Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

“To cover some hot news?  Like the Lincoln-Douglas debates?” – Kolchak, the Night Stalker

I have a lot of experience with debate – I use debate to catch defish.

This is the post where we’ll do the liveblogging in the comments tomorrow.  I know there are probably some technically better ways to do it, but I’m going this way because everyone already knows how to get here and how to hit the refresh button on your browser.  Clumsy as a pit bull doing brain surgery?  Sure.  But that’s politics.

This will be the last debate for both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.  That’s not as bold a prediction as it might sound at first.

Donald will either retire after his next term (most likely), declare himself emperor (second most likely) so he’s done.  But if he declares himself emperor, imagine the reign of Trump Barron the First, as he annexes first Canada in Operation Leafblower, then Mexico in Operation Tequila Shooter, and finally Europe.  There won’t need to be an actual military action to take over Europe, they’ll just send over six Texans with varmint rifles to handle the light work.  As long as the Texans speak the national language of Europe, Arabic, it’ll be easy.

I’m sure this was what the Resistance was fighting for, n’est-ce pas?  (used with permission)

In this timeline, we all rise and salute the birth of the American Empire where there is a burger in every mouth, and riding mowers for every butt.  But there is another timeline.

Joe Biden is obviously still good at reading things if he’s had his Ovaltine® and seven straight days in a hyperbaric Tupperware™ container.  Since there won’t be a teleprompter at this debate, he’ll have to make due with radio signals.  If Joe wins, however, there is zero, and I mean zero probability that he will be able to finish a term as president without being removed from office because he lost every memory that occurred after that time his grandpa made him a scooter by nailing rollerskates to planks during the War of 1812.

Biden is gone, mentally.  If Biden is elected, I’m expecting that President Harris will take over by, oh, February.  She and Vice President Amy Schumer will then begin the exhausting task of attempting to subvert everything that produced prosperity in America.  I predict they’ll start by introducing a strict set of regulations governing how food in breakroom refrigerators is treated, even though Antifa® will by this time have conquered Sesame Street® and have declared it a sovereign nation, with focus on the letter ‘C’, the number ‘1917’ and the month of ‘October’.

Joe Biden finished a Sesame Street puzzle in only six hours.  He was proud.  On the box it said three to five years!

In a rare scoop for this website, I have obtained internal Biden-Harris campaign emails discussing the response to the ongoing Chinese Water Torture® release of ever more damning information about the Biden family.

From:  Joe Biden
Date:  October 16, 2020
To:  Jennifer Dillon (Campaign Manager for Joe Biden – J.W.)
Subject:  Hunter’s Sex Drive

Melanie.  I mean Susan.  How do I switch this thing over to Showtime®?

Can I get some of those hard candies?  The yellow ones.  The peppermint ones make my eyes ache, which makes it hard to read the helicopter.  Butterstache are my favorite.

Did I hear someone say that Hunter’s sex drives have been found?  There were people yelling that as I was, well, I’m not sure what I was doing.  But why is everyone worried about Hunter’s sex drives?  Wasn’t him knocking up a stripper proof enough, you dog faced pony soldier?  The man’s got plenty of sex drives.

 

From:  Jennifer Dillon
Date:  October 16, 2020
To:  Joe Biden
Subject:  Re:  Hunter’s Sex Drives

Boss,

No, what they found were hard drives from Hunter’s old computers.  It seems that he took laptops from the Beau Biden Foundation (the place where we launder get money from Soros and the Clintons) and then used them for Facebook® and porn surfing.  I think he liked Netflix™, too, but it seems that he’s using your login information.  At least I hope that’s the case, and that it wasn’t you watching Cuties every night since it came out.

All we can piece together is that, incredibly high on crack, Hunter couldn’t figure out why the computers weren’t working.  The fact that he hadn’t charged them in a month was a mystery to his drug-addled brain – he kept getting new computers and using them and then, assuming they were broken, took them all in to get repaired.

He had no idea, zero, of where he took them.  Did you know he was sniffing model airplane glue again?

Looks like he did give the repair place his password, “BIDEnROX69DUDE.”

 

From:  Joe Biden
Date:  October 17, 2020
To:  Jennifer Dillon
Subject:  Re: Re: Hunter’s Sex Drives

Oh.  The n doesn’t look right.  Is that how they spell now?

I’m glad he’s making models again.  Spent enough money on that kid’s model making hobby when he was a kid to buy a Syrian child.  Funny, Hunter said he just needed the glue – he said he could make his own kit.  He was dedicated – making models until he was thirty-five!

Where are my pants?  Has anyone seen that Filipino kid?  The one who smells like jasmine in the jungle?  I need someone to rub my feet.

 

From:  Jennifer Dillon
Date:  October 17, 2020
To:  Joe Biden
Subject:  Re: Re: Re: Hunter’s Sex Drives

Boss,

Great news!  I called up our contacts at Twitter®, Google™, and Facebook© and they’ve all agreed to make sure NO ONE sees this story.  It turns out that these emails suggest you took millions of dollars of money from Hunter and then used the power of the United States Government to cover it up!

Our team did a great job on the cover up.  And I think that we can count on places like Snopes®, the New York Times©, and the Washington Post™ to bury this until after Kamala takes over you’re elected president!

We’ll just hide you until the debate.  We’ll practice on Wednesday.  And no walking outside in your bathrobe like last week.

 

From:  Joe Biden
Date:  October 20, 2020
To:  Jennifer Dillon
Subject:  Re: Re: Re: Hunter’s Sex Drives

Just got up.  Man, I feel better.  What was in that blue pill?

The Facebook® is that button on my Blackberry™, right?  I just press it.  Then my snap chats, right?

How did you fix the button on my thingamabob so that it doesn’t talk to me about Hunter’s sex drives?  Did you have to change the floppy drive?

Oh, and if we want to practice debating, we should get Jeffery Toobin in here.  I hear he’s a master debater.

I hear Jeffrey Toobin wrote a romance novel – it was a real tearjerker.

Okay, these aren’t really their emails.  I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see the real emails.  They’re probably higher in actual humor value than these.

See you tonight.  I’ll even drag The Mrs. downstairs for the final debate.

“First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?” – Silence of the Lambs

The local bank in Modern Mayberry was robbed by a ghost – it was a polterheist.

Blog note:  I will be live blogging the debate on Thursday night along with The Mrs. but I cannot promise to drink as much as last time.  I’ll be here 15 minutes beforehand.  I’ll put up a post tomorrow for the liveblog.

As careful regular readers have probably noticed, I’m generally a strong advocate of living within your means.  That means not blowing all of your money on PEZ®, fast women (or slow men), and anything related to the movie Highlander II when your paycheck hits the bank.

If you look at life as a road, debt is a great valley.  Once you drop in, it’s very hard to get out, because the deeper you get in the steeper the valley walls are.  I mean, yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death Debt, at least it’s nice to get some time outside.

Even though I’m against debt, there are exceptions, unlike my “no exception policy” about dating married women.  The Mrs. gets a little irritated about that one.

Never date a girl with a lazy eye.  They’re always seeing someone else.

Houses don’t count, as long as you live in them and don’t consider them an investment.  I understand that few people have the cash to buy a house, so everyone gets a pass there.  Heck, I’ve paid off most of my mortgage, so now it’s officially lessage.

The other debt that is (again, generally) acceptable is a marketable education.  Does this include a degree in Grievance Studies, X-Box Couch Engineering or Snack Maintenance?

Of course not.  No business wants to hire those people, unless their HR department needs drones to be sacrificed to feed the Queen HR Bee her nectar.

The biggest killer to a happy life is debt.  It hangs over you.  When I was in debt, I thought about it several times a day, wondering how I could ever get out of debt.  Thankfully, no one really needs both kidneys.

Even worse than debt is the interest you have to pay on debt.  Not only do you have to pay back money you didn’t have in the first place, you have to pay more back.  Probably the only weapons greater in destructiveness in international relations than nuclear bombs are interest rates.  Oddly, it isn’t listed as an act of war to send in the International Monetary Fund to make loans to nations who can’t afford toilets.

My mother-in-law said her dogs liked to drink out of the toilet because the water was cool and fresher than the water in their bowls.  Then I began to wonder – how did she know that?

As an aside, I indicated once that I thought that a moratorium on all interest payments was worthy of consideration.  There was a huge pushback from readers indicating I didn’t understand how the modern economy worked.  In the meantime, European Central Banks have issued debt with a negative interest rate.  For those not paying attention, that means if you deposit money, you have to pay the bank for the privilege of depositing it.  It just shows the old story is true, give a man a gun and he’ll rob a bank.  Give a man a bank?  He’ll rob everyone.

Hmmm.  And I was told that I don’t understand how the modern economy works.  I think I’ll win this one in the long run.

Debt is a killer.  Many Americans borrow money for a cool pickup truck to drive to work to have enough money to pay for a cool pickup that they can drive to work so they have enough money to pay for a cool pickup so they can drive to work so that they have enough money to pay for a cool pickup . . . .  (Lather, rinse, repeat.)

Hmmm.

What do you call a fight between loan sharks?  A conflict of interest.

I did tell an employee that was reporting to me that I suggest that people never buy a new car unless they had a cool million, cash.  I stand by that.  There are reasons for that:

• Older cars last longer than almost every Hollywood marriage. Especially to Angelina Jolie and her coven of children stolen from each continent on Earth, except Antarctica, because there are some things that even penguins won’t put up with.
• Generally, older cars cost less to maintain than a Hollywood starlet. And they maintain their value better, too.  Ever try to trade Jamie Gertz for a ’67 Camero?  Zero takers.
• If you follow the N+1 rule (one car for each driver in the house who has to go to school or work plus a single spare for the whole family) your job is safe. You always have a car that works even if that car is older than Madonna’s first facelift.

Following this rule has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in car payments.  It has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in car insurance payments, tens of thousands of alimony payments to disgruntled starlets, and thousands in car taxes.  But it’s also a lifestyle – you have to be comfortable not having your ego wrapped up in cars.

That’s just one facet of turning down luxury.

My friends say I have a big ego, but enough about them.

Your income will fluctuate throughout your career.  It’s really okay to indulge from time to time, based on that income.  For me, that indulgence has been reflected in:

• Nicer wine. Not great wine, but not pruno, either.
• Amazon® doo-dads. If I saw a sphere of tungsten on Amazon™ and it was 2AM and I had a few beers, maybe I’d buy it (it’s on the sitting room coffee table).  For those not in the know – tungsten is extraordinarily dense, somewhere close to gold, but not as dense as a CNN® contributor who can’t tell if the Zoom© call is on “mute” before defending Sparta all by himself, if you know what I mean.
• Not questioning every purchase of The Mrs. When dollars are tight, the marriage has to be tighter, since every purchase is a joint decision.  Then I become, “why did you have to use two sheets of paper towel on that” man.  For reference, Jeffery Toobin only needed one sheet of paper towel.

But built into this is that purely fun purchases happen only if you’re debt-free with a good income stream coming in.  If not?  It’s a joint decision.  With projections.  And charts.  It takes a good marriage to deal with that.

The most important part of luxury is making sure that you can walk away from it.

Is my pride in my car?

Well, no.  Obviously.  My newest car is five years old and that’s The Mrs.’ daily driver.  The one I drive regularly was built just after they found Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole in the desert.  My ego isn’t wrapped up in my car.

I bought a cheese grater that was owned by both Josef Stalin and Saddam Hussein.  It was the grater of two evils.

One of my favorite stories revolves around a group of Dallas housewives who were at a kid soccer game.  All of the mothers are there with the latest models of cars from Lexus® and Mercedes™ and Audi©.  But one mother drives up in a ten-year-old Buick™ and drops off her kid.

“I wish I was like her,” one mother said to another, “so rich that she can drive an older car.”

I read a statistic a few years ago – I’ve never been able to find it again.  But it said that something like 70% of people driving around in a Mercedes™ had a loan on it.  Think about that – me in my old car with one light-second of miles on it, owned free and clear, has more money than the average Dallas housewife.

Pursuit of life for the pursuit of pleasure is, in the end, a meaningless pursuit.  The idea isn’t that the road is easy, the idea is that you have the strength for the road.  Pleasure isn’t a goal, it’s a side trip that should last a few days.

Then, back to the road.

“Tomorrow the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time.” – Batman Begins

H.P. Lovecraft walks into a bar, and the result was such that any man would be driven mad by the events that followed.  Oh, and there was a rabbi and a horse.

When I was a kid, as I’ve established before, I read.  A lot.  At least an hour a day on the school bus.  I’d read at home, too, since the nearest kid lived miles and miles away from Wilder Mountain, and occasionally Ma Wilder ran out of pork chops to tie around my neck so the dog would play with me.

Reading, though, held a very special place around our house, and was something that was revered by both Ma and Pa.  One example?  While I technically had a bedtime, Ma Wilder actively encouraged me to stay up as late as I wanted to if I was reading.

Game on.

What did I like reading?  Science fiction was number one on the list, and horror was number two.  (I also read a few fantasy novels, mainly Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, but that’s a can of worms I don’t want to open when I say most fantasy outside of Tolkien and Howard is just junk.  Oops, I just did.)

Stephen King named his son Joe.  No, I’m not joking.

The problem with writing horror is that it’s even harder to find good horror authors than it is to find good fantasy authors.  Stephen King was just about the best – it’s important to remember that at one point the guy really could write a good story that was scary.  I lost more sleep to ‘Salem’s Lot than any book, ever.  Even though there were approximately twenty people in a ten-mile radius of where we lived, I was pretty sure that at least five were vampires when I was twelve.  And most of the people were old – can you imagine the sound when the dentures with fangs sloshed around on their gums?  And then they’d offer me hard candy after they exsanguinated me.  I still shiver when I think about it.

I found Edgar Allen Poe disappointing.  Not scary.  I think it was his enormous head, which was counted as the ninth planet until astronomers had a vote.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment to me?

H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft had such a reputation for being scary.  Sadly, the man just couldn’t write.

H.P. Lovecraft’s cookbook was called the Necro-nom-nom-icon.

I bought several Lovecraft books while I was growing up, and perhaps because of the prose in the format of “great creeping masses of undulating nouns that, if stared at, would drive a man to madness,” the stories just never caught my imagination.  They weren’t scary to twelve-year-old me.  I never felt that I’d die because of a “color out of space” or that creatures from the “mountains of madness” would ever threaten me, except for boredom.

As I got older, I discovered that there was one thing that Lovecraft was good at:  amazing ideas.  And when good writers finally took his work, they produced some amazing fiction and movies.  I rented the VHS tape of Reanimator without knowing that it was a reworking of an old Lovecraft tale.  It was amazing, though I don’t recommend it AT ALL if you’re a horror lightweight.  Of people who figured out how to really bring Lovecraft to life, Brian Yuzna is the winner.

But Lovecraft’s ideas remain.  Those are actually interesting to read about, even though he didn’t do a great job executing on them.  Perhaps Lovecraft’s most famous idea is that of Cthulhu.  What’s Cthulhu, besides the sound my toilet made after Pugsley flushed 142 novelty-size bars of soap (this really happened) when he was three?

I read a horror book in braille once.  I could always feel when something bad was about to happen.

For those of you that aren’t familiar, Cthulhu is an Elder God – one of the creatures of the distant past.  I’ll let Lovecraft himself describe Cthulhu

There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless [Chinese guy] had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

The really scary idea, to me, is that these Elder Gods are amoral.  They couldn’t care less about men.  We are, for the most part, as insignificant as the wrapper on a Whopper® to Oprah when she’s in an Oprah Whopper™ Frenzy© – trust me – keep your arms and feet away from the Whoppers™ when this happens.

Face it, we all knew that the Zuck wasn’t really from this time and dimension, right?

And, these Elder Gods couldn’t even live in our time, because the “stars weren’t right” and had to wait until the stars were right again.  That was an especially creepy thought, because who knew when that was going to be?  Was it next week?  Next year?  It was certainly going to happen, but when?

Lovecraft may be long dead, but our current economic situation makes me think that we’re living in what I’m calling the Cthulhu Collapse.  It’s a collapse that’s out there, frozen as the guy who went to absolute zero – but don’t worry about him, he’s 0 k.  Just because the Cthulhu Collapse isn’t living and breathing right now doesn’t mean it’s not real.

It’s just waiting for the stars to align.  Here are some of the stars moving into position:

• In the fiscal year just ended, we had a deficit of over $3 trillion. This is more than all of the last three years.    Heck I know some people that don’t make $3 trillion in a whole year.
• The overall public debt increased from somewhere around 75% of GDP to over 100%. Also in just one year.  The current public debt is higher than the highest year of World War II, and we didn’t even invent a cool new bomb or 99,465 fighter planes.  I’ll go on the record as saying that producing 99,465 prop-driven fighter planes would much more cool than bailing out a Wall Street firm.  Any Wall Street firm.
• The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve® (which is neither Federal nor a reserve, discuss) has increased by $3 trillion.   Wonder where all that money went?  PEZ®.  That must be it.
• For those of you keeping score on our home game, that’s a total of at least $6 trillion in additional money sloshing around. This year.  No wonder they didn’t have enough cash left to pay to make coins.

The shortest horror story so far?  2020.

• Gross Domestic Product has dropped by 5%, at least. That means the economy produces less than it did last year, by at least $1 trillion.  But real math says you have to subtract the deficit and the Fed balance sheet gains, so my money says that the economy really dropped by 35% last year if you drop the financial steroids that have been pumped into it.  But a plane isn’t like an economy, since planes only crash once.
• At least 80,000 small businesses shut down between March and late July, 2020. Small business’ fail, a lot, right?  This number is at least 36% higher than normal.  One report I heard said that more than half of San Francisco’s small businesses closed so far this year.  The theaters are re-opening as libraries filled with novels that have been made into movies – they’re calling it paper-view.
• Businesses that are staying in business don’t need to rent (as much) real estate anymore. Put simply, it’s far cheaper to have the wagie workers go home and work than rent the 37^th floor of the Hastur The Unspeakable Tower in downtown Chicago.  Or was that the Chase® Tower?  I get confused when I compare monsters of unspeakable horror and fictional creatures that Lovecraft wrote about.  Regardless, the lowered occupancy rates have knock-on effects.  Lowered car and transport consumption.  Lowered gasoline consumption.  Lowered tire use.  Lower number of excuses on what you were doing late on Tuesday night.  The result?  Even lower GDP.  Even more lost jobs.  Lost lingerie sales for mistresses.
• As Federal funding (giveaways) to businesses dry up, businesses are cutting workers, permanently. In many cases, these are very good jobs.  The bright side of having your financial life collapse?  I heard about a guy who lost his wallet and then had his identity stolen.  The crook sent him a note in the mail:  “It sucks to be you.”

Do I think the economy is in serious trouble?  I do.  I’ve said that for years, and this is nothing but an acceleration of trends that were already in place.  The general consensus is that the printing presses should go into overdrive to print more money to give to people:  this is nearly the only thing that nearly every politician agrees on in 2020.

The Mrs. wants me to make more money.  Turns out you need a special paper for that.

Part of the problem is that so much of the money is sloshed into the stock markets in ways that aren’t at all clear.  This is on purpose.  How many dollars have been pumped into the market to keep it stratospheric?  It’s not a coincidence that this is the year that the billionaire class has seen the biggest gains ever in their wealth.  Elon Musk alone gained enough money this year to buy Albania.  I’m hoping he reforms the Albanian Navy – their submarines have to resurface every two minutes so the rowers can breathe.

So, even though Lovecraft’s ideas are great, his stories aren’t scary.  But when the Cthulhu Collapse hits, after the stars align?

Lovecraft put it this way:

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.

Horror movies don’t scare me.  What scares me?  Looking down at my phone and seeing five missed calls from The Mrs.

See?  Not scary.

But the Cthulhu Collapse?  That’s something that’s scary.  Have fun getting some sleep tonight – I hear the stars are simply lovely!

“You were right, Smith. You’re always right. It was inevitable.” – The Matrix: Revolutions

Right now it feels like we’re watching a slow-motion video of a wreck that’s getting ready to happen. We know it’s going to happen, but have no idea how to stop it as physics makes it inevitable.

6. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
7. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
8. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
9. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
10. Open War.

We are in the gray zone between step 9. and step 10. I will maintain the clock at 2 minutes to midnight. Violence continues to be commonly justified by local and state authorities, but there are now premeditated, fatal attacks by the Left. As noted in a previous update, the only thing keeping the clock ticking to full midnight is the number of deaths.

In this issue: Front Matter – Being Out In Front – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – You Have No Idea – Links

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern.

Being Out In Front

When I started doing these updates, I wondered if I was being too pessimistic. In part, the original scale was developed based on personal experience – I had visited a “blue” state a few years ago on summer vacation.

A man, apparently looking at birds in a little-used state monument, saw us drive in. He trained his binoculars on our license plate. “Lower-upper Midwestia, eh?” he yelled. “Yes,” I responded.

“Who’d you vote for?” Unusual, but, whatever.

“Well, his name starts with a T,” I replied, grinning.

It puts the donkey in the pit, or a lifetime of communism it will get.

He then proceeded to call me a name for a portion of the anatomy that was the first thing people panicked about when COVID-19 hit and everyone bought all of that toilet paper.

“What did you say?”

“You heard me.” He then repeated the anatomical description and then scurried, rat-like into his SUV.

The Mrs. had gone to the little bathroom at the historical site, and had missed the interaction. I’m glad. She would have broken him like a stick. She always handles my light work.

But this was a significant data point. Never in my life had I been attacked, in public, for no reason other than my ballot. For most of my life, political differences had been a path to amusing conversations among friends. We had considered moving to this state. Why would we, though, when people acted like that? And now, people are moving out of California for the same reason we didn’t move to that blue state.

Once upon a time, we could talk about our political disagreements and still be friends. That worked, because even though there were things we disagreed about, we agreed about most things. Now? Leftists have largely abandoned the things that made us Americans. We have nothing to say to each other.

Seriously, The Mrs. would have broken him in the most embarrassing thirty seconds of his life.

When a stranger will insult you in public over nothing more than your ballot? The time of violence is close.

Violence And Censorship Update

Last month I put forth the criteria (from the literature I could find) that 1,000 was the number of deaths that signified a civil war. There was at least one great comment that made the point that we were already there and the 1,000 death minimum was arbitrary.

It is. But we have to have something, even if it’s arbitrary. The last I could find, there were 50 documented deaths due to the protest as listed by the Washington Post. My bet is that number is too low. It doesn’t, for instance, add in the numbers of dead due to rampant lawlessness in cities where BLM®/Antifa™ have taken root and taken over.

Not all of those “excess” murders are political, but a lot more are than I think are currently being admitted. Although it’s unscientific, I’d put the number of deaths closer to 150 than 50, but no one is tallying them.

On the censorship front, Facebook® has announced that no political ads will be run in the United States the week prior to the election. Facebook© has been removing points that differ from the “official” line about medical opinions, many of which have varied significantly throughout 2020.

Always wondered why the people in Hong Kong are holding American flags and are against censorship, while Antifa© are burning American flags and demanding censorship.

Perhaps the biggest censorship has been elimination of all Facebook™ posts expressing support for Kyle Rittenhouse, who in my opinion was exercising his right of self-defense. The same is true for virtually every major Internet funding service where Kyle’s supporters have tried to get monetary support for him. In the end, at last check they nearly have enough money for his bail. Yet Gofundme® regularly funds people accused of murder. But not witchcraft or self-defense.

They have to have a line somewhere.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent. The public “perception” of violence keeps dropping over time, in part (my opinion) is that people are now expecting violence, and the sight of burning buildings and riots in the street are just accepted in September of 2020 – I don’t think there’s anyone (besides CNN®) that would say that September was more peaceful than April 2020, but if you look at the graph, we’ve just become used to constant political violence from the Left.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability was up in September. I think there’s a really growing feeling among the people on the Left that Trump will win, and that would be the scariest thing that they can imagine. Well, that and getting real jobs.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions, are up significantly. I wrote last month that I expected a decline through October. Oops. This is why you don’t trust me with your money. But I think the numbers are juiced – I think that the unemployment numbers are artificially low, perhaps significantly so. And I’m expecting the markets to drop off a cliff. Sometime soon.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Numbers of illegals being caught is rising again – it’s at higher than all but one of the last five years. Even if it’s bad here, it’s worse south of the border.

You Have No Idea

. . . how bad it can get.

One thing that history has proven is that the most difficult conflicts are civil wars. They are generally unrestrained in the level of brutality. Why? Unlike war objectives such as wanting Ukraine for extra storage for lawn furniture or wanting Spain to just shut up, already, civil war objectives are personal.

Just saying, you can store a LOT of patio furniture in the Ukraine.

You can see that in Antifa®, especially. I’ve written a lot about them, and I’ve made an effort to really try to understand their mentality. I wrote a post specifically about that, and it’s one of my favorites (Why Would Anyone Become A Leftist?). For Antifa™, it’s personal. Very personal. As Sam Hyde said,

“When we win, do not forget that these people want you broke, dead, your kids raped and brainwashed, and they think it’s funny.”

One thing that was memorable to me was when I was reading Concerned American over at the excellent Western Rifle Shooters Association (LINK) was when he said that he thought that no one over fifty would live through the coming crisis.

A statement that stark took me by surprise. It’s not that he’s wrong – I don’t know that he is. But it brought home to me that the potential for damage in the coming few years dwarfs anything that has ever happened in the United States.

Be aware. Prepare. Be in the safest place you can be.

LINKS

The links are, once again, all from Ricky, as are the headers. You have no idea how much I appreciate that on nights when I post.

Inside America, bloodlust rises, infecting one-in-three…

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/business-leaders-who-reject-woke-culture-be-first-people-lined-against-wall-and-shot

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/10/01/political-violence-424157

https://www.digitalinformationworld.com/2020/09/facebook-can-cause-civil-war-because-of-its-additive-nature.html

Outside of America, foreigners watch us go over the cliff…

https://medium.com/indica/i-lived-through-collapse-america-is-already-there-ba1e4b54c5fc

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/america-could-be-heading-towards-a-second-civil-war,14306

https://www.thenational.ae/world/the-americas/us-becomes-cauldron-for-civil-conflict-as-election-draws-closer-1.1083305

https://www.thedailybeast.com/russian-media-is-rooting-for-civil-war-in-america

The right wing is the problem?!?

https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/commentary/portland-killing-trump-caravan-civil-war-20200830.html

https://signalscv.com/2020/09/jonathan-kraut-an-undeclared-civil-war-in-america/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/09/11/long-dangerous-history-far-rights-calls-violence-civil-war/

https://washingtonmonthly.com/2020/08/30/white-supremacists-are-invading-american-cities-to-incite-a-civil-war/

Left wing Marxism is the solution!?!

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/09/09/pers-s09.html

Anderson Cooper/CNN is clueless!?!

https://www.mediaite.com/election-2020/you-really-believe-that-anderson-cooper-stunned-when-tom-friedman-predicts-america-on-the-brink-of-potential-second-civil-war/

https://thehill.com/homenews/media/518142-thomas-friedman-to-cnn-us-potentially-heading-to-second-civil-war

Videos…

https://www.theblaze.com/glenn-beck-special/the-lefts-color-revolution-playbook?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1

https://www.loudersound.com/news/us-prog-rockers-crack-the-sky-release-video-for-another-civil-war

https://youtu.be/bkqLeECebao

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/kyle-rittenhouses-defense-team-bolsters-self-defense-case-new-viral-footage

Opinions…(are like, um, AR-15s – everybody’s got one)

https://www.michiganadvance.com/2020/09/17/gop-senate-nominee-john-james-america-is-close-to-a-civil-war/

https://madison.com/ct/opinion/mailbag/dave-wester-we-are-on-the-edge-of-civil-war/article_ef3551b4-eac3-5a24-a5d1-9c1af0879595.html

https://www.southplattesentinel.com/2020/09/25/is-civil-war-upon-us/

https://www.stgeorgeutah.com/news/archive/2020/09/24/lte-letter-to-the-editor-our-refusal-to-set-aside-differences-is-another-civil-war-in-the-making/#.X2_dGGhKhnI

https://www.columbiadailyherald.com/story/opinion/columns/2020/09/02/rowland-civil-war-real-possibility/5690696002/

https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-09-05/A-civil-war-right-around-the-corner-TxvB9wXJMA/index.html

https://www.tahlequahdailypress.com/opinion/columns/column-will-it-be-civil-discourse-or-civil-war/article_55fc01bc-52cf-5f9b-a480-da28c8bfaec9.html

Deep(er) dives on why….

https://world.wng.org/2020/09/the_path_to_civil_war

https://dailyreckoning.com/civil-war-two/

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/16542/transition-integri

https://newrepublic.com/article/159172/united-states-break-up

https://www.salon.com/2020/09/22/disunited-states-could-a-second-civil-war–and-an-end-to-the-union–really-happen/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/america-political-violence-risk/2020/09/11/be924628-f388-11ea-999c-67ff7bf6a9d2_story.html

The Official CW2 Uniform…

https://camobags.auctivacommerce.com/Product.aspx?ProductId=1844161