Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Regret And Dread – Two Problems You Don’t Really Have To Have

“I have people waiting for me. They don’t know what I do, they never will. They’re protected. But I do what I do so they can have a better life. And if I live or if I die, it doesn’t make a difference to me, as long as they have what they need. So when it’s my time to go, I will go knowing I did everything I could for them.” – Better Call Saul

If you press your gas and brake at the same time, your car takes a screenshot.

I tend to like writing my Friday posts the most. Why? Most generally, I get away from the reality of the present situations that we are living in. That’s nice.

Why do I feel like I can do this?

Because nothing is done yet, and nothing is settled yet. I’ve written posts about regret. I still feel that regret is a wasted emotion – the past is done. Of course, I try to learn from my mistakes. But I can’t spend my life being upset about them. The real question is how can I incorporate the mistakes so I have a better future? I even told The Mrs. that she should embrace her mistakes, too. She was so happy she hugged me.

Especially of note are those mistakes I made that weren’t mistakes I made based on a lack of virtue. If I did the right thing, for the right reason, the result is the result, and I will live with the consequences. Sometimes bad things happen when you do everything right. I mean, when the doctor told me I had a rare disease, I asked, “How rare?”

“Well, you get to pick a name.”

Those are the breaks.

Firefighters in Athens have it tough – you’re not supposed to put water on Greece fires.

A similar emotion is dread.

I read a quote when I was a kid – Heinlein? Twain? A fever dream while on laudanum writing about Xanadu? – that stuck with me. “Worrying about what might happen is paying interest on money you haven’t borrowed yet.” It’s a good quote.

Regret is looking at the past, dread (or its cousin, fear) is about looking at the future. But they’re the same. Neither of those two things are real. One once was real, and one might be real.

I’ll admit that when I look out at the future, I do see dark days ahead. But right now, I’m sitting in my basement, The Mrs. had gone upstairs for sleep, the basement is perfectly comfy, and all is right with the world. Something might happen next week. Next month. Next year. The price of tires is up. The price of gasoline is up. Heck, Hunter Biden can’t even find decent meth nowadays. It will get worse.

So?

I fell down at the airport once. Almost missed a flight.

I think that often we are more upset by the thought of potential future discomfort than actual, present discomfort. It can be consuming, and all for something that hasn’t happened yet.

And, it used to be me. I used to do the math – how many months could I make mortgage payments if I lost my job? How many days could I feed my family? And, it’s one thing planning for that, but I was also sometimes scared.

Until one day I just decided to not be scared – I’d go through life and do my best, and let the chips fall where they may. I decided that it was fine to plan, it was fine to economize to save money, but it wasn’t fine to worry.

So I stopped.

It was weird – one night I was worried, and the next night I decided that I wasn’t going to worry anymore. I just made the conscious decision I wasn’t going to worry anymore about that. It was the last significant worry that I gave up. I also worried about my short attention span, but that problem seems to solve itself.

The Kamikaze instructor to his class: “Now, class, pay attention because I’m only going to do this once.”

And it’s not like I live in a world where bad things don’t happen. I know bad things happen – horrible things. But today, I can choose not to worry about them.

Heck, I can pick something that is real and we can be certain that is going to happen – death. The shadow of death looms above us all. But to be consumed by it so that it causes a life lived in fear? That’s like already being dead.

It might surprise some people, but death is something that isn’t new. Seneca, the (very dead) Roman stoic philosopher, said:

“No man can have a peaceful life who thinks too much about lengthening it. Most men ebb and flow in wretchedness between the fear of death and the hardships of life; they are unwilling to live, and yet they do not know how to die.”

Kelvin and Celsius interviewed for a job, but Celsius got it. Kelvin absolutely didn’t have a degree.

Reflect on death – if you knew that you wouldn’t wake up ever again, what would you do with your remaining hours? This reflection on death has multiple values to you and your character:

It reinforces that which is important to us, here today.
It exposes the frivolous that consume too much of our time.
It shows what’s really of value – the money you made will be less important than the lives you’ve changed.
You don’t have to worry about returning that library book.

Today is pretty good. Enjoy it. Skip the regret, the worry, and the dread. While you’re breathing, live.

What can you make happen today?

Inflation: Crowding Out The Real Economy

“You don’t? Well, you don’t have to understand what it eh, it eh . . . It was printed in eh . . . Washington. Well, and when they print something in Washington, they know what it means.” – Green Acres

“Never trust an actor with a gun.” – Abraham Lincoln

Like the beginning of a movie starring Will Smith as Winnie the Pooh, Amy Schumer as Piglet, and Mitt “Mittens” Romney as Christopher Robin, you know one thing: the pain is only starting.

The pain I’m speaking of is inflation, though. I’d love to be the bearer of happy news. I’d love to say, “Nah, as soon as things straighten out in (spins wheel) China West Taiwan, things will be better. Nope.

Let me explain.

The Federal Government is really good at exactly two things, and one of them is spending money. Since they already donated a few billion bucks worth of stuff to the Taliban, they decided to go for a few trillion to everyone who was breathing.

What’s the difference between a rake and an AK-47? Don’t ask me, I just fly the drone.

The spending has been amazing, and it has created the expected result: inflation. It’s not done, though.

As I said, the Federal Government is good at spending money, but it’s slow at spending money. Although it looks like the Federal Government is just willy-nilly stuffing the money it just printed into the mouths of anyone nearby, it’s much more complicated than that.

First, a bureaucrat has to invent the program. And that means?

Paperwork. That has to be reviewed and approved. And every buzzword of sustainable and underserved and economic equity has to be mashed into the program and form. Once complete?

The program has to be announced, and various states, counties, alternative bands, and alternative energy providers then pounce on the paperwork to ask for buckets of cash. Biden’s grants for free crack pipes won’t figure out what communities they need to go to by themselves!

This process takes months. Then, once awarded, people need to order the crack pipes from China Terre Haute. Why not China? This is the Federal Government, and we know it is charged with protecting the American Crackpipe Maker Equalitarian Sisterhood (ACMES). So, all the crack pipe materials will be locally sourced from approved Wiccans.

How to cook crack and clean crabs: step one – use commas.

If it stopped at crack pipes, it would be fine, probably. But it’s not just that. It’s concrete for a burst of road construction. It’s rebar for the concrete. It’s plywood for the forms.

There was already price pressure on almost everything. Now that some of the largest steel (around 100 million tons of production) works in the world are shut down or sanctioned due to Vlad’s Spring Vacation, (not to mention fuel costs shooting up higher than a T-72 turret) that rebar is now much more expensive.

If that were the only problem, these sort of crushing cost increases would probably be something that we could live with. But whenever the government wants to buy a cubic yard of concrete to make a new office to process paperwork for Build Back Better Bux applications, well, that increases the cost.

For everyone.

In Denmark, they tried to repave a street with Legos®. They ran into a lot of roadblocks.

It makes the cost of building or expanding a business higher, unpredictable, and perhaps unattainable. Government spending – trillions of dollars of government spending that came from money that was simply wished into existence – crowds out private spending.

That means the new Pizza Hut® can’t be built because concrete is too expensive. That means the new PEZ™ factory can’t be built to keep up with the PEZ© demand because steel for the machinery costs too much. The alternatives that create a productive economy are walled off due to increased costs.

So, it’s happening now.

A little.

I’m telling you now, the big waves of Fed.Gov spending have yet to hit. Hundreds of millions of dollars more than the usual printing are hitting the economy – each month. The pressure from printing has yet to stop. It has yet to slow. It is still increasing.

I don’t think my doctor likes me. I called him and told him that I took a bunch of sleeping pills. He told me have a few drinks to relax.

The economy of every country that hyperinflated did so because of one simple reason: the leadership seemed to not understand that printing didn’t lead to prosperity. They had some sort of belief that money was a magical totem so that they could print more, and people would be happy.

In small quantities, it works. Home prices go up. Prices go up. People who save (as always) are the ones that get burned as their saved cash lowers in value.

Germany hyperinflated in the 1920s because they wanted to print cash. Lots of it. They didn’t have the good fortune to be able to create all they wanted with computers and the press of a button, so they had to hyperinflate the old-fashioned way: printing.

How bad did it get?

That certainly didn’t lead to any sort of social upheaval.

They managed to double the capacity of the printing press by only printing on one side.

I bet we can match that: I bet we can start making electronic money with only four bits per byte. I guess I can be the bearer of glad tidings and report there is good news, though:

We don’t have to watch a movie starring Will Smith as Winnie the Pooh, Amy Schumer as Piglet, and Mitt “Mittens” Romney as Christopher Robin. We’ve got that going for us.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part IV: Grooming A Society

“I’m sorry, I believe in good grooming.” – The Simpsons

I was outbid trying to buy a shopping center. I guess the old saying is right: you just can’t win a mall.

The biggest part of a dictator’s ability to control a people is the control of their thoughts. Sure, a large supply of bullets is nice, but if you use that method, sooner or later you run out of people to control. How, then, is that sort of mental crowd control done in a nation that once staged a rebellion over a tax on whiskey? The answer is simple –a little bit at a time.

The first step in that is to program the people. The easiest way to do that is to control their education and their entertainment. In the modern world, it is that combination of education and entertainment that form our modern-day mythos – the very definition of who we are and what we stand for.

Education was the easiest part, and, by necessity, the first. The problem (from the standpoint of those that would set the world up for dictators) is that educators aren’t swapped out yearly. No, educators often are in a classroom for decades, watching hundreds of their children move from grade to grade. I think my kindergarten teacher was old enough to have known Moses personally, though in her defense I was probably more of a handful than those James and Younger brothers she told stories about.

True fact: They charge a $6 entry fee to see Karl’s grave.

That’s why the real Leftism (as far as I can tell) didn’t start showing up in the classroom until, perhaps, the 1960s. That had given them time to infiltrate the colleges and begin to sway the way that teachers were taught. I knew something was up when I told one teacher I was struggling with a class.

“Who, the Bourgeoisie?” she asked.

An aside – teachers often slant Left/Globalist anyway – they work for a government, after all. The teacher unions are strongly Leftist in political leanings. Educating a group of teachers and then placing them in the schools only changes the schools slowly. But after a while, a critical mass is achieved, and government schools become indoctrination centers for Leftist thought.

To be clear – government schools have always been indoctrination centers. The previous versions prior to the 1960s had (in my opinion) more innocuous indoctrination, putting memes like these in the heads of the students:

The United States is a force for good,
Christopher Columbus was alright,
The Inalienable rights are: life, liberty, and the pursuit of PEZ™,
Hard work is important,
If you pee on the playground you have to go see the principal,
Religious values are one of the things that make the United States strong, and
There is a morality beyond mere legality that keeps society cohesive.

I could keep going on this list. But the values that the kids were programmed with led to a prosperous society that, generally, was also a society where you trusted your neighbor and, even though he might have voted for the other guy, was still on the same team. Was it perfect? No, of course not, and a lack of skepticism led to all manner of government shenanigans being ignored – MK Ultra, I’m looking at . . . what was I saying?

Is it just me, or is that glowing?

The change in schools was the vanguard of that Leftist. Ideas were infiltrated that began to chip away at the idea of values. Equity in education became a buzzword even in the 1970s, decades before managing the equality of outcomes became the goal. Heck, you could even teach math and give grades back then.

Of course, the Leftist ownership of education wasn’t the only thrust at that time. Movies and television began to change as well. I didn’t see first-run episodes of Leave it to Beaver nor All in the Family, but I could see the shows couldn’t have been more different as I watched them on reruns.

Leave it to Beaver was a show about kids going through typical kid problems, and also dealing with that oily Eddie Haskell. That also led to the Funniest untrue rumor ever: Eddie Haskell was played by a young Alice Cooper. It would have been far more interesting if Eddie had a guillotine.

I did hear that Rob Halford did move to a Tibetan monastery. I guess that makes him a Buddhist Priest.

All in the Family, though, was a show that could have been called All in on the Narrative. All in the Family was simply a tool to move the narrative to the Left, plus it showcased that family-dividing character – the ever-bumbling incompetent father. Later shows in the 1970s moved the father to a position of irrelevance: single-parent households became a staple of sitcoms.

Sitcoms were used because nothing is better at attacking power than comedy, since it allows the comedian to poke fun at the weakest parts of their enemy. I wonder why comedy is out of style . . . hmmm. Oh, wait. Amy Schumer.

I could go on about movies, but they were playing their role in pulling the narrative along. There’s a reason that The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween, and Friday the 13^th all had monsters that were young – essentially the monsters were all children (or, started out as kids in Halloween or Friday the 13^th). . . Gen X age. No wonder my kindergarten teacher called me a little monster!

The propaganda in both television and film was the same: show the most sympathetic case of (insert movement – divorce, abortion, gay rights, et cetera) and then milk it for everything that it was worth. It didn’t matter that the case represented the very edge of reality, that small 0.01% of cases – no, publicize it and create an emotional backstory.

Why? To program people. When I look back at many (not all!) movies from that time frame there are places I can see the Narrative Programming being implanted. Heck, when I was a kid I wondered why people on the Right couldn’t be funny. They can be – P.J. O’Rourke taught that to the world.

I saw one bee I thought was drunk. Turned out he was just buzzed.

I don’t think it was a coincidence that church attendance started to go down in the 1970s. I don’t have a lot of data on why – perhaps single-parent households are less likely to go? Regardless, there’s plenty of data that shows when. The 1970s.

The Left focuses on identity and has since before the 1970s. The big reason for this focus is that class never really existed here in the United States in any sort of formal fashion. We never had Lords and Ladies and Kings, just rich people and poor people. And most poor people think there’s at least a hope that they’ll become rich people, which is why the lottery is still a tax on people who can’t do math.

So, that left only identity. The playbook on the Left was to let every identity group know that they were a victim. Women’s Lib. The 1967 riots. Certainly, there were legitimate grievances in some cases, but the Left wanted to create division between groups – and it’s possible to show how every group has been treated unfairly. Except for the Dutch. They had it coming.

Their answer was simple: normalize the victim status of nearly every group in order to fragment society. What is normal changes, first slowly, then all at once.

Joe walks into a bar and sees a hot woman and asks her, “So, do I come here often?”

Joe Biden in 2008 was against gay marriage. Joe Biden in 2022 wants to make it illegal for states to stop kids from getting hormone blockers. Yes – the same man who said that “marriage is between a man and a woman” only fourteen years ago now wants minors to receive powerful hormones that will unalterably change their bodies. On a whim.

What is normal now changes in a heartbeat, which is easy once the fixed morality of religion is gone. Then, the only standard becomes the law: if it’s legal, it must be moral. And in a dictatorship, who makes the laws?

Next Up: There’s more to come in this series, but I’m waiting on some reference books to show up. See how hard I work for you?

The Funniest Post You’ll Read Today About The Stoics

“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

Never trust Hunter Biden to pick up pizza and coke for a party.

The last five posts have been fairly dark, and Monday’s post will be dark, too. I already know that dark humor is like aid for the citizens of Ukraine – not everyone gets it (this is a repeat from 1932, LINK). That’s to be expected. We live in interesting times. But the good news is, it’s Friday. Last Friday, I happened upon a friend. I promise, I have more than one, despite what the NSA says.

In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!

My friend noted that he had to go shopping, and he wasn’t particularly looking forward to it. I responded, “Well, Marcus Aurelius said that you can find happiness in whatever moment, and the limiting factor is often what you feel about the situation, rather than the situation.” I said this even though I haven’t been shopping since Jimmy Kimmel was funny.

He smiled. We continued talking, and he went off shopping. As I was sitting at my table, I found this quote, from the inestimable P. G. Wodehouse’s , as found here (LINK) from his Jeeves and Wooster series of books (also a television series starring Stephen Fry as Jeeves and Hugh Laurie as Wooster). Setup – Jeeves is the intelligent, dry-witted, valet to Bertie Wooster, an idle British aristocrat. Thanks to Wodehouse, hilarity often ensues:

“Who do you think I am, Alfred Einstein?”

I turned to Jeeves. “So, Jeeves!”

“Yes, sir.”

“What do you mean, ‘Yes, sir’?”

“I was endeavouring [Wilder note: the British cannot spell] to convey my appreciation of the fact that your position is in many respects somewhat difficult, sir. But I wonder if I might call your attention to an observation of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. He said: ‘Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part; of the great web’.”

I breathed a bit stertorously. “He said that, did he?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, you can tell him from me he’s an ass.”

Bonus points if you knew what stertorously meant. I had to look it up. Snort.

Is she attractive? Neigh.

I’ve heard it said that life is a tragedy to those that feel, a comedy to those that think. Given that, the really funny part of life is that when times are down we don’t want to listen to the simple stoic Truths of life:

Control what you can, don’t let those things you don’t control (like the Wendy’s® drive through line, or Hunter Biden’s amazing appetite for crack) drive you nuts.
There is Virtue. We can spend our lives splitting hairs about what is virtuous, or, we could just be virtuous. Be Virtuous.
Most passions aren’t healthy. Some are, but taken to extreme, even those become unhealthy, like when I lift weights and become so strong that I can rip apart the fabric of the Universe just by tensing my glistening pectoral muscles? See, unhealthy. Understand the difference, and don’t be ruled by emotion. Passion is for 18 year olds, reason is for adults.
Johnny Depp was pretty good in the movie Dead Man.
Seek wisdom to guide your virtue.
Seek justice to create a more virtuous society. Not an equitable society, but a virtuous one. Let Disney™ know that there’s a difference.
Understand that courage is required – Virtue often comes with a price, which may be about $3.50, in 1973. Or a career in 2020.
Living outside of Virtue is the clearest definition of Vice.
Possessions are, for the most part, neither good nor bad, but what we do with them determines their value. Anyone want to buy a slightly used copy of the Necronomicon?

The lures that pull us away from being virtuous are many. PEZ®. TikGram©. InstaFace©. SnapTwit®. PornHULU©. TinderMAX®. EskimoBrotherDataBase (EBDB)™. The idea is that if we’re distracted, we don’t focus on the things that are important in life, like virtue.

One of the things that sets humans apart is that we think about our actions and the consequences. The result of all the lures? It pulls us away from improving ourselves, from having introspection and working through our issues. Issues? I don’t have issues. Like most people, I have subscriptions.

Surround yourself with people who have issues – they always have beer. And 21-year-old nannys.

True life: I was having a problem, something that really, really made me mad, like the Game of Thrones™ parents who named their kids “Daenerys” saw her turn into a war criminal. I didn’t let it consume me like a dragon consuming a daycare center, but in those small, still moments of life that issue managed to creep into my conscious.

Like when I woke up at 3am and it didn’t mean I had to go to the bathroom (which never happens, because I’ve evolved beyond needing liquids to live), I’d think about it. Finally, a hypnogogic conversation with myself provided the answer.

“John, what would you tell your best friend if he had this same problem?”

“Self,” I answered, “I would tell my friend to let it go. It happened a year ago. It wasn’t personal. And it’s probably for the best.”

Coffee spelled backwards is eeffoc. And before I have coffee, I don’t give eeffoc.

I had clarity. I had an answer. I had closure. And it didn’t come from social media. It came from thinking and understanding what advice I’d give my closest friend. Since I hadn’t talked with, well, really anyone, I had to deal with it myself.

I finally did deal with it. And now, when I wake up at 3AM? I worry about the devil since I haven’t had to pee in a month.

Introspection is our friend, as long as we don’t allow ourselves to drown in a sea of self-pity, and as long as we use it to measure ourselves against virtue. How do we measure it?

As near as I can find, Marcus Aurelius was religious, but certainly not a Christian. As Caesar, he was the Humongous Maximus of religious stuff, and his writings wondered about what impact the gods had in the lives of men, at least after he got that petroleum from those pesky kids.

Marcus Aurelius, the early years.

The impact of religion is enormous. When we live without a concept of a greater purpose, it’s like having pancakes without syrup, or thermonuclear weapons without the initial fission core that puts the hydrogen in H-Bomb. With no greater purpose, our lives are less than what they could be. As I’ve said before, most atheists aren’t atheists – they actually hate God, generally because they know that the life they are leading and/or the choices they are making are not virtuous. They know it.

Of course, I’ve met (and almost every atheist reader here) atheists that don’t hate God. Those folks? We’re cool. Generally, they don’t dislike people like me who believe in God, they just approach the world in a different way. But I’ve noticed this about the atheists that don’t hate God – they generally like living in a society where people believe in God. Why? It’s a more virtuous society, and the streets are very empty on Sunday morning.

I won’t hold myself up to be Virtuous, or even virtuous. I will note that I really, really do try. I think I’m more virtuous this year than last year, though I shower less because of my greater virtue. And that’s the point. Every day, I try to be better inside than the last. I try to make the world a bit better than it was the day before. And I try to tell the Truth.

Unfortunately, I bet sometimes people still say after a post like this, “John Wilder? Well, you can tell him from me, he’s an ass.”

Ha!

I’m not even awake.

The Economic Fate Of The United States: Two Choices

“No, you’ve already made the choice. Now you have to understand it.” – The Matrix Reloaded

I spent hundreds to rent a limo, but there was no driver. All that cash on a limo, and nothing to chauffeur it.

I did posts about inflation before inflation hit, but I’m not a psychic. It’s not like I work for ESPN or something. No. This inflation was absolutely predictable, and in fact, has been absolutely predictable since 2008. Ben Bernanke’s Fed© Approved™ solution to the Great Liquidity Crisis during the Great Recession was simple: print a lot of money.

Make no mistake, the economic problem was big back then in 2008. I personally saw an entire segment of the economy reach a full dead stop. Rail cars piled up at the sidings on my drive to work near Modern Mayberry because the railroads had no place to put them – miles of them. I mean, without rail cars how could new railroad employees train?

Why did this happen? Nobody knew which banks had money and which ones didn’t. The trust that underlies the system had been blown up by a series of banks defaulting, with stocks crashing, and bonds plummeting. Heck, even physicists stopped trusting atoms – they make up everything. The Fed’s® solution to this lack of trust? Like I said, print money.

They were sneaky about how they did it – they printed money and gave it to the banks by buying up the awful assets they had on the books. The money vacuumed up the bad debt like Charlie Sheen on the set of Two and a Half Grams.

Something tells me he’d be a more thoughtful Fed® chairman than the one we have now.

The printing also kicked the can down the road. We could spend all day about the causes, but the reality is that we are the can that was kicked down the road. Our current inflation is the result of keeping the party going even when the system should have cleared out the bad debts, cleared out the dead companies, and cleared out the waste that caused the crisis.

Would it have been tough? Sure, especially on elevator repairmen – but their business is always up and down anyway.

So, now what?

The reality is simple. As a nation, we face only two choices.

The first choice we could make is to keep doing what we’re doing. We can keep printing money, and keep pretending that the economic problems are created by the sanctions we put in place over a regional border conflict that we helped create and certainly encouraged.

The result of the decision to keep printing will first be higher prices. Higher fuel prices mean less driving, but they also mean that the cost of nearly everything you buy costs more: food, trash service, beer, PEZ®, posters of Elvis (especially posters of the The King after he discovered carbohydrates), everything physical will cost more.

Why can’t Elvis drive his Cadillac™ in reverse? He’s dead.

Oh, sure, hyperinflation seems like fun at first. Rising prices, rising wages . . . but the wages never keep up with the prices. And businesses can’t keep up with the rising costs, so long-term contracts that had been great are now unprofitable. Bare shelves show up. People rush to ditch cash to buy stuff because they know that Kraft© Mac n’ Cheese™ is going to be 20% more next week, so canned goods have a better rate of return than the stock market. Some people don’t like canned food, but for me it’s ate out of tin.

But then banks have finally gotten wise, and we’ll see higher interest rates on car loans, home loans, and student debt. Higher costs on cars plus higher interest costs mean lower new car sales, especially when people are struggling to find change in their couches to buy Pizza Rolls® and Twinkies™.

Lower new car sales mean fewer new cars made. Which requires fewer workers. Which increases unemployment. Eventually, there’s a recession or depression as economic activity ceases to be meaningful – weird things happen as people resort to a manic level of activity.

The banks finally get wise and loans don’t come with an interest rate, they come with a scheme to create a way that the bank doesn’t go bankrupt as the currency value plummets. The values are pegged to a commodity (like gold) or an inflation index. Bankers have been through this before in country after country and know every trick to keep themselves whole. I assure you, inflation has their interest.

I saw a homeless man talking to his shadow. That means six more weeks of inflation.

Ultimately, the orgy of printing results in destitution, unemployment, and a political and moral crisis. How bad is it? Reminders of the hyperinflation caused by worthless money during the Revolutionary War are still in the Constitution – “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make anything but gold and silver tender in payment of debts.” I even keep a copy of the Constitution on the wall – The Mrs. calls it the Decoration of Independence.

Wonder why the German bankers are so crazy about not letting the euro hyperinflate? They’ve been through that before. And German bankers are generally pessimists, which is why they study Russian.

Sadly, we’re seeing these impacts even though many of the trillions in printing haven’t even hit the economy yet. Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill hasn’t even hit the economy yet. Think construction is expensive now? Wait until there are a trillion more dollar in construction contracts that hit the economy in the next six months. That will lead to millions of guys standing around trying to look busy.

I wanted to build highways, but I decided not to go down that road.

So, that’s path one – keep going and wait for everything to blow up like slobber from a pasty dingo with a bag of decade-old beef jerky, which seems like an oddly specific analogy, but I have my reasons. What will be on the other side? No one can say – often, hyperinflation destroys the entire fabric of the country, making the people desperate, willing to do anything, even watch another Marvel® movie.

There is, of course, a second choice:

Quit printing money.

Stop entirely.

Have the Fed® increase the interest rate to slow down the economy and re-value the currency. Stop the shenanigans.

The result of that is, of course, also a major recession – probably worse than the Great Recession of 2008. Possibly as bad as the Great Depression.

There will be plummeting home values as interest rates increase. There will be unemployment. But once the debt clears, in a decade or so, what will be left will be an economy that is based, perhaps, on a more fundamentally sound currency, or even one that won’t inflate until it is worthless. I can dream, can’t I?

It’s not a pleasant idea, going through that pain. But in the end, it provides a chance for economic prosperity.

That’s it. Those are really the only choices I see in the economy. We’ll have to pick one.

I have no faith that the second path will be taken. Why? This graph, for one. Looks like people who like free stuff, vote for people who give them . . . free stuff.

Romney supporters signed their checks on the front, Obama voters signed theirs on the back.

It requires making a hard choice, a knowing difficulty. It’s like having the discipline to eat the broccoli and skip the ice cream before they wheel you out to read things off the teleprompter. I have seen no sign of the political class of the United States being willing to make any difficult decision. I have seen only a little appetite in the general populace to take the tough road.

No, I think we’ll make the first choice. When inflation gets worse? My bet is that the reaction of the political leadership will be to send checks to everyone. Wait and see.

No, I’m not a psychic. But I wish I was a remote viewer. I’m still looking for the one from the stereo.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: The Fall Of Biden?

“Get a new president.” – Escape from New York

Biden was in three states today: confusion, disorientation, and bewilderment.

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 Clock O’Doom at the same location. For now. 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 – In Soviet Russia, Sanctions Work On You – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Joe Has Lost His Support – 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 nearly 680 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

In Soviet Russia, Sanctions Work On You

I’m sure the sanctions sounded good on paper. After all, when the Russians took Crimea in 2014, the sanctions worked. Russia was as vulnerable as a chocolate cake locked in a room with Amy Schumer.

Since the Russians cut off the natural gas to Europe, the Germans can now really Netflix™ and chill.

This time, however, the sanctions aren’t working quite as expected. Certainly, there are shortages of things in Russia, but Russia’s single biggest import is cell phones, and none of those are coming from the United States. Some of the things that the Russians don’t have access to are:

Netflix®
ApplePay™
PornHub©
Coca-Cola® and
Facebook©.

Frankly, if all of those things disappeared forever in my life, I wouldn’t notice them at all. If they disappeared forever? Absolutely none of those things are required for life. Heck, I could make the point that none of them are even required for happiness, but then again I get enjoyment out of camping.

Now we know why we don’t have flying cars: Facebook®.

There are certainly impacts on the people in Russia, but remember, the summary of Russian history, “and then things got worse.” People in Russia already have low expectations, so nobody is surprised when they go to the store and find that the only thing to eat is yet more cabbage.

In the United States, however, the sanctions have already had a significant impact. Prices for things are going up, in some cases 20%. Per week. The local restaurants all took the time to print new menus (in one case for the first time in five years) due to all of the price increases. Gasoline is becoming so expensive that I think people are thinking about straining their teenager’s combs so they can use all of that oil.

Loans to buy pizza, loans to fill a truck with gasoline. How kind – I don’t think I can ever repay you!

The sanctions are already having an immediate impact in the United States. Economic difficulty will lead to social difficulty. We are used to going to the store and expecting to see products lined up and waiting for us. What happens when we have to line up and wait for the products?

I’m thinking that a few scathing Facebook™ posts won’t really help.

Violence And Censorship Update

YouTube®

One item that I missed talking about last month was YouTube®. One of the things that the people who curate The Narrative hate is that there are ways for “little people” to get the Truth out. When people find that outlet, and when people start sharing that news, what can YouTube© do?

They even censored Dracula – a Count suspended.

Well, they can enact a new policy. In this case, they limit views of accounts with less than 1,000 subscribers. They actively suppress citizen-journalists. Why? So they can control the news. The days of a viral YouTube™ video are dead. Unless, of course, it’s approved content.

DuckDuckGo™

DuckDuckGo™ had a reputation of not suppressing politically incorrect websites. I even ran a check and DuckDuckGo© suppressed this website less than Google™. Yay! I converted all of my search bars to DuckDuckGo®. Looks like they finally caved, and now will suppress search results to hide places that just don’t fit with their approval.

This meme has been approved by DuckDuckGo™.

Russian News

RT™ is a Russian news service that has been kicked off of YouTube® and the app to watch it on your cell phone is now no longer available on Apple™ or whatever the Google™ app store is called. Why? It’s being censored. Now, I do understand that RT© is absolutely Russian propaganda, but that still means it likely has more truth to it the average CNN™ broadcast. So, what are the Russians saying that is so dangerous that billionaire corporations and European governments will do whatever they can so you can’t hear it?

I guess they’re worried they’ll be Putin us on?

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 is flat. March isn’t (usually) a big month for violence, so that’s to be expected. I would expect the next little bit to remain calm as well, perhaps turning back up in May or June.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, but instability was flat in March. I don’t expect a big change this next month, but the Dems will be desperate to do something before November. Perhaps dumping Biden (see below).

Economic:

The drop in economic confidence was, as predicted, short-term. It dropped like a rock this month, and will (my bet) be even worse next month.

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels for this time of year. All-time record levels. Again.

Joe Has Lost His Support

And those were the good things they had to say about him.

It has always puzzled me how someone so disliked, so uncharismatic as Biden could have gotten the Democratic nomination. Certainly, the election was stolen, but why install Biden? Perhaps the idea is that he was a puppet and could be controlled? Perhaps he was thought to be so weak that he could be ignored?

Thankfully, it’s a picture book.

I don’t have a really good idea. And his choice of Kamala Harris was mystifying: he chose someone who personally attacked him during the primaries. Additionally, she had such weak support that she was one of the first Democrats to drop out.

But now, the official newspaper of the CIA and Amazon™, the Washington Post©, has confirmed what everyone on the Right knew back in October of 2020. The Hunter Biden laptop is real. Despite the FBI “losing” the original laptop, the data remains. And, now the major newspapers are all over the story.

Why? There is only one reason – Joe has reached his expiration date.

You know it’s bad when the crack-smoking and underage hookers are the least damaging part of the hard drive contents.

Thus, the gaffes. They’re letting him speak, and reporting on the nonsense that comes out of his mouth, finally. The amazingly low I.Q. of Kamala Harris has likewise been put on display. The Powers That Be have decided that Joe has no more value to them than an empty McDonald’s© Hot Mustard Sauce™ packet. The revelations on the Biden laptop are being brought out in a slow drip, so it does the most damage.

They are going to abandon Biden.

I’d imagine whatever videotape they have of Kamala Harris will be shared with her and she’ll quietly decline the opportunity to become Kneepads-in-Chief.

You know that when you’ve lost the Late Night Funny Joke Men, they’re coming for you.

Who they’re clearing the deck for is to me at least, a mystery. The Left knows it will get pasted at the mid-term elections if current conditions continue.

The wise choice would be to move toward the Center. I’m betting they move toward the radical side of the Left.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

Manhattan: https://twitter.com/1010WINS/status/1506339929458200576

San Fran: https://twitter.com/DionLimTV/status/1503172398513676291

https://twitter.com/i/status/1499811575896629249

https://twitter.com/AsianDawn4/status/1499587261045690368

Beverly Hills: https://twitter.com/RobertNBCLA/status/1506406190145712131

Yonkers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0KWPqUBGUQ

On the Track: https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1509279621983965184

Philly: https://6abc.com/video/embed/?pid=11640116

Near Laredo TX: https://twitter.com/GraduatedBen/status/1503545303995199489

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FAxB5XEwvpA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOLrjSIF4iY

Good Guys

Chinatown NYC: https://twitter.com/EvelynYang/status/1503393328318005251

Alameda CA: https://twitter.com/DionLimTV/status/1506084204676673543

On the Road: https://twitter.com/WarPath2pt0/status/1503722788556873731

Pawn Shop: https://twitter.com/breakonthru234/status/1509187648933359621

Philly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ElSrns_Qg3k

One Guy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlP8Ft9MoNk

Body Count

USA: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/nearly-75-25-of-us-counties-lost-population-last-year-as-deaths-outnumbered-births-data-shows/ar-AAVqsQI

https://www.wnd.com/2022/03/cdc-data-millennials-suffered-alarming-spike-excess-deaths-last-fall/

https://www.kgw.com/article/news/crime/gun-violence/portland-homicide-victims-2022/283-1c676898-fdce-447e-8b33-b1371a8e28d0

DOD:https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/the-department-of-defense-just-got?s=r

https://waynedupree.com/2022/03/servicemen-dying-bunk/

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/pentagon-congress/2022/03/28/biden-budget-would-mean-smallest-army-since-wwii/

VAX:https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/its-official-the-vaccines-are-killing?s=r

bstack.com/p/its-official-the-vaccines-are-killing?s=r

https://citizenfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/vaccine-deaths.jpg

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2022/03/covid-us-death-rate/626972/

https://www.medalerts.org/vaersdb/findfield.php?TABLE=ON&GROUP1=AGE&EVENTS=ON&VAX=COVID19&DIED=Yes

FEN:https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10625023/A-record-105-000-Americans-died-drug-overdose-October-2020-2021.html

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/theres-fentanyl-in-everything-4-new-hospitalizations-linked-to-fentanyl-just-days-after-spring-breakers-overdosed/ar-AAV3hr6

MEX:https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/at-cartel-extermination-site-mexico-nears-100k-missing

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10673361/Jalisco-New-Generation-Cartel-cell-leader-targeted-hit-squad-Chicago-mother-four.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10612051/Mexico-finds-17-bodies-buried-backyards-patios.html

https://www.vice.com/en/article/epx8vw/21-bodies-found-in-a-mass-grave-if-there-is-no-body-there-is-no-crime

Vote Count

USA: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3756988

USA: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/03/28/new_peer-reviewed_research_finds_evidence_of_2020_voter_fraud_147378.html

USA: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2022/mar/28/joe-biden-got-255000-excess-votes-fraud-tainted-sw/

USA: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-nyt-now-admits-the-biden-laptop?s=r

USA: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/03/24/election-integrity-review-of-notable-state-legislation-and-issues/

USA: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/2020-election-nullification-audit-bills-dead-or-dying-state-legislatures

USA: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/03/15/mail_voting_and_election_legitimacy_147335.html

GA: https://twitter.com/realLizUSA/status/1500936918422495234

GA: https://voterga.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/How-Georgia-election-results-were-electronically-manipulated-legislators.pdf

TX: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/texas-elections-official-resign-after-1000s-uncounted-ballots-found

WI: https://twitter.com/realLizUSA/status/1509541070148976640

WI: https://www.wpr.org/gableman-report-calls-decertifying-2020-election-legislatures-nonpartisan-lawyers-say-thats-not

WI: https://www.wpr.org/sites/default/files/osc-second-interim-report.pdf

WI: https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/did-you-know-green-bays-election?s=r

WI: https://kanekoa.substack.com/p/wisconsins-voting-machines-were-connected?s=w

Civil War

LAW:https://sports.yahoo.com/overwhelmed-prosecutors-quitting-tears-amid-231200659.html

https://freebeacon.com/campus/hundreds-of-yale-law-students-disrupt-bipartisan-free-speech-event/

https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/the-takeover-of-americas-legal-system?s=r

ALT:https://www.cbsnews.com/news/incel-threat-secret-service-report/

https://www.stripes.com/theaters/us/2022-03-23/witness-whitmer-kidnapping-stop-biden-win-5452846.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/03/08/they-are-preparing-war-an-expert-civil-wars-discusses-where-political-extremists-ar e-taking-this-country/

CW2:https://theamericansun.com/2022/03/22/stop-with-the-red-dawn-fantasies/

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/blog/know-your-enemy-a-second-civil-war-with-jamelle-bouie

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/history/articles/cold-civil-war

https://www.newsweek.com/2022/04/08/civil-war-20-why-splitting-would-100-trillion-mistake-1690730.html

https://www.baltimoresun.com/maryland/carroll/opinion/cc-op-mcgrew-civil-war-in-us-20220303-hk3qad66rjd5tgg3lb3wt5prbe-story.html

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part III

“No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power tyrants and dictators cannot stand. The Centauri learned that lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.” – Babylon 5

I like the electronics DIY store – The Ohm Depot.

Part I of this series can be found here (LINK), and Part II can be found here (LINK).

Thinking about dictatorship is difficult. I was raised in a system that considered dictatorship more or less impossible. We didn’t even have any jokes about dictators because we didn’t speak Spanish, German, Italian, Russian or Chinese. I was raised in the wilds where you could be certain that every house contained more firearms than people, usually many more. And safe? Doors were rarely locked.

They taught us how to use rifles effectively in school. I even won the prize for marksmanship in eighth grade, which was a personally autographed photo of Andrew Jackson. Every boy took the test and got his Hunter Safety card, except me. I’d had my card since second grade.

The girls? Who knows what they did while we were shooting rifles, making models, and talking about football. This class was for boys only, and strangely we didn’t have difficulty identifying what a girl was. We didn’t even have advanced biology degrees to tell the boys from the girls back then, though I will admit to have been an avid amateur biologist while I was in high school. And even I could tell the difference.

So, back to the point, dictatorship was something that I didn’t think a lot of. And there’s no way that it’s a certainty since Civil War 2.0 is still a very real possibility. That being said, I started to research a bit deeper. What are the signposts that a dictatorship is near?

A truck carrying Vicks Vap-O-Rub® overturned yesterday. Thankfully, there was no congestion.

Most of the articles were written by Leftist journalists who wanted to reee! that Trump was the worst tyrant since Stalin’s more evil brother. One of them was even in a magazine for young adolescent females, whatever those are.

I found one article (Trump era, pre-George Floyd, pre-‘Rona) that had the following conditions (LINK). I didn’t think the article was great. But, being written by a writer from India, it was refreshingly free of Trump Derangement Syndrome. Here is (more or less the list, with some minor edits from me):

Control of the Media: CNN®? Leftist think CNN™ is centrist. Outside of dissident media on the Internet and (sometimes) Fox©, I think we can firmly check this box. The denial of Hunter Biden’s laptop, anyone?
Rigging of the Electoral System: That is more than self-evident from the strange and obviously fraudulent results of the 2020 election, but it is also 100% admitted by the Left, in Time Magazine, no less. It’s here (LINK), though it’s now behind a wall.
Control of the Judicial System: This is only mostly, since Trump managed to put several justices on the Supreme Court. All in all, though, the court system has skewed Left for ages.
Spying on the Population: This box has been checked since 2001 and the Patriot Act. Snowden, anyone?
Harassing Dissidents: Compare the reaction to people literally burning down cities and staging insurrection in the streets to truckers peacefully protesting. Also: say something that is against The Narrative on YouTube®, see how long your account lasts. As a website operator, I certainly know when I’m over the target because the site catches flak.
Suppression of Dissidents – Dissident Protest is Terrorism: January 6^th. End of story.
Promotion of Civil Unrest: George Floyd protests were going to happen, regardless of the person. It just needed an appropriate victim and the video spread far and wide, even though drugs killed St. George of Our Lady of Fentanyl and not a police officer’s knee. Riots were going to happen – it was part of the plan.

Ouch!

By my count, that’s seven out of seven, and that’s just since December of 2019. It’s interesting just how much Donald Trump, despite not really achieving much of lasting note, upset the system. Trump didn’t restore law and order. Heck, he couldn’t even restore Firefly. But yet, they were willing to take off the mask just to get him out.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Or maybe that was the point?

Taking a step back, civilizations have a lifespan. The following cycle is attributed to Alexander Tytler, a dead Scottish guy. There are two problems with this:

There is no evidence Tytler ever said anything like this.
The name Tytler makes me think of an Austrian politician who moved to Germany and was popular in the 1930s and early 1940s and then decided to get breast enhancement.

Okay, deep down, I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old.

The real author of the Tytler Cycle is probably Henning Prentiss, an executive, who is also dead and whose name is not nearly as funny. The 1943 speech it’s from is here (LINK).

So, here is what Tytler Prentiss had to say:

“The historical cycle seems to be:

From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to apathy,
from apathy to dependency; and
from dependency back to bondage once more.

At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies.”

The end state is what we’re really interested in – the failure of government, the loss of hope, and the dependence on someone, anyone, to save them. All they have to surrender is control. And, in the United States that doesn’t necessarily mean the same party – in many ways the GOP is just the “for God’s sake, don’t put me in charge, they’ll expect me to do something” wing of the Democratic Party.

How did the Roman Senate choose a new dictator? They played rock, paper, Caesars.

The Strong Man himself is certainly out there right now. He might be unknown to us, but he is building, biding his time. It’s almost certainly not AOC, since she’s not anyone’s idea of a problem solver unless your problem is needing a Margarita, no salt. It’s not someone too old like Bernie Sanders who will turn to dust if Sunlight ever hits him – which is why he has coffins in the basement of the multiple mansions he owns.

It’s certainly not the Ad Libber in Chief, since he (like his pants) is in the process of being dumped (you don’t think those releases about Hunter’s laptop are coincidental, do you?). No, someone young, vigorous, yet already sold to The Narrative. Dan Crenshaw (World Economic Forum™ Young Leader®), my eye is on you.

But it doesn’t have to be Dan. Any man who has The Plan, charisma, and reasonable personal hygiene (including regular showers) might become the Strong Man. It won’t be a woman: the masculinity of the “tough” solutions will be a part of the sales pitch, along with the ever so regretful admission that temporary controls are needed to restore the abundance of the past.

So, control is surrendered. Rights are conditional –rights will be honored as long as it is convenient, ignored, or suppressed when not. The budding Kommissars of Australia provided the poster child for the sudden evaporation of rights when inconvenient for government. In a continent where every insect is an inexhaustible vat of poison, every animal has fangs and can disembowel a man with a kick, and the nectar of half the plants does things that would make H.P. Lovecraft shudder, who knew that the most dangerous creatures were . . . government employees?

I went to Australia and they asked me if I had a criminal record. I said, “I didn’t know that was still required.”

Keep this in mind, as well: The United States government is fine with taking $300 billion of Russia’s funds. Think the Strong Man would hesitate to confiscate all the funds of a dissident? Most dissidents I know don’t even have half the nuclear weapons Russia does.

What does the dictator, the Strong Man want to control, then?

Well, all of us.

How does he do it?

Well, the Strong Man can control other things that allow him to control his people:

Food
Money
Pharmaceuticals
Media
Politics
Culture
Technology
Communications
Family Structure
Energy
Immigration
Fertility

If the Strong Man doesn’t like me, he can kill me and replace me with a compliant citizen and use my money to buy himself something nice, like a new watch. All for the greater good, of course. Orwell described the real goal of every Strong Man best: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Wow – this part got darker and emptier than the space between Kamala’s ears between ideas. I’ll close with this happy thought: Bondage leads to faith, faith to courage, and courage to liberty. And remember, there are large parts of the United States where guns still far outnumber people. Regardless of the detours we take into darkness, there will always be a light for mankind.

I mean, unless the light is the comet that’s going to hit us. Oh, wait, I wasn’t supposed to give spoilers for 2023 yet!

Not my original.

Next: (There will be a delay in this one, perhaps next week, perhaps the week after) Mechanisms of Control

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part II

“Did you ever run for dictator of anything?” – Green Acres

Why didn’t Julius Caesar ever say “thank you” to anyone? He didn’t speak English.

This is Part II of the series. Part I can be found here (LINK).

The history of when the United States started to slip into a dictatorship is long, but I’ll start with the Civil War. The worst part of the Civil War (besides, you know, all of the dead people) was Lincoln running roughshod over the Constitution whenever it suited him:

Shut down opposition newspapers, arresting the owners and editors,
Arrested a former congressman (generally a good idea) and put him to a military tribunal (he wasn’t in the military) and then . . . deported him to the Confederacy,
Legalized disco, and
Put the entire state of Maryland under martial law.

Important Civil War Fact: It is not true that, despite popular conception, Lincoln had written the first draft of the Gettysburg Address on a Bacon Swiss Hand-Breaded Chicken Sandwich™ wrapper from Carl’s Jr.© Lincoln actually preferred Arby’s®.

The movie Lincoln grossed $300,000,000, which is weird because Abe normally didn’t do well in theaters.

But the slip toward despotism wasn’t done and the precedent was one people didn’t forget: in a crisis, the rights of the citizens who oppose you are optional. War and crisis seemed to bring it out the best, and although I could spend quite a bit about the overreaches of other presidents (Woodrow Wilson, I’m looking at you) the next person grasping for the tyrant’s ring was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR was really awful, if you love liberty. His expansion of Federal power (unlike most of Lincoln’s) is still with us today. As the economic crisis of the Great Depression hit nation after nation and led to dictatorships across the world, America craved their own Strong Man.

It also explains why he never ran for office.

Roosevelt was more than ready. It is quite arguable that the vast majority of the things that Roosevelt did made the crisis longer. It is acknowledged today by the Federal Reserve™ (thanks, Wilson) that they not only caused the Great Depression, but that their actions made it worse. It makes me so mad: if I didn’t have a cold, I’d Sudafed®.

Roosevelt did not let the crisis go to waste. He created power structure after power structure in the country. Social Security. Threatening the Supreme Court so that his definition of the Interstate Commerce Clause was adopted, which allows the Federal government to reach into almost every business in the country today.

Roosevelt also violated the idea that presidents served two terms, and two terms only. Thankfully, he died about 300 years into his presidency. And, thankfully, he inspired a Constitutional Amendment to prevent anyone from rolling in his wheelchair tracks.

But the rot of creeping state control continued. What held it at bay was, thankfully (and oddly enough), the Soviets.

I didn’t like their food, though – I’m against the Soviet Onion.

Centralization is always the goal of the dictator. In order to compete with the Soviets, though, we needed to keep our economy in overdrive to build more jets and missiles and nuclear bombs. The easiest way to do that? Dispersed knowledge. Incentives. Voluntary cooperation. In short, capitalism. The Soviets may have thought that they’d bury us, but in reality they never could keep up with a people motivated by freedom, patriotism, and profit.

We buried the Soviets.

But the requirement to beat them also required a people in the United States that were ill-suited for a Caesar.

Unfortunately, in addition to building missiles, the communists had been trying to hollow out the institutions of the United States. It’s ironic: the Soviet Union was hollowed out by communism around the same time that the big rot of communism that the Soviets planted in the United States started to show here. They wormed their way through what I now call The List of the Long March through the Institutions:

Colleges and Universities
The K-12 educational system.
Most Protestant religious organizations.
Most Catholic organizations.
The American Medical Association.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

I had a communist girlfriend who I later found out was a psycho. How did I miss the red flags?

The control of these Institutions ultimately gives the Left the power to destabilize society. It rots society from within. The signs of that sort of rot are so big they cannot be concealed now:

70% of citizens supporting some form of mandatory vaxx in blue states (81% in Washington, D.C.),
Only speech and activities approved of by the toxic combination of government, BigTechBook™, and GloboCorp® is approved,
George R.R. Martin is still pretending he’s writing his next Game of Thrones® book,
The leader of Iran still had a Twitter™ account while the President’s account was cancelled,
Open borders are reality, flooding the United States with many with no functional idea of liberty,
Firing for wrongthink is not only approved, it’s encouraged, and
Disney®, a global company, is attempting to override the will of the people of Florida because their employees do not agree with the idea that teachers shouldn’t talk about gay sex with five-year-olds.

That’s bad enough. The good news is that not everyone is an NPC, waiting to receive the next government-approved Woke Upgrade that (spins wheel) attempts to convince you your computer is non-binary. Heck, if you’re reading this, chances are high that you make your own decisions and are skeptical of much of The Agenda.

I’d like my remains to be scattered at Disneyworld®. I don’t want to be cremated, though.

But in 2022, we have the potential for the biggest economic failure in the history of the United States. We have the possibility of a failed economy combined with a failed currency. This would bring economic chaos that would be destabilizing. In the 1930s, 20% of the American workforce was in agriculture. Now? Around 2%.

Without jobs, in a collapsing economy? That’s a lot of hungry people. A lot of homeless people.

A lot of people without hope. A lot of people who will look for a man who promises solutions. The Strong Man.

The response? That’s Friday’s post: The Strong Man, and the signposts along the way.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek

“Comrade Stalin, a fortune-teller came to see you!” “Execute him. If he was any good, he would have known not to come.”

Most people like to be told what to do. They want to be led. That makes sense, given the history of humanity. We work best when we work together, and the worst group is a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader. Because of this, hierarchy is a built-in feature to our operating system. Get a group of lumberjacks together, and one of them will want to be named the branch manager.

The downside of this “working together” is that the vast mass of people are willing to behave like lemmings and all jump off the cliff, as long as that’s what everyone else in the group is doing. Heck, lemmings would even jump off a dock, if they felt pier pressure. For me, the last few years has been the biggest revelation in human behavior and how easily people (especially NPCs) can be reprogrammed.

The three biggest reprogramming efforts in the last few years have been Trump, COVID, and Ukraine. I’ll skip Trump for the moment, and jump into COVID. Was the ‘Rona a real disease? Certainly. The reaction to it was overblown at every level. The average age of people who died from Corona-chan was (through my rough calculations) 73 in the United States.

In two years, a total of 921 deaths below the age of 17 were recorded. By my calcs, this was less than 1% of the deaths from all causes for kids of that age. In other words, it was uncommon. For that, though, we shut down schools, shut down the economy, and tossed trillions in cash out everywhere. That led to pent-up demand – when the local Lego® store reopened, people lined up for blocks.

You’re aware of all of that, of course. This isn’t ancient history. But the number of Americans who became Corona believers overnight was in the tens of millions. The reactions of panic were amazing. It became the reason for the existence of the news media and Big Tech® to actively put a blanket of censorship on all views that didn’t agree with whatever the blessed St. Anthony Fauci, PBUH, didn’t believe that afternoon.

The ‘Rona continued to be a means of control, as well as amazing profitability for the vaxx makers. Biden even tried to up the ante with controls that would have made Brezhnev blush that were (in some cases) later defeated, which made him stop before he went full Trudeau. Never go full Trudeau.

Eventually, the vaxx requirements and silly Corona restrictions got so politically muddled and unpopular that the subject had to be changed. A desperate politician with low approval ratings decided that the best thing that could have happened to him is . . . Russia.

Cowboys don’t have to worry either, they have herd immunity.

Leftists have been head over heels hating Russia for quite a long time, even more than they hate having to switch cars after the Amber Alert comes over the radio. I started to write a paragraph as to why – but why doesn’t matter.

It would have been elementary statecraft for Biden to get Ukraine and Russia to have a peaceful settlement, or at least one short of war. Instead, every public statement was a variant of “let’s you and him fight.”

Biden actively egged on the conflict that no one believed would actually happen.

Why? This why is important.

It was to swap out the chips. COVID-19 Fear Enabler™ was replaced with 2022 Russia Hate®. Joe saw his shot to again become nearly as popular as “that dance the kids are doing, the twist” and someone decided to make the chip swap.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to be on the side of Ukraine – there are. Me? I’m not on either side – I don’t need to choose between various them. But the real loser of this war won’t only be Ukraine and Russia. In the long run, I think the biggest loser will be the economy of the United States, especially with unemployment after Ukraine has to lay off the Biden, Pelosi, and Romney families.

Pictured: Will Smith not hitting someone for making a joke.

I see that there is a very, very significant portion of the populace that is highly susceptible to this reprogramming – again – no every Russia hater is an NPC, but many are. The technology for this reprogramming has been honed very well over time. People who couldn’t spell Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map want to intervene with a no-fly zone and troops. One wonders if they know that “no-fly” has nothing to do with zipperless pants.

Whether planned or not, this will very likely result in the final crisis that the United States will face in its current form. The difficulty is that we are a population that is already divided. I feel that the recent sanctions against Russia are an own goal that will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the reserve currency and wrote about that here: (https://wilderwealthywise.com/russia-and-the-end-of-the-dollar/).

Ultimately, this leads to that final crisis that we’ll face as a nation.

How will we deal with an economic crisis? Certainly there is the possibility of Civil War 2.0, which is what I had previously had as my number one risk. It’s still there, but a new risk is becoming more and more probable as we head towards Biden’s Depression. What kind of crisis? That one is simple. Economic disruption in the United States of Weimar proportions, as I’ll outline below.

A move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency (which is happening right now) will create poverty. Yes, we make food in the United States. But we don’t make the microchips required to run the John Deere® harvesters. We also make most of the energy that we consume. But we don’t make the steel to produce the pipe to drill it or move it. We’ve simply lost much of the technological and experience base required to make the things we need, except for Doritos®.

As noted above, I can see other probabilities, but Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the unipolar world we had since 1992. This creates the conditions necessary to crush a United States built on a FIRE economy.

What’s a FIRE economy? Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Yup, that’s the United States. Regardless of how it has been used, it is an economy that’s built around sloshing money around. No matter what the condo sells for in New York, it won’t put a single more hamburger into a McDonald’s® in Manhattan.

Russia can make and harvest the food, because they can make tractors or import them from China. Russia can make excess energy, as well as the pipe to move it. They don’t even need China for that. The United States used to be indispensable. Now?

The United States imports $90 billion a month more than it exports. $90 billion. Why do people sent us $90 billion in stuff every month more than we send out? Because we pay with dollars.

If only he could have gotten another 150,000 votes at 3am, I’m sure he could have won Saudi Arabia.

These dollars exist because we just print them, or, more likely, create electronic bits that we call dollars. It was a good gig, but Biden’s sanctions against Russia have shown the Russians that they don’t need the Western financial system. They can sell oil and fertilizer and grain for . . . rubles. Or gold. Or microchips. They don’t need the dollar.

This sort of crisis facing the United States has happened before. Most of the time, it rhymes.

A decadent people
Weakened through a fixation only on pleasure and power
Because they live in abundance
Are confronted with a crisis – typically ending the pleasure

What, then, do the people want?

Well, of course, they want the pleasure back. They want the abundance back. What are they willing to do? Anything. As I said, people like to be led. So, when the Strong Man shows up with the Plan, they’re ready to accept it.

What does the Strong Man require to return the pleasure and abundance back? Simple, said the spider to the no-fly zone: Control.

Who is ready to give control? People who can swap programming nearly immediately, to swap out COVID Fear Pack™ to Save Ukraine 2022 Upgrade© without skipping a beat.

And that’s how you get a Dictator

Wednesday: The Road to Dictatorship, Past, Present, and Future.

The Space Between The Words

“Well, I don’t care if it was some dork in a costume. For one brief moment, I felt the heartbeat of creation, and it was one with my own.” – Futurama

I love my step ladder, but it’ll never be my real ladder.

It was March of 2005. I remember it fairly well. It was when we were living in Alaska. The move had been a big risk for The Mrs. and I – moving north across the better part of a continent for work. I was fortunate to have a good boss and good co-workers.

It was there that I had what I would normally call an epiphany, but epiphany seems too strong. A realization? Maybe. Regardless, to me, it seemed profound.

The Space Between The Words . . . it was a throwaway line by a guest on a radio show that The Mrs. and I were listening to on KFBX, the local AM station. But sometimes a phrase sticks with you, and this one stuck with me like the phrase “floozy crotch snout” sticks to Kamala Harris.

Or am I the only one who calls her that?

Yup, real quote. Her real words are better than almost any meme.

Regardless . . . The Space Between The Words. It seemed as insignificant as Hunter Biden’s willpower until in that hypnogogic state between wakefulness and sleep I thought about it . . . The Space Between The Words.

What exists there, in The Space Between The Words?

My realization was that The Space Between The Words isn’t made of silence. It is far from that dead and sterile nothingness that silence implies.

My HVAC guy sure has his ducts in a row.

For me, that space is infinity. It is the engine of creation itself.

I wrote “The Space Between The Words” down on a piece of Post-It® note and taped it to my computer monitor. I still have that piece of now-faded pale yellow paper stuck in a book I carry with me every day. To me, it is a touchstone and a personal reminder.

Why does it matter to me?

When I am talking, (or doing public speaking, which I do 10,000% more often than I want to do and potentially 20,000% more than the audience wants me to do) if I ever get flustered, I can just stop. I can pause. I realize that I can tap into The Space Between The Words, that creative power that allows me to choose whichever of the thousands of words I know as the very next one. I get to choose that next phrase. I get to choose the way the conversation can go. I get to create the possibilities with only the choice of my words.

The Space Between The Words is crucial.

If I choose well, I can turn a simple conversation into something meaningful. One of the powers of words is that, when applied correctly, is that they can become something transformative. A simple conversation can change a person’s life forever. Especially if it’s on tape – just ask Richard Nixon.

My buddy and I got a huge contract to make toy vampires. There’s only two of us – I have to make every second Count.

The choice of words is, as I mentioned before, the power of creation. I don’t claim to own that power. Again, the word I would use isn’t that I came up with the idea or invented the concept I’m describing now. I just discovered something that I’m sure many others before me knew was there, just like I discovered that someone was keeping a list of all of my jokes in a dad-o-base.

I won’t claim to be a great or charismatic public speaker. I’ve had my moments. But I do know that I’ve changed at least one or two lives through things that I have said, and I do know that I’ve said more of what I mean with greater clarity when I allowed The Space Between The Words to guide me.

I bet no one expected that meme.

Likewise, when I write, I don’t claim to be a great writer. I do, however (when it’s not 3am!) try to carefully edit what I write so that it has the meaning I want to share. Sometimes I don’t get there. Sometimes, when writing one of these posts, the content takes a sharp turn, and I let it run. I know that the full idea I was trying to get out will get born, eventually.

Or it won’t.

That’s the beauty of The Space Between The Words. Even when writing, it is there.

And, to a certain extent, it has changed me. I’m no longer afraid to stop, to pause, and to collect. In one sense, that vast galaxy of creation that I feel I’ve tapped into is something much greater than I will ever be, especially if I keep losing weight.

I wonder what other planet worms exist on . . . otherwise why do we call them Earth worms?

In a religious sense, it feels like I’ve come into a brief (and unworthy!) contact with Logos – a deep universal well that I can only see dimly. Not Legos®, but Logos. Legos™ just hurt your foot when you walk down the hall in the dark.

In my experience, The Space Between The Words contains wisdom. The Space Between the Words contains creation. The Space Between The Words contains . . . redemption.

Listen for it – I assure you there is no silence there between the words. There is no self-doubt. It is calm. It is patient. It is Good. And, for me, it has certainly been worth keeping that Post-It® note around.

Warning: next week we’ll take a darker turn, probably all week, if not longer. I’ll still try to be the “Mary Poppins of Doom” and interject humor and a smile where I can, but realize – there are many twists and turns ahead, and probabilities leading to a dark future are rapidly coalescing.