Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Smoking, Orphans, and the French

“Yes. Give him his cigarettes. It won’t be the nicotine that kills you, Mr. Bond.” – You Only Live Twice

An early but failed attempt at a cigarette advertisement as they ran out of orphans too quickly.

(This is a retread, I have the sniffles tonight (and got started late). It’s from November of 2018, so, I wonder where the heart disease is going now that 12-year-old kids are having heart attacks?)

Heart attacks were unknown before 1900 – probably because 97% of people before 1900 died in surprise buffalo stampedes and dysentery on the Oregon Trail®.

But I recently learned something that fascinated me. Heart disease has plummeted during the last fifty years. Here’s the graph. I found it here (LINK), with a h/t to Mangun (LINK):

So, heart disease is plummeting. But I thought we were getting fatter?

Not good. There’s a lot of Oreos® and regret in that graph . . . .

According to the NIH, we are getting fatter. But we’ve (more or less) eliminated heart disease as a cause of death. Huh? I would have thought that heart disease would have increased during that time period abetted by a high-fructose corn syrup diet, increasingly sedentary lifestyle, Netflix®, the Internet, and reliance on every modern convenience. Oh, wait, that’s just me.

Not saying being fat is healthy – it’s linked to a large number of issues including very large pants. But not so much heart disease. So what changed between 1900 (effectively zero heart disease) and 1965 (when heart disease peaked) and today?

Cigarettes (graph is from the CDC).

Sure people smoked before 1900. Mark Twain smoked the equivalent of the population of Honduras in cigars every day. And people smoked pipes, often while cultivating manly mustaches that looked like creatures from an H.G. Wells novel. But cigarettes? Not so much, as cigarettes were French, and even back in 1900 no one liked the French. 54 cigarettes per year per person were smoked in the United States in 1900. In 1965, the peak year for heart attacks was also the peak year for cigarette smoking, when Americans smoked 4,259 cigarettes per person, per year. And they looked so very cool, except for the heart attacks. And the berets.

Also, Watson, an amazing fact: Kermit The Frog has the same middle name as Jack The Ripper. Not a coincidence I think . . . the game is afoot! Let’s catch a Muppet® murderer!

The difference between cigars (or pipes) and cigarettes is that no sane person inhales pipe or cigar smoke. Again, not saying that either of those things are particularly healthy, but it appears that pulling the chemicals from combusting tobacco into your lungs is a bad thing. I mean, not as bad as being an orphan, but bad.

Also, can an orphan eat legally in a family-style restaurant?

Could it be other things, like statins? Nope – they were late to the party, and there are significant debates about if they’re good for you at all. Aspirin may be a factor in the lowered death rates, but it really seems like smoking cigarettes . . . might be bad for you.

As usual, I am compelled by my lawyer to tell you I’m not a doctor, and that pesky court order requires me to tell you that I’m not allowed around pumpkin pie when there’s lighter fluid nearby, but my conclusion is probably pretty innocuous: don’t smoke cigarettes, unless you want to die early of a sudden heart attack and save more Social Security money for me.

The One Where I Prove Electric Cars Are A Lie

“For more enjoyment and greater efficiency, consumption is being standardized.” – THX1138

Patton never colored his hair, because my heroes never dye.

Electric cars are a scam. A really, really big one, and in ways that most people aren’t talking about. My original sentence that I typed said, “in ways that moist people aren’t talking about” but I feel moist today, so that didn’t fit. Let me explain. About the cars. Not why I’m moist – this is supposed to be a family-friendly blog.

Electric cars are, in most ways, absolutely inferior to cars powered by Oil, Our Slippery Friend™. Why? The technology is relatively new, the first electric car (really a locomotive, but who’s counting) having been invented only in 1842 in Edinburgh by engineer Robert Davidson. It traveled at the breakneck speed of 4 miles per hour, which is roughly 4 miles per hour faster than Davidson could move after a fifth of something that John Walker® (yes that one) might have been selling back then.

So, it’s not fair to judge electric cars, since they have been only developing for 180 or so years. It’s still an infant technology. Oh, wait.

How can you say it’s not an infant technology? It sucks.

But California has decided to ban the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035. Hurray, California! You’re geniuses beyond imagination! You’ll single-handedly solve global warming.

Or . . . will that pesky math get in the way?

Let’s see – in order to get California girls to the beach, it takes 13.8-15 billion gallons of gasoline. We’re skipping diesel for now, and just dealing with gasoline. I’ll use 15 billion gallons because in the immortal words of the captain of the Hindenburg, “Close enough.”

Let’s do the math.

15 billion gallons of sweet, sweet gasoline is 500 TW-h (that’s terawatt hours, which is the metric equivalent 5,000 bushels per fortnight). California produces in electricity, in total . . . drumroll please, 277 TW-h. So, California produces slightly more than half the electricity needed by its stunning new fleet of cars.

All I can say is that’s shocking!

To keep just the same level of energy production available for homes (because, presumably, all new citizens between now and then will live in tents) that California will need to triple the amount of power it produces. If you count in increased uses for the iAndroid™ Eleventy-X® and GameBoxStation 2000©, the grid will have to multiply by four or five times. And, remember, we skipped diesel engines, so it’s nearly certain that my estimate is low.

And if they tried to make those cars run on PEZ® (normal PEZ©, not PEZ™ made of anti-matter) it would require 278 quadrillion PEZ™, if you assumed that you could burn PEZ™ at the same efficiency that you could burn gasoline. And that would be 278 quadrillion PEZ© a year. Every year.

Hey, if this PEZ™ idea works out I could mint money.

To quote Monty Python on a related matter, “Where’s the fetus going to gestate? In a box?”, we’ve reached a point where politics cease in any reasonable fashion to correlate to reality. As I’ve seen in recent years, California’s electrical grid is in a shambles, so much so that, rather than be blamed for creating the periodic apocalypse-level fires, the various utilities have been hiring homeless people to burn forests so they don’t get blamed for all of the fires.

In reality, it’s not their fault. Californians keep using electricity, but the process for building reliable infrastructure is so Sovietized that to upgrade their transmission lines requires more paperwork than conductor wire, by weight, and takes longer than Biden does to remember that John McCain died half a decade ago. And this is a state that’s going to quintuple energy production?

Using what?

Seriously, where do they think energy comes from? Oh, I forgot. Outlets. “Why do we need more power plants?” I can hear President Kamala asking, “There’s always power when I plug something into an outlet. Besides, if we lost electricity we could watch television by candlelight.” The answer is that the energy has to come from someplace, like the dams they’ve been destroying, the nuclear power plants they’ve been shutting down, or the coal plants that they won’t allow to be built.

Perhaps they could use the power of the Void?

If it were just that level of stupid, it’s survivable. But it’s more than stupid, it’s greedy stupid, and here’s the rub: they’re doing this to soak the folks buying cars.

Let’s take, me. My newest car is (I think) a 2016. It was paid for in . . . 2016. My daily driver is a 2010. It’s got a 130,000 miles on it, and I replaced the engine in it at 115,000 miles, and it cost $5,400. At 5,000-10,000 miles a year? It might last another decade, easily. It’s not complicated, the air conditioner works, and it’s comfortable.

Try that with an electric car, I dare you. My 2010 had the engine blow up. $5,400, plus tax, and I was back to happy motoring. A Chevy® Volt™ had a bad battery. $29,842. Snopes™ even confirmed it was the real deal. But they tried to put a good spin on it. “It was an antique car” that was two years younger than mine, “and the battery technology was old.”

I hope the car bought her a drink first.

I have one car that is now 20 years old. How many batteries would it have had to go through? And you can be certain that the latest bill to replace it would have made the entire car worthless. Period.

This is an odd game. Cars had become very, very reliable, some lasting 300,000 or more miles with only routine maintenance. There’s a reason that, aside from the AK-47, the Toyota® HiLux© is the brand of choice of insurgent armies everywhere. They last forever, and you can mount multiple heavy weapons on them.

That just won’t do. As a consumer, you have to be made to consuuuuume. Me? With my old car, I’ve more than offset the “carbon debt” caused by making it, so replacing it will actually be damaging to the climate (if you believe in that sort of thing). And electricity will have to involve tossing more carbon into the atmosphere and will cost a lot more, so it’s not that, either.

Joe Biden is making helping stop energy usage – every time he’s on TV people turn it off.

No, the root cause is that cars are too reliable and people are using them far too long. If you have a paid-off car, you’re not paying interest. You’re not paying for new car plants. You become an economic black hole and the powers that be will do anything (and I mean anything) to force you to consuuuuume. Remember digital TV? I saw several articles where economists were calculating the economic uplift from forcing everyone to junk their old televisions for new ones.

Let’s consuuuuume! And with electric cars, use ‘em or not, they rot away so you’ll have to pay $29,000 for a new battery or consuuuuume a new car. Emissions? Who cares? We’ve got to keep people slaving away, paying interest, and buying the new thing. Insane? Certainly.

What did Californians use to light their homes before they had candles? Electricity.

Thankfully we have television and commercials. I’m sure that they will be used for good and not to convince everyone that the point of their life is consumption.

Well, I guess now you know why I’m moist. Too much time consuuuuuming.

Civil War Weather Report: The Last Election?

“Messy thing, elections.” – Rome

If Democrats get their way, we’ll never have a long, protracted election count to learn who won again. We’ll know before the election. Besides, I’ve been told that if your election lasts more than 24 hours, you should call a physician.

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

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same, though tensions are certainly increasing. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Election 2022 – Violence And Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – How It Starts: Canada – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join over 720 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge. Most of today’s memes are free-range, and not originals. The crop was really good this month.

Election 2022

Since I’ve been a kid, each election has been framed as, “the most important in American history”. As of now, the Left is looking to spike the ball and end any challenge to their power now and into the future: they want to change the rules.

Well, at least we know who Hunter votes for.

Right now, the Senate is the only roadblock to federalizing all state elections, by putting forward a slate of rules that make election fraud trivial. Why wouldn’t the people on the Right cheat? Well, first off, we’re not that organized. It’s true. I think it was Charles Péguy who said it: “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom,” which makes sense. And don’t think that the Left doesn’t make use of that fact.

WWWT? (What Would Watterston Think?).

The result of this is that fair elections will cease to exist. Me? I want elections to be harder. I’d love it if people had to graph an equation and name four consecutive presidents from the 1800s to vote. As such, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to require an identification card to vote, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask someone to vote on a specific day and to have registered thirty days before.

Oh, and the legislation? Apparently, it makes it illegal for states to remove dead people from the voter list automatically. But what it does give them is control. And the Senate leadership is willing to go all-out on this one, eliminate the filibuster, and ram this down.

Why not? It gives the Left control, forever.

Always remember the stakes.

Violence And Censorship Update

Measuring violence in 2020 was pretty easy – a riot here, a murder there, and adding in the numbers was pretty straightforward. Violence hasn’t dropped, it’s just become, well, boring. There are thousands more murders, but they just look like normal crimes. As cops don’t want to risk life in jail for stopping a drugged-out banana-buyer, many district attorneys have been bought and paid for by Soros to enact just the street violence we’re seeing today. So, measuring direct political violence is hard. I’m not giving up, just noting that the violence is still there, but just not as easy to track.

Russian Gas

A Russian Twitch® streamer had his account censored. His transgression? He had a live stream going from his house showing his gas burners on his stove on, continually. I guess that made some people pretty hot.

Kiwi Farms

I’m not going into the really weird history of this website. I’ve been there a couple of times, and it wasn’t for me. That being said, it has been the subject of a full-court press by trans activists that want to have it shut down, and have been doing a pretty good job of getting it deplatformed again and again. On balance, it was probably less dangerous than Twitter®, but it didn’t agree with the current norm.

New Zealand

I’d prefer Kiwi Farms to what’s going on with the Kiwis in New Zealand. New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Ratty McRatface, er, Jacinda Ardern, has come out against freedom and free speech. Her takeaway quote: “How do you tackle climate change if people don’t believe it exists?” Also, I believe that she is now looking for a block of cheese to gnaw on.

Facebook®

I missed this one last month – Facebook© has banned the hashtag #diedsuddenly because, well, it is forbidden to question the safety of a “vaccine” developed in a few hours and delivered in an experimental manner using technology never before implemented on a wide scale. I mean, what could go wrong?

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. And I wonder when Biden will determine that begging isn’t a strategy?

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence ticked slightly downward this month and the abortion backlash subsided. Will October be spicy due to elections? I’m betting not.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it dropped a bit more – wait until October – it might be big.

Economic:

Economic indicators shot down this month. Inflation has caught up with the Market. Not good.

Illegal Aliens:

For the first time in the last year, I can’t say that It set a new record for this time of year. But it was close. Must still be hot out.

How It Starts: Canada

In my opinion, the real reason that we haven’t been in a Civil War yet is we lack a unifying reason. Canada might just have found one: guns. In the United States, I’m not going to say that we’re fond of guns, but it really is built into the national DNA. From Lexington and Concord to last weekend, Americans love shooting guns. Why?

Freedom, I guess. And I’d also toss out that the founding stock that are ancestors of a majority of the people in the country were a bit wild. This selected for people who sought freedom. If that was the case, and if attitudes are genetically handed down, people who came here to be free passed that down genetically.

In Canada, however, there is a bill up that would restrict guns immensely – one summary indicated that you could no longer transfer handguns from one owner to anyone else, and that buybacks would “intensify”.

These buybacks are always sold on the basis of “safety” but we all know what the real goal is.

But in Canada, in the Prairie provinces, they’re having Nunavut. Alberta, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan are preparing to nullify this gun grab.

There is even talk about them leaving Canada altogether, which would be awesome. Then you could go from the tip of Alaska down to the toe of Florida and be in a free country the whole way. I’m pretty sure that we could get along, since they speak the language, like hockey, and make okay beer. Oh, and combine them with the Red States in America? We have most of the oil, most of the food, and most of the guns.

Sounds like a winner.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/DionLimTV/status/1574542273773117440

https://youtu.be/ghMb9xHU31s
https://twitter.com/CBSNews/status/1572360002798485504

https://twitter.com/i/status/1566119675758624771

https://twitter.com/i/status/1566815458254376961

https://twitter.com/citizens_sanity/status/1566131407654715394

https://twitter.com/i/status/1569726738355339266

https://twitter.com/eclipsethis2003/status/1568009704877719552

https://twitter.com/ProfanityNewz/status/1567724993412304897
https://youtu.be/YULQKb68FHM

https://youtu.be/VWCTlcczmOo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hET1H6RZVwQ

https://twitter.com/StokingFreedom/status/1570412128200171521

https://hotair.com/tree-hugging-sister/2022/09/26/philadelphias-story-worse-than-waah-waah-at-the-wawa-n499096

https://breaking911.com/get-in-the-closet-suspects-in-virginia-home-invasion-caught-on-camera/

https://twitter.com/MemphoNewsLady/status/1567748252992212992

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/memphis-mayor-blasts-facebook-streaming-mass-killers-early-release-4-our-fellow-citizens

https://heavy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/305915336_3142177816113006_7925894570550381876_n.mp4?_=1

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1565566842365624320

https://twitter.com/conservmillen/status/1572192397018234888

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1572110371946901506

https://youtu.be/gNARbEgwkkI

One Guy

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1566887635217514498

https://www.newsweek.com/texas-teenager-shotgun-takes-down-two-home-invaders-one-escapes-1741782

https://twitter.com/i/status/1567525359352180737

Body Count

https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2022/09/13/modeling-the-future-of-religion-in-america/

https://gehweb.ucsd.edu/wp-content/uploads/CalVEX-09.06.22.pdf

https://www.unz.com/jtaylor/more-murders/

https://www.realclearwire.com/articles/2022/09/28/opioids__work_hidden_scourge_sapping_the_economy_855616.html

https://www.sofx.com/these-kids-are-dying-inside-the-overdose-crisis-sweeping-fort-bragg-rolling-stone/

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/09/the-u-s-army-has-a-fentanyl-problem-thanks-to-mexico-and-china/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/roberthart/2022/09/07/oath-keepers-members-include-hundreds-of-elected-officials-police-and-military-personnel-leaked-list-suggests/?sh=3ee6cb0c5389

https://www.adl.org/resources/report/oath-keepers-data-leak-unmasking-extremism-public-life

https://www.theepochtimes.com/adults-aged-35-44-died-at-twice-the-expected-rate-last-summer-life-insurance-data-suggests_4711510.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge

https://www.theepochtimes.com/more-than-half-of-babies-toddlers-surveyed-had-systemic-reaction-after-covid-19-vaccine_4707948.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=cfp

https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/

https://archive.ph/MoP0V

Vote Count

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoMfIkz7v6s

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1571351490165350402

https://youtu.be/bqBnp2AdH7Y

https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/have-chinese-spies-infiltrated-american

https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/fbi-conceals-chinese-infiltration

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-demonizes-maga-republicans-dems-spent-million-pro-trump-candidates-win-primaries

https://scheerpost.com/2022/09/05/chris-hedges-lets-stop-pretending-america-is-a-functioning-democracy/

https://internationalman.com/articles/doug-casey-on-class-warfare-eat-the-rich-sentiment-and-what-happens-next/

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/fairness-justice/delaware-judge-rules-vote-by-mail-law-unconstitutional-cannot-be-used-in-november

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/florida-watchdog-groups-allege-mail-ballot-and-voter-roll-violations-2020-2022

https://www.axios.com/2022/09/08/snap-voter-data-republican-democrats

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pennsylvania-county-sued-over-illegal-ballot-drop-box-usage-captured-camera

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pennsylvania-county-sues-dominion-voting-systems-over-severe-anomalies-2020-election

https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-grassroot-election-integrity-movement-sweeps-battleground-states_4740686.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=CFP

https://uncoverdc.com/2022/09/27/jovan-hutton-pulitzer-election-day-ballots-may-have-been-inserted-in-maricopa-county/

https://nypost.com/2022/09/14/facebook-spied-on-private-messages-of-americans-who-questioned-2020-election/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11213581/Congress-age-senate-house.html

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2022%2F09%2F12%2Fdoj-refuses-to-release-biden-administration-plan-to-intervene-in-2022-midterm-election%2F

https://www.insider.com/all-the-us-capitol-pro-trump-riot-arrests-charges-names-2021-1

https://spaceworms.substack.com/p/bribing-voters-is-getting-out-of

https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-speech-had-it-all-backward-fascist-democratic-party-trump-ideology-america-jan-6-democracy-11662161065?mod=djemalertNEWS

https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/01/politics/election-workers-officials-harassment-kentucky-texas/index.html

https://www.foxnews.com/us/former-virginia-election-official-indicted-on-corruption-charges

Civil War

https://twitter.com/tomselliott/status/1566522380280889347

http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=63335
https://mattlabash.substack.com/p/is-trump-pushing-civil-war

https://www.npr.org/2022/09/20/1124142684/some-compare-todays-political-divide-to-the-civil-war-but-what-about-the-1960s

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/05/why-ive-stopped-fearing-america-is-headed-civil-war/

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2022/09/can-we-drop-the-silly-idea-that-america-is-heading-for-a-civil-war

https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/commentary/2022/08/30/sarah-vowell-one-civil-war-was/

https://dailymontanan.com/2022/09/09/a-maga-led-civil-war-thats-not-going-to-happen/

https://nypost.com/2022/09/07/kathy-griffin-slammed-for-saying-republicans-will-start-a-civil-war/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/us-civil-war-horizon

https://www.washingtonpost.com/podcasts/capehart/steve-phillips-on-how-we-win-the-civil-war/

https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/greg-gutfeld-melting-pot-together-civil-war-isnt-possible

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/06/no-doomsday-bunker-not-a-single-gun-if-the-us-really-is-heading-for-civil-war-im-stuffed

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psych-unseen/202209/mistrust-misinformation-and-the-possibility-civil-war-in-america

https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2022/09/05/barbara-walter-civil-war-trump-doj-rehtoric-sot-nr-vpx.cnn

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3647063-can-civil-war-happen-again/

https://www.wired.com/story/the-end-of-roe-will-spark-a-digital-civil-war/

https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/politics-and-more/the-risk-of-a-new-american-civil-war

https://www.minotdailynews.com/opinion/editorials/2022/09/toward-a-second-american-civil-war/

https://www.msnbc.com/the-mehdi-hasan-show/watch/just-how-close-is-the-u-s-to-a-civil-war-148895813806

https://www.thedailybeast.com/cbs-star-reporter-major-garrett-fears-were-on-the-brink-of-civil-war

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/another-american-civil-war-take-heed-or-take-cover-204583

https://www.newsweek.com/civil-war-may-have-already-begun-msnbc-host-says-citing-maga-violence-1739679

https://macdailynews.com/2022/09/27/bill-gates-were-going-to-have-a-hung-election-and-a-civil-war/

https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/25/remembering-hate-speech/

https://roycewhite.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-joe-biden

https://twitchy.com/samj-3930/2022/09/04/conservatives-explain-how-i-am-a-threat-to-the-very-soul-of-this-nation-in-powerful-thread-making-biden-look-even-worsea/

https://summit.news/2022/09/07/poll-majority-believe-bidens-maga-extremists-speech-a-dangerous-escalation-in-rhetoric-designed-to-incite-conflict/

https://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2022/09/05/f15-vs-ar15-bet-on-the-guys-with-the-guns-n2612609

Don’t Fear The Reaper

“No. Not like this. I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.” Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California get all the lawyers? New Jersey picked first.

When The Soon To Be Mrs. and I were just dating, I was cooking something or other. I think it was eggs. I like eggs sunny side up, and don’t particularly care if they’re cooked all the way.

The Soon To Be Mrs.: “Aren’t you worried about salmonella?”

John Wilder: (Laughs in full Chad manifestation.)

The Soon To Be Mrs.: (Swoons.)

Seriously, she swooned. I’ve never seen it before in my life, but in that moment I think that was what sealed the deal, the moment in time that The Soon To Be Mrs. realized that this one is different. He’s not like the others. Here is a man who has zero fear of The Current Thing, and knows that salmonella won’t be the thing that punches his ticket out of having a functioning circulatory system.

Weird. You can get salmonella from chickens, but not chickenella from salmon.

No. I’m not afraid of salmonella. I would spit in its tiny little eyes or flagellum or tentacles and say, “Not today, my bacterium friend! My Danish-Scots-Germanic blood is far too strong for the likes of you!” And then I would attack Poland. Oh, wait, that’s been done.

I know I’m not going to die like Hemingway, and I’m not going to die like the comedy greats Belushi, Twain, or Nietzsche did. Nope. I think I’m gonna go out like Elvis. On a toilet after having eaten a fried peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwich covered in cheddar cheese and mayo. Nope, I’m gonna die on a toilet.

I mean, after all, a king should spend his last moments on the throne, right?

A lot of people worry about dying. I suppose I did, in my 20s, when I was worried about carrying out my responsibilities as a dad. Those are serious responsibilities – because those kids are going to be the legacy that I leave on Earth. That and my writing, collection of PEZ® dispensers and velvet Elvis paintings.

I tell you, when the King died, that left me all shook up.

Again, a lot of people worry about dying. I’m not sure why. Of things that are more-or-less predetermined, that’s the big one. We’re all going to die. All of us.

And I’m not sure I care.

Oh, sure, I want to live. I have no particular desire to die. If given the preference, I suppose I’m in favor of my continued heartbeat. But I don’t fear death. I don’t go to sleep at night wondering if this pain or that pain or that thing might be the symptom I look up on WebMD® that seals the deal that Wilder is going up to irritate Jesus in Heaven with bad puns.

I don’t worry about some future point when I’m going to enjoy life. I’ve achieved nearly every goal I’ve ever set for my life. End. Full stop. It’s like when a baseball game goes into extra innings, “Hey, free baseball.” And me? Free life. I’ve done nearly everything I’ve ever wanted to do.

If you don’t like Hillary, you should move to Benghazi. At least you know that there, she’ll leave you alone.

What do you give a man who has everything? I mean, besides another bottle of wine. You give that man: Today.

I’ve got Today. The only moment I live in is right now. And right now isn’t all that bad. I’m sitting in the sitting room (question: is any room I sit in, by definition, a sitting room? Discuss.) with the cool night air blowing in the window, some songs I love playing on the laptop, a cold beer by the keyboard, and the knowledge that at this moment, everything is fine.

Literally, in my life, Every Single Thing Is Fine. I could go into details, but you already know how awesome I am. So, I live for today?

Hell no.

That’s YOLO. The idea that “You Only Live Once” is a free pass to act in any fashion has corroded society. It’s really at the root of many of the problems we have today. It is, in many ways, the absolute inverse of the philosophy I’m trying to describe. YOLO seeks to elevate hedonism and the passions of the moment as the highest good. YOLO is Tinder® times Planned Parenthood© times SnapFaceGramInstaChat® times Rwanda®.

I wonder if Hindus consider YOLO offensive? (not my meme, as found)

It’s the inversion of beauty: it consists of being positive about, well, any old thing that feels good. I could list these “pleasures”, but you know the list as well as I do. We see it every day, with vice being paraded as virtue, and the continual demand going out for people to celebrate it, because, “Can’t you see? This horrid abomination that no healthy society or people in the entire history of the world has tolerated, iS BeAuTIfUL!” No, I think living a life built on YOLO is one doomed to fail – inevitably it will fail based on two reasons: it is materialism or a faith based on the nihilism of the material world writ large, and it is based on needs, like youth, wealth, sensation, or, yes, even life.

So, not YOLO.

One thing I’ve tried to preach is outcome independence. Indeed, since the final outcome of life on Earth is fixed, all the intermediate steps lead there. Instead, I try to focus on virtue and faith. I write not because of YOLO, and not because it’s easy. Some nights it’s hard as hell to get the post to “close” and feel right. There are dozens of posts where, even after 1600 words, I still didn’t say exactly what I meant to say. That’s okay, it’s on me. I’m learning, and if I were perfect at this, I wouldn’t have more work to do.

For me, it’s the work. It’s getting better. It’s finding ways to add value to those people around me. There are those who pull their weight in the world, and those that don’t. I want to be one that pulls his weight, who has contributed as much as I can to helping my family and the wider world.

Why was Karl Marx buried at Highgate Cemetery? He was dead.

I don’t always do it. And I’m not always right, either. I’ve produced some stuff in my life that was really, really good, but not perfect. Thankfully, that’s not my mark, either, since just like immortality here on Earth, searching for perfection is a lonely and silly pastime. I want to make the world a better place with my family (first) and my work (now second) guided by God. And I want people to laugh hard while learning and thinking about the things I write.

The beauty of this is to win, all I have to do is the best that I can do every day. To win? All I have to do is be the best person I can be every day. See? Each night, I go to bed and sleep soundly if I know, in that day, that I gave it my all. Do I take time for me? Sure. But that’s not the goal – I serve a higher purpose.

So, what do I fear? Not death. It’s coming whether I like it or not, and, honestly, I’d rather not return my body in factory-fresh condition – I’d like all the parts to fail at once. On the toilet. I think Elvis would have wanted it that way.

Oh, wait . . . .

I wonder if Elvis ate eggs sunny-side-up? Hang on, I’m sure he did. Elvis ate everything.

The Economic End Of Europe

“I don’t get history. If I wanted to know what happened in Europe a long time ago, I’d watch Game of Thrones.” – Community

Why do communist governments always fail? They cease the means of production.

(Memes today are mostly as-found.)

The handling of the war in Ukraine will go down as a historic blunder, rivaled by only a few events in history:

Archduke Franz Ferdinand deciding to go cruising down the road in his ragtop,
Socrates, who in his last words said, “I drank what??” (thanks, Real Genius), and
The forming of the band U2®.

The Western World had already been rocked by the response to COVID-19. The economic shenanigans required to keep the economy on life support had been bad enough. The entire debt-based currency system had been lurching back and forth more than Hillary Clinton after quality time with a bottle of gin and her “Madame President” scrapbook.

And bad things are going around in Switzerland, as we’ll see below. And big trouble may lie ahead for Great Britain:

In truth, the recovery from the Great Recession hadn’t created any real structural changes. The primary mechanism for preventing utter economic collapse was printing bucketloads of cash and shoving it into the faces of the banks so that they didn’t fail in a catastrophic and sequential fashion. It isn’t the only time that irresponsible decision-making was rewarded with buckets of greenbacks, but let’s not dwell on Hunter Biden.

Where are we now?

Europe is facing an energy drought – one that (unless Russian gas shipments are resumed fairly quickly) will result in lowered economic output. How bad? Some have said, “Great Depression bad.” The precursors of this can be seen in the cracks we see developing economically:

If the Pope commanded the cash be transferred electronically, would that have been a PayPal® order?

Now, one thing I do know: religions are really, really good about keeping their eye on their cash. I wonder if there was some reason that the Pope was wanting this financial move? Was it because he like making Papal airplanes? Or, was it because someone had tipped him off?

Why can’t the Pope be cremated? He’s still alive.

People are betting that Credit Suisse® to fail. They’re also betting that Deutsche Bank™ will fail. Why? When banks lend money to people that can’t pay it back, well, unless the Federal Reserve© comes around to stuff the banks full of cash, they fail.

So, COVID-19 hits, governments around the world print cash, but nothing is physically broken. We can (sort of) pretend that the world is fine, and whistle through the graveyard and hope that we can squeak out another year of wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

Then, Ukraine. As I’ve said before, with a sane president capable of making good decisions, this would have been solved with a few phone calls, some Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and maybe a few coupons for 50%-off shrimp at Red Lobster™. Nope. Biden escalated all of it.

And, again, maybe (probably not, but maybe) in a world with an economy that had underlying actual strength, Biden could have pushed it just like he did and not cratered the entire economy of the West.

But he did. And now the consequences cannot be avoided. Interest rates are shooting up.

How high?

Oh, surely we aren’t in a real estate bubble.

Oops. But at least the international community isn’t panicking.

Oh, they are? Well, at least Biden hasn’t sold off our energy reserves in a naked bid to influence the 2022 election.

Oh, he did? Well, at least Biden has a good understanding of how energy markets work, and how supply and demand sets prices.

Oh. Well, I guess that’s really scary. Thankfully, no one is messing around with the fundamentals of reality.

Huh. I guess my dog just quit.

Well, at least The Mrs. and I had a serious talk about the bedroom.

All foolishness aside, if Europe has an energy drought that lasts three years or more (one of the latest estimates I’ve seen) the results will be as devastating as a war. Economies need jobs to produce wealth so people can have wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

And, despite the magical thinking of some people on the Left, free anything (not just healthcare) isn’t free. Someone, somewhere, has to work for it to pay for it, otherwise it’s slavery. Which, I think, is fine for Leftists, because they never imagine themselves the slaves.

But I have faith, faith that the Swiss will save us.

The Swiss have a long and proud history. This history goes back to at least 1307, or so the legend goes, to William Tell (the guy who shot the apple resting on his kid’s head). In fact, William Tell and his son were in a bowling league, but the records of what team they were on are now lost to us. We will never know for whom the Tells bowled.

Deception: The Media Is Soaking In It

“Theatricality and deception are powerful weapons, Alfred. It’s a good start.” – Batman Begins

Thankfully he wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

I’m certain that few had any idea of how the Internet would change the world. Oh, sure, some did. In one of the zillion versions of Ender’s Game (or the never ending stream of sequels) Orson Scott Card wrote about the Internet, in the 1980s, I think. In his version, people could make carefully reasoned arguments and other people would listen to them and be swayed.

Ha! Instead we have Twitter® with its 280 character limit, and meme warfare.

I actually don’t mind meme warfare being the place where ideas are injected into society, primarily because the Right memes pretty well, and the Left can’t meme at all.

That is, of course, what the Left is worried about. When the Internet began to gain popularity in the mid-1990s, it was a Wild West. It was first created, page by page, by people who were passionate about something. The programming was easy, and the hardest thing was to get noticed, since the search engines and directories were rudimentary. I used at least three, depending on what I was searching for, because one was good for technical stuff, one was good for “normie” stuff, and the last one, as I recall, wasn’t good for much at all.

On the Internet, you can be whatever you want to be, so why do so many people pick “stupid”?

Then came the Media®. At first, they didn’t really know how to use it, so they’d just put their written stuff out there, since video would swamp most dial-up connections. But everyone knew it was going to be big, which is why AOL© merged with Time-Warner™ even though all AOL® presented was just a single way to get to the Internet.

But the problem for the Media™ and .GOV was that the Internet had shattered their ability to carefully script a single narrative. It had also destroyed their ability to memory hole or gloss over big stories. Now those passionate people could chronicle entire events that the .GOV would rather you forget, or, better yet, never even know about. The carefully crafted defamation of everyone who believed in something outside of the Approved Narrative as a Conspiracy Theorist began to crumble.

People say it’s a small world, but I know I certainly wouldn’t want to paint it. And in that small world where communication had drastically lowered the time for information to come out, and also made it harder for the information to be erased. The Genie of information, once out of the bottle, couldn’t be put back in.

Does anyone know what an ink blot test is? I Googled® it, but only found pictures of my parents yelling at me.

The Wild West continued. Google® had a corporate slogan of Don’t be Evil® and Amazon™ would sell most any book that was it was legal to sell. And the established Media© and .GOV still had no real understanding of how to control what people see and hear and remember. The Internet was built to be decentralized, and hard to control.

I think, from what I see so far that the strategy has been to do at least five things:

Throw Lots of Content Out

Oddly, even though the major news sources keep firing journalists, they keep making more stuff. What kind of stuff? Clickbait, really. Stories with little informational content, stories about celebrities, top 10 lists of best/worst/etc. (fill in the blank). These aren’t news – they’re entertainment. Heck, one browser I have on my phone has (it looks like) computer-generated compilations of posts from Reddit®. The idea is to distract. And if the algorithm is good enough, heck, maybe that person will forget what they were looking for in the first place.

Marginalize and Trivialize

This is one that’s carried on from the past. If I had written a post about MK-Ultra (where the CIA essentially acted like the worst possible mixture of Jeffrey Dahmer and the DMV) in the 1960s, it would have been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” at best. The idea isn’t to contradict, it’s to hit the person making the accusation with personal attacks, and make it sound like they’re a nutcase. And when the facts come out? Minimize them – make them sound unimportant, “Oh, that tear gas we used at Waco? Well it may be flammable, but only in super-high concentrations. We won the war. Go back to sleep.”

So, Alex Jones was right again, eh?

Control Discussion

How many people that you interact with are . . . real?

I’ve recently gotten robocalls that are very sophisticated, so much so that they nearly get through the uncanny valley of sounding right. But what if the sound wasn’t an issue? In a Twitter® comment it isn’t. It is known that a significant percentage of Twitter® users are bots – programmed to interact. Why would anyone go to that level of trouble? Because they want to sell you something – an ideology, a candidate, or PEZ™. They’re also useful to make it seem like there’s a consensus.

People are wired as pack animals, and generally want to be a part of the group, to not be left out. Plus, a group of bots can drown out viewpoints and ideas and bury them in a sea of text. On a related note, how many conversations are taking place on the Internet that are nothing more than one bot talking to another?

Control Access

Most people come to this website either directly or from other blogs. The web search traffic I get is amazingly low – most days less than 3% of my traffic. That’s new. I used to get more traffic from search engines (20%+) but after July or so of 2020, Google™ shut the valve, and traffic dropped. Likewise, I know that this site is banned by corporations. Why? Maybe my ideas are considered to be . . . dangerous.

A related question is this: just how many website hits does Google® really have? I searched for Civil War Weather Report and noted I wasn’t on the first page. I jumped ahead to page 18. If you’ll note, on an earlier page, Google© claims that there are 34,800,000 results. But when you get to page 18, well, there are only 174 results. I know I’ve written nearly 40 Civil War Weather Reports. Funny that I didn’t see ‘em all in this list . . .

Note that Amazon®, which for a long time would not ban any legal book, now bans hundreds if not thousands of books merely because Amazon™ disagrees with their ideas.

Just Keep Lying

It seems to work for the FBI, Bill Clinton, and the CIA, so why not expand it to the Media®? That’s just what they do. These pictures will help illustrate the problem:

So, in the end, it has been established that the Media© wants to control you. The only remaining question so that we can put the pressure where it needs to be is this: who controls the Media™?

Unplug Yourself From Things That Drain You. And Kardashians.

Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself. – The Matrix

Okay, it’s not great. The other one was, “What do you get when Keanu Reeves does ‘shrooms? Neo-sporin.” See, I saved you from that.

Unplug yourself.

I mean, don’t stop coming here. That would be silly, because you definitely want to associate yourself with someone who has the amazingly good hygiene and stellar good looks that I do. I mean, unplug yourself from places that make you mad.

Consciously, most of my posts, while letting you know the unvarnished Truth with a capital T* (*really, as best as I know it), are meant to poke fun at it. It might make you think about things that you really don’t want to think about. I understand. I’m still sorry about that Kardashian meme.

Honestly, dating a Kardashian would be like dating a wookie®.

Well, obviously not that sorry.

Back to the Truth.

Most people that I talk to have an Agent Smith (from The Matrix, not that pesky ATF guy who keeps asking if the stuffed dog I have is filled with Tannerite, because, let’s face it, the only thing that ATF agents love shooting more than kids is dogs) moment.

No, the Agent Smith moment I have with friends goes like this: I talk about facts. They nod. I talk about actual events. They nod. Then I bring up a premise that is inescapable: “So, we agree gravity exists.” Nod. “And I’m holding a coffee mug over a 1,000 foot (4.3 Celsius) cliff.” Nod. “And if I drop it, it will fall down, and shatter into a million pieces, and it will never be able to be put together again.”

Then Agent Smith takes over the conversation. “Well, I don’t want to think about that.” The conversation is over. There is a step that they cannot take. It’s like me trying to convince them that a constant diet of candy corn, Twinkies®, fried Snickers® bars, and drinking the fluid from a chocolate fountain that 359 kindergarteners have been putting their booger-soaked fingers into isn’t a good diet.

This is what happens when you follow the USDA food pyramid.

I recall having a conversation several years ago with a guy on the Left. “Yes, John Wilder, I agree. Massive immigration is destroying every one of the values in our country. But strawberries might be more expensive if we didn’t allow them in.”

My response was rather simple, “So, you, a guy on the Left, wants to pay people less so you can have cheaper strawberries? Wouldn’t it be simpler to pay people more, pay less than 1% of what you make in a month to pay Americans enough to give you strawberries?”

Agent Smith took over his mind. “Umm, well, I don’t understand those things very well.”

I took him to the ledge, but he refused to look over.

But, hey, he saved $0.35 this week.

That’s the Truth. And, I assure you, the Truth is your friend.

What is Truth? Step on a scale. Look down. The number is the Truth. Try to pick up a weight. If you can, you can. That is Truth. The Iron never lies. The scale never lies.

I was working with a person who noted I had lost some weight. He asked me, “How can I lose weight?”

My response was simple: “Weigh yourself. Every day. The scale doesn’t lie.”

The look on his face was amazing. I think he wanted me to tell him, “Believe in aliens, bigfoot (bigfeet?) and the Loch Ness Monster, drink seven shots of Hershey’s® chocolate syrup ever night, and you’ll lose 27 pounds a week.” When I told him to weigh himself, his face fell.

He didn’t want the Truth. And I didn’t follow up with, “By the way, I also rarely eat between Saturday night and Friday,” because that would bake the gourd of most people. They don’t want to know that losing weight sucks, that it requires amazing work and walking into the house at night after work and telling The Mrs., “No dinner for me, I’m fasting.”

I’ve been doing this whole Intermittent Fasting thing. Bums me out. I did it at least nine times today.

People want pretty lies. Yet, the healthiest thing for them is the Truth. Just before I started writing this, Frequent Commenter Ricky emailed me a story that said that, per FDA guidelines, water could not be labeled as, “healthy”. So, enjoy all the Gatorade®, Pepsi™, and Coca-Slop© that you want. It doesn’t have fat in it, so, according to bad science dating back to before I was born, it’s better for you than water.

Nope, the Truth sucks. People are awful. Bad guys win – a lot. People get old. And then they die. All of us die. And, the FDA lies. But, most of you come here regularly. Can you handle the Truth? Yup, you can. And you seek it. I think most of you understand that.

But there is a group of people who are trying to demoralize you. The easiest way to win a battle, per George S. Patton, Jr., is to make the enemy afraid of you. Yet, they wouldn’t have to do any of this if they had won.

They haven’t won. They are desperate to win, yet you and I remain, stubborn, like islands in the middle of a hurricane. We live. We persist. And we will win. That’s what scares them the most.

Why am I so stubborn? I’m not telling you.

So, when you see something that makes you feel like all is lost, remember, that’s them whispering in your ear. The want you to think that you can’t win, even though everything that is right, beautiful, and True is on your side. When you see this sort of demoralization?

Turn it off.

Don’t go back. Not because you’re afraid of opposing viewpoints, but because you refuse to have your emotions manipulated. Never, ever, let Agent Smith inside. Seek the Truth. It’s there. Unless it’s a Kardashian that isn’t hairy.

That’s a lie.

Flirtin’ With Disaster, And By Disaster, I Mean Nuclear War

“A four-alarm fire in Downtown Moscow clears way for a glorious new tractor factory, And, on the lighter side of the news, Hundreds of Capitalists are Soon to Perish in Shuttle Disaster.” – Airplane II: The Sequel

Hillary tried to sell her soul to the devil to be elected president, but the devil declined, “Can’t do it, you don’t have any collateral.”

The big story in the news is the hurricane about to hit Florida. If it were about to hit Detroit or Baltimore, it might add a few billion in value to those cities, but alas, it looks like it might create damage beyond anything ever seen by man – it might muss Tom Brady’s hair. It also reminded me that I’m hungry, since I accidentally typed “burricane” twice before I got it right – my mind must be on burritos. Or maybe it’s prophecy – that a hurricane-sized burrito will hit Tampa?

That’s (the hurricane, not the burrito) the story in the news, however, I think the much bigger story is buried. Or it was buried.

Russia makes most of its money by shipping natural gas, oil, fertilizer, and wheat out to the world. It imports tracksuits, cell phones, and gold chains. As I’ve covered before, what Russia imports is silly, but what it exports is crucial. The cheapest way, by far, to export oil is in the hair of a Russian or Italian. But they don’t do so well at moving natural gas, so people build big holes called pipelines.

Really, that’s all a pipeline is. It’s a hole. As tempting as it is, I’m not going to make a Kamala Harris joke. And you can bury it like they do most places, you can put it on stilts like they did in Alaska, or you can even have it under the sea.

I hear that part of the ocean is haunted, so Germany might be getting super-natural gas.

As the Europeans have come under more political pressure to stop adding CO₂ to the atmosphere, they’ve moved away from coal. They’d like to move to entirely renewable energy sources, but last I heard those only exist in sufficient supply to power a technological civilization in the dreams that Greta Thunberg had in the womb as her mother engaged in one too many vodkas while riding rollercoasters on sleeping pills.

No, in 2022 Europe is powered by fossil fuels. Sure, there are some renewables, and the French built a lot of nuclear power plants. But the desire for power has increased exponentially to keep up with civilizational growth. Concentrated energy is also a multiplier, it allows a person or a company or a nation to do far more. With natural gas, a German factory can build all the Volkswagens® and bratwurst and lederhosen that the world needs. Without it? The production is (if they’re lucky) one percent of the powered production.

Time zones are confusing. It’s September 28 in Europe, September 29 in Australia, and 1953 in Moscow.

Russia was the biggest single supplier of natural gas to Europe, providing 45% of the needs. Nord Stream© was one such pipeline, and it took the route of going on the seabed from Russia to Germany. Why? One reason was that it avoided having to pay Poland, Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries that never visit this blog for “transit rights” through those countries. For example, if Russia wanted to send gas through Ukraine (natural gas, not sarin) then Russia would have to pay Ukraine for the right to do so.

They say they saw Bubbles in the water after the explosion . . .

As such, the Poles and the Ukrainians hated Nord Stream®. But, it was successful. And the Germans loved it. Besides Austrians in the 1930s, what can all Germans agree on? That they like the Nord Stream© and Nord Stream II ™ projects. It lowers the price of energy for them, and makes it less likely that they’ll be held hostage by the Poles (hint, the Poles are still a bit miffed at the Germans and the Russians). The Ukrainians hated it most of all, since it looked like those projects alone would end up costing them over $4 billion dollars a year in transit fees, and it also lowers their political power to hold Russia hostage at the expense of European countries.

And some people have paid dearly for that . . . .

That brings us close to today. The United States has always opposed any of the Nord Stream projects. Why? First, if Europe is divided, the United States has one less group to be concerned with on the world stage. Almost as bad as a united Europe is Germany and Russia on good terms. Combine Germany’s economic powerhouse with Russia’s raw materials? That’s a threat that gives the State Department bad dreams.

Wasn’t she in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest?

This probably explains 90% of what went on in Ukraine, and the other 10% involves Hunter. Could Biden have de-escalated the conflict? With one phone call, yes. But it’s going now, and there reaches a point where even I’m concerned – and that’s the crippling (it can be fixed, but how bad is the damage?) of Nord Stream™ I and Nord Stream® II.

My dad can fix it. He’s got the ultimate set of repair tools.

Why would the United States do that? Well, the biggest reason (that I can think of) is that it makes it so that Germany can’t back out of the sanctions when winter gets cold and prices start to be amazingly high and there just happens to be this nice, big straw filled with natural gas that they could suck on all day to be warm.

Note: this is supposed to be a satire account.

How do we know that people knew this was going to happen? Well, there are reports the CIA told Germany an attack was imminent. And there’s this little matter of the British pound collapsing right before the incident. And, there’s the little matter that an explosive was found next to the original Nord Stream© not too long after Russia took Crimea back in 2014. The detonation wire was cut, so whoever was getting ready to blow up the pipe had changed their mind (cough) Obama (cough). The fact that this happened even before we know the results of the Russian referendum?

Do you think the Ukrainians would meet this result with Jeb!ulation?

Do I think that Germans will freeze to death? Probably not many. They may clear-cut forests, they may shut down industry for February and March, and they might make it against the law to heat your house in any way other than having a chubby girl in corduroy pants rub her thighs together as a space heater. On an economic scale, Frequent Commenter Ricky noted, it might devastate Germany’s economy even more than 9/11 did ours.

But now they can’t pick up the phone and call Putin and say, “We miss heat. Er, you. Please turn it back on. Here are rubles.” That option is gone, and that’s why I’m certain that it wasn’t the Russians who did this: why destroy your best bargaining chip? And, no, it’s not shoddy Russian construction – the companies that made the pipe and built the line are the best in the world, not Yuri’s Pipeline By Mail Company.

Even the Polish know the score . . .

And I thought it was Joe Biden, not For Bidden.

So the United States did it. Biden even told us that he was going to do it. I’m not sure he remembers he did it, but he did. It’s even on video, and he looks rather lucid (for Biden) during the speech.

The thing that scares me is this: if I were Russia, I’d take this as a rules expansion pack: undersea pipelines are now fair game. And the ones that feed Europe from Norway are mighty vulnerable. This, more than anything, just ups the level of tension and ensures that what started as a property dispute keeps escalating. And escalating. And escalating.

In Minecraft, of course.

And one thing I learned from Tom Clancy movies?

Hmm. Good advice. I’ll even add this bit:

Frequent Commenter Ricky also noted that I get to be the first person to make fun of the next stage in escalation toward a nuclear war. So, I’ve got that going for me.

Life Lessons From George S. Patton, Jr.

“Do you think it would cause a complete breakdown of discipline if a lowly lieutenant kissed a starship captain on the bridge of his ship?” – Star Trek, TOS

If Peter Sellers fought for Patton, would he have driven a pink panzer?

I have been a long-time fan of General George S. Patton, Jr. It started when I was a kid, and my history teacher even ordered a few extra Patton films for the World War II section of U.S. history because he knew I was a Patton fan. Probably the biggest accolade that he could have was from the Germans who he fought, one of whom said simply, “He is your best.”

For whatever reason, though, I had never read The Patton Papers 1940-1945. On a whim a week or so ago, I ordered a copy, and I cracked it open at lunch the day it arrived before I headed back to work. I’m not sure I’ve ever enjoyed a book more. I’m not sure The Mrs. feels the same way, since when I’m reading it, about every five minutes I’ll come up with a snippet to read to her. She keeps saying, “Thanks, but no tanks.”

The book itself is a compilation of diary entries, letters Patton wrote, and orders he gave in the period from 1940-1945. To have the ability to read through those are amazing, even when he just writes about the mundane aspects of his life or his son having trouble in math at school. I didn’t start at the beginning, I just picked it up and started reading at a more-or-less random spot, which coincided with his taking command of American troops in North Africa. And then I couldn’t put it down.

While many passages have resonated with me, I decided to write about one in particular today. It consists of his instructions that were provided to his officers prior to launching Operation Husky, where he and Montgomery launched a naval invasion of Sicily. Spoiler alert: he did pretty well. This is one passage I’ll make sure to share with Pugsley and The Boy because there is so much truth not only in a military sense, but in life to what Patton wrote on June 5, 1943.

Stuff in italics is Patton’s (from page 261 and page 262). My comments are in plain text.

Discipline is based on pride in the profession of arms, on meticulous attention to details, and on mutual respect and confidence. Discipline must be a habit so ingrained that it is stronger than the excitement of battle or the fear of death.

Discipline can only be obtained when all officers are imbued with the sense of their lawful obligation to their men and to their country that they cannot tolerate negligence. Officers who fail to correct errors or praise excellence are valueless in peace and dangerous misfits in war.

Discipline starts with a single individual. In my case, it doesn’t come from without, it must come from within. Getting up on time. Paying the bills. Having a sense of purpose in life. It has been my observation that people will do what you want when you’re looking if they fear punishment. If they are being judged, they might do it when others are around. When it becomes a value, however, they do it every time, all the time, even when no one is looking, and even when no one will ever know.

Officers must assert themselves by example and by voice.

People watch. And people listen. Letting things slide never creates excellence.

There is no approved solution to any tactical situation.

There is only one tactical principle which is not subject to change. It is: “To so use the means at hand to inflict the maximum amount of wounds, death, and destruction on the enemy in the minimum of time.”

Obviously, war isn’t a game, but the lesson for life outside of attacking Sicily in 1943 still exists. And it’s not to use Claymores (FRONT TOWARD ENEMY) and a mortar barrage to open a business meeting. But I have been involved in business and life situations where time was of the essence, and being polite just had to go out the window.

Never attack [enemy] strength, [but rather his weakness] . . .

You can never be too strong. Get every man and gun you can secure provided it does not delay your attack . . .

Casualties vary directly with the time you are exposed t effective fire . . . Rapidity of attack shortens the time of exposure . . .

If you cannot see the enemy, and you seldom can, shoot at the place he is most likely to be . . .

Our mortars and our artillery are superb weapons when they are firing. When silent, they are junk – see that they fire!

One thread that runs through Patton’s writing and actions is his devotion to attacking. Defending wasn’t something that he was interested in. In life, I think that attitude is required. It’s easy to give up, it’s easy to fall into the trap that there’s nothing more to do, nothing more to gain. It’s similar to having all A’s on my eighth-grade report card and deciding to coast on that for the rest of my life.

Potential can only be realized if we push ourselves, and we can only push on the attack. So, attack life like a poodle going after a pork chop, up to the very last breath.

Never take counsel of your fears. The enemy is more worried than you are. Numerical superiority, while useful, is not vital to successful offensive action. The fact that you are attacking induces the enemy to believe that you are stronger than he is . . .

A good solution applied with vigor now is better than a perfect solution ten minutes later . . .

IN CASE OF DOUBT, ATTACK . . .

Again, attack. But the additional thought is added: don’t listen to your fears. Fear is something that will paralyze even a strong man. And from my experience, the best way to get over fears and avoid the paralysis that comes with them is to take action. What action? Any action that leads you toward your goal. Even the smallest action often sets off a cascade of following actions that lead to . . . success.

Mine fields, while dangerous, are not impassable. They are far less of a hazard than artillery concentrations . . .

Speed and ruthless violence on the beaches is vital. There must be no hesitation in debarking. To linger on the beach is fatal.

We are going to run into problems. Some of them huge. Some of them of our own making. The idea is to push through. The Mrs. and I watched a kid on the local wrestling team that was just awful in terms of skills, experience, and well, brains. But, he’d get it in his head that he could win, and he would go out and win some very, very unlikely matches. Why? He didn’t hesitate. He jumped on the chances he made.

I’ll probably have a few more of these as I go through the book. And, as much fun as it is to read, I’m going to take my time to enjoy it. I’d best show a little bit of discipline . . . Patton might be watching.

Yes, Your Leftist Friends Are Mentally Ill. You’re Not. Share This Post With Them To Trigger Them.

“Snap out of it! You’re Krusty the Clown! One of Look Magazine’s Hundred Most Promising Clowns of 1958!” – The Simpsons

I told Pugsley that Aristotle taught us that, “We are what we repeatedly do.” So I told him I was his mother.

A Dutch dude named Erasmus of Rotterdam (who died in 1536) made a famous quote that I’m sure you’re all familiar with, namely, “In regione caecorum rex est luscus.” Presumably, Erasmus said this before he died. I was going to follow this up with a joke about the Dutch, but then I looked at my site statistics, and found that the Netherlands is number 5 on the countries that come to visit here at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise.

So, my conclusion is this: people of the Netherlands are amazing people who have impeccable taste in fine writing and I’d be glad to give them all a free bikini wax, but I’m pretty sure that they’re so tall, blonde, disciplined and perfectly proportioned that they’ve trained their bodies to not grow hair where they don’t want it. Go Netherlands!

I’m pretty sure they have flying cars in the Netherlands now.

Anyway, what Erasmus was saying was originally in Latin, but Latin isn’t a dead language – it’s still Roman around. My initial translation was, “Near the gas station in the skanky part of town, never pick up women after 3am.” These are wise words, but what Erasmus really meant was, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”

That’s one of those phrases that sounds really cool. In fact, I imagined being able to see in a country full of blind people. I mean, the only actor that would be able to play Batman would be Christian Braille. And, using my crazy superpower of sight, I’d be able to break into their houses at night and steal all of their PEZ®.

But that’s not the way it would work.

I would probably try to explain to them that I could see – a sense that they didn’t have at all. The concept of photons and colors and would sound crazy to them. In fact, they’d probably think I was crazy and come at night while I was sleeping and give me blanket parties or worse until I shut up or left.

In the modern world, it’s similar, but it’s what’s commonly referred to as “Clown World” where everything is inverted. Things that are beautiful are corrupted, and people are expected to applaud the bravery inherent in people reveling in the corruption. I’ll let Stonetoss lead the introduction of the topic at hand.

If you’re not familiar with what Stonetoss is writing about, there is a “teacher” in Canada who decided, apparently, to wear comically large and obscene fake breasts to shop class. How do we know they’re obscene? YouTube® banned them.

But, yet, these Z-cups are allowed because a “teacher” showed up to work wearing them, and the school board is apparently afraid to confront the dude. When a parent tried to bring the subject up, the local school board shut down the meeting rather than confront the amazing amounts of silicone (or foam rubber??) being paraded in their classrooms. In fact, they say it’s illegal to criticize the “teacher”.

In my assessment of the situation, there are two possibilities. The first is that the “teacher” is so mentally insane that allowing him to dress like this is similar to allowing him to claim that he’s made of string cheese and now has a mouse phobia. That’s the first possibility.

The second is that the “teacher” is gaming the system and seeing how far he can push things so he can get mental disability payments and not have to show up to work, or not be graded based on his job performance. I actually consider this more likely, but, hey, it’s 2022 so he just might be bonkers.

This was actually the plot to a South Park® episode where a teacher became more aggressively, explicitly gay in front of his students in an attempt (I recall) to get fired. Instead, the people celebrated his inappropriate behavior because of his bravery. So, yeah. Blame Canada. I’m sure that this is what the Canadian troops were thinking about when they hit the beach at D-Day, the freedom for shop teachers to don Z-cup fake breasts.

Women are, oddly, not at all good with this. Not all women, of course. I use The Mrs. as a sounding board for this sort of insanity, and she (more or less) notes that it’s offensive for (at least some) actual women to see men parading around pretending to be women. But Canada says it’s okay. And companies will ban you for “hate” if you dare to not say that this is completely normal.

In 2022, it’s now accepted that teachers indoctrinated in Leftist institutions should be allowed free access to your children. And there’s nothing bad that can come of that. Because teachers have shown themselves to be so stable.

The problem really does start with Leftism. I know I drone on and on about this, but it’s true. Leftism is a mental illness rooted in victimhood. How can I prove this? THEY TELL US THIS WHENEVER THEY CAN. It’s worse than being stuck in a room filled with vegans who do Crossfit®.

I sometimes think it’s a competition on how many mental illnesses that they can have, like they all want to be the Georgy Zhukov of mental illness and be the (she/they/them/it) with the most medals.

Part of the idea is that Leftists are incapable of harboring thoughts that are counter to their programming. Scott Adams found this out and after this cartoon strip, he was canceled from 77 newspapers.

Here are a few examples of why.

Yup. Martha’s Vineyard. Importing millions of people across the border is amazing, right? Well, no. Not when they show up in near the beach bungalows of the rich and famous. Obama lives on Martha’s Vineyard, and his house alone could have housed every illegal alien that was transported there. But, no.

They booted all the illegals in 44 hours. Who needs a wall when you invade the territories of Leftist lawyers?

But the damage of Leftism is real. It destroys families. And it stops families from even being made.

But it leaves some really important questions to be asked.

And it makes you wonder what Biden is really after, when it turns out that “Right Wing Extremism” is actually less deadly than riding lawnmowers. Really.

Seriously, though, this isn’t the battle the Left should push, because when real Right Wing Extremism hits? Continents burn.

I guess that works for me. I’ll continue to be a Right Wing Extremist.

And if they want Clown World, that’s fine. They can soak in it.

Me? I think this next picture works better than anything they can come up with.

Erasmus would certainly agree with me. And? Go Netherlands! You guys rock!!!! (Yes, I know Ariel is Danish, but you Danes have got to get your pageviews up.)