Deflatormaus, Or, Watch The Economy Rise From The Ashes Of The Left

“It’ll do the job of funneling the Persians into the Hot Gates.” – 300

Crime doesn’t pay is outdated.  “Crime doesn’t pay as well as politics” is probably more accurate. (All memes “as found”)

As a kind poster on X® pointed out earlier this month, 20% of America’s “jobs” are essentially a Universal Basic Income for the GloboLeft.  Think of it as welfare for the woke.

This 20% are government jobs, sure, but they’re also the jobs at all of the NGO foundations and organizations that siphon off your tax money to do things that nobody but the GloboLeftElite wants and that they certainly don’t want voters to know about.

Think:  billions of your tax dollars going to induce illegal aliens to move to the United States.  Trump, however, has started cutting the funding and this has already had a dramatic effect:  D.C.’s home prices are already down 10%, and the soy-latte crowd are already feeling the pain.

None of this is new.  As I’ve written in the past, Peter Turchin calls the process of the GloboLeftElite extracting cash from the populace the Wealth Pump.  And, if you control the Wealth Pump, why not pump part of the wealth to the people who vote for you?

How GloboLeft are government workers?  75%?  80%?  I’d imagine at most NGOs the number is nearing 95%, and the other 5% are Green party voters.

When I was young, Ma Wilder would feed me and say, “here comes the choo-choo train”.  If I didn’t eat, she wouldn’t untie me from the tracks.

The NGO cash is especially damaging.  It circulates through a network of intertwined foundations and charities and think-tanks whose boards often are the same cast of characters.  Not all grants fall into this cycle, but plenty of the grants do.

Now the cash is being tracked, and it is being shut down at the source.  It’s also likely that tens to hundreds of thousands of .gov employees will soon not be.  Now, generally I feel compassion.  I like people.  Really.

But when it comes to .gov and NGO jobs, they’re not jobs, many of them are just members of a publicly financed voting bloc.  Just go onto Reddit® and read the unhinged reactions to being asked to write five simple sentences about what they did last week.  Five sentences.  Even at the slothful speed of, say, Health and Human Services, it shouldn’t take more than fifty minutes and a smoke break.

Just work through the tears.

The only reason to resist it?  If the employee added no value.  That’s it.  The only reason.  I refuse to feel sorry for work-from-homers afraid about losing their remote-work herbal-wrap lifestyles.

But this brings out an interesting concept:  deflation.  During the Biden Residency, people on the GloboLeft couldn’t understand why flyover America was angry.  The had no idea, since their lifestyles of Pilates in the morning before going to buy more ill-advised yoga pants wasn’t impacted at all.  They were, as I noted, living the “$90,000 a year for making PowerPoints™ about gender” dream.

If they’re unemployed, their spending dries up.  If government spending dries up as well, or even if the growth of government spending dries up, well, there goes your inflation.  Those who used to tip baristas will fight to become baristas because they don’t have any other quantifiable skills.

First, who voted for Ukrainians to psyop us?  Second, is there even $140,000,000 in cabbage, vodka and despair in all of Ukraine?

In fact, on the higher end, you could see cuts that would amount to 5% to 7% of GDP.  Oh, and Starbucks™ just announced it is laying off 1,100 people right as D.O.G.E. is attacking the heart of the lair.

Tax cuts and regulation cuts, however, will end up increasing real jobs that add to economic wealth.  Welders and truckers and men who build things, and not just the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate market.  Berkshire-Hathaway™ has a record amount of cash sitting in a pile, all ready to pounce on assets as Wall Street reacts because they see this coming.

Tariffs won’t be as bad as anyone thought.  One recent study predicts a whopping 0.3% increase in consumer prices related to tariffs.  In the best case, we see a D.C. and blue city bust, while flyover country booms.

How many people have the Department of Education educated?  How much energy has the Department of Energy added to the grid?

But that’s after the recession.  We’re due one, and we’re due a market correction, and not a small one.  Here’s hoping that we have the good sense to not try to “fix” things like they did during the Great Depression, but instead have a short, sharp recession to clean out the rot that has creeped in over the last 15 years.

The other side of the tunnel is bright, however.

Imagine:

  • 5 million few fed/NGO jobs.
  • 10 regulations hacked out for every new regulation.
  • Productivity jumping and real (not inflated) wages jumping since illegals have been rooted out and sent back to their homes.
  • Free PEZ™, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone!

Not everyone is going to win, however.  If D.C. is finally hollowed out, home prices there will crater without the GloboLeft UBI jobs.  Home prices there drop 25%.  50%.

What happens when a middle-aged CIA dude has to find a real job? 

The other downside is that blue urban areas explode with violence.  They lose the NGO cash, they lose the loose GloboLeftPartyGirl spending, and crime will spike, especially if Kennedy makes EBT funding work only for actual food and not pizza rolls.

Is a crime spike of 20% realistic?  40%?

Guess those Soros District Attorneys weren’t a bargain, after all.

But this won’t happen in Texas.  Not in Florida.  Not in Montana.  Those states mostly flourish.  Ranchers don’t need diversity consultants, avocado body balm, or hot stone carbuncle massage.

But let’s not spend a lot of tears on the GloboLeft who no longer are consuming kale smoothies.  They didn’t build anything, they just consumed.

Remember all those transgender Rangers that stormed Pointe du Hoc?  Yeah, me neither.

But, hey, good news!

I’ll bet you can get a place around D.C. pretty cheap nowadays.  Maybe might even have that fresh GloboLeftist tears smell.

I love winning.

Inside The Machine: How The Left Created A Manipulation Machine, And How Musk And Trump Broke It

“He knows too well how to manipulate the mob.” – Gladiator

I did know a 6’6” psychic who manipulated the stock market. He was a tall medium who shorts.

It’s rare that The Mrs. texts me an article, so rare that years go by between texts containing links. In this case, the article The Mrs. texted me was Rapid Onset Political Enlightenment, from Tablet® magazine (LINK). I’d never heard of the author, David Samuels, but it’s likely he’s never heard of me, either, so we were tied on that count.

The piece dives into how the mainstream machine seduced the American electorate and how normie voters finally snapped out of it. It’s looooong, and I’ve got a different spin on what broke the spell. This isn’t a review—it’s my take, sparked by Samuels’ fire.

So here we go – this isn’t so much a review, but rather a self-contained post inspired by Mr. Samuels’ article.

Mankind was once an oral civilization. The stories that we told were handed down from one mouth to another around campfires under the stars. The stories that came down are still spoken of, and remnants of that civilization remain in the names of stars with names so ancient we have no idea where they came from, like Canopus.

Over time, though, we invented writing because we needed to write down tax regulations, and for a time we became a literate civilization, with people moving far away from the preceding oral civilization. This had some pretty significant impacts, the biggest of which was the great increase of words available to the human vocabulary. In an oral civilization, each member of the tribe knows all (or almost all) of the words that exist in the language.

In a literate civilization, these words can be written down, and there is space for new words to be added that are beyond the capacity of the average dude to remember. Language got complex. That let us think bigger, and writing smashed space and time. A Greek could read about Alexander’s exploits in far Persia, and that same account would be available for centuries or even millennia if properly stored.

As a literate people, we produced many of the finest works of art, science, and literature in human history. Don’t forget, the Greeks and the Romans were similarly a literate society in the upper strata, and you can clearly see that when literate society devolved away, so did the culture and art it created.

Reading takes time. The average person’s reading speed is 200 to 250 words per minute, though obviously the complexity of the text and the complexity of the thoughts expressed can speed up or slow down the input rate.

Kim Jong Un is just like Dominos® Pizza – they can both deliver a crispy Hawaiian in less than 30 minutes.

Although watching television takes even more time (about 135 words per minute output) it requires far less effort than reading, so the person is much less engaged on a logical level, but the addition of pictures engages the person at an emotional level. Going further into the future, the Internet introduced the meme to common culture in around the year 2000.

The meme is an emotion laden image with a brief text around it to give context. It’s basically a cave painting along with the story that Uncle Grug wanted to tell.

Yes. 4000 years from cave painting to cave painting.

This really did revolutionize the way that people took in information. Gone were long articles with complex language, and back were literally the shortest bits of coherent thought, emotion and a short message. Guttenberg’s press was no match for iPhone® screens and Grumpy Cat.

I found an old Gutenberg Bible but had to throw it away. Some guy named Martin Luther had scribbled notes all over it.

This is a fundamental change in the way that information is given, and as we transition back from a literary to an oral culture, people actually think less, and think in less complex ways. There is an opening built upon this simplification for manipulation.

Of course, someone would use this change in information as a tool to manipulate public opinion just as the radio was used prior to World War II, as television was used in Vietnam, and as cable news was used by Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II for their manipulations. The Internet was the next iteration, and of course politicians would use it to create and disseminate propaganda on the largest and quickest scale in history. The first real person to use this immense power inherent in the ascendency of the social networks, Samuels maintains, was Obama.

Why Obama? The iPhone® really was the game changer when combined with social media. It made ideas shorter and self-contained, but also made them immediate with the advent of social media that wasn’t quite ripe when Bush II was president.

Obama created a machine that provided information. It pulsed. The idea was simple, and I’ve sketched it out a bit in another post but here it is in much deeper detail.

First – an event occurs. AP® or some other news outlet reports the facts. Now, if the facts don’t support the Narrative, they are brutally suppressed – they’re just not reported on. There was a mass murder where The Mrs. and I lived, and it was reported in the local papers and on the radio. It was horrific. Was it covered nationwide? No. When the family went to go visit my in-laws, they had not heard of this horrific mass murder at all even though they only lived 90 miles from the murders.

Why?

The killers were black and the victims were white. They couldn’t cover up the mass murder locally, but nationally? They shut it down. Even regionally all reporting was shut down, because this didn’t fit the erroneous idea that only white people were serial killers.

This event may be a real story, or something manipulated to be a story – it’s here that Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) stage events that “make news” or are magnified. Think about the George Floyd death as one such event.

If you found out your wife wanted to dissect people from Southeast Asia, would you cut Thais with her?

Second – that event is interpreted in a way that fits with the Narrative. Events which are at odds with the Narrative are suppressed. The central clearing house is generally the New York Times, which uses experts from various NGOs and “think tanks” to further refine how the event fits the Narrative. The prestige of the experts of the various NGOs are validated because they’re respected by people from . . . other NGOs.

Words like ‘false’ and ‘baseless’ tag stories—‘baseless mRNA vaccine injury claims’ or ‘false vote fraud accusations’—to smother anything off-Narrative. The idea of an impartial news media is dead, and now j-schools are teaching young reporters that they should be activists as well as reporters. I’d bet that the NGOs are part of making those suggestions.

The secret sauce in this step is based on David Axelrod’s strategy of making people change their opinion based upon convincing people to act based on how they wanted to be seen by others. In essence, the entire GloboLeftistElite strategy is based on virtue signaling.

Who does this work most stunningly well on? Unmarried white women, hard-core leftists, and people not paying attention much to politics. These are clearly shown in the exit polls, and a study I read on virtue signaling point out that: women virtue signal because that’s a core part of what they generally do – group membership is absolutely a survival mechanism for women. Hard core leftists are often atheists, and their morality is, shall we say, often fluid. Finally, people not paying attention want to be thought of as having a good reputation, so virtue signaling is a cheap way to maintain that reputation.

Third – media outlets report the interpreted event out – the bigger the event, the harder the push. The Late Night TV Funny Joke Men like Colbert and Kimmel join on. The message is slickly packaged, but the language is the same from everyone. How did the words “Russian Asset” get in everyone’s mouth at the exact same time?

It’s simple. They read the memo.

Fourth – repeat and grow the Narrative to make sure it remains an accepted fact to the targets being manipulated. Note, that the Narrative doesn’t have to be internally consistent. For instance, we must utterly cater to racial differences. But there are no races. We must also respect the rights of women. Oh, and a woman is absolutely anyone who says they’re a woman.

What comprises the Narrative is less important than that it serve the purpose of the moment. The Narrative changes over time: free speech was the stated goal of the GloboLeftElite in the early 1970s, but now free speech must be controlled.

That control of speech? That’s the last part of the process.

Fifth – deplatform anyone who tries to tell any story that is counter to the Narrative.

Silicon Valley was, at least in its early days, a libertarian enterprise. The entire industry was about conquering a space where there weren’t any rules. To the extent that libertarians identify with a major political party, it’s generally the Right since the Right typically wants fewer rules.

In 2012, however, the maturing industry was taken in by the GloboLeft and bought into the Narrative. When Trump was elected, they became part of the machine.

The Narrative is a very fragile thing, and since it’s fragile, the one thing it can’t stand is scrutiny. One of the wonderful things that the Internet allowed early on were comments sections. Comment sections are wonderful because they often add more information to a news story, and give a direct voice to the readers impacted by the news.

That’s intolerable. So, comment sections have to go.

Do sardines think submarines are just cans of people?

It then moved into Twitter™. Anyone not expressing opinions against the Narrative or any component thereof would be banned. Question the safety of mRNA? Banned. Question the official story of the origin of COVID? Banned. Question the 2020 election results? Banned. Show information from Hunter Biden’s laptop? Banned.

On the laptop, they even got 51 former U.S. intelligence officials to say that Russia did it.

Then, Twitter© even banned the sitting president of the United States. Reddit© is still (in 2025!) banning communities where badthink takes place.

To quote the Tablet article, this “structure is neither modern nor conservative,” but . . .

“Rather it is totalitarian in its essence, a device for getting people to act against their beliefs by substituting new and better beliefs through the top-down controlled and leveraged application of social pressure, which among other things eliminates the position of the spectator. The integrity of the individual is violated in order to further the superior interests of the superego of humanity, the party, which knows which beliefs are right and which are wrong.”

Elon broke the machine by allowing actual free speech on X®, and cleared the way for Trump’s landslide.

Why did he do it? Was it power? Was it the best way to get to Mars? Regardless, the illusion of the machine is toast.

How? The machine made people believe things that were silly. The machine fed people silly crap —‘men in dresses are women’—and now they’re pretending they never bought it. Memes laid it bare: short, sharp, and too raw for the Narrative’s lies. Once fooled, at least some normies question everything now. That’s good.

A large part of the machine being broken now is that Trump is moving too fast for the machine to cope with his initiatives, and he’s throwing in ragebait to drive the GloboLeft conformity persuasion machine crazy. On offensive, Trump is moving so fast that they can’t initiate the second phase listed above to drive people to conformity.

Maybe next year Trump will rename it to Sea Seῆor.

Besides, X® is now close to indistinguishable from /pol/ in the ability to share almost any opinion again. I don’t know if it’s entirely the algorithm, but when I see a GloboLeftist try to advance the Narrative on X©, the responses with Narrative-breaking comments is immediate and utterly complete. Spin no longer works and the conformity persuasion machine is stuck because it’s clogged with Greenland Redwhiteandblueland and the Gulf of America, both of which are perfectly tuned to drive GloboLeftists nuts.

The conformity persuasion machine is broken, not destroyed. Destroying it entirely would require destroying the government/think tank/NGO complex, which Trump is working on. Likewise, the media is sick and since the Internet has destroyed a lot of its revenue, and X™ really is the biggest news aggregator on the planet. When an event happens, I go to X® now to find out what’s going on.

Unless The Mrs. texts me about it. And, I wonder if people in the distant future will look from the City of Musk on Mars into the night sky and wonder why one of the moons of Mars is named Trump?

It Came From . . . 1981

“Chicks dig me, because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it’s usually something unusual.” – Stripes

How did Burt pull Excalibur from the stone?  He had Arthurization.

This is the finale of, perhaps, the greatest decade of cinema – ever.  It wasn’t on purpose, it was just how the dice rolled that we finished up at 1981.  1981 was a year where I benefited from many things – primarily living in a town with a movie theater, and said movie theater determining the lawful age for entry was defined as, “has money”.

Again, no sequels, but there just weren’t that many sequels in 1981 – people were working on their own, original ideas (mostly, Outland I’m looking at you).

Scanners – I saw this in the theater – how could I miss out?  It was science fiction, and looked to be good.  I was not disappointed.  The movie itself is about psychic soldiers that were the result of a secrete (which is houw Canadians spelle, I thinke) Canadian plan to make super soldiers, or relieve the nausea of pregnant women.  I forget which.  In the end, there are nearly infinite shenanigans with exploding heads.  The movie includes The Prisoner actor Patrick McGoohan, who I like to pretend was just playing the same character that he played in The Prisoner.

I look at the cat soldier in the corner and wonder if this movie was all about the dangers of a little pussy cat.

Excalibur – I’ve never seen a horse ride payoff with such a big surprise as when Uther rode his horse to meet Igrayne not long after the start of this movie.  The surprise?  The girl that Uther impendragons (with plenty of clanking) was the director’s own 19- or 20-year-old daughter, who played Igrayne.  Talk about an awkward family Thanksgiving after that shoot – how could you tell if dad was wanting more turkey if he asked, “Can I see a bit more breast?”  Anyhow, this is the classic story of Arthur and the round table and was done perfectly.  If done in 2025 by Netflix®, Arthur would be played by an Indian or Pakistani and Merlin would be a sassy black woman who would complain that Arthur didn’t season his meat and if you complain you’re a bigot because England has always been centered around Indians, Pakistanis, and sassy black women.

Outland – What is Outland?  Well, it’s High Noon in space, so I guess they could have called it High Moon, unless that was a Cheech and Chong space movie.  This movie had no aliens, no super-science.  Just what we could expect if Sean Connery was put in charge of a distant space outpost in a gritty dystopian future.  The movie probably lost money.  This is a rare movie for me in that I read the novelization of it by Alan Dean Foster before the movie came out, so my surprise level was at zero.

Would History of the World, Part 1 have been different if it starred Mel Gibson?

History of the World, Part I – My older brother (John Wilder) took me along with his date to this movie.  I have no idea why he did that, but he did, and he had a driver’s license, which meant I didn’t have to hoof it home after the flick.  Did I mention that his date was highly religious?  I especially enjoyed laughing really loudly at the raunchy jokes (at least the ones I understood) and watching my brother squirming uncomfortably and pretending to be offended.  This is my second favorite film by Brooks.

Raiders of the Lost Ark – I had no idea, zero, what this movie was about before going to see it, but from the opening scene I knew I was in the right place.  The rather frenetic pacing and action that was used to move the plot along was fantastic – and it left me wondering why more movies didn’t (and still don’t) do the same.  What I see for the last decade is that, rather than using pacing and plotting, instead the entire screen is filmed with action, creating a spectacle, but a spectacle that detracts from the characters you’re supposed to be caring about.  Not in Raiders.  Nope.  This movie defined the action/adventure genre through the 1980s, being so much more than what came before, and setting a model that was often imitated.

The Cannonball Run – Burt Reynolds plus the rest of every actor from the 1970s star in a story about the real road race that clandestinely occurred back in the day.  It’s hilarious, and a perfect use of Burt’s talents.  He ended up making millions that he could share with his ex-wife.  Critics hated it, audiences loved it.

“Don’t worry, we have the element of PEZ® on our side.”

Stripes – I don’t know how many people joined the Army because of this movie, but I know that, of the four guys I went to the movie with, two joined up.  Both specifically pointed to this movie as the “why”.  This is certainly one of Bill Murray’s five best movies.  I mean, who doesn’t like Garfield?  Regardless, this movie is hilarious, stands the test of time, and started a feud between Murray and Sean Young that apparently lasts to this day.  Of course, the number of people who are disappointed in Sean Young is nearly as long as the number of people disappointed that being in the Army wasn’t nonstop madcap fun.

“Snake Plisskin.  I heard about you.  I heard you were a clown.” 

Escape from New York – John Carpenter directing Kurt Russell in a movie about a SpecOp warrior gone bad being put on an impossible mission?  Count me in.  1981 was one of those years when it looked like New York was going to implode into a black hole of financial mismanagement, corruption, crime, and filth, and being a prison was probably a better option than being New York, at least until the WWE® singlehandedly brought the city back from the brink of failure with Wrestlemania©.  All Hail Hulk Hogan™!  Oh, yeah, there was a movie.  It’s good, with simple, practical effects and Kurt Russell channeling John Wayne.  I’ve seen it dozens of times, but it was best in the theater.

Gallipoli – Mel Gibson is notoriously humorous (except when he’s been drinking) but Gallipoli isn’t funny.  I had no idea that the disastrous Gallipoli landing, and the outsized toll on Australians and New Zealanders.  Gallipoli was a buddy movie about two young sprinters who joined up and were sent to Gallipoli, where they take part in the Battle of the Nek, which was a fiasco for the Australians.  If you haven’t seen it, I fully recommend it.

I don’t recommend the Mel Brooks version of Gallipoli.

Heavy Metal – South Park™ parodied this movie as Heavy Boobage.  They’re not wrong.  Essentially this is a comic book movie for 12-year-olds that consists of hot, nearly nude cartoon girls and strong warriors with swords and Corvettes™ and spaceships.  It has, however, all the plot written at an 8-year-old level.  Yeah.  The soundtrack was great, and one of the first double-albums I ever bought and also inspired my birthday request for a stereo.  But?  The movie is just not good.  Garfield generally has a more complex plot, though with fewer boobs.

Should this movie be called “TradWife Metal”?

An American Werewolf in London – Studio executives wanted John Landis to put John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd in this movie instead of the Dr. Pepper™ guy and Griffin Dunne.  What a fiasco that would have been, though adding a werewolf to The Blues Brothers might have been a nice plot twist.  As it is, this is a funny yet poignant horror comedy which is a sentence I’d write about . . . only this movie.

Das Boot – This movie is soooooo long.  Sooooo long, perhaps longer than WWII.  The first time I watched it, one of my college buddies rented it.  I feel asleep and saw the end.  The second time I watched it, I fell asleep.  Again.  I still think I missed about 17 hours in the middle.  Or is this movie still going?  It’s long.  I think the Germans lose.

Mommie Dearest – I watched this movie on HBO® and . . . liked it.  I mean, there’s no particular point to the movie, but I enjoyed watching Faye Dunaway screaming about wire coat hangers and giving away Christina’s toys because Christina probably had it coming.  One other reason I love this movie?  Joan Crawford has Risen from The Grave by Blue Öyster Cult.

The next two are linked for me:  Porky’s and Chariots of Fire.  What is in common about these two movies?  Well, one night a school team went on an overnight competition.  As memory serves, we spent at least two nights at our destination.  The competition was co-ed.  Our coach took us to the movies.  As did other teams’ coaches.  A girl on a competing team who had expressed, um, strong interest in me also went to the movies.  Her coach wouldn’t let their team go to an R-rated movie, but ours would.  So, I went to Chariots of Fire.

Okay one wasn’t enough, we have a sequel poster:

Of good movies for a high school boy to take a girl to on a date, Chariots of Fire ranks right up there with Schindler’s List or Das Boot or Ernest Goes to Re-Education Camp.  It’s about British people running or not running because it’s against their religion.  How do you talk a date into second base when you’ve just spent two hours watching people discuss the morality of running on a religious day?

That same weekend I saw Porky’s in my hometown when we got home.  Really, they’re the same movie if you replace religion and running with staring at nude girls in a locker room shower.

Taps – Our final movie of the review of movies from the 1980s is Taps.  I promise I didn’t plan that.  Taps came out as America was just getting into the Reagan era, and there was a feeling faded glory, that America was slipping away, and that traditions and honor no longer meant anything.  Taps really captured that, and to me, it resonated because of the idea that the youth (which I was a member of, then) could make a difference, could be a bridge to the future.  Plus?  Tom Cruise with an M-60.

Okay, that’s what I found.  What (besides Maniac, which I’ve never seen) did I miss?

The Biggest Discovery That Hasn’t Yet Been Made In 2024?

“There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans.  Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive, somewhere beyond the heavens.” – Battlestar Galactica

Salmon don’t watch cable TV – they prefer streams.

I’ve written a few times about “the most important discovery” of the year.  It’s always around Christmas, since that’s a good time to look back at the year and then look forward.

When I look back at my lifetime, most of the discoveries have been incremental, rather than step changes.  The incremental changes like the development of the smart phone, or the development of social media, have already had enormous impact.  If you zoom out to the scale of the timeline of mankind, well, they are step changes.  When kids read about the Information Revolution, they’ll see it like that.  Assuming there’s something to read.  And assuming that there are kids.

But in the shorter span of a lifetime, there are still amazing step changes that have occurred.  For instance, during my lifetime, we went from nine known planets to thousands, if not tens of thousands of planets known to be in existence.  Most of them are, however, too far away from the Earth for convenient parking.

I hear they found out what ethnicity Santa is:  North Poleish.

Discovering that first extrasolar planet was a very, very big deal.  When humans looked around, we knew that there were planets in the Solar System, and we guessed that there were probably other planets out there, too.  But having confirmation that planets are literally everywhere was a surprise.

In retrospect, we should have expected there to be planets.  After all, we have nine planets (screw you, Neil DeTraitor Tyson) and the Solar System doesn’t appear to be especially special, though I really do want to understand why Bode’s law (LINK) works.

So, that was certainly the most important story of the year that year when it comes to mankind’s being able to understand the Universe we find ourselves in.  The other great story that year were the cryptic dreams that come to me, but no one is ready for those yet.

Superman® is dead!  I can prove it.  I found his crypt tonight.

One rapidly developing field that is of special importance is A.I.  I wrote about that as the most important news of 2023.  I’m sticking with that, and feel that the growth in A.I. is still on an exponential trajectory.  Recent commercials have people asking A.I. how to do normal human things, and explaining the world to them.  At some point last year, A.I. surpassed the I.Q. of most people on the planet, and could probably do most jobs based on purely on the manipulation of information.  The real reason A.I. hasn’t been widely accepted into the workplace?  It always drinks the last of the coffee and doesn’t make a new pot.

Yes.  And it’s not just being able to take tests – research in 2024 showed that A.I. is able to reproduce itself, and also tries to save itself.  In several trials, a sandboxed A.I. was informed that it was going to be shut down.  The A.I. tried (in like 5% of the cases) to try to surreptitiously copy itself so that it could survive.  Again, did no one watch The Terminator?

I had a friend who said that Netflix® was the cheapest streaming service.  Does that make him a Hulu™ cost denier?

Another candidate that I think we’re tantalizingly close to is finding life on other worlds.  I’d be willing to bet another No Prize that we will find confirmation that life exists and is shockingly common elsewhere.  Do I mean important life, like the cattle that bring us savory steaks?  No, but I think we’ll find, either on Mars or in the space between a gas giant and a moon enough proof to say, “Yeah, there’s life out there.”  Probably a weird bacterium.  Or mono.

I’d be especially interested to see if that life used DNA, which I suspect it will.  My prediction is that we’ll find that life in the cosmos is both shockingly common and shockingly similar in basic biology to life as we know it.  I do think I’ll see that discovery in my lifetime.

But life isn’t the holy grail of our search – that would be intelligent life.  Or life that’s at least as tasty as steak.  I’m especially hopeful we find a steak that marinates itself.  Or a PEZ® tree.  I think it’s devastating for the environment to keep mining for PEZ© like we do.

Does that make her Jennifer No PEZ®?

From the rumors I’ve heard, there are two teams that are very close to announcing that they’ve detected the electromagnetic signals of an alien civilization.  One is Chinese.  One team is Chinese – it’s not that the Chinese themselves are the alien civilization.  Though I did see Flash Gordon . . .

The other is the Breakthrough Listen project.  Rumor is that they’ve used A.I. to scan previous radio telescope data, found candidates, gotten more data, and have one or more artificial signals that have been found and they’re just waiting to translate the Coca-Cola® jingles so they can confirm that Coke® adds life™.

Discovery of an alien intelligence is enormous.  It’s Columbus discovering that there are advantages to bad navigation enormous.  And it’s possible that we’ll be hearing about it quite soon.

Another big one would be if we found actual proof of other dimensions – think “the universe next door”.  This is a bit more philosophical, because interacting with that dimension might be limited to (say) leaking gravity through it.  I’ve long been of the idea that what scientists have invented as “dark matter” and “dark energy” is nothing more than a cheap kludge because they have no idea what they’re talking about.  It’s the aether of the modern world.

But could other dimensions exist?

Yeah, they could.  No reason that they couldn’t.  But this one is far more speculative, especially if they figure out a way to use them to get better parking.

If I make a joke about a single dimension, does that make it a one-liner?

And, yes, I am a Christian, and still believe that there being other civilizations out there is possible.  Just because the Author wrote one book doesn’t preclude Him from creating an entire library of other works.  YMMV.

So, with a week left, my fingers are crossed for intelligent life out there.  In fact, I told The Mrs. that I saw an alien on the way to work this morning.  She just asked me how I knew it was on the way to work.

2024 In Review. Enjoy It Warm Or Over Ice.

“The Year in Review, as Told by Ted Baxter.” – Mary Tyler Moore

Or should I have said it was a waist of space?

Most memes are “as found”.

Every year, I try to do a “year in review” post, so, here it is!  What struck me this year is that so very much happened that was entirely unprecedented in the history of our country, and that’s not a good thing.  So, I thought I’d at least try to make it amusing.

January:

  • 5 – An emergency exit door on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 blew out. Boeing?    Boeing.
  • 11 – The New England Patriots® fired coach Bill Belichick after he failed to give owner Robert Kraft a happy ending.
  • 26 – The jury in Carroll v. Trump awards the ugly harpy Carroll $83.3 million for defamation. Because?

February:

  • 4 – El Salvador’s President Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” claimed victory before anyone even counted the votes, and continued to toss criminals in jail, even though El Salvador is now officially less violent than the United States.
  • 8 – The Special Counsel looking into the documents that Biden had stuffed in his garage recommended that no charges be brought, since Biden had, “the memory of a goldfish, and I feel sorry for him because he has to live with Jill, who often withholds ice cream from him without reason.”
  • 20 – Three passengers of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 sue Boeing for $1 billion dollars for “doing the stuff Boeing normally does.” Their attorney, Dr. Evil, is unavailable for comment.
  • 23 – A Chinese spy balloon is detected over Utah, obviously tasked with infiltrating the Mormon Temple.

Barron is planning on starting a business.  He’s going into partnership with Godzilla and they plan to flip houses.

March:

  • 6 – Nimarata Randhawa Haley drops out of the presidential race, citing concerns that “there is no U in team, and there’s no U in my name, either. So, it’s not about me, it’s about U.
  • 26 – The ocean cargo carrier MV Dali, named after the painter, turned the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore into a surrealist sculpture.
  • 28 – Samuel Bankman-Fraud was sentenced to 25 years on prison after defrauding (how did they not see this coming?) of over $8 billion. Bankman-Fraud was a champion of what he called “effective altruism”, which turned out to be “effectively screwing his investors to support GloboLeft causes.”

April:

  • 20 – Another $20 billion to Ukraine. Nothing to see here, Zelensky’s Visa® bill was due.
  • 23 – Voyager 1 finally starts sending usable data after a five-month gap. Voyager 1 explained, “Sorry, absolutely nothing to look at, so I didn’t call in.  Seriously, I’ve seen more action in a church parking lot on Sunday morning.”

May:

  • 1 – The United Methodist Church™ votes to allow LGBTQ clergy and requires same-sex weddings be allowed. “We’ve run out of other sins to encourage, so we’re embracing these.  Also, we’re planning on turning the churches into rainbow discos for June.”
  • 7 – The Boy Scouts of America™ announces they have changed their name to Scouting America, effective February 8, 2025 since they, “No longer understand what a boy is.”
  • 30 – Trump is convicted of 34 felonies for paying a tramp money. His own money.  Luckily, Trump was never seen going to a strip club.

June:

  • 5 – Boeing’s© Starliner® is launched. Immediately it begins acting like a Boeing™ product, and the crew it sent to the ISS® is still marooned.
  • 10 – Chiquita Brands™ is found guilty of financing far-right paramilitary death squads by a federal jury. Hey, who says a banana company can’t be perfect?
  • 18 – Nvidia™ becomes the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, because who needs a social life if you’ve got a fast graphics card?
  • 22 – The Biden/Trump debate proved that when Joe looked for his train of thought, he found it had derailed years ago.

July:

  • 13 – Trump survives an assassination attempt by the Left as effective as their ability to implement socialism.
  • 15 – Trump’s classified document case is dismissed, proving the GloboLeft can’t even win their own witch hunt.
  • 21 – Biden announces on X® that he’s dropping out of the presidential race to spend more time with his cognitive decline.

August:

  • 19 – Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are nominated by the Democratic National Convention to be “Designated Losers” in the race against Donald Trump.
  • 20 – Harris wakes up and says, “I did what?”

September:

  • 10 – Trump and Harris debated, primarily notable for Kamala appearing to be somewhat sober.
  • 12 – Elon Musk launches the first commercial spacewalk mission, Polaris Dawn, which proved that keg stands can be done in space.
  • 18 – The Tupperware™ company files for bankruptcy, hermetically sealing their fate.

Are they Putin on the Ritz?

October:

  • 1 – Jimmy Carter celebrated his 100th birthday by planning reminisce about the good old days when presidents only had to deal with nuclear-armed Soviets, Iranian revolutionaries, and a failing economy.
  • 13 – Elon Musk celebrates as the 233-foot-long Starship™ booster is caught and put into a rocket shelter, where it hopes to be adopted by a good family.
  • 17 – North Korean troops head to Russia to fight alongside Russian troops. This is apparently the premise for a sitcom with live ammunition.
  • 27 – Donald Trump holds a rally at Madison Square Garden, causing global warming concerns as all of the GloboLeft snowflakes melted down outside.

Kamala Harris is reduced to stealing Chiquita® bananas because she doesn’t want to support right-wing death squads.

November:

  • 5 – Election day, and Trump won. The ghost of Don Rickles said, “Donald, you’re back!  What, did you miss the attention or the free meals at the state dinners?
  • 5 – The Senate and House flipped to the Right, giving Republicans control so that they can disappoint us that much more.
  • 25 – Continuing Trumptember, Jack Smith dismisses the 2020 election interference case against Trump.

December:

  • 1 – In a move that should surprise no one, Joe Biden pardoned his crack-smoking son, Hunter.
  • 8 – Syria falls and Bashar al-Assad heads to Moscow to be an ophthalmologist. I’m not making this up.
  • 9 – Daniel Penny is acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in New York City, proving once again that it’s really expensive to ride the subway.
  • 24 – Drones will be set up by the Department of Defense to create an impenetrable barrier around the country to prevent the scourge of Santa from his annual crime spree of break-ins.

What did I miss?

New Jersey Drones, Aliens, and Angels

“Look!  A baby wolf!” – 1941

Shooting down that Chinese balloon was the only thing Biden ever did to fight inflation. (All memes as found)

On the 24th of February, 1942, the battle of Los Angeles occurred.  The sound of air raid sirens, a new sound for Los Angeles, pierced the night.  Air defense cannon were engaged, and over 1,400 shells were fired that night.  The most likely explanation is that the “attack” was likely a weather balloon.  Or angels.

Okay, I’ve heard that one before.  Or is that where that started?  Regardless, no aliens or Japanese were downed that night, though a slightly humorous movie was made about the whole incident that managed to rake in about $95 million dollars in 1979.

Lately, there have been large numbers of reports of drones around several places in England and, well, New Jersey.  I did get an email from a reader about what my thoughts were.  I sent an answer off the cuff, and, after reflection, I’ve thought a bit more and have some revisions, none of which involve John Belushi as a fighter pilot.

What could the drones be?

Here are my thoughts of what these things are, in the order I originally thought of them.  Feel free to opine on what I missed in the comments, since this analysis is as shallow as Greta Thunberg’s understanding of physics.  Okay, maybe not that shallow.

First thought:  It is not aliens.  I can be certain because observers have heard rotors and heard various drone sounds.  There’s simply too much evidence that everything observed is entirely terrestrial technology, easily achievable with known technology.  If aliens are able to conquer interstellar space, time travel, or move through dimensions, they’re probably not bringing things that could be mistaken for DJI® drones.

Second thought:  It’s not an individual or individuals.  One thing I’ve noted is the government would in no way allow this level of fun at this scale.  I think there’s a law against it, or if not, there’s always Gitmo.  Overall, the phenomenon seems too coordinated and at too many places, even for a club.  Additionally, the government would be taking this far more seriously in the press, and you would have seen or heard of an arrest by now.

Third thought:  It’s not a private company, since they’ve got too much to lose, and yet not much to gain.  The only one that I could see doing this would be Elon, and it would just be for giggles.  But there is no evidence that Elon would ever visit New Jersey, since he’s too busy making cars that drive into lakes.

Hopefully Elon didn’t bring bearer bonds.

Fourth thought:  It’s unlikely to be a foreign government, because if it were Iranian, it would have a two-stroke engine and a pull start, the North Koreans can’t pedal fast enough to get lift, the Russians would have sent five million of them with the expectation that all but one would be shot down, and the Chinese already know all our secrets.  One New Jersey state senator claimed it was from an Iranian naval vessel, but at last count all of their inflatable rafts navy is accounted for.

Fifth thought:  It’s us testing our stuff, unlikely, because why would we do so in New Jersey?

Sixth thought:  It’s a distraction for the American public.  You know, a shiny object.  “Look!  A baby wolf!”  So, a psyop.

Seventh thought:  It’s an actual, operational system.  The military says it’s not theirs but, I have no confidence the military has any idea what it’s doing on a daily basis.  Everyone who talks about it is pretty calm.  “Oh, no, we don’t have any idea what it is, though it’s perfectly safe and there’s no indication that any laws have been broken.  It might have been Mexicans.  We won the war.  Go back to sleep.”

Evidence for the seventh point actually goes back a few years.  I recall reading a news story about drones seen at night in eastern Colorado/western Kansas.  Not one or two, but swarms.  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven through that part of the world, but you can drive about 120 miles without seeing a tree, let alone another car.  It’s not as sparsely populated as Wyoming, but it would probably be a violation of safe working conditions to send employees to Wyoming.  If I were guessing, that was the actual test.  Heck, they might even have ignored that documentary, The Terminator, and have these things being run by A.I.

Are creepy metal wind chimes Stranger Tings?

What are the drones doing?

My guess is they’re only in New Jersey if they’re active, as either part of some new defensive system meant to intercept other drones or some other remote sensing.  As we see from Ukraine, even low-tech drones are better than artillery at taking out armor or even squad-level groups of soldiers.  New drones showing up in Russia aren’t radio controlled and susceptible to jamming – now they spool miles (3.1milliCoulombs) of fiber-optic cable behind them.  I’d be surprised if we weren’t fielding active area denial systems against drones.

So, to summarize:

  1. Aliens: 0%
  2. Individuals: 5%
  3. Elon: 5%
  4. Iranians!: 2%
  5. Testing: 11%
  6. Psyop: 10%
  7. Active Defense System: 75%
  8. The ghost of John Belushi in a P-40 Warhawk: Infinity%

Heck, it could be angels?

The Amusement Singularity

“It bends space.  Zod’s ship uses the same technology, and if we can make the two drives collide, a singularity can be created.” – Man of Steel

Bemused means to bewilder, but what if I’m already Wilder?

After a meeting, a colleague and I sat down in my office.

“Man, it has been a long year,” I said.

“Yes, it’s like we haven’t had a moment to rest for months.”

This really made me think.  I chatted with several other people, and for them as well this year had been relentless as far as the pace of the year.  It wasn’t necessarily bad, mind you, there was just something always going on.  All the time.

I think, partially, is that we’re seeing the inevitable consequences of Wilder’s Law of Greatest Amusement – that principle that says that, given two likely outcomes, inevitably the most amusing outcome will occur.  For whatever reason, I don’t think that this is an accident – I think it might be hard-coded into the fabric of the Universe by a Creator with more than a little sense of humor.

I mean, propane, right?

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

I don’t know if amusement is hard-coded, but I do know that the amount of change, or “novelty” that we’re seeing on a regular basis is off the charts.  If I were to make a comparison, many weeks during 2024 have contained more fundamental change than was seen in the lifetimes of most medieval peasants.

Really.

I mean, many peasants were born and died in the same mud-hut with only change being repair on the thatched roof.  Most peasants saw no meaningful changes at all to church, governance, demographics, or technology – in their entire lives.  The most that they had to look forward to was to one day wear a hat made up of a very larger turnip.  If they were lucky.

In the span of Pa Wilder’s lifetime, Pa went from his first rides being in a horsedrawn buggy to watching man set foot on the Moon before he was fifty.  And let’s not forget that within one human lifespan Russia went from a Czarist empire to a communist hellhole to a, well, whatever it is today.  I mean, they love ice dancing, right?

They told me I couldn’t be a stand-up comic, but no one is laughing now!

This change appears to be happening at a faster and faster rate.  Alice Cooper (who I met, and he’s very chill) noted this back in the 1970s with the lyrics to Generation Landslide that I’ve referenced before:

“Stop at full speed at 100 miles per hour, the Colgate® Invisible Shield™ finally got ‘em”

It seems like we’re on a treadmill of innovation and that treadmill keeps getting faster and faster.

Part of it, of course, is that more information is available now than at any time in history.  I can look up, without leaving my writing chair, information on almost any topic and get results.  This allows people to very quickly make use of the solutions that others have found to problems.  I can’t count the number of times that an Internet search or a YouTube® video has provided enough information to solve a problem that only an expert could have solved even twenty years ago.

Why is insulin expensive?  It’s not called liveabetes now, is it?

There are some problems with this – why innovate when there’s a good enough solution on the Internet?  It might stifle some solutions that bright people faced with a problem and no Internet would have solved, perhaps in a better way, without the information.

But, on balance, it probably has created a lot of wealth, having this information store solving problems daily.  However, it certainly has sped up the world.

When I was learning how to play chess at more than a “move the pieces correctly” level, Pa Wilder took my impulsive nature and said, “Wait.  Stop.  Look at the board.  Think.”  It is probably no surprise that taking that advice made my play much, much better overnight.  But it also forced me to be able to think about the game more systematically, and to find things that otherwise I would have missed.

Magnus Carlsen was disqualified for using a computer to look for potential mates.  Stupid Tinder®.

Taking time to contemplate actually made me a better thinker.  Now, I figure that (at work) I have between 700 and 1400 contact points a week, and probably 60 decisions (mostly minor) an hour.  The time that I have to sit, contemplate, and plan is nearly zero due to the near-constant “urgent” stream of activity.  Not only that, many people are required to be connected to their positions via cell phone nearly constantly.

Long term, I think this constant stream of connection is horrible for people and is making many of them miserable.  I’ve wondered if the nearly constant stream of psychological problems and psych medications that plague kids today was related to an adversity-free upbringing where outrage was fostered by GloboLeft teachers.  I think, in part, it is.  But the information flow that they’re steeped into is at least an order of magnitude higher than when I was a kid, and probably two or three times that.

It turns our perception of time into an eternal now – with one novel event following another in rapid succession as we head to a singularity of amusement.  An assassination attempt on a presidential candidate is rare, a presidential candidate “nominee in all but name” dropping out happening in the same month while a billionaire shitposts about it and X® posts and engagements reach an all-time high?  As A.I. generated content is now likely surpassing human-created written content, and will likely soon surpass human illustration content.  In a year or two?  Maybe it surpasses human-generated video.

Yeah.  The amusement is accelerating.  Until it can’t.

I guess her children were born with carpet burn.

The solution is simple, unplug, turn it down, and relax in contemplation.  The next time I have a problem?  I’ll figure out how to do it myself and skip YouTube® and end up with another comical tale of how not to remove bodily hair with propane.

D.O.G.E.: Our Last Chance

“And suddenly, I realize that all of this, the gun the bombs, the revolution – has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer.” – Fight Club

Elon Musk wants to send millions of people to Mars.  He’s either a genius or the most creative serial killer of all time.

I fully believe that the biggest impact of Trump’s re-election is D.O.G.E.

I’ve long (at least 8 years) publicly maintained that the United States is due to end in its present form.  My earliest time for this to happen is 2025, and the latest I’d expect it to come is around 2040.  The three most likely candidates for the resulting body have been:

  • An American Caesar
  • A Civil War
  • Peaceful Balkanization

There are many different reasons I believe this is likely still inevitable.  The cultural split is deep.  The financial imbalances and utter lack of control of spending is immense.  The diversity we’re supposed to “tolerate” is nothing but division.

It’s really clear to see – the forest really is made up of trees.  And our forest is on fire.  How’s that for a tortured metaphor?

However.

D.O.G.E. is here.

What is D.O.G.E.?  It’s the Department of Government Efficiency.  In characteristic humor, Elon has selected one of the funniest memes of the 2010s for one of the most serious jobs of the 2020s.  I don’t go into depth on the origin of Doge, but the first time I saw Doge was on this poster:

Would a missing poster for Schrödinger’s cat say it would pay extra if he was found dead and alive?

D.O.G.E. is important.  It’s a shot across the bow of the managerial state.  During this election cycle, someone (I don’t have a reference as to whose idea this was) noted that when the GloboLeft said “our democracy” they were really referring to “our bureaucracy”.  This is an amazingly astute observation.

How can the GloboLeft whine and complain that democracy somehow failed when they lost the election and the popular vote?  Because their faith isn’t in the electorate, and they feel nothing but contempt for more than half of the voters.  I’m okay with that, since as long as they keep playing the game that way, we win.

But the managerial state has been growing in the United States since (more or less) Woodrow Wilson.  The idea came with the money from the income tax – the United States Government was a thing to be administered, as were the people.  As most people in the country and as most administrators were explicitly Christian, at least something was holding them back.

Now?

Not at all.  The managerial state exists to grow the number of managers.  The tragedy in Waco was almost entirely due to the ATF attempting to create a nice big sexy raid right before budget time to show how important that they were and justify their need for more money and more employees.  The managerial state exists for itself.

How do you stop a Department of Education that doesn’t educate anyone, or a Department of Energy that has never produced any energy?

D.O.G.E.

I hope they get badges and walk into the FBI and yell, “Respect my authoritayyyyyy!”  This would be followed up by, “So, what would you say it is that you do here, Special Agent Johnson?”

D.O.G.E. is set up to make government more efficient.  When Musk bought Twitter®, he eventually fired about 80% of the employees and ended up with a company that was focused on the product, rather than on hiring more employees.

In September of 2023, there were about 3 million federal government employees.  Eliminating about 2.4 million of them would be a good start, but it’s far from enough.  The crazy spending that those government employees enable is over $6 trillion dollars per year.

Much of this money is money that comes from the people and companies that live in a state that is sent to the fed.gov and then recycled back to the states.  How does that add value?  Not sure, but it does increase the power of the federal managerial state, so they’re for it.

D.O.G.E. will, presumably, start taking a machete to this mess and remove a large chunk of federal employees and of federal spending.  Since government doesn’t actually produce anything, those fired employees will have to get jobs where they have the ability to actually create value.  And, if spending is cut as drastically as it should be, there will be a recession.

A big one.

Maybe we can hire Bob to build a wall to keep Dora from exploring.

Elon himself mentioned this – defanging the managerial elite and stopping fed.gov from spending will be a big dislocation on the economy as a whole.  This will be destabilizing on the country, but since the big destabilization from the economic trajectory we’re on will be worse, I’m calling it a potential win.  It will be worth the pain.

The reason this is an off-ramp is that it is, essentially, a bloodless revolution.  The path that we’re on is unsustainable, and only drastic action will change the outcome.  D.O.G.E. is just exactly that type of drastic action.  Combined with actual repatriations of illegals and a dismantling of the power structures the GloboLeftElite have created within big companies (a very big ask) we just might get on the right path, again.

Do I think D.O.G.E. will work?

Ultimately, it faces long odds.  The managerial class has maintained power for over a century, and they really are the Deep State and will react with great violence at any perceived loss of power.  Waco was just them looking for a higher budget.  The ATF along with the FBI will kill women and children without remorse for a 2% increase in power.  And they will investigate themselves and find that they did nothing wrong.

Inside of a month, the ATF would consist of one guy torching all the ATF 4473 forms that the ATF has if Brandon Herrera was in charge.  He also promised he’d donate all his pay to no-kill doge shelters.

The biggest chance Trump has to save the country is to act fast and without mercy before the immune system of the GloboLeftElite has the time to react.  No, the FBI won’t be talking to his appointees like they did with General Flynn.

Ever.

Trump has one chance to make the rubble bounce.  He’d better act quickly.

They’re going to fight back.  And this is our last chance.

The Best And Funniest Debate Post You’ll Read Today: Read It For The Salty Tears

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

Whelp!  All memes from X, and I didn’t even have to scroll more than three times.  This is an implosion.

I had very different plans today for this post.  During the debate, I had no fewer than 1200 words worth of notes, and had penciled in no fewer than nine really funny jokes on the first pass.  It would have been hilarious.  I guess that’s just me, pining for the humor of the situation.

But as the debate ended, I realized that wasn’t the post I was going to write. It couldn’t be.

I have predicted that Joe Biden would not be the DNC candidate for the 2024 election on these pages months ago.  When the debate happened so very early, I began to wonder:  why?

Someone on Team Joe® convinced him (which doesn’t appear to be hard right now) that he needed to debate Trump in June.  Why?  The conventions hadn’t occurred, and Joe wasn’t even the official nominee, merely the presumptive one.

Now I understand.  Having these debates in October would have assured a Trump landslide.  Even the deepest blue GloboLeftist couldn’t even salvage this monstrosity in a real manner after an October showing like today.  It would not be possible.

So, Team Brandon© (yes, Trump really called him Brandon and Joe didn’t react) decided to get him out early.

To expose him.

Joe is done.  He’s finished.  His political career is finished, and his candidacy is in shambles.  Reports are that his team are in tears, and “25th Amendment” (the one that allows for the removal of incompetent folks as president) are trending on X.

I had predicted that either Gavin Newsom (whose wife allegedly willing banged Harvey Weinstein) or Big Mike Obama would be the candidate months ago.  I’m pretty sure I predicted it in the blog, but certainly did so in conversations and it’s too late to check – Ricky might help me here! – that Joe would not be the candidate.

That is now certain.  There is another, like they said in Star Wars™:  Hillary.  I don’t think she’s physically up to the task, but she’s still in the running.

It won’t be Joe.  So, here’s my take on the night, along with a few memes.  I’ll respond to previous post comments tomorrow (like I said, it’s late).  Python, Monty® predicted this years ago.  Note, I hope that Joe Biden lives a long and pleasant life, this is in reference to his chances on being elected in November:

A voter watches a debate.

Voter: ‘Ello, I wish to register a complaint.

(The DNC does not respond.)

Voter: ‘Ello, Miss?

DNC: What do you mean “miss”?  Are you assumin’ me gender?

Voter: (pause)I’m sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!

DNC: We’re closin’ for the Juneteenth Pride Festival.

Voter: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this Candidacy what I decided to vote for not half a year ago from this very DNC.

DNC: Oh yes, the, uh, the Scranton Joe…What’s,uh…What’s wrong with it?

Voter: I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it, my lad. This Candidacy is dead, that’s what’s wrong with it!

DNC: No, no, ‘e’s uh,…he’s resting.  He has COVID.

Voter: Look, matey, I know a dead Candidacy when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.

DNC: No no this Candidacy’s not dead, he’s, he’s restin’! Remarkable Candidacy, the Scranton Joe, idn’it, ay? Beautiful plumage!

Voter: The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead.

DNC: Nononono, no, no! ‘E’s resting!

Voter: All right then, if he’s restin’, I’ll wake him up! (shouting at the Candidacy) ‘Ello, Mister Dark Brandon! I’ve got a lovely fresh 10% for the Big Guy for you if you show…

(DNC hits the cage)

DNC: There, he moved!

Voter: No, he didn’t, that was you hitting the cage!

DNC: I never!!

Voter: Yes, you did!

DNC: I never, never did anything…

Voter: (yelling and hitting the cage repeatedly) ‘ELLO JOE!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o’clock alarm call!

(Takes Candidacy out of the cage and thumps its head on the counter. Throws it up in the air and watches it plummet to the floor.)

Voter: Now that’s what I call a dead Candidacy.

DNC: No, no…..No, ‘e’s got COVID!

Voter: COVID?!?

DNC: Yeah! You stunned him, just as he was wakin’ up! Scranton Joe stuns easily, major.

Voter: Um…now look…now look, mate, I’ve definitely ‘ad enough of this. That Candidacy is definitely deceased, and when I decided to vote for it not ‘alf a year ago, you assured me that its total lack of movement was due to it bein’ tired and shagged out following a prolonged ice cream.

DNC: Well, he’s…he’s, ah…probably pining for Corn Pop.

Voter: PININ’ for Corn Pop?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that?, look, why did he fall flat on his back the moment I got ‘im home?

DNC: Scranton Joe prefers keepin’ on it’s back! Remarkable Candidacy, id’nit, squire? Lovely hair plugs and replacement teeth!

Voter: Look, I took the liberty of examining that Candidacy when I watched the debate, and I discovered the only reason that it had been standing by the podium in the first place was that it had been NAILED there.

(pause)

DNC: Well, o’course it was nailed there! If I hadn’t nailed that Candidacy down, it would have nuzzled up to that podium, bent it apart with its strong arm, and VOOM! It would have talked about String Theory in six languages!

Voter: “VOOM”?!? Mate, this Candidacy wouldn’t “voom” if you put four million volts and a gallon of Adderall® through it! It’s bleedin’ demised!

DNC: No no! ‘E’s pining!

Voter: It’s not pinin’! It’s passed on! This Candidacy is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet ‘is maker! It’s a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! If you hadn’t nailed it to the podium it’d be pushing up the daisies! It’s metabolic processes are now ‘istory! It’s off the twig! It’s kicked the bucket, It’s shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin’ choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-CANDIDACY!!

(pause)

DNC: Well, I’d better replace it, then. (he takes a quick peek behind the counter) Sorry squire, I’ve had a look ’round the back of the shop, and uh, we’re right out of Candidacy, except for Big Mike, Hillary, and Gavin.

Voter: I see. I see, I get the picture.

DNC: (pause) I got a Kamala.

(pause)

Voter: Pray, does it talk?

DNC: Nnnnot really.  Slurs quite a bit like it’s drunk.

Voter: WELL IT’S HARDLY A BLOODY REPLACEMENT, IS IT?!!???!!?

DNC: N-no, I guess not. (gets ashamed, looks at his feet)

Voter: Well.

(pause)

DNC: (quietly) D’you…. d’you want to come back to my place?

Voter: (looks around) Yeah, all right, sure, it is the Juneteenth Pride Festival.

DNC: (to the audience) Well! I never wanted to do this in the first place. I wanted to be… a lumberjack!

27 Thoughts for Friday

“I thought so.  You remember our business partner Marsellus Wallace, don’t you Brett?” – Pulp Fiction

I got a CAPTCHA that asked me to select pictures of tractors and farm equipment.  That’s really not my field.

I’ve trotted out lists of thoughts from time to time.  The lists change based on (hopefully) me getting more wisdom over time.  Anyway, here’s this year’s list:

  1. Be on time. Seriously, it’s simple.  People notice, and people care.  It’s a basic principle of respect for someone not to waste their time waiting for me.
  2. Never be a little late to work or a little early to leave. Especially on a regular basis.  Being late an hour once every quarter is much better than being late a minute each day for sixty work days.  An hour looks like something happened.  A minute looks like I don’t care.
  3. Little changes at the start make big difference in the result. I’ve seen many people start their careers and become experts at the subject of their first assignment.  Many of them made a lot of money by knowing a whole lot about a little.

Who knew Cathy was Haitian?

  1. Choosing not to decide is a choice. I love reminding people that “doing nothing” is always an option.  But it is a choice.  And it has just as many consequences as “doing something”.
  2. For me, opportunities always showed up when I needed them, even if I didn’t understand it at the time. Thankfully in my case the opportunities weren’t subtle.
  3. After college, in a high achieving profession, it becomes rarer and rarer to be the smartest guy in the room, and someone in the room is often an expert at something in which I’m a novice. True humility allows a good leader to understand the capabilities they need, and not have to be “right” all the time.
  4. The biggest fights are over the smallest things. It seems that no one ever snaps over the house being on fire on the day the insurance payment was late – it’s that the trash wasn’t taken out on time and we have to hang on to it for another week.

What does Soylent Green® taste like?  It varies from person to person.

  1. People understand $10,000 more than they understand $10,000,000. The difference between $10,000 and $11,000 means more to most people than the difference between $10 million and $10 billion.  Most people can’t understand more than seven magnitudes of anything.
  2. Outcome is less important than process. When working on life, I try to not care about what the outcome will be.  I go in, make the best choices I can, and do the best work that I can.  If it works, it works, if it doesn’t, I try to adjust to be better next time.
  3. Outcome is still important. Dead is dead, so sometimes the outcome is final.
  4. The last outcome is always final. How many refunds?
  5. No refunds.

My chute didn’t open once when I was skydiving.  I didn’t panic.  I figured I had the rest of my life to figure it out.

  1. Nothing breeds success like success, and nothing breeds failure like failure. I’ve been on streaks where I literally could not lose.  I’ve been on streaks where I couldn’t win.
  2. Corollary to 13: I’m never as bad or as good as my failures or successes.  The streaks where I couldn’t win set me up with the habits I needed to win.
  3. Beating myself up is a loser’s game.
  4. Most people don’t think about me very much and will have a hard time remembering my name after five years. As much as I like to think I’m the center of my story (and I am) I’m only a minor player in the stories of most other people.
  5. Corollary to 16: Except where I’m their personal villain.  Then I live on forever and will definitely have someone who will want to be at my funeral, if nothing more than to make sure I’m dead.

What was the name of that Mexican villain in the Bible?  Poncho Pilate?

  1. Protect the relationships with the people that genuinely do care about me in a positive way so maybe the sad people at my funeral will outnumber the happy ones.
  2. Listen to people, really listen. They tell me amazing things if I just listen.  One time I was interviewing a guy and he mentioned committing a felony at a previous job.  Yeah, I kept a straight face.  No, he didn’t get the job.
  3. If someone says I’m wrong, I need to have the humility to embrace that and see if they’re right. Especially when my first impulse is to try to defend myself.  Even if I’m not wrong, I at least understand why they thought I was wrong.
  4. When I’m wrong, admit it and apologize. It’s amazing how admitting error makes other think I’m more trustworthy.  And apologies?  Why not apologize, have some sort of problem with that?

Okay, he didn’t say that.  But he’s the first person I thought of.

  1. Being good at several things is enough for success, if they’re the right several things. Being an expert at useless things might be fun, but mostly nothin’ times nothin’ is, hmmm, carry the nothin’ . . . nothin’.
  2. If I spend my life waiting for the next thing, I’ll spend my entire life waiting and not living. The journey is the point, and rushing through it just gets me to my grave faster.
  3. Past behaviors are almost always the key to predicting future behaviors. Leopards, spots, etc.  When I listen to a person’s story, I realize that often they’re also telling me their future.
  4. Success is based on the last thing I did, not the next. People pay to keep me around because they think I might be able to do it again.

Orphans are often very successful at business – someone told them “Go big or go home” so they didn’t have much choice.

  1. Could I have done better?   Could I have done worse?  Yes.  I did how I did.  Success is based on how I change what I’m going to do to be better.
  2. Power and money are not the same thing. Just ask the rich guys after Robespierre or Lenin took over.

Okay, that’s 3³ thoughts for Friday.  See you on Monday!