture critical goods has been outsourced around the world, because, let’s face it, no one is better at sewing up a soccer ball than an 8-year-old Pakistani kid. And if we took the time to teach them and spent the money to build the factories, no one is better at making iPhones™ than Chinese women who are locked in those factories who have to put up nets to keep people from actually killing themselves when they try to jump off that same factory roof. I think the Chinese even charge the women an “amusement park ride fee” when they jump.

So, how did we get here?

The United States has always had an ornery streak. I think Andrew Jackson would have happily had every single central banker in the United States executed – of course, the central bankers retaliated by putting his face on the $20 bill, but I assure you they waited until they were certain he was dead.

And, despite what Biden thinks, Andrew was not a member of the Jackson 5.

How, then, do you take a country that has divided in a massive War Between The States, been brought back (mostly) together, and divide the nation again? In many ways the three items I’ll bring up are intertwined and feed off of each other, but I’ll take each one in turn.

Propaganda. The first part is to skew the definition of America. America was a nation even up into the 1960s, where most (85%-90%) of people had a common ancestry in northwestern Europe, with Great Britain having the largest contribution. Scots may have had problems with the Irish, and the Irish with the English, they might have been neutral about the Swiss, and all of them might have been irritated by the French and Germans, but the common bounds of country and culture were there.

What changed? The idea that if you came to America, it would be expected that you would assimilate to America. Sure, your name might have been Giuseppe, but your grandkid’s name might be Colin, or Brandon, or Brayden. You left that old world behind and consciously gave it up for the new culture. The American culture.

“9 or 10? Let ‘em in! 3 or 4? Here’s the door.” will be my presidential campaign slogan.

The first lie is the lie that there is no American culture. I can understand that from the point of view of most of the world. How would a fish know about water when he’s swimming in it? American culture (with due credit to Great Britain for kickstarting it) became the most pervasive in the world, spinning off ideas and music and clothes and food at an amazing rate.

Now, of course, propaganda would tell us that we have no culture, and it is evil for us to expect people who come to our country to learn our language, and respect our culture first. No, that’s inverted. It does no good to a person who would divide a country for that to happen. Instead? It’s evil to ask people to learn English. If they kill chickens to sacrifice to Gorbo and marry off their eight-year-old kids to 32-year-old first cousins? We are expected to celebrate that.

No. That’s an inversion. They came here. If they can’t assimilate into American culture and American norms? Out. And take the chickens.

A friend told me he made a voodoo doll of me. I said, “You’re pulling my leg!”

Other ways that propaganda has hurt America are numerous, probably enough for a book. One that’s still hurting us is the idea that nuclear power is evil. It isn’t. It’s funny that all the Green® power seems to be either more polluting or require those 8-year-old kids in Pakistan to learn how to mine lithium rather than sew up soccer balls to make batteries for cars fueled on pure Hopium. No, if you don’t like oil and gas, the only real solution is either condemning the country to an unending abject poverty or to build nuclear power plants.

The warfare culture post 9/11 has also been difficult. What, exactly, were we doing in Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden assumed ocean temperature? Don’t know. Why did we go into Iraq? Don’t know. Why did we overthrow governments in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?

Don’t know. But the propaganda that accompanied all of those divided the country, though it’s not nearly as bad as the race grievance industry that’s been in full tilt in the last two decades – but I’ll save that for a future post.

Pathological Altruism. If I have a puppy, and it piddles on the floor and everyone laughs and it’s cute, well, when it’s a big dog no one laughs. Then the dog wonders why I’m beating it for something I was laughing about. No one wants to be the bad guy and say, “No, you have to be punished for your actions so you won’t do it again.” Everyone wants to give people another chance.

My friend’s house was also hit by the dessert thief. He takes the cake.

A friend of mine had his house broken into. They were able to catch the criminals, and he attended the trial. Result of them stealing thousands and thousands of dollars of his property? A suspended sentence for one guy (who had multiple prior felony convictions) and two years for the other. What message, exactly, is that sending?

The Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act of 1965 (plus the amnesties that have followed and will follow) are horrifying in their pathological altruism and use of propaganda. The composition of the country has changed – it’s no longer a nation. Where once there was a central culture, now every viewpoint is expected to be equally valid, and (I’m not making this up) the incoming medical school class pledged to honor “all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by western medicine.”

Let’s go kill some chickens, because that will get rid of the gunshot wound. Oh, right, don’t forget the Ouija® board.

Corruption. The United States has always been corrupt, let’s get that out first. But the beauty of the corruption early on is that, mostly, it was limited because the scope of the Federal government was limited. Sure, Sheriff Smith over in Mount Pilot would take bribes, but he’d eventually be caught. And did several members of the state legislature take bribes to get the “right” senator into office?

Sure. That happened, too. Three events ushered in eras of nearly unfettered power for the Federal government: the Civil War, the 16th and 17th Amendments, and the New Deal. The Civil War ended the idea that the Several States were sovereign – they became mere political subdivisions of the United States. The 16th and 17th Amendments made it possible to tax and ended the appointment of Senators. Now, Senators became Representatives with six-year terms, rather than appointed representatives of the Several States – a huge difference.

Fetterman also had a prostate exam the other day – thumbs up!

This level of corruption concentrated power at the Federal level and made the farces we see today where people who are on the Right receive massive sentences at the Federal level for minor crimes, but people on the Left are not even indicted, and almost anyone who has power has a free pass for anything but killing someone on-screen at halftime during the Superbowl™, and that only counts as a delay of game penalty.

I originally had more items here, but had to delete them because otherwise this could become a book. I’m certain, though, that the top three cover it well enough for now. I do think that America is getting ready to get out of the easy chair. And the spanking hand is getting ready.