Weimerica – Page 2 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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.

King, Kamala, And Evil

“Give me what I want, and I’ll go away.” – Storm of the Century

I hear King’s next novel is about a girl who falls off a boat in Maine and is eaten by a giant shellfish – the title is “New England Clam Chowed Her”.

A few weeks ago, I was re-watching the Stephen King miniseries The Storm of the Century. I recall watching it when The Mrs. and I were newly married. I recalled enjoying it at the time. A Cliff’s Notes™ version is generic Mysterious Villain with Mysterious Powers shows up on a Mysterious Isolated Island off the coast of Mysterious Maine for Mysterious Reasons.

The movie first aired in 1999. While watching it, the demographic change in entertainment is obvious, since all of the characters in the movie are white. This is entirely in keeping with what Maine looked like in 1999 and still looks like, with approximately 90% of Maine residents being white as of the last census. Of course, if they were going to do the series in 2024, certainly there would be a Moslem or a black woman in a wheelchair who is the only good character.

Oh, and culturally, the characters were mainly married and had kids and most of the relationships were solid and people went to church. The good guy was a father, who was married, and his wife was probably the least moral character of the movie.

Yeah, not a 2024 movie since women are perfect in 2024.

Honestly, I liked Jar-Jar Binks™ better.

Yet, the movie was dark in a way that got me thinking – is the world out there even darker than we think?

I’ve been ruminating on that for weeks, and today I was listening to a YouTube® video while smoking a cigar in the hot tub tonight, and it was about . . . how bad the banking industry was, complete with an informant talking about secret sex parties and all manner of debauchery that I won’t discuss on this mostly family-friendly blog. The conclusion of the informant was that these parties were used to gather video to use for blackmail. I guess they just can’t charge each other penalty interest rates.

One very successful trader who was interviewed decided that he was going to quit the high-stress life even though he was making hundreds of millions for the investment bank. He told his boss. His boss took him to lunch, and told him a story about a trader that had quit. The bank then went through his emails, his trades, looking for anything that they could use to sue him or to turn over to the authorities.

It didn’t matter if the allegations stuck, the firm could keep coming up with them until the trader went broke. It was just like a Mafia shakedown.

The trader decided then, he wouldn’t quit, and made himself such a pain that they fired him. I imagine that was a really amusing two weeks of his life, and I hope he brought in some trout that he’d caught and cleaned them on the copier.

Punctuation is important! “I’m quitting alcohol for a month” is far different than “I’m quitting. Alcohol for a month.”

But when it comes to this blackmail, I wonder just how many people that are successful, are successful only because they can be controlled. Epstein, more than anything, was likely a generator of this type of material for people to use to control others. Why have the client lists never been made public? Why have the recordings never come to light?

Because those same recordings, that same information is likely being used today to control those people. The same with P. Diddy or Puff Daddy or whatever he’s known as today – what do you think the recordings from his parties were used for?

And how in the hell did Epstein and Diddy get fortunes estimated to be near a billion dollars?

Coming soon to a Diddy near you.

They were part of the control apparatus.

I have no doubt that Kamala is utterly controlled in the same fashion. She was placed in her current position precisely because she can be controlled, and will do what she is told. She didn’t lead in the cover up of Biden’s decrepit condition, but she certainly has been complicit. Whatever committee that is running the White House has decided that with Kamala as president they could keep doing whatever it is that they’re doing, and that she can’t or won’t stop them.

She’s made the deal, and for the trappings of power will do whatever they tell her to do.

Who are they? The GloboLeftElite.

I used to just call them “The Left”, but that really doesn’t fit, nor does “communist”, and it doesn’t explain the core of what they seem to stand for.

It makes me laugh when the dentist asks the last time I flossed, I think, “Man, doesn’t he remember? He was there.”

No, the thing that they stand for first is globalism. This is why they can take and transplant 20,000 Haitians into a town of 50,000, forever changing the demographics of a small and happy town to get cheap labor and dispossess the people that built the town in the first place. Their reach is global, and I think that nations are just pesky anachronisms in their minds, and whatever people actually built a country aren’t important.

So, that’s the Global part. The Left part is that they are fully on board with much more governmental control of everything. They want the government to tell us what we can do, where we can do it, and what we can say, as long as the government allows them to do whatever they want sexually without consequence. That appears to be all they want.

So, the GloboLeft are the foot soldiers, and the GloboLeftElite are the rulers. Those are the people who actually run the murky enterprises, and whose desires make the actual laws in the country. And, they do what they want, and control people via blackmail and lawfare.

It’s just that simple.

If the British started a chapter of their Flat Earth Society in America, would it be called the Apartment Earth Society?

In one way it’s darker than any of Stephen King’s villains, though. King is a member of the GloboLeft, but probably not the GloboLeftElite. But the villains he wrote about often had a purpose – in Storm of the Century, King’s bad guy wanted a child so he could raise it to be his Evil protégé. Wanting a child to carry on your Mysterious Evil Work is far more wholesome than the executives that will ruin a town just to increase the profit margin by a percent or two, or to dilute the heritage American voting stock so that the people who built the country will be dispossessed forever.

Stephen King’s Evil Villian said, “Give me what I want and I’ll go away.” The GloboLeftElite wants power forever.

Now that, I call Evil.

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.

Are We In The Middle Of A Planned Revolution? Yes.

“Day 93 under the dome. With necessities growing dangerously low, who knows what spark will set off this powder keg?” – The Simpsons Movie

I saw two men in matching outfits so I asked them if they were gay. Turns out that doesn’t make the NYPD happy.

A phenomenon that has sweep the world in the early 21^st century has been the “Color Revolution”. This is characterized by a “grassroots” movement whose aim was theoretically to create a liberal Western democracy on the European model. An example would be most Western European countries, with the exception of the Islamic Caliphate of France.

What methods were used in these “peaceful” revolutions?

Leadership by Non-Governmental Organizations Civil Disobedience
Civil Disorder/Disobedience/Protests
Total Lack of Chill
Use of the Internet to Organize
Heavy “Student” Participation

When I read that list, I see a single conclusion: the CIA did it, sometimes with the help of George Soros.

Probably one of the first places that this method was used was the Soviet Union. All of the “spontaneous” protests at the beginning were likely anything but spontaneous. The wonderful part of this type of operation is that if it works, great, an enemy is off the board. If it doesn’t? Everyone involved can put on their “so sorry that happened to you, buddy” face while preparing for the next one.

To be fair, I don’t think that most of the people that were trying to get the Soviet Union to collapse thought it was going to work as well and as completely and as quickly as it did. One minute, the Soviets were all “Viktor Drago” and the next they were all “Trotsky after meeting an icepick”.

What do you call a man with an ice pick in his head? Anything you want – he clearly doesn’t control the security apparatus of the USSR.

But there is more at play here. Ricky emailed me an article from 2014 that talked in depth about Color Revolutions and their mechanics by Andrew Korybko which inspired this post. You can find that article here.

The Color Revolution Model: An Exposé of the Core Mechanics

When we look at a Color Revolution, it’s like looking at an iceberg: you only see the bit above the water but miss entirely the part that’s going to cause James Cameron to make a billion dollars and inflict those stupid Avatar™ movies on us. No, Color Revolutions are years in the making and start with:

Ideology: In the Color Revolutions to date, all of them have been based on the attempt to create a Western-liberal style of government, hence my suggestion that this was the CIA attempting to export “freedom” to a group of people who have consistently and convincingly desired to not be free. Sure, some Egyptians want to live in a Western-style democracy, but most of them don’t. Hell, most of the Muslims that have moved to Western Europe don’t want, at all, a Western-style democracy.

They want Sharia law, they want a government based in Islam, and they want all the wealth that the Western-style liberal democracies seem to create. They want to live in Cairo on the Thames, not the actual, crappy Cairo on the Nile. Why did Egypt’s Color Revolution fail? Why did Libya’s? Why did Syria’s?

They didn’t want that Western liberal democracy ideology, they just wanted the stuff.

Telling a good joke about the French Revolution is all about the execution.

Cash: As NASA astronaut Gus Grissom said in the movie The Right Stuff, “No bucks, no Buck Rodgers®.” In a Color Revolution you could say, “No simoleons, no Napoleons”. That’s as close as I can get unless I retcon Stalin’s first name to Moolah.

But money has to come from somewhere, and most of the people that make up these Color Revolutions are poor college students who live on ramen and despair.

Where did BLM get money? According to the Claremont Institute (LINK), Microsoft® pledged $244,400,000 to Black Lives Matter. Black Lives Matter is a Marxist organization pushing radical GloboLeftElite disruption.

Microsoft© is funding a Color Revolution

Against . . . you.

That’s a pickup line that could work for Boeing, too.

People: There is always an inner circle of leaders of the Color Revolution, probably hand-picked by the funders. The are willing and passionate about the Color Revolution, primarily because they see themselves as the ones who will get power after the event. Because someone has to drink the Kool-Aid®, there are also followers. Those are broken into two groups – the troops and the members of general public that are sympathetic to the revolutionaries.

Propaganda: First, the message is crafted. It is prepared in advance for the moment it will be communicated, and the People mobilized. The propaganda may already be in place, sitting on websites prepared by and for the movement. It may have been trained into the foot soldiers of the Color Revolution. Regardless, the message gets out, and the goal is to get sympathy and support as the revolt proceeds. In the United States, mainstream media is fully onboard with the GloboLeftistElite plans – would anyone be surprised to find out that ABC® gave Kamala the debate questions? And answers?

I do think the debate about Mobius strips is a bit one-sided.

Spark: Once all of the above are in place and ready to go, all that’s needed is a spark. George Floyd, for instance was a spark. It wasn’t George Floyd, it was that there was a video of a dying junkie that met the needs of the Color Revolution, which was already prepared and ready to go, complete with Ideology, Cash, People and Propaganda, complete with a complicit media to fan the fiery but non-violent flames.

Once these all came together, Floyd’s death was chosen and someone, somewhere, said, “Perfect. Go.” It doesn’t matter that Floyd was going to die due to the incredible amounts of drugs in his system. All that mattered was what the video showed of his on-camera death.

Korybko suggested, back in 2014, that examples of these Sparks included (all of these are direct quotes):

A rigged election
The jailing of an opposition leader
The signing of (or failure to sign) a controversial piece of legislation
A government crackdown against the opposition or the imposition of martial law
Declaring or being involved in an unpopular war

Of the three Sparks that Korybko suggested, the top almost certainly happened in 2020, and the second and fourth are being implemented in some fashion against Trump and/or his supporters. The list is, obviously, not exhaustive, and the event need never have happened in reality, as long as people can be convinced it happened.

After the event, the protests start. And grow. And spread. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the Floyd Protests were an attempted Color Revolution in the United States that was called off after the mechanisms to secure the 2020 election for Biden were in place, and, perhaps a warning of sorts to Biden that he’d best do what he was told if he could remember.

I was listening to a podcast tonight and Eric Weinstein noted that he had been assured that Biden does not have access to “the football” and that the United States is currently being run by a committee of the powerful. The same committee, no doubt, that has put Kamala at the brink of power. Note that Biden only dropped out after the (first) failed assassination of Trump.

Occupy Wall Street challenged the money powers of New York (not sure who was funding them, China?). This was not to be allowed, so, to counter it, Trayvon Martin was used as a Spark, moving on to the “Gentle Giant” Michael Brown, and finally to George Floyd.

The fact that the clear self-defense shooting of Trayvon Martin was used to get the hippies and AntiFa® out of New York and have them start protesting for black people instead of against bankers. I guess the bankers got scared, and hippies and AntiFa® have a short attention span, or their leaders just like money. They had to have something to do, and since it’s always easy to stir up a racial fight, that’s what the bankers picked, because a class fight might have endangered actual bankers.

One stolen joke is a coincidence, two is a pattern. Thirty is an Amy Schumer standup routine.

These movements aren’t popular, and aren’t spontaneous, though they’re staged to appear so. They aren’t even permanent – most countries that have had a Color Revolution revert to their old styles of government with just a little bit of time and often a lot of chaos. Egypt went from its military government to a very brief “democracy” and then right back to a military government because that’s what Egyptians seem to want.

This may sound as crazy as predicting the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, but the government of the United States is nearing collapse, and the Color Revolution technique, or something like it, is being employed against you and funded by people like Microsoft® to guide the fall into, they hope, a situation where bankers can frolic freely.

That’s the rub – the importation of the endless hordes of illegals, the economic devastation of inflation and the contrived energy and housing crises and continual cultural provocations are cracks, big ones, setting the stage for a major change. And, again, each and every one of them is intentional, and it’s gone far enough that I still believe we’re entering the danger window in 2025, with the early to middle 2030s the most likely time when the final Spark hits.

Beyond the Spark?

It’s up to us.

The Debate

“Mr. Rooney, Ferris is home and he’s very ill. I debated even leaving him.” – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off

Who won the presidential debate last night? People who didn’t watch.

As my father said when the cows got into the marijuana, “Son, the steaks are high.”

That’s how I’d describe the Trump/Kamala debate. Apparently, they’ve never met, so her charge that Trump put a wet finger in her ear and said “Wet Willie Brown” is certainly false. One of the rules is that Kamala has a two-drink minimum.

I decided I’d just blog about the debate instead. Since I’m going to get into the hot tub later with a cigar and maybe a scotch, today’s post will be, unfortunately, written while sober.

Notes: I like the muted microphone idea. It stops the debate for being a shouting match, though I wish they would give the candidates an array of condiments they could throw at each other. Regardless, here is my (partially made up) transcript.

But she’d be happy to force you to take it.

My biggest hope? That Trump says, “Be quiet or I’ll spank you, you disrespectful little turnip.”

Showtime!

Kamala walks to Don. I think she would have peed on him to show dominance, but she couldn’t lift her leg up, or Hindu tradition prevents it.

First question:

Are people better off than four years ago?

Kamala: “I understand the problem and I have no idea what to do about it. I’m going to say absolutely nothing, but then attack Trump.”

Trump: “No sales tax, other countries will pay for the wall, took billions and billions from Chi-nah. We’ve had a terrible economy, worse than ever seen since ever. We’ve had people stream into this country from mental institutions, and even Baltimore.”

Kamala: “Worst epidemic, worst unemployment and personally burned the Constitution after farting on the Statue of Liberty.”

Trump: “Cut taxes, make the greatest economy, ever, and then Kamala ate a baby. Alive. At Central Park. I was there.”

Kamala: “I’ve memorized a thing about the economy. Here it is.”

Trump: “She has no plan. It’s four sentences – run spot run.” I wish I had made that up, but that was Trump’s line, it’s hilarious.

You want to add tariffs, and that might cost more money. Why do you hate America?

Trump: “They kept my tariffs, because I made the best tariffs, and now people can’t afford bacon.”

Kamala: “There was a trade deficit, and Trump sold chips to China, and the United States should win the race against China.” It really didn’t say anything in the answer, but it was well said, much better than her normal word salad.

Trump: “Taiwan sold chips to Chi-nah. Immigration is bad. She’s a Marxist.” (Actually, one of Trump’s passionate answers, and pretty articulate and less hand-wavy than usual.

President Trump you were against abortion and then for abortion and why do you hate women?

Trump: “Six Supreme Court justices got Roe v. Wade out of the states, and now states can make a decision and people can make a vote. Ohio and Kansas were okay with killing kids.”

Kamala: “Trump is a liar. He’s the devil. Women have to leave a state to kill a baby, and can’t even do it at their home state. I might sign a bill making baby killing legal everywhere.”

Trump: “Kamala’s a liar. And stupid. And incompetent at government.”

Kamala: “Any woman should be able to kill any baby whenever. Perhaps up until college.” Kamala is making it personal, and looking at Trump as an accuser. Trump doesn’t fall for this.

Trump: “She’s a liar. Everybody knows it.”

The microphones are not always turned off during the answers of the other candidate.

It’s hard to make a good abortion joke, but leave it to the Left.

Why did you let just a few illegal people in?

Kamala: “I want to stop drugs from coming in.” She starting to slur her words. “Trump didn’t approve the bill and that’s because he hates you and you should go to his stupid rally.”

Trump: “There’s no reason to go to her rallies. People don’t leave my rallies. People want to take their country back. What they have done with allowing millions and millions into our country, they’re eating the cats, they’re eating the pets.” This has happened, but ABC News disagreed.

Kamala: (first giggle) “Talk about extreme! The very worst republicans love me.” Kamala is actually effectively getting under Trump’s skin at this point.

Trump: “I fired them.”

Perhaps he’s upset because that was Fang-Fang’s dinner?

How can you send all of these illegals back?

Trump: “They allowed terrorists, drug dealers, criminals and Venezuelans in. Their crime is down. But they’re destroying the fabric of our country.” (no humor added on this comment)

Kamala: (next giggle, more slurring) “This is rich! Trump is a criminal and awful, and I have answers, I promise.”

Trump: “It’s a political prosecution.” Really good answer here.

Kamala: “Trump would kill your children if he were back in the White House.”

Kamala, you flip flop, so please explain why you have such a good reason to flip flop?

Kamala: “After I was against oil, I was for oil. I want everyone to have houses, because that won’t increase inflation, but we’ll need to need to import labor to make them. And this friend I had in high school who is totally not made up was sexually assaulted. I want to help people not be mean like Trump.”

Trump: “I am so very rich. Fracking? She’s been against fracking and the police (even Sting) and – I’m talking now – does that sound familiar? – and wants to turn do transgender surgery on illegal aliens.”

Transgender surgery for even alien-aliens, would be my bet. But ALF as a woman?

Mr. President, why did you start an insurrection and why do you regret it?

Trump: “Peacefully and patriotically. You left that out. When are the illegals going to be prosecuted? When are the people who burned down Minneapolis going to be prosecuted?”

Mr. President, why don’t you say you regret this?

Trump: “I didn’t do anything to regret.”

Kamala: “I was at the Capitol. The President wanted to desecrate the nation’s Capitol because he hates you and Donald Trump hates Jews.” Trump does not take the bait to stare back at her, which people would take as threatening.

Trump: “Why is she now doing anything on the border? Biden can close the border, he’s not.”

Mr. President, why won’t you say you lost the election we stole fair and square?

Trump: “The illegals are trying to vote.” Kamala does not look remotely happy and ABC pulls away from the split screen.

Why does Donald Trump want to stop illegals from voting?

Kamala: “Donald Trump should accept the fact that we stole the election fair and square.”

Trump: “Victor Orban – why is the world blowing up? The most respected and most feared president was Trump. Kamala didn’t get a single vote. She failed.”

Israel and Palestine aren’t getting along, tell us a made-up way that you’d solve it?

Kamala: “War is bad. We shouldn’t have one. I really like Israel, though.”

Trump: “It never would have started. Russia wouldn’t have invaded Ukraine. Kamala hates Israel. But, Kamala also hates Arabs. And probably hates kittens.”

Kamala: “I love Israel. Trump is weak and loves dictators.”

Trump: “Putin endorses Kamala.”

Commercial Break – A commercial for feminine products. Who knew women were filled with blue liquid?

Mr. President, you could solve Ukraine in 24 hours?

Trump: “We’ve spent $250 billion in Ukraine because Biden won’t ask Europe. I can call Putin and Zelinsky and settle it. I’ll do a deal. It would be a great deal. We could have World War III.”

Kamala: “You’re running against me. Putin wants to take over all of the Starbucks™ in Europe. No cappuccino for anyone. And Poland. You want to give up Poland.”

Trump: “Quiet, please. Putin would be sitting in Moscow, and don’t forget he has nuclear weapons. Kamala was sent to negotiate peace, and three days later? War. She’s worse than Biden. She is a horrible negotiator.”

Kamala: “I’m going to say a lot of things about Trump, to avoid talking about how I failed negotiating in Ukraine.”

Trump: “I got Europeans to pay for NATO.”

Kamala was a lot more prepared than she was the first time around.

Do you regret what happened in Afghanistan?

Kamala: “We got out of Afghanistan. Trump’s deal in Afghanistan was the worst. Trump invited terrorists to Camp David, America’s most holy place.”

Trump: “My agreement was good, the Afghanistan withdrawal was horrible.”

President Trump, why are you a racist?

Trump: “I’m not.”

Kamala: “He is.”

Trump: “She’s horrible.”

Kamala: “He’s horrible.”

Trump: “She’s horrible.”

(Hosts utterly losing control)

President Trump, how are you going to fix healthcare?

Trump: “I saved Obamacare, but it wasn’t great, but I’m trying to find a better one.””

Oh, wonderful Kamala, how can you say something about healthcare that conforms to the answer you memorized?

Kamala: “I’m not going to take your guns. And I know people who have been sick and we want Obamacare to get even better. And healthcare is a right.”

Trump: “Kamala wants everyone on government insurance.”

What would you do to stop climate change?

Kamala: “Climate change is horrible and I have invested $1 trillion in clean energy with my donors and opened factories around the world.”

Trump: “Kamala loves Chi-nha. They’ve destroyed business and manufacturing, and Biden got paid off by China and Ukraine? They are crooks.”

Commercial Break – Debate sponsored by Crazy Z’s Unpainted Ukraine, for the best in discount barely used weapons.

Closing Statements:

Kamala: “We’re not going back to low prices. I’ve never had a real job. We need me as a president.”

Trump: “Here are the wonderful things she’s going to do, but she hasn’t done it. Why hasn’t she done it? I can rebuild America. I can make it better, faster. I’ll call it the six-million-dollar country.”

Overall, Trump was Trump, and this was probably his best debate of all of them during three elections. Kamala, however, didn’t look like the blithering idiot that she is, since it looks like they got her off the sauce long enough to do debate prep.

If you liked Trump, you still like Trump. If you liked Kamala, you’re probably not a regular reader, but you probably still like Kamala and are relieved that she didn’t Biden-out with disjointed word salads. I think Team Kamala will be happy enough with this performance that they’ll trot her out for a few very carefully scripted interviews.

There will not be another debate.

How will the normies take it? Not a clear victory either way, and the undecided mainly don’t watch these things, so it’ll be decided by what news they hear between the “top hits of the 80s, and more” and what they’re paying for gasoline.

Or, by the people who count the votes in big cities in swing states.

Stay tuned, and I suggest spending election night at a mountaintop restaurant, where the steaks will be high.

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.

The Drive To Kill The Constitution

“Hold your ground, hold your ground! Sons of Gondor, of Rohan, my brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me. A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship, but it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields, when the age of men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand, Men of the West!” – Return of the King

I had a sacred, flammable piece of wood once. It was a match made in Heaven.

All memes “as found”

One of the places that people on the TradRight have made progress over my lifetime in actually increasing freedom is in the area of gun rights. This is good, and has been aided by Federalist Society™ acting as an institution to bring justices to the Supreme Court whose goals aren’t to modernize the Constitution or to use it to end up being the opposite document that it was intended to be.

Of particular importance to the Constitution is the Bill of Rights. The Bill of Rights wasn’t quite an afterthought, but a creation of the complaints from the Anti-Federalists that the new government had no prohibitions against what it couldn’t do.

The Federalists said, “Hey, don’t worry, dudes. The Constitution is fine because there’s a very limited role for the federal government in the document. Even if it wanted to, the federal government couldn’t take away your right to own guns. Hell, you guys have private warships with cannons on them – how badass is that?”

The Federalists were worried that with a list of prohibitions against the federal government, then the only thing that would be considered as rights were the ones that they listed, and not the much broader list they took as self-evident. The Federalists thought that there were just too many places the government shouldn’t be able to go to list them all. The Anti-Federalists said, “No, man, here are our minimums. And we’ll add one at the end, the 10^th one, that says the states or the people get to keep that long list.”

The Anti-Federalists won the day. They created a dozen amendments, of which ten were finally adopted as the Bill of Rights. Obviously, keeping men away from power is harder than keeping Kamala Harris away from the Night Train®, and government grew into a colossus, much larger and with more powers than the framers ever intended. And like the fat girl at the middle school dance, the 10^th Amendment is the most ignored of all of them.

This was obvious even by the time of the Civil War. I think, rightly, that the U.S. Civil War could be renamed the “War Against the States” because the central role of the States in the governance of the country was essentially dead at the end of the war. It only required the passage of the 17^th Amendment in 1912, removing the election of senators from the state legislatures and giving it to popular vote for a final gutting of the rights of the State.

Now the GloboLeft has assumed the reins, and with the states out of the way, the final push has come against the people. Here’s the way that Aldous Huxley described it:

“By means of ever more effective methods of mind manipulation, the democracies will change their nature; the quaint old forms: elections, parliaments, Supreme Courts and all the rest will remain. The underlying substance will be a new kind of totalitarianism. All the traditional names, all the hallowed slogans will remain exactly what they were in the good old days. Democracy and freedom will be the theme of every broadcast and editorial. Meanwhile the ruling oligarchy and its highly trained elite of soldiers, policemen, thought-manufacturers and mind-manipulators will quietly run the show as they see fit.”

That’s where we are now. Whereas the Constitution has been powerless to stop the creeping totalitarianism, the Federalist Society judges have been enough, equipped with just two parts of the Bill of Rights have kept totalitarianism from final victory.

If the GloboLeftElite see an obstacle, what do they do? Get rid of it. Thus, the idea is now being floated by the GloboLeftElite to ditch the Constitution. The writer of the latest hit piece against what remains of the Constitution is Jennifer Szalai, who wrote, “The Constitution is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?” in the New York Times®.

Ms. Szalai was born in another country (Canada) educated in Europe, and now, for whatever reason, seems to desire to talk about a country to which she clearly has little allegiance to. The most laughable passage tries to skew the attempt to interpret the Constitution as it to what it plainly meant and was intended as “ideology” and noting that this prevents judges from “doing nice things”.

Szalai also notes that judges reading the Constitution and doing what it says frustrates what “the majority of people want”. Apparently Szalai doesn’t know that’s exactly what it was designed to do: to stop a majority of people, hot with passion, from trampling the rights of the individual.

Yeah, that was the plan.

Look at Australia, banning most weapons and putting ludicrous rules on the ones that remained legal. Why? Because they didn’t have the 2^nd Amendment stopping a knee-jerk reaction to a mass shooting that seems really like it was a set up. The only path to get all the guns removed from the hands of the people in the United States is to pass a Constitutional amendment, and even that probably won’t work for decades.

A case in point of bad law versus the Constitution: after 9/11 the Patriot Act was passed to target “terrorists” even though it gives a government of colossal size powers that would have made King George envious and would have made George Washington reach for an AR-15.

Unless the GloboLeftElite could take over every method that people have to communicate with each other. Outside of websites here and there and places like Gab®, there were very few places that people on the TradRight could get together to talk to each other. Places like Gab™ were literally cut off from things like payment processors (Coinbase©, PayPal™ and many, many, many others).

The pesky 1^st Amendment keeps the government from (overtly) clamping down on speech. Unless they ask Mark Zuckerberg to do it for them and he agrees because having people think for themselves about COVID was too dangerous. The press literally used those words – “thinking for yourself is too dangerous.” Look at the constant drumbeat to give away our freedom:

It’s the communications they want, first. As long as they can make us feel isolated and alone, the only person with dangerous opinions. Then, finally, they can win.

Their goal is the removal of the freedoms we’ve cherished and slowly seen erode either through the cowardice of weak men or the avarice of greedy men or the schemes of bad men.

The only thing that stands in their way? Us.

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.

Is Everything Worse Than It Was In 1900?

“Jefferson Public School. Fort Wayne, Indiana. Back on that planet you say you came from?” – Planet of the Apes

I went into a bar for time travelers and they were upset I haven’t paid my tab from next week.

For large chunks of human history, things didn’t change all that much from one century to the next. Oh, sure, there were innovations and social changes and cyclic government transformations (Roman Republic to Roman Empire, for instance) but life was such that in many cases, dropping a Frenchman from Paris in 1300 A.D. into Paris around 1400 A.D. would have been a fairly comprehensible change for the resident, except he would probably have had to get a different color beret.

Let’s go back to 1900, though. What changes might have seemed like science fiction (dystopian or otherwise) to a time traveler from Fort Wayne (let’s call him Taylor) if he showed up in the year 2024?

I guess Joe is happy he finally made a banana republic.

Lets start with . . .

Social Changes:

Elevation of sexual fetish to that of a sacrament rather than that of a criminal offense.
Unromantic sex with large numbers of partners for unmarried teenage girls and women is the norm.
Sex changes for children are not punishable by prison time.
Universal, free availability of pornographic images and videos.
Women working. Sure, some worked, but it wasn’t the norm.
Women voting. Yes, it was allowed in some places, but certainly not all.
Criminals being treated with non-judgement, except when it comes to “hate crimes” – the concept of saying a “bad word” as being worse and less forgivable than murder.
Rap music. I still can’t believe it exists.
The fall in popularity of churches.
Staggeringly low birthrates in developed countries.
Credit scores as a primary measure of suitability coordinated by large, faceless financial companies.
Working for large corporations as the norm, rather than a rare exception, like the dude who worked for the railroad.

My grade on how Taylor would rank these? Utterly dehumanizing for most of them. I think he’d be shocked at the collapse of the morality required to run a just society in the absence of tyranny.

Why do I hate the metric system? I’ll never accept a foreign ruler.

I think the sexual stuff would be the most shocking. Sure, humans have been boinking each other in all sorts of ways since Adam’s third night with Eve, but the celebration of things that were called degenerate (or worse) in nearly every Western civilization for thousands of years would be the most shocking.

The criminal change would be a big thing for Taylor, since he was probably used to speedy justice of a trial followed by a fairly quick hanging.

World Power Changes:

The complete dissolution of the British Empire into a proto-Islamic Caliphate.
The complete collapse of the Major Power colonial system leaving many colonies adrift in a state of partially collapsed civilizations that can’t care for themselves.
Western government essentially declaring war on their own citizens in order to import aliens who don’t really assimilate, and importing those aliens in staggering numbers.
Near universal, real-time information gathering on nearly every citizen from cameras and tracking devices that they buy and carry with them.
A very small number of very large companies control what news people see.
Drones in modern warfare cutting down the ability of troops to be sneaky, at all.
Nuclear weapons which can devastate cities of a larger size than existed in 1900.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can reach any area of the Earth and devastate square miles in less than an hour.
Jet fighters which, although nearly obsolete, can move at multiples of the speed of sound and destroy people and planes and things hundreds of miles away.
Centralization of the financial systems of the world into a near-monolithic system where billions in capital could move easily from one continent to another in seconds.
World hunger as less of a problem than world obesity.
The staggering number of laws and rules from the federal level covering every aspect of life.
Identity theft.

The set of changes was bad, but this may be thought of as more chaotic. In Taylor’s time, colonies certainly exploited the natural resources of a region, but in many places they also gave order and governance to areas that had (until that time) were at the mud and straw hut technology level, and are rapidly regressing back to the mud and straw hut technology level.

Do national anthems qualify as country music?

Warfare went from Teddy’s charge up San Juan Hill to remote controlled impersonal warfare that has the capacity to kill billions in an afternoon. I’m pretty sure that would be horrifying to him.

General Technology:

Modern cars, including partially self-driving cars are amazing pieces of technology, and combined with modern highways provide a dream transportation system – coast to coast, in a car, in a couple of days.
Air travel from nearly any part of the world to nearly any other part of the world is possible in hours.
Humanity has travelled to the Moon. The Moon!
Instantaneous communication with people all around the world is possible.
Instantaneous video from anyplace in the world is possible.
Most of the knowledge accumulated by the human race is available nearly instantaneously.
Organ transplants are a thing.
Modern architecture has become ugly and soulless, with no space for beauty and humanity.
Creation of industrial “food” which incorporates large numbers of components that were created in a chemical plant rather than a growing plant or cow or pig.

What would Taylor say about these? He’d probably be impressed by the first part of the list, but the last two would be very troubling. In the last two weeks I ate a “pretzel” with cheezefoodsauce®, and it was tasty. But compare it to a freshly grown garden tomato? I’d rather have the tomato every time.

The Mrs. didn’t want a brain transplant, but then the surgeon changed her mind.

So, what color beret kufi do you think the Frenchman be wearing in 2124?

How Did It Get So Crazy, So Fast?

“It was O-Ren Ishii and her powerful posse, the Crazy 88, that proved the victor.” – Kill Bill, Vol. 1

My friends always made fun of me in high school for having an imaginary girlfriend. Of course, the joke was on them: they were imaginary, too.

One of the comments on a post a few weeks back asked a pretty good question:

“How did we get so crazy, so fast?”

The answer actually involves several intertwining threads, mice, Soviets, and gasoline engines, so let’s see of we can weave a web that covers at least a chunk of what has made us so crazy, so quickly. This is a distillation of the last seven years’ worth of study and writing, so some of it might be pretty familiar. Also, it’s not necessarily complete yet, but here are the major threads that I see that have led to what Heinlein called The Crazy Years.

First: Societal Malaise Due to Abundance

I’ve written several times about John Bumpass (that’s his real middle name according to the Internet) Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiment, see immediately below this paragraph for links to two previous posts. The short summary is Dr. Calhoun asked a crazy question: what would happen if you gave a population of mice everything they could want: food, water, freedom from predation, space to live, bedding material, and places to make nests.

Want Dystopia? Because this is how you get Dystopia.

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

The result? The mice died out. At a certain point they stopped mating, mother mice stopped taking care of infant mice, gangs formed, and some mice (the “beautiful ones”) just spent their time grooming themselves and not really interacting.

If this sounds like Reddit® or TikTok™ or the Democratic National Convention, well, you’re right. For a certain subset of the population, abundance has ruined them.

My friend told me I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “ironic” which was ironic because it was Tuesday.

I think it started in the 1960s. I’m just guessing. I like to blame the hippies, so they’re likely the early-version. It then continued into the wildest era of abundance the world has ever seen: the 1990s. If you look at any time lapse, that’s when the United States started leading the world (it has spread now, literally) in having obesity, not hunger, be the bigger (pun intended) health problem.

I think this started to manifest itself, big time, in the music of the 1990s. We went from Warrant singing about Cherry Pie to Kurt Cobain mumbling about how living in the suburbs with all the Pop Tarts™ his fat face could eat was killing him. Turns out that shotguns are even more deadly than Pop Tarts©. Who knew? We had a generation that was lost because they had everything.

I think a candidate for the hallmark phrase of this Crazy Cause is: “Why are we even here, dude?”

Never take diet advice from a fat guy, and never take life advice from Kurt Cobain.

Second: Societal Anxiety Due to No Challenges

I recently made the comment on X® that a lot of people would e better off if they had been bullied as kids. Was I serious? Yeah, I was. One response was, “Why do you want to make things worse?”

The truth is, for me, that bullies actually helped me build my character and my resolve. And, believe it or not, sometimes the bullies were right and the things that they bullied me about (second graders can be assholes) were things I needed to fix to be a better person. Did I lift harder to get stronger because of it? Yes. Did I develop the internal resilience so that the people who (rightfully) bullied the smarmy second grader that I was eventually earned the respect of the bullies?

Yes. Males, even young males, need to develop a hierarchy and understand their place in it and why they are inferior to Chuck Norris.

No child is born perfect, and it is the challenges in life that help define and develop character. Without challenge, development is stunted.

I think that today’s twentysomethings have the problem that they look into a future that certainly looks grim to them, yet they’ve never had a chance to develop their character and are told again and again how perfect they are and how their choices are important.

Newsflash: the choices of a second grader generally deserve about as much attention as the choices my dog wants to make. Both will eat all of the cake in the house if you let them and make messes everywhere. It’s our job as parents to not care what they think when it’s important to develop character and virtue.

Chuck Norris can recite pi backwards.

As a society we face many of the same problems: what is it we stand for and what are we trying to accomplish? We don’t have Soviets to fight, we’re actively encouraging invaders into our country to replace us, and we don’t have any cool national purpose like the Apollo program.

I think a candidate for the catchphrase of this crazy cause is: “Why am I so worthless?”

Third: Societal Atomization Due To Tech

As humans, we have minds that are built around smaller social systems, mainly. The big move from rural to urban happened in the west only recently. Our legacy social structure is (mainly) to live in a town for a very long time, put down roots, make friends, make a reputation.

Most people aren’t leaders, they’re followers, and want to be led. Why else would sane people want zoning regulations?

The good news is I can have up to six Eldrich Abominations without asking for a zoning variance request.

But now, put us in a constantly churning urban landscape where we don’t know the next-door-neighbor in the apartment building? Who do we turn to?

Well, whatever latenightjokeman says or whatever TikTik™ says or whatever InstaFace© allows to be printed. People are defining themselves on how YouTube™ says Europeans feel about Donald Trump.

They are also allowed to pick whatever gender they are. How do I know tech is driving this? Back when COVID made everyone homeschooled, transgenderism dropped. Why? No one to identify to – which is why “transwomen” with no girl parts get offended when gynecologists won’t give them appointments.

Yes. That’s a thing.

The iPhone™ is a big driver. It puts connections in the hands of kids. I talked with one Millennial, and he said that at the start of his high school career, kids “cruised main” looking for other kids. By the end of high school, it was all phones. Friendships dropped, and dating dropped. Mix that with the first two causes above, and it leads to fewer kids.

Dating sites magnify this, and make every girl “4” think that she deserves a Chad ranked 9 or higher because one time a drunk Chad had sex with her. This leads to Chads being happy, but girls being sad and hollow inside.

I think a catchphrase for this Crazy Cause is “Who or what the heck am I?”

When I was a kid I thought my dad was Superman®. Later, I wonder why he put a cape on after drinking bourbon.

Result of these interacting strands of Crazy are a large number of people who:

Stand for nothing
Have no examples of virtue other than seeking money in their lives
See no point in anything other than the present moment
Are distracted
Think they’re too good for PEZ™
Are filled with the combination of anxiety and narcissism
Do and feel whatever the media tells them to do
Haven’t built social circles of any particular strength – clubs and churches are on constant decline

There’s good news.

All of this is self-limiting. We’re not mice, and plenty of good humans haven’t fallen into Calhoun’s Behavioral Sink. Many of those same people have overcome challenges sufficient to shape their character for the better. Finally, there are enough of us that don’t follow.

We lead. Or we choose our own path.

And?

We’re gonna win.