“Dolores, I have five days to complete this picture. Don’t get goofy on me.” – Ed Wood
Sometimes, a picture is worth 1,000 words, so, here are 33,000 words. All memes in this post are free-range, and as found on the Internet.
Cathedrals, Buzz Aldrin, And Changing The World
“You know, most people think that the name Buzz Aldrin has some huge meaning behind it. Nope, he was afraid of bees.” – Frasier
What’s the difference between Joe Biden and Buzz Aldrin? Buzz Aldrin walked on the Moon. Joe Biden likes kids to rub his leg hair.
I think back to the builders of the European cathedrals. The construction of Notre Dame was started in 1163 A.D., not long after the Norman Conquest of England. Notre Dame was finished in 1345 A.D.
182 years. I might not even live that long, and I take vitamins and eat only a diet of meat that I hunt half-naked while armed only with stone-tipped spears. The people in Wal-Mart® have gotten a bit tired of the spears, but it doesn’t technically violate their weapons policy. And I use a Visa™ to pay, though they make a “eeeew” face when I pull it from my fur loincloth on a sweaty summer day.
Think about that. NO! Not my sweaty fur loincloth, the cathedral. Think about the motivation that it requires to get up every morning when the thing you’re trying to accomplish won’t be done in your lifetime. Or the lifetime of your child. Or the lifetime of their children.
That requires motivation. Also, I have no idea what they used for alarm clocks, and their humor-blogging infrastructure appeared to be singing marginally naughty songs about the local barmaid and complaining about how French they were and how they hoped the Germans would never invent panzers.
The Hunchback of Notre Dame sure had a twisted back story.
Motivation, though, remains key in everything you do in life, even if you’re not building a cathedral. One motivational mistake is to aim too high. When someone aims too high, they run the risk of being disappointed by results.
As I’ve discussed with one of my friends, he noted that research shows the most happy people in the Olympics®, overall, are the bronze medal winners. Third place isn’t so bad. Since I heard that the intelligence of dolphins was second only to man, that means Leftists should be happy, being in third place and all.
For the bronze medal winners, well, here they are on the world stage. They did really well. Were they close to winning it all? Sure, close enough to get a bronze medal. But, there’s the guy over there with the silver medal, so, he and another guy were better.
Most bronze medal winners can be happy that if they’d been just a little bit better, they’d have been in . . . second place. If they’d worked a lot harder, they’d have still been only one place better. So, third isn’t so bad. They might even get the Junior High Marching Band to lead a parade when they get home.
The silver medal winner, though, will always have it eating on him: what if he hadn’t skipped practice that week? What if he had pushed a little harder in the weight room? The silver medalist is plagued with a bushel basket of “what if’s” that will wake him up in the middle of the night. Second place is tantalizing. It is the story of near success, like England’s soccer team.
Helen Keller never saw a movie about pirates. Because she’s dead.
The gold medalist? It depends. In many cases, Olympic™ level athletes work for two decades to get the skill and experience to win Olympic® gold, to be, literally, the best in the world at something that no one will pay them to do.
Sure winning’s great, right? But what happens when the dog finally catches the car? What then?
Let’s move sideways a bit more, and return to one of my favorite people in history: Buzz Aldrin. It will all make sense in the end. I’m a trained professional.
Buzz was a guy who did a lot of things that were world-class. He went to the USMA at West Point. He was a fighter pilot who shot down commies in Korea, but still didn’t get to kill as many commies as Mao or Stalin did. He got a doctorate from MIT on rocket navigation.
And one other thing. What was it?
Oh, yeah. He was the second man on the frigging Moon.
That’s really cool. But there appears to be a downside to that. It wasn’t a just something small and fleeting like an Olympic® gold medal, it was one of the ultimate gold medals in all of human history.
Ever.
How do you follow that up? Get a Denny’s® Franchisee Award for cleanest bathroom in Des Moines?
I hear Santa’s bathroom is clean because he uses Comet.
Neil Armstrong figured out how to follow it up. That man was always kind of spooky and Zen and perhaps was okay owning a Denny’s© in Des Moines, selling Moons over My Hammies™ and Rootie Tootie Fresh and Fruity® pancakes.
Buzz didn’t figure it out, probably because his work in physics and killing commies did not prepare him to make a decent pancake. Imagine: Buzz was 39 and there was literally no way his life hadn’t peaked. Nothing, and I mean nothing he could ever do again would match up to what he did.
First a week passes. Then a month passes. Then a year passes. The hollow feeling inside of Buzz grew. How do you move forward? How do you top yourself? I mean, you could make a really great pancake, but it would have to be the best pancake in the history of pancakes. Dang. That still doesn’t beat being on the frigging Moon.
He was stumped. He had fame. He had the ability to get whatever money he wanted, more or less.
But he had peaked.
What to do?
Buzz crawled into a bottle. Eventually, after leaving the Air Force, Buzz even spent time selling used cars. Sure, that worked for Kurt Russell in the 1980 film, but Buzz was awful at it.
What’s the difference between a used car salesman and a COVID-Jab advocate? The used car salesman knows when he’s lying.
As near as I can tell, Mr. Aldrin finally pulled himself out of his funk. He finally decided his place was being an advocate for manned spaceflight, specifically to Mars. He even helped to create a transfer orbit to make a trip to Mars the most time-effective that he could envision. You could say that Buzz figured out the gravity of the situation.
That more than anything, I think, helped him. Buzz found something that was so big, so important, that he knew he wasn’t going to be able to do it in his lifetime.
Mars. A worthy goal for mankind. A goal that is meant for brave dreamers, for people who might want to change humanity. He had found his cathedral.
Again. Buzz had already done it once.
Mr. Aldrin is an unusual case – one of the highest achievers in a generation of high achievers. Many mornings I’m just glad that the alarm managed to wake me up. But I’ve had my share of success in the business world, reaching as high as I ever really wanted to go, doing the one job I wanted to do.
When Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Mike Collins went to meet President Nixon after the Moon mission, Mike had to spend the entire time driving around the White House.
Where Buzz aimed high, perhaps I didn’t aim as high, but I still got there.
Then what?
My writing is a part of that. Where do you go when you have whatever you want?
You find something important, and you start building. You start building something more important than you. I think Neil Armstrong found that when he started teaching. Perhaps he got his satisfaction from helping the next generation learn.
I can’t be sure. Neil didn’t really say. He seemed happy that the attention had passed. My Apollo-gies if I got that wrong. And this isn’t about him, anyway.
The lesson I learned from Buzz was a simple one: have a goal.
Find a cathedral to build. Find something so much bigger than yourself that you’re willing to build it even though no one alive on Earth will ever see it through. Make it something that you can care about. Make it big enough that, at best, you can help build only part of it.
If you can find your cathedral, you will have the rarest of gifts: you will shape the future.
Remember, not all cathedrals are made with stones, and the best ones are built in the minds of men.
Why?
Because rent is cheaper there.
Critical Race Theory: Another Communist Game
“Jack has got to find the Override before the rest of these reactors go critical! – 24
My math teacher used a lot of graph paper. I think she was plotting something.
The education of children has to be the imperative of a culture. Why? That education forms their perspective on the past. That perspective gives a view of what works, and what doesn’t work. It also must account for the stories of virtue and villainy.
Who are the bad guys of the culture? Who are the good guys from the culture? To a student, it matters. The myth of George Washington was important – here was a man who voluntarily let go of power – twice. And we all know why George’s dad didn’t punish him for chopping down the cherry tree: George had an ax.
This education comes from more than the schools. It also comes in the form of the messages that our children receive as they grow up. It’s embedded in the cartoons they watch. It’s in the television and videos they watch. Why do people say there is no American culture? They’re soaking in it.
A primary objective of every tyranny that has ever existed is to indoctrinate the youth. Back before television and radio, it took a lot of local effort. Unless the Church was on your side, it probably would be difficult to keep the message tight. Marxists fought this by eliminating the Church.
Ever hear of the ghost that got arrested for possession?
As a young Wilder, the culture I was exposed to was one of what I’d call “standard postwar liberalism.” No, Pa and Ma Wilder weren’t Leftists, at all. But between 1950 and 1990 or so, most people were liberal in one sense or another. I had to interview Pa Wilder for a school project, and asked his thoughts about marijuana legalization:
“Well, it’s awfully hard to criticize someone smoking marijuana with a bourbon in my hand.”
See, liberal, though I’d bet a month’s pay that Pa Wilder was never in the same room with a joint in his life. But since that was a school project when I was in fifth grade, maybe that was part of my indoctrination, as well. Hmmm.
I think Ma and Pa voted for Reagan, twice, but their philosophy was more of a conservative blend of libertarianism, which I think fit their time and place. In reality, there wasn’t much difference between George H.W. Bush and Mike Dukakis. Both were liberals, H.W. was just a liberal who had worked for the C.I.A.
I hope that Idaho never legalizes pot. Think of all the baked potatoes.
Culture in that time and place was dominated by television. And not only was it dominated by television, it was dominated by three networks: ABC®, NBC™, and CBS©. When it came to culture, they were all on the same page, the liberal one. They even canceled the sitcom about Abe Lincoln – it was shot before a live studio audience.
That liberal culture that they put out on the airwaves, minute after minute, was the single most inclusive culture in the history of mankind. The networks indoctrinated an entire generation of white kids into the least prejudiced generation of any people in the history of mankind.
Really.
That was my generation. The indoctrination was so very deep that when we heard someone make a disparaging remark about another, we’d physically wince. This indoctrination turned it from a rational thought to a matter of faith.
That was the key. We were on board. We really did believe in a country that was based in a sense of civic nationalism as the highest value. To be fair, it’s a beautiful story, and if it were left at that, maybe, just maybe it might have worked. Even though I’ve always been on the Right, I was on board.
When the UK left the EU they freed up 1 GB.
However, down in another level of indoctrination that was played out in communities different than mine, the message was likewise a different one: the United States is inherently evil, racist, and (that community) were nothing more than victims.
What? Who was spreading that message?
The Academy. The Academy is the network of colleges and schools. High school isn’t the end of indoctrination, college is the next step.
For example: one kid that I went to high school with normally dressed like a serious nerd. Button-up collared shirts and slacks. The rest of us were in t-shirts and jeans, mostly.
I saw him at Christmas after we’d both been at college for the first semester. He was wearing torn jeans, a green trench coat, a beret, and John Lennon sunglasses. I think he got better.
That was after six months. Yes, he went to a really, really Leftist school. But his personality changed entirely after that. A major source of indoctrination into Leftist dogma is at the colleges: why do you think they invented degrees that have “studies” in the title? I mean, it’s not (only) to get people that are unequipped to take real courses into spending $150,000 for a degree that will earn them a $23,000 a year job they could have had straight out of high school.
And the colleges indoctrinate the next professors. Those professors in turn then indoctrinate the next school teacher, and the next youth pastor and the next youth baseball coach.
Hey, it’s all up on the Gonzaga® website. Looks like the Academy takes care of its own.
For decades, the Academy has been teaching Critical Theory at schools. Critical Theory is Marxist, and not the good Groucho kind. The reason that Critical Theory was developed was because people in the United States in the 1920s weren’t (and aren’t) class conscious. Commies tried to use the rich and poor divide to create revolution in the United States, and found something unusual:
Not only wasn’t the United States class conscious, many of the people that they could get to join labor unions were anti-communist. That perplexed the Leftists, until they realized that most Americans thought that they could become rich. The fixed idea of class that worked so well in Russia and China failed miserably in the United States.
What to do? In this case, develop Critical Theory. They did this because a certain former corporal kicked all of the commies out of a certain country, so instead of heading to Russia, they decided to infect the United States. They called themselves the Frankfurt School. DuckDuckGo® them if you’re bored. You won’t be disappointed.
Critical Theory tries to use an assessment of history, society, and culture to challenge power structures as well as culture. They use a tremendous number of nonsense academic-speak words in what they’re saying because it’s not really academics, it’s a cult.
Really, though, the goal was to find something, anything, to drive a wedge between the American people. And, after trying and failing, the Frankfurt School found that wedge.
Race.
I got pulled over the other day for just trying to keep up with traffic. The state patrolman said the road was clear. “Yes, officer, that’s how far behind I am.”
Race has been the single most divisive topic in the United States, and the Academy is doing everything possible to pour pee in the PEZ® bowl of America. Why? The Soviets, who the Leftists that make up the Academy love, went bankrupt.
Next? The Chinese embraced state-run capitalism combined with a Chinese nationalism that makes true Leftists cringe. What to do?
Ahhh, yes, create enough racial tension to pull everything down. Here, at last, they can finally create a true equality!
Critical Race Theory is one of the latest salvos intended to completely reconfigure the United States, if not the world. Note that it’s just “Critical Theory” with Race tucked smartly in the middle. It is nothing more than the early versions of this Marxist attack on Western Civilization in general, and the United States in particular, but using their most effective wedge: race.
I’d say (if I were to guess) the best race relations ever seen in the history of the world were somewhere between 1990 and 2008 in the United States. Barack Obama wasn’t elected as a racial wedge, but that’s exactly how he played his cards. He had the unique opportunity to heal, but instead chose to rip the Band-Aid® off and then rub Madonna’s underwear on the healing wound.
Or more time with an iron.
Every place (and I mean every place) that I’ve worked where things went well, there wasn’t a sense of entitlement. People worked hard, heck, sometimes competed to work harder. It wasn’t about the money, it was about doing good work. But one person can show up in a workplace and destroy that cohesion.
All they have to do is convince a few people that they’re being taken advantage of. That people in another company have it better. That they have a new enemy, the Man. That’s what Critical Theory, and in this case, Critical Race Theory is all about. Creating division.
It’s cloaked, like every Leftist lie is. Leftists who write, teach, and indoctrinate using this nonsense are exactly the type of people who use phrases like, “My truth.” They say that they’re doing nothing more than “telling the truth” which explains why they don’t want lessons or homework discussed with parents.
It’s about creating division.
What do you think reparations are? A fight for division. Understand, if reparations were set at $30,000 or $300,000 or $3,000,000 per person, the answer would be, “It’s not enough.”
It will never be enough because the goal isn’t goodwill toward men, it is division.
I guess women who vote for the Right are okay. I always liked Republic-hens. (not my meme)
In my generation, the indoctrination was all some version of, “hey, we can all get along,” and if the goal was to get along they had gone very far. But that was never the goal. Division is first.
Then, destruction. Followed by? Suppression that would make Stalin jealous. Then, they think, Power.
The Leftists must think they have won. Critical Race Theory is the equivalent of surrounding the embassy in Saigon. If we don’t push back, who will be left to educate?
And if we don’t push back, will there be room on that last chopper out?
The Greatest Game
“A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts.” – Red Dawn
I have a friend who has a trophy wife. It wasn’t first place.
I once had a position with a certain paramilitary organization aimed at youth who identified as were boys. I have always raised my own children by a simple rule: if they thought they were old enough to try something, they probably were. A related rule was: if I thought they were old enough, I’d make them try something. Especially if it made my life easier.
Five-year-olds can do drywall. I mean, through the tears, that is.
Obviously, this got mixed results. The judgment of a ten-year-old is not as good as that of even a boy two years older. When I asked Pugsley to warm up the car one winter evening when he was 10 or so, while sitting in the front seat he did a neutral drop at high RPM. Right into the house.
Live and learn. Weirdly, we managed to put the wall back into place (mostly) with a mallet. Was I irritated he ran a car into our house? Certainly. But, independence has costs.
Learning is never free.
I promise to stop using police-related puns. I’ll give them arrest.
When I later became a paramilitary organization leader to other boys in addition to mine, I found something interesting: most parents hadn’t taught the boys even rudimentary life skills or woodcraft. Lessons I had learned just tromping around Wilder Mountain seemed like magic to them. It made sense. We don’t really live in a world that values those skills.
In my first campout with the boys, one of the skills we focused on was simple: building a fire. To my amazement, half of the boys hadn’t done that, ever. One of the oldest boys on the campout was around sixteen. He worked on his fire for over an hour. In that hour, he learned a lot of ways to not start a fire. Finally, he got it going.
Me: “Okay, good job! You can put it out now.”
He didn’t. It was the first fire he’d ever made, and he stoked and babied that fire like it was the first one that mankind had ever mastered. And, for him, that was true. He kept that fire going for hours.
There was a fire at Goodwill® today. No injuries, just some secondhand smoke exposure.
I learned as much from the boys as they learned from me. In this moment I learned a real, hard fact of life. When that boy made his first fire, he didn’t need a badge. He didn’t need a medal. What did he need?
Nothing. He had struggled for an hour to make that fire. His reward wasn’t anything outside of him. His reward was the skill. In a sense, that real, physical fire had started a metaphorical fire in him.
Give that a thought. Soccer leagues give children participation trophies so their feelings aren’t hurt. I’m not sure anyone understands the damage done by those hunks of gilt plastic. The trophies are cheap, but the sense of entitlement created by them lasts a lifetime.
When a man makes a fire, or wins a judo match, or does something that is his and his alone, the medal isn’t the accomplishment, the medal is the acknowledgment.
A child who grows up in Montana who can ride a horse, skin an elk, and shoot a rifle straight and true doesn’t need a medal. They don’t need outside affirmation. They are who they are.
Arnold was a great gardener. They called him the Germinator.
That’s the rule of the Greatest Game. Struggle. Learn. Master. Repeat.
Missing? A trophy. Why is it missing? It’s simply not necessary.
We live in a culture where people don’t have to struggle. I imagine the only meal missed in recent memory by readers here is one they chose to miss. Food in this day may be more expensive than it was last year, but it’s still everywhere. The calories to feed a person are plentiful.
So why are video games popular?
They’re popular because we’re wired to Struggle, Learn, Master, and Repeat. Deep down inside, though, we know it’s only a pale shadow of the Greatest Game.
Technology has improved so much that it has interfered with the programming that is at the core of what it means to be human. To be the best that we can be, the struggle has to be worth our time. The game has to be worth playing.
No matter how bad you think you are, Moses was worse. He broke all of the Commandments at once.
I think that a lot of the dysfunction in our society stems to that – people who would have mattered to their tribe back in 200 B.C. or 1,000 A.D. are simply playing their parts in big machines. Our technology has changed our culture. Our culture has changed our roles in society.
These changed roles weren’t made with men in mind, they emerged from the technology. Even 140 years ago, the typical farmer and his family often had to fabricate many if not most of the things that he depended on. That led to independence.
The farmer was free in a way that people chained to an international financial system and a technological corporate machine aren’t. He was free to succeed, or free to fail.
What mattered was how he played the Greatest Game.
We’re still here. We can play the Greatest Game, because, surprisingly, it’s still out there. Each day we have the chance: Struggle, Learn, Master and Repeat.
Me? I’m still learning to make a fire or two.
Investing The Oligarch Way
“Even for billionaire playboys, three o’clock is pushing it. The price of leading a double life, I fear.” – Batman Begins
I tried to find a good joke about carpentry, but nothing wood work.
Most of my life I’ve lived in places that were sparsely populated. On Wilder Mountain during the school year, the nearest kid between the ages of 5 and 16 was about 8 miles away. Ma Wilder would tie a pork chop around my neck so the dog would play with me.
I kid. The solitude was nice. I hiked by myself. Some people “summered” there, meaning they had enough money to turn a season into a verb. That was nice because that meant the same kid would show up year after year and we would go fishing or biking.
Right now, I have probably a hundred neighbors within a two-mile drive.
By many standards, that’s sparse, too. For me, it’s just on the edge of “crowded” but since my daily commute consists of one stoplight that’s generally green, I can make it work.
You want scary? North Korea has a missile that can hit New York City. If it can make it there, it can make it anywhere.
The trend, though, isn’t small towns like Modern Mayberry. The trend is amazingly large and increasingly dehumanized cities. I was watching the zombie movie set in South Korea, Last Train to Busan, with Pugsley last year. It was really Seoul-crushing. I decided to use the Internet to find pictures of what South Korea looks like when zombies aren’t chasing mass transit.
I was shocked by the density. It turns out that South Korea has an average population density of 1,326 people per square mile, which is even more zombies per square mile than that German zombie movie, Shambler’s List.
Sure, you say, South Korea is only half of the population density of the city of Houston. But that’s the urban part, and not including the ‘burbs. The country of South Korea is, on average, nearly twice as dense as heavily populated suburbs. On average. That includes forests and rice paddies and zombie storage lots, er, cemeteries.
Despite the obvious inferiority for personal defense when the Moderna©-Pfizer™ Vaxombies inevitably show up (That means it’s working), cities continue to draw people to them. The biggest reason, I suppose, is jobs.
Ever think that the evil aliens from They Live were a lot nicer than the human leaders we have today?
Having never grown up in that density, when I lived in a Houston ‘burb that had a population density of around 800 people per square mile. I always felt lost and anonymous in that number of people. With the flow of traffic, a five-mile jaunt to the supermarket could take 15 minutes or more.
Why did I do it? My job.
Before writing this, I wasn’t sure how long this could go on. A quick DuckDuckGo® search quickly told me the answer – Houston. Certainly farther than Houston density: one slum in Mumbai has a population density of 720,000 to 870,000 people per square mile depending on the source you choose to believe. That’s a square (roughly) of six feet by six feet for each person, which includes streets.
36,300 people would be mashed into my five-acre lot. I hope the ones that get assigned a space in the lake can tread water. At heart, I’d prefer an Italian slum to an Indian one – I think I’d do okay in a spaghetto.
In other news, I now count as a family of three.
I’m pretty sure that mankind wasn’t designed in any way to live in conditions like that. One article (which attempted to make the slum sound a lot less like a war crime) still mentioned the smell. I guess in India none of the houses had base-mints.
Again, a slum in India isn’t a how-to manual for human habitation on Earth, but that’s a major trend in the United States today. When I joke that they want you to live in the pod and eat the bugs, keep in mind that’s more than a joke to the powers that be.
See, I’m not kidding.
The solution, of course, is to own actual land. Bill Gates and the other members of the Oligarch Class certainly have figured that out as well. Bill recently bought 242,000 acres – enough to hold nearly 1.8 billion people by Mumbai-slum levels of packing ‘em in.
Although Mr. Gates is recently become exposed as über-creepy, no one accuses him of being stupid, except for the time when Melinda Gates told him, “Bill, this marriage isn’t working.” Bill responded, “Well, let’s get divorced, remarry, and see if that doesn’t clear up the problems.”
The land rush is on. Generally, these booms are followed by busts. But when one of the things that is likely going to go bust is the currency itself, well, a small fluctuation in land prices doesn’t seem to matter much. It must be a good deal, too. Nearly half the land in Scotland is owned by just 432 people. That might be why people are unhappy there – I hear even their flag is cross.
They want you to have a Land Rover® and a landlord.
Over time, the Oligarch Class has managed to create a pretty good way to hang on to wealth for generation after generation: massive tracts of land, art, and precious things. The Oligarch Class isn’t stupid – they keep the land and art in trusts so it moves from generation to generation seamlessly. They never own it, but they control it. I imagine that it would be even to imagine some of the assets tied up in trusts by the Oligarch Class.
Art? If you have art in your family for 100 years, well, it’s bound to be worth something. If you have it, you can sell a Picasso when revenues are down, and buy a Monet or a Manet when revenues are up. And jewels and gold are great ways to move lots of assets in a small package.
The nice thing about being in the Oligarch Class means that no one ever gets to tell you to live in the pod and eat the bugs. Heck, they’ve already got every need covered. I thought about trying to set up a charity for the Oligarch class after the last land bust, but then I realized they already had one: the United States Treasury.
Is it possible to generate this type of wealth? Sure, some people have done it. It’s not easy, and something tells me that behind most amazingly large fortunes are amazingly large crimes. But after a few centuries? Most people just forget about the crimes as you marry your kids off with other members of the Oligarch Class after they meet at Harvard™.
Getting in with the Oligarch Class is tough – entry level isn’t measured just in billions, it’s also measured in years. Newly minted guys with just a billion or so need not apply. They have to have standards to keep the little people out.
I’m not a hermit, at least I’ve never heard anyone call me that.
For now, at least, I live in a part of the country where I have instant and unfettered access to hundreds of acres of land to hunt on, shoot on, or just visit. It may not be Wilder Mountain, but it’s much closer to that than Houston was for us.
Now, did I leave that Picasso in my other chalet?
Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: F-15 And Nukes Edition
“Computer, this is Captain James Kirk of the USS Enterprise. Begin 30-second countdown. Code zero-zero-zero-destruct-zero.” – Star Trek
When you kill the last Dracula clone? That’s the final Count down.
- 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.
June had (again) increased levels of violence over the norm, but it was down from last June when the George Floyd riots began the active operational phase of the Leftist Coup. Again, none of the violence that I could see originated from the Right. None.
I’m holding June at 9 out of 10. That’s still two minutes to midnight. Last month I repeated that “ July or August could take us to a 10” and the reason is becoming clear as hot weather and economic woes are showing up on the street.
I currently put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) hanging in at around 900 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.
As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful. Things could change at any minute. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.
In this issue: Front Matter – Extremist Content – Violence And Censorship Update –– Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Demonizing America – 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 500 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.
Extremist Content
It’s been a while since the person sworn in as President of the United States threatened his own people with violence. Here’s what Mr. Biden said recently:
“Those who say the blood of patriots, you know, and all the stuff about how we’re gonna have to move against the government, if you think you need to have weapons to take on the government, you need F-15s and maybe some nuclear weapons.”
I wrote about that here (The Wilder Response To Mr. Biden), but more on that later.
After some research, this isn’t the first time that Mr. Biden has said something similar, though last time he described committing mass murder of Americans using American troops he avoided mentioning nuclear weapons. He just stuck to Hellfire® missiles. I guess those are more humane, though I heard if I throw my shoes into hellfire, I could watch the soles burn.
I guess this might work. I hear Pakistan uses Sikh-heating missiles.
To be clear, if any of the people writing on the Right had mentioned using weapons of mass destruction against either the Left or FedGov I imagine they would have gotten a meeting with the FBI in a small hot room in a distant state and the chance to see if Ted Kaczynski has written anything recently.
Thanks, I’m John Wilder, and welcome to my Ted Talk®.
But Mr. Biden does it, it just makes the headlines for the afternoon. This is not only the single most extreme thing that any sitting president has ever said, at least in my recollection. The scary thing is the lack of reaction from the news media. Had Trump mentioned one-way helicopter flights for Antifa®?
Imagine the collective panties in a bunch.
I ain’t got time to bleed.
Extremism, though, is the problem. The Left has become unhinged in its quest to take over every element of life in the United States. About the only thing left are 100,000,000 or so people who reject Leftism. And all of those people have guns. So many guns. And they don’t want to sell them to the government – they couldn’t imagine selling them to organized crime.
I guess that makes us the extremists?
Violence And Censorship Update
The beatings and low-level constant riots in cities across the country continues. The level of violence we face today would have been considered off the scale in 2000. But today? They are what we call “another Saturday night in Portland.” How is everyone enjoying the new normal?
You want a civil war? This is how you get a civil war.
Censorship is the main story in the Violence and Censorship Update. The first story starts with:
Me.
Of the 1,569 some-odd days that this blog has been operational, it has gone down twice. The first was because of (as near as I can tell) a botched update of the WordPress® version software. It was down for just a few hours on a Saturday. The post that was up wasn’t anything more or less controversial than usual. It probably involved PEZ©.
Last week, however, I experienced an . . . unusual outage. It was while this post (The Wilder Response To Mr. Biden) was up and running. The entire site shut down just as one of the widest audiences that I’ve ever had was coming by to read that story. After hours of wrangling and two botched solutions, the blog was back up and running.
Who was it? I have a good friend who knows about such things, and he thought that it didn’t smell right. Rather than a big government conspiracy, it was, he thought, more likely to be an amateur who didn’t like the message. To be sure, the wheels of government are so large and we are all so tiny that any of us (any, up to and including Gates and Bezos) could be crushed by it and it wouldn’t even slow its spin.
So, a message? A coincidence? As people tell me, there are no coincidences. Regardless, I write.
But if you’re on Facebook®, please note that the following is no coincidence:
I’d love to meet Zuckerberg. He’s someone really is interested in my hobbies, political interests, job, spending habits, history, and friends.
Yup. Facebook™ is now actively checking the people you interact with, and warning you if they Facebook© doesn’t like their opinion. It is even offering you expert help.
Hurray! That’s just what I need, support from a global corporation on what to think about the unapproved media I consume. Thanks, guys!
I haven’t been on Facebook® in, well, a very long time. But if you’re one of the people still going there, be happy that they’ll tell you what to think.
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:
Up is more violent, and violence is down again in June. Is it really down, or are we just used to seeing it?
Political Instability:
Up is more unstable. Instability increased this month, as expected. As I predicted last month, instability is down right now. Unless there’s a crisis, I expect political instability to remain low until at least September.
Economic:
Inflation is finally beginning to hit this measure. Right now we’re in a trap: take measures to stop inflation, and you tank the economy. Take measures to keep the economy going, you increase inflation. Sounds like my first marriage.
Illegal Aliens:
This data is at record levels for every year I have data for. I think it’s plateaued because the bus won’t take any more people over. I guess Congress will authorize more money for busses? Or maybe, just maybe, the Border Patrol is just letting them go on by because they know that their actions won’t change a thing?
Demonizing America
There is a complete effort by the Left to demonize traditional American values. It starts with the flag:
If your basic idea of loving a country New York Times is to hate everything about it, you might want to rethink what loving a country means.
This particular article is by Sarah Maslin Nir. “Ms.” Nir, who from her online photos appears to be transgender, is the writer. “She” has had several other pieces of “journalism” published, where “she” has displayed a continual hate for the United States.
Sarah Maslin Nir comes into the bar. The bartender says, “Why the long face?”
It’s okay if “Ms.” Nir wants to use her journalistic platform to go after the traditional values of the United States every single time she writes. It has also become clear that the New York Times® will go after traditional values whenever they can. The stories that the newspapers publish aren’t things that happen by mistake like my conception, they’re a choice like Jeff Epstein’s death.
And that choice is to demonize everything about the United States. Another example? Shockingly, it’s from the New York Times™. Again. It seems like they’re always behind this. At what point can you declare a newspaper an enemy combatant?
To destroy a people without bloodshed, the first thing someone must do is destroy their connection to their past. To vilify that which was good. They even tried to vilify fireworks by pointing out the people with PTSD might be triggered. As if they didn’t know July 4 was coming?
When would you do this?
On the most favored holiday of what you want to destroy. For Americans, that would be July 4. To win a civil war without fighting, you’d demoralize a people so they had no will to fight back.
You’ll never convince a patriot that the Constitution was a bad idea. Sure, some of them think the bill of rights didn’t go far enough. But most people raised with traditional American values won’t be convinced by the 1619 Project© or any of the drivel I’ve posted above.
So why do they do it?
Remember, for Leftists, Orwell is a “How To” and not a cautionary tale.
To create division. To widen the gap. To demoralize. To destroy the people that made the United States great.
So, for a Leftist? Tuesday.
LINKS
As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!
Fed Clowns To The Left Of Me…
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-us-never-been-as-divided-since-civil-war
https://slate.com/culture/2021/06/civil-war-documentary-peacock-juneteenth-history.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJoU520xQnU
Joker States To The Right…
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2021-06-24/us-civil-war-now-table-new-alliances-form
https://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics-government/article252170028.html
Here I Am, Stuck In The Middle With You
https://thehill.com/homenews/media/560681-trump-supporter-warns-cnn-reporter-of-civil-war-if-former-president-not
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/april-may-june-2021/americas-next-insurgency/
https://newrepublic.com/article/162637/third-reconstruction-second-civil-war
https://thebulwark.com/the-civil-war-they-seek/
Law And Order Breakdown, Orange Cards Bad Edition: GOOJF (Get Out Of Jail Free)
NYC: https://nypost.com/2021/06/20/hundreds-of-nyc-rioters-looters-have-charges-dropped/
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/beware-of-george-soros-trojan-horse-prosecutors/
https://ammo.com/articles/george-soros
Temps Rising In The Ongoing Cold ACLU Dem GOP Race War…
https://nypost.com/2021/06/08/get-ready-for-a-full-scale-democrat-civil-war/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jun/07/idaho-republicans-far-right-mask-mandates
https://spectatorworld.com/topic/identity-crisis-politics-race-wreck-america-charles-murray/
And Boiling Over on the Streets: Welcome To The Party, Pal…
https://twitter.com/pix11news/status/1405928349311057922?lang=en
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaucPPrYZJQ
https://twitter.com/lourdesubieta/status/1406738672909684736?lang=en
https://www.instagram.com/p/CQg7Vt6AVIy/
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-grim-trade-off-of-blm-29d
Parting Shots…
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/north-korean-defector-us-similarities-insane/
https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-systemic-risk-no-one-sees.html
https://thebulwark.com/thucydides-on-partisanship-insurrection-and-the-risks-of-civil-war/
https://www.amazon.com/New-Civil-War-Exposing-Restoring/dp/1645438406
Special July 4th Podcast
Okay, it’s probably getting to you on July 5th, but I was in a burger and fireworks coma until now. It’s pretty short, clocking in at around 7 minutes.
The Blog will return with the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report which will show up at 7:30 AM Eastern on the page and, as usual, sent out to subscribers.
I had promised that I’d post a link when The Boy got Bombs and Bants up on other formats, and here it is (Bombs And Bants) for Bitchute, Apple podcasts, and Odysee.
Life: We Spend It Every Second
“This is your life, and it’s ending one minute at a time.†– Fight Club
In life, don’t burn your bridges. They’re all made of steel and concrete now.
I was talking with an acquaintance the other day, and asked him what exactly it was that he wanted out of life. I know that sounds weird. But I like to understand people, so I ask them weird questions. The really odd part of that is if you ask someone a question (especially an odd one), most of the time they won’t lie.
I have no idea why. It’s the same reason that when you ask Joe Biden a question he says, “Umm, er, ahhh, blonde leg hairs, wanna touch ‘em?â€Â See, not all politicians lie. Just the ones who don’t have dementia.
Back to my acquaintance. “What do you want out of life?â€Â He paused. It was a longer pause, so I was expecting something profound.
“You know, I think I’m looking forward to being old enough to retire.â€
This particular gentleman is in his thirties, and plans to retire at 65.
Rowan Atkinson is now a has-Bean.
First, retirement at 65 might be a dream for most people in their thirties today. I have no idea what the future economy will look like. It may involve Bitcoin® and jetpacks, or it might involve cannibalism and burning old VHS tapes of Who’s The Boss? so Tony Danza can keep us all warm with family-friendly humor and the thermal energy from burning plastic. In 2021 I’m betting on Tony Danza.
Second, I can recall being in my thirties pretty well. The one thing I certainly wasn’t thinking about was retirement. I was thinking of ways to have fun, and ways to contribute to humanity. Heck, back then I thought I might even start writing at some point in my life to both contribute and have fun.
At some point.
Here, among people I know, is an example of a person who is actively sleepwalking his way to being 65. My acquaintance is wishing his life away. Now, I have a lot of faults and have done things that would have made the Portrait of Dorian Gray melt like the reactor at Chernobyl, but wishing my life away isn’t one of those sins. (I do apologize for green chili flavored-PEZ™, which was sort-of my fault.)
Yes, there have been times that I couldn’t wait for something to finish, especially when it was the end of a seemingly endless stream of 84 hour work weeks. Yeah, I was glad when that was over. But I’m also glad I did it. Nothing tells you what you can do until you’ve done more that you thought you ever could.
What’s Joe Biden’s favorite gum flavor? Retire-mint.
Ben Franklin said it best, in a quote that I’ve used multiple times: “Dost thou love life? Then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of.â€Â He was right. And Franklin was not known for wasting time, especially when it came to the ladies. The man was a beast on Tinderâ„¢. Here is his message to Mistress Fancy Pantaloons 1769:
“If thou desire many things, many things will seem but a few. A few compared to my most magnificent biceps and firmly corrugated abdominal musculature.â€
I have become convinced that a significant number of people in society have not only started squandering time, but are intentionally doing so. They are stuck shuffling their feet, mark time, until some future event when “things will be better.â€Â What future event?
There are many:
I was ready to go home after a few days on a sleepover, and called my Mom. “Mom, I’m ready to go home.â€Â Her response?
Ma Wilder just said, “John, you’re married.â€Â Yeah, my first marriage was pretty bad.
So, I object to wishing your life away. I mean, unless I’m at the dentist. I just want that stuff over with. But each and every moment of my life has one thing in common – it is a minute of my life that is forever lost.
Died in 1973:Â Still releasing books on a more regular pace than George R.R. Martin.
Certainly, there are minutes that I cherish more than others. But as I get older, I find that I have fewer minutes that I want to spend on bad movies. If I’m going to spend some time in someone else’s dream, it had better be a damn good dream, and not the ones I have when I’m sleeping about forgetting to wear my pants to the White House and finding that Joe liked that idea.
(shudder)
As I get older, I find that I certainly think differently than I did when I was just a kid. Fluid intelligence, that innovative creative rush that allows physicists to intuitively feel their way to ever more accurate and complex models of reality at both the subatomic and galactic levels seems to peak at around thirty. I still wonder why my “the Universe is actually a melty plate of cheesy spaghetti with meat sauce†theory never got the attention it deserved. I guess that the other physicists thought I was an impasta.
Thankfully, for older folks, there’s more than one dimension of intelligence. Crystallized intelligence, which consists of the increasing ability to connect ideas and increasing ability to communicate them seems to be dominant later in life. This may explain while an older professor might not be doing world-shaking innovation, but might still have much to add to science, and would almost always be a better teacher.
Regardless, whatever I end up doing, I know that for me to make the most of life I actually have to live it in the here and now. Sure, I have to reminisce about the past – that’s how I learn. And I have to plan for the future – that’s how I avoid criminal charges for tax evasion and fines for my grass being too long.
Communism is like tax fraud. Both seem great at first, but both end with government agents knocking at your door.
Dwelling in the past is a recipe to live with regret. Dwelling in the future is a way to live in the false opiate of the dream. To make the past worth the scars you earned and the future possible, you have to live and take action in the present.
Action.
Action is what men do.
If the action is worth taking? It requires courage. Courage, because failure is always a possibility. Courage, because a future worth taking action for isn’t an easy decision. And courage is required to stand up to the school bully, even though it’s been quite a few decades since I’ve beaten up a seventh-grader.
I’m not saying it didn’t feel good, but when I had my lawyer sue her? That was the best.
The good thing about the past is, at least, that it’s over. The bad thing is that if the scar tissue is too deep, it can cause me to hesitate. There are tons of different ways that things can go bad, and in my life, I’ve explored more than one of them. Heck, when I told The Mrs. she should embrace her mistakes, she hugged me.
There is hope, however. A friend of mine once told me when I was down: “John, if you had a line of troubles in front of you, half that you’d lived through, and have that you hadn’t you’d always pick the ones that you have already conquered.â€
Most problems (not all) that make me the most apprehensive are the problems I haven’t faced. Is that a lack of faith in me, or a fear of the unknown?
I’m not sure. And I’m not sure that it matters.
Why did PETA send cats to Mars? They heard about the Curiosity rover.
But I do know this: each and every day I have a choice whether to phone it in, or to give it everything I have. I won’t lie, there are days I phone it in. And there are days when I get in the car to come home and say, “Yeah, that was utterly worth it. Nobody could have done that better.â€
Those days normally run like a breeze – I walk in the door and can’t believe it’s time to walk out.
Sadly, by doing more and being more, subjectively, I’ll burn through my time much faster than my acquaintance. That’s okay. I’m living for something, not just passing the time.
And when I type these words, I’m doing everything. I’m living in the moment. I’m using my past. And I’m doing whatever little bit I can to help the future.
Don’t just exist. Mean something. Be significant.
They can’t stop the signal, Mal.
“They can’t stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal.” – Serenity
“The chair is against the wall. The chair is against the wall. John has a long mustache. John has a long mustache. It’s twelve o’clock, American. Another day closer to victory, and for all of you out there on or behind the line, this is your song.”
Wednesday is the day when I write about economics. Why Wednesday? Because it’s my blog.
I’m going to start with something that might seem unrelated. Hang on, this will make sense in a bit. I’m a trained professional, you’re in good hands. And my hands? They smell of elderberries. But not hamsters. I’m not into that.
On Monday, I was experiencing the highest traffic this august blog has ever gotten. People were coming here so fast I was worried that I wouldn’t have enough coffee cups and hand-tatted doilies. More people than live in Modern Mayberry were coming here every hour or so.
Thousands of people! Good Heavens!
In the middle of this, an extreme social faux pas. It was like my cat had impregnated an English princess.
Again.
My little missive discussing exactly what I thought of Mr. Biden’s idea that his F-15’s and nuclear weapons beat up on our modern sporting lawyers and BUFFs like me went dark. Gone. Epstein didn’t kill himself, and neither did my blog.
If you were surprised Epstein killed himself, imagine how surprised he was.
Boom. Gone. For hours, the entire blog went was as dead as Hillary’s woo-hoo has been since, oh, wait, there’s a limit on Epstein jokes.
To be clear: I don’t host this website on a computer built with chicken wire and parts from a 1996 Packard-Bell© tower I found in the recycling bin and some toner cartridges from a 2003 Hewlett-Packard™ laser printer and some used chest-hair grease.
Nope, I save that stuff for the heart-lung machine at the local hospital. This website is hosted professionally. I had a thought that it might get popular, so the hosting I got was the “So You Think You Might Be Drudge® Someday Sucker” package that guaranteed I’d be covered unless Bernie Sanders finally admitted he liked being a multi-millionaire.
The sum total of Internet bandwidth required to host this blog is tiny. You can stuff the entire blog – every word and every image ever – into 30 megabytes. Without compression. Skip the bikini posts, and you’d be under 20 megs.
But why would you skip the bikinis? No. I didn’t skip the bikinis. I used that to make them relevant for this post. See? John I. Wilder. Super genius.
Why don’t Leftists wear bikinis to the beach? I mean, I thought they had nothing to hide.
I digress. The post in question (Read it here) that was so popular had one image. One. That image is 59.5 kilobytes. Plus 1400 and some odd words. Call it 100 kB. I can’t even get decent resolution on one bikini top with that. C’mon. You want a decent resolution, right?
There is no way that the blog was stressing the server. There had been 25 days since the last software update. Everything was nice and stable for tens of thousands of views over the weekend.
But then, when it was really getting going, as the view streamed upward like Joe Biden after a transfusion of young human blood?
The entire blog was as gone as George Floyd’s criminal record.
George Floyd’s real record at boxing is 4-3. Sad we have to count his girlfriends.
When a visitor would come here, they got a message telling them that they should go somewhere else. Maybe a site that would give them yoga lessons. Or teach them how to hand-tat doilies.
As soon as I knew about it, I got to work. I had to go back to an earlier version of the software, and then rebuild twice to get the links to come back. It was about as dramatic as when Matthew Broderick told the computer not to start a nuclear war. I had several coffees in the middle, but the school principal decided not to suspend me.
Maybe it was just a sheer coincidence that the time when I wrote my most popular post ever, days after it was increasing in popularity exponentially that it disappeared.
Sure. That could happen. And Epstein killed himself.
It had been 1200 days, and only one outage, and that was a technical thingy on a not at all exciting weekend. I found out on Saturday morning and had it fixed in 20 minutes.
You do the math. Maybe it was a sign?
Just any old sign. This was actually the movie that led to The Mrs. and I being married. Who knew Steve Martin saved Western Civilization?
Okay, this is the part where we do the right turn and end up in Albuquerque. Hang with me. There are airbags if you start feeling queasy. Oh, I’m sorry, that’s not airbags. There are airbags if you hit someone else with your car while you’re driving it.
That’s what airbags are.
I mean, I don’t think airbags help anyone if you throw your car at them. But if someone makes you so mad you throw your car at them? They had it coming.
So, if you get queasy I can’t help you. And if you can throw your car at someone, I’m hiring.
Regardless, I promise it all will make sense in the end.
I’ve written quite a bit about the future. The majority of my career is in the past, until I become the undisputed Leader of Earth. I imagine that job will require at least some work after 5p.m. Probably not on weekends, though.
I’ll have people for that.
Although I like to mentally live in that world, sadly, I have to confront reality. Many of the posts I’ve written have talked about the virtuous aspects of economics. Work hard. Be honest. Give more than you’re asked for. Don’t cheat people.
Bet he never saw that coming.
Those are great pieces of advice, especially when you’re working in a place that’s built on merit. In reality, though, if you’re working in a family business, you’ll never rise farther than the owner’s worst son. Unless you marry the boss’s daughter.
Hey, it worked for Jared Kushner, right?
Regardless, there’s at least one aspect in the hundreds of posts I’ve been allowed to transmit into the ether that I’ve neglected mentioning until now:
If you work in a company that considers you a political heretic, your lifespan is limited.
I know that a common phrase on the Right is, “Get woke, go broke,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Once you reach a certain size, there appears to be no limit to the number of people that the company can hire that do nothing to serve a customer. There are legions of leeches that will just take complaints. There are platoons of parasites that just exist to make sure rules (that don’t help anyone) are enforced.
This won’t change the value of the corporation. At least not for years and years.
Look at Coca-Cola®. They actively trained employees in active hatred of a specific race, but, hey, look at the stock prices! They keep going up.
Look at Gillette™:
In 2019, when they actively tried to shame their target customers, men people who shave, their stock price was about $91. In 2021, it’s now up to $135.
To be clear, I haven’t bought a single Gillette® product since 2019, and as few Procter and Gamble© (Gillette’s© parent company) products as I can.
Gillette™ got woke. They’re not broke. And neither is Coke©.
(I’ll stop before this becomes a Dr. Seuss post about Jeff the Bezos who tried to use our product searches to seize us.)
Whatchutalkinaboutwillis?
Why isn’t Procter and Gamble™ broke? They make products that I had no idea that I was buying to support Woke until I looked them up while I was writing this post tonight.
Tide™.
Old Spice©.
Cascade®.
Admittedly I try not to wash my pants so the water doesn’t steal my masculine essence so we minimize Tide® use.
I think my three-day armpit smell is “pleasantly musky” which Old Spice © doesn’t like, and washing dishes is for cowards who don’t want to boost their immune system because of ptomaine.
Regardless, I have all that crap in my house right now. I’m guessing that I spend about $100 a year on Proctor and Gamble’s® crap.
So, Gillette™ won, I guess.
But if I were to give advice to my kids? Their money is not worth your soul.
If you looked at Google® in 2001, there wouldn’t have been a better place to work in the world. Their motto was simple: “Don’t be evil.” In 2021? Their motto is now, “leave no virtue standing.” I would say their motto was, “bayonet the corpses” but that’s likely to be the motto of the Right in the not too distant future.
Here’s a new one:
Don’t work at a company that demands your soul.
Sure, if you agree with what they’re doing, it works. If you like killing babies, by all means go work at Planned Murdermoms Parenthood©. If you like censorship curated free speech, by all means, go work at Twitter® or FaceBorg™. And if you believe that we’ve always been at war with Eastasia, Google© is your dream job.
I hear one Satanist’s soul weighed a pentagram.
And if you want to incite dweebs to incite violence, give them weapons, and then foil the crime? Well how could you beat the FBI? As long as we’re on government jobs, I hear the ATF is hiring . . .
In 2021, many companies (or gover1nmental agencies) demand your soul.
This is your choice. If you pretend, there are only two outcomes. They’ll end up firing you, or end up owning your soul.
Not a hard choice for me. If you were 22 today I’d tell you – avoid the Leftists. Avoid Leftist companies. Avoid Leftist jobs.
As for me?
Wilderwealthywise? I own the domain name. I have the backed up files. If they take me down?
I’m really down. But I don’t worry.
Someone will replace me. Next man up. And there are millions of us. One down, next up.
That’s why we’ll win.
“They can’t stop the signal, Mal. They can never stop the signal.”
Welcome To The Unravelling
“All we can do, Scully, is pull the thread. See what it unravels.” – The X-Files
I imagine the guy who decided to use Velcro™ on shoes said, “Why knot?”
Well, that struck a nerve.
I’m never sure when I hit “post” how what I’ve written will be taken. Some of the things I’ve written that I’ve felt were really good don’t have much of an impact. I’m not complaining – when I’ve finished writing a post it feels like my soul is a bit lighter – like I’ve accomplished something more than turn oxygen into carbon dioxide for the day.
One clue that a post will be popular is when the post appears to write itself. That was the case with my last post. When I finished, I was in bed two hours earlier than normal. I normally go to sleep when the cows wander back into the field, because that’s pasture bedtime.
The reason, I think, that post was so popular is because I just had the good fortune to write what many other people were thinking.
This is because we’re unravelling. We just don’t have words for it. It’s not just as a nation, it appears to be all of Western Civilization.
What the media would have people believe is that there is a great, monolithic consensus. Prior to the Internet, that might have been achievable. There was only One Acceptable Opinion, and it was presented to you live, in living color on three networks. The local paper (generally) also had some version or other of the One Acceptable Opinion.
Elvis Presley’s last big hit? The bathroom floor.
That meant that stories could disappear from the public view fairly easily. Ruby Ridge? I heard of that story on a local talk radio station. The person who was telling the story, honestly, sounded crazy. Here they were talking about this crazy story of a man being framed and then Federal agents killing his family.
The guy really did sound crazy. Here he was, telling a story that I hadn’t heard of.
Crazy. It sounded like a conspiracy theory.
The government used to be considered a trustworthy source by, well, everyone. Looking back, I’m pretty certain the government never did tell us the Truth. But the important thing was everyone believed the One Acceptable Opinion.
After her boyfriend went missing in the forest, what conspiracy did Barbie® believe in? Kentrails.
Oh, sure, there were failures now and then. When Tail Gunner Joe pointed out, rightly, that the State Department and Hollywood® were filled with commies, people were upset.
Leftism was generally viewed as bad. It was so obvious that Stalin was a bad guy that even the New York Times® couldn’t hide it, as they had swept the human cost of the Holodomor (In The World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold And Silver Medals) under the rug two decades earlier.
In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!
The way the Left did that is they went to their normal playbook. How do you trump logic and facts? A plain appeal to emotion:
“Have you no sense of decency, Sir, at long last?” was how they went after Senator Joe McCarthy. They tried to make his dogged pursuit of Leftism appear to be an unhinged attack against ghosts.
But McCarthy was . . . right. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was shown that Joe was right about the scope and scale of Soviet infiltration. Where? Everywhere Joe had said. McCarthyism was just what you and I would call, “Telling the truth.”
Again, McCarthy was right. Leftism had infiltrated the Federal government. Stalin had better progress reports on the atomic bomb than those that were given to Truman. There’s a reason we celebrate Juneteenth around my house.
Why did Julius and Ethel Rosenberg cross the road? Because they were never on your side. (meme: not original)
Leftism has burrowed inside of our country. For decades. When Reagan was shot we couldn’t watch it on TV. There were no televisions in our classrooms. But some teachers had radios and instead of listening to a lecture on social studies, we sat and listened to the news on a tinny AM radio.
Would President Reagan live? No one knew. All we knew was that he was in the hospital.
One kid, whose parents were Leftist professors at the local college, said, simply, “I hope he dies. Maybe then the Senate will choose Ted Kennedy as Vice President.”
The split we see now isn’t new. It’s been festering in our country for decades.
I could come up with example after example. But if I were to try to create a scenario where people would be on each other like Karens on a manager, I couldn’t create a better scenario than what I see today:
- Multiple cultures forced together in small spaces.
- Actual propaganda presented as nightly news.
- Dogs and cats, living together.
- An Internet where people can check facts for themselves.
- A demonization of the Culture that created the place.
My fat parrot just died after a long illness. It’s a huge weight off my shoulder.
I actively don’t believe anything I hear anymore. For months, Google®, Facebook™ and Twitter© would ban anyone who said that the ‘Rona came from a lab in China.
Ban.
Now, that’s the current One Acceptable Opinion. The previous version has been tossed by a Winston Smith-type person into the memory hole. But we remember.
And now we know that the entire “conspiracy theory” smear tactic was created, explicitly, so people wouldn’t ask questions. Wonder what really happened to JFK? Dunno. There are still nearly 500,000 pages yet to be released.
Not words. Pages.
I guess everyone knows how Kennedy died. That one is a no-brainer.
But does that really matter? Kennedy is dead. What really matters is that the Feds created the entire idea of mocking people who believed in anything other than the One Acceptable Opinion. Think the COVID-19 mRNA treatment is as sketchy as sharing a needle with Johnny Depp?
You’re a conspiracy theorist. You must not believe in sCiEncE! There is One Acceptable Theory. Anyone who disagrees is stupid or evil.
But now in 2021, we have the Internet. In 1982, or in 1952 this might have worked. The sheep would go back to grazing.
Now?
It’s just more energy to help the country unravel as the One Acceptable Theory is just like the famed Emperor Who Had No Clothes.
Is there anything left to unravel?