How Invaders Are Looting Your 401k

“The French have just invaded.” – Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure

I guess the Mongol Empire had its pros and Khans.

On Monday’s post I gave an example of propaganda, and how it is used to manipulate public opinion.  The example I chose was the phrase “Diversity is our Strength™” which, when viewed from the standpoint of what diversity really gives us, is Orwellian doublespeak.  Diversity causes problems, so much so that journalist Michael Yon has started calling them what might be more apt:  invaders.

One of the problems it causes is related to resources.  While not every invader (legal or illegal) is a net cost to the country, most are.  A recent study by the House Homeland Security Commission (LINK) showed that immigrants (just the illegal variety) cost taxpayers at least $720 billion since Biden took office, and have contributed no more than $120 billion in taxes at all levels, for a net loss of $600 billion dollars.

That’s a huge tax burden, because it assumes that they individual taxpayer is picking up the cost.  So, what kind of costs are in this number?

  • Housing
  • Welfare
  • Schools
  • Police
  • Transport
  • Impacts on Private Property on the Border

If you assume only 10,000,000 invaders, well, that’s a stunning $60,000 per invader, or for a familia of four, nearly a quarter million dollars.  This gives the term “Anchor Baby” a new meaning, since they are literally anchors on our economy, each one holding us back to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, with a net negative lifetime cost that could be in the millions.

If you pronounced her name as “Pamela with a K” would that mean we’d have to call her Pamalak?

But we know the answer of how many invaders are devastating our country is higher, and the cost is much higher than the $720,000,000,000 over four years.  On one side, this money is going to support the invaders.  But this is money that should have been spent on our elderly, our veterans, our infrastructure, and our children.  Nearly every single invader, man, woman, or child, is making the Unites States a poorer nation and is taking from those heritage Americans who have the greatest needs.

Of course, you’re saying, John Wilder, what happened to your compassion for your fellow man?  It’s not compassion at all when all of this is being done against the consent of the vast majority of Americans.  How mad are Americans at this?  Kamala Harris is now saying she wants to build a wall.

I’m afraid to visit Turkey or China.  Too many red flags.

As I have maintained again and again, it is not charity if it is forced, rather, it is GloboLeftists using the resources of the country to pay for this invasion.  As James O’Keefe found out, most of the “private” funds used to assist invaders are actually recycled government grants from places like the Department of State, so even the “private” funds are actually resources looted from you and I.  With no input, with no choice.

What’s Ukraine’s biggest import?  Russian artillery shells. 

That’s not charity, or if it is charity, it’s surprise charity like a mugging is a surprise donation or rape is surprise sex.

Here are more costs that the invaders force upon Americans:

  • Increased Housing Cost: Pop quiz – if 20,000,000 invaders cross a border, how many houses will they consume?  If they live 18 to a house, does that lower or raise housing cost?  If we build 3,000,000 more houses for them, does that raise or lower the cost of building supplies?
  • Lowered Wages: Supply and demand figures in again here.  The derivation of this proof is left to the reader.
  • Increased Crime: It costs $1.6 billion just for federal costs to house invaders in prison annually.  States house even more, so who knows what the overall total is.  This total isn’t included in the report’s number, and doesn’t include the value of stolen property and destroyed lives caused by invaders.
  • School Resource Increase: The 5.1 million children of the invaders cost more than heritage Americans.  Why?  They often speak little English, and that costs, at least, 15% more.  But what about the social friction from invaders with American students?  What about the lost learning opportunities?

In the above list, again, there are missing externalities that are caused by a significant invader class – like needs for new laws, the impact of a large law evading class (48% of New York City transit riders don’t pay any fare), and the loss of societal cohesion.  As Sadiq Khan, invader anchor baby mayor of London said:  terror attacks are “part and parcel of living in a big city.”

I guess terrorism is part of the strength that diversity brings us?

Does it bother anyone besides me that hundreds of thousands of “other” people are invading?

In 2019 the Wilder family was taking a long trip through the Great American West.  It was probably around 1AM.  We were in the space where there might have been two FM channels on the entire dial.  One was an NPR®/college station, so I tuned to that one.

The program was about people from other countries and cultures coming to America and the difficulties that they had in assimilation.  Okay, I’ll listen.  It turned out that on this particular episode, the focus was on invaders with really heavy accents.  What I learned that if you, a heritage American, had difficulty understanding someone speaking broken English in a very heavy accent, the problem, citizen, is that you’re a bad person.  You’re the problem.

Yes.  I’m not making this up.  They actually put this on the air.  Now, I don’t know about you, but if not being able to comprehend someone whose grasp of the English language is as crisp as Kamala Harris’ grasp on sobriety is racist, well, I’m a racist.  And so, then, are you.

I hear summer in Finland is the best day of the year.

That’s the other facet of the loss of social cohesion:  in every instance, the culture of the Americans who built the country is supposed to give way to every other culture.  If it’s culturally allowed for people to be rude, pushy, and insulting in their country, well, take your Midwestern manners and deal with it.  But if you’re rude, pushy, and insulting, well, that makes you a bigot.

It’s a no-win situation.

Like the invaders.  What’s the real cost?  I’d guess no less than double the official number, and possibly triple when you look at the inflationary pressures put on our systems by the invaders.  But what’s $2 trillion when you’re trying to “fundamentally transform America” like Obama promised?

I personally wish the invaders no ill will.  Given the nearly trillion-dollar basket of free stuff, almost anyone would come from the places they live, yet as they cross the border, they carried the flags of their homes, because the only reason they’re here is for the stuff.  For the most part, they hold no allegiance to the United States.  This is the opposite of previous waves of immigrants, who either contributed or died, since fed.gov didn’t pour out trillions to help Uncle Hans from the Netherlands.

The cumulative economic impact of the collapse of our immigration system may be devastating at a time when the economic situation of the United States in particular and the West in general can least absorb it.

But at least we know that peace is war, and diversity is our strength.

Propaganda: It’s Not Just For Diapers Anymore

“I’ll be taking these Huggies® and whatever cash you’ve got.” – Raising Arizona

A friend told me he could use his 3-D printer to make guns.  I didn’t brag:  I’ve had a Canon™ printer for years.

Movies are amazing tools.  Movies are the backbone of an entire American industry, but it’s a really small industry, with global box office revenues hitting a record of $42.5 billion before COVID.

Sure, $42.5 billion sounds like a lot of money, but Elon Musk paid $44 billion for X®.  One single pipeline, the Nordstream 2®, cost about $10 billion.  That’s just one pipeline:  natural gas pipeline construction spending was over $206 billion in 2020, so it’s roughly five times the size of the size of the movie business.

Yet we focus on movies, and focus on stars.  And Ben Affleck, for some reason.  Must be his insurance company.

But the reason that we focus on movies, of course, is the stories.

The stories have real power, because they’re watched and internalized.  Part of the point of propaganda is that, even if you’re aware of the attempt to manipulate you, you’re still impacted by it, though in a lesser format.  And movies, when we’re actually “shown” a story are much more powerful than reading a story.

But the NBC sitcom based on his life was shot before a live studio audience.

I think this is because reading requires the reader to function as a co-creator of the story:  you have to imagine the armies of Orcs headed to Helm’s Deep™, so as Tolkien writes the words, your part of the creation is imagining and modeling the characters, the setting, the smoke and fog and the arrows in flight.  Yes, books and stories and news are propaganda, too, but the visual is so much more effective, which is why they went to such great lengths to stage the drowned boy on a beach to make people feel a certain way so that millions of invaders could be let into Europe.

Large chunks of movies are pure propaganda.  I recall watching Raising Arizona right before I had a baby.  There’s a fairly humorous scene in the movie that involved Huggies™ diapers, so I bought Huggies© diapers to give them a try.  Huggies® diapers sucked and we moved on to Pampers©, but the propaganda worked.  And I knew it was propaganda.  I knew that Huggies™ had given money to be in the movie.

It wasn’t evil propaganda, but it was propaganda, nonetheless.

If I ever get old, I might quit lifting weights.  Don’t worry, I’ll put in my too weak notice first.

I’ve since developed another theory:  the bigger the lie that they’re attempting to force you to swallow, the more the propaganda, and the more it becomes vilified to have an opinion that differs even by the slightest degree from the lie.

You can probably think of examples, but I’ll start off with one of the biggest lies:

“Diversity is our strength.”

That’s just a horrible lie.  Would Japan be better off if 100,000 Haitians were dropped off in Tokyo tomorrow afternoon?

No!  Haitians have had over 200 years to try to improve Haiti, and it’s awful.  It’s not because of climate or natural resources:  the Dominican Republic is on the exact same island, and has a per capita GDP of $11,825.  Not great, but not horrible.  Haiti?  It’s an economic basketcase with a per capita GDP of $2,125.

Bringing Haitians to any country wouldn’t improve it, because the people who make Haiti the hellhole that it is are the Haitians.  Being on the Magic Dirt of Japan won’t change them.  Being on the Magic Dirt of the United States won’t change them, either.

“Ramen” – Scooby Doo® finishing a prayer.

On particular film that focused on this subversion was 2017’s Logan.  Yup, another superhero movie about the character Wolverine™, but this one ended with the immortal and indestructible mutant Wolverine© dying as an old man, and with his replacement mutants all being illegal aliens from Mexico.  Oh, and the cross that they put on his grave?  The end scene shows one of the mutants pushing it over so it’s an “X” and not a cross.

I’m not making this up.

According to the movie, diversity is not only our strength®, it’s inevitable.  Oh, and your Christian God?  We’ll mock Him as well.

The reality is that greater levels of diversity are correlated with greater levels of crime, lower levels of social trust, and lower productivity in a workplace.  For a “strength” I’m not sure what that “strength” is improving.  So, it has to be sold, again and again and again.

The propaganda machine has been in overload mode for decades on the “girls are just the same as boys” and the result has been a confused mass of children as the most impressionable youth are hit with that message and women are shown in action movies doing things no woman ever born on planet Earth would be capable of doing.

I guess one of Abraham Lincoln’s regrets was appointing Ruth Bader Ginsburg to the Supreme Court.

The really fortunate thing is that this latest propaganda has been a horrible mistake.  In the new rules, no woman can ever do anything wrong.  No woman can be forced to grow and change since they were perfect since birth.  No woman can be defeated by a man, ever.  It’s the revenge of the Girlboss©.

That makes for a really stupid story.  And Hollywood™ is finally figuring that out since people don’t go to see really stupid movies with stupid plots.

That’s to our advantage.  If people aren’t going to see the propaganda, well, they won’t be indoctrinated.

And, although I’m not firmly of the opinion that Elon is on our side, his purchase of X® gives him the ability to influence the propaganda that’s being forced on us 24/7/365 from every single location.  It allows people to react to The Narrative and mock it.

And that’s the key, because it’s not really The Narrative, it’s really The Narrative Against Truth.

The essence of a good meme is a few words and an emotional punch.  The reasons memes from the TradRight work much better than from the GloboLeftElite is simple:  our memes are based on Truth, not based on The Narrative.

It scared me when I asked the librarian where the conspiracy books were and she said, “They’re right behind you.”

And, no matter how much they fight us, their propaganda couldn’t make Huggies™ better than Pampers©.  And no matter how hard they push, their propaganda can’t make lies the Truth.

Think about what you cannot say, and ask:  “Why can’t I say that?”

Change, Batman, Male Prostitutes, And Bears

“You were looking for a way to change your life.  You could not do this on your own.” – Fight Club

My Chinese friend gave me an iPad.  I just love homemade presents!

I can tell when I’m really ready for change.  I don’t think about it.  I don’t plan it.

I do it.  I become it.

Instantly.

How can I tell when I’m not ready to change?

I think about it.  I plan it.  I consider ideas like, “starting Monday, I’m going to . . . “

Then Monday comes around.  Meh.  There’s always next Monday.

Change is instantaneous, it’s a drag racer (I mean cars, not men in dresses that for some unspecified reason like to read to children) after the pedal has been pushed to the floor and the car is launched.  The desire to change?  That lingers and hangs around on the couch, eating curly fries and thinking about what it one day might do.

Shame on you if you haven’t heard of Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute, who offers professional hygiene, discretion, and animal gratification.

One of my friends when I was living in Alaska shared this story:

Wife:  “I’m leaving.”

Husband:  “What, what the hell?  You’re leaving me?”

Wife:  “No.  I’m leaving Alaska.  I’m moving.”

Husband:  “Why?  I thought that, while we had our ups and downs, our marriage is pretty good.”

Wife:  “No.  I’m not leaving you, I’m leaving Alaska.  It’s fine if you want to come, too.”

My friend (who I will call Tim since that’s his name) said that this was a constant pattern that he had seen.  Perfectly happy couple, and then one day, bam, the wife said she was outta there, done with Alaska except for the rearview mirror.  He said it generally happened about 20 years after the couple had moved to Alaska.  Sometimes 19 years.

Do mimes with invisible walls have obstacle illusions?

He had no idea why it happened, but it was frequent enough that he’d seen the pattern play out again and again.

Now that, my friends, is change.

Another example more relevant to me is biking.  I used to bike a lot, and I know from experience that the only thing that is as insufferable as a gay vegan-Democrat-Crossfit® enthusiast is a bicyclist.  But when I decided that I was going to use biking as an exercise to get into better shape (which worked) I went all in.  No, I didn’t buy the silly jersey or the clip on shoes or a bike that weighed .03 ounces (351 kiloPascals), but I did buy the gear I needed to be good enough to lose some weight.  Hell, I wasn’t racing, I wanted a heavy bike so I had to work my fat ass harder.

So, after 5,000 plus bike miles a year for two years, I found I lost approximately 10 pounds.

Why didn’t the bear go to college?  Because bears don’t go to college.

Hmmm, I guess I can’t ride my bike faster than my fork, but when I was on my bike, even though I was far from a world-record anything, I was training as hard as any world-class athlete.  Just not as long, and just without the talent that they had.  I mean, I was dedicated, but there was no way I was gonna cut my testicle off like Lance Armstrong.

But, again, the change was instantaneous.  Just as instantaneous as when I decided to stop biking because I noticed it was causing some damage to my body, and having a bad ankle wasn’t worth losing 10 pounds.

One day, bicyclist.

The next day?

Not.

So, change itself is instant.  And also predictable – it always has and always will require just three simple things, as Ludwig von Mises (who is dead) wrote:

A Vision of a Better State

A Path to Get to the Better State

A Belief That My Action Along the Path Will Get Me to the Better State

If you have Vision, Path, and Belief, you change.  If I don’t have them, even if I’m missing just one of them, I don’t change.  At all.  I just sit on my couch eating curly fries.

Anyone can want to change, in fact I’m sure we all want to change.  But until we get those three simple keys, we won’t.

When my youngest was five, The Mrs. and I asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he said, “Batman”.  Now he wonders why we won’t take him to the theater.

Why do people who have heart attacks sometimes become fitness devotees?  Because they now have A Vision of a Better State – not being dead next year.  They have A Path to Get to the Better State – exercise and eating right.  They now have A Belief That Their Action Along the Path Will Get Them to the Better State – their doctor told them, and now they’re paying attention.

That’s a rather extreme example, but it’s one that gets raised all the time.

I think the reasons that more people don’t make changes comes from a few simple reasons:

Despair:  They don’t believe that anything that they do can change the situation that they’re in so they don’t even dwell on a better state or look for a path.  They’ve given up.

Not Looking:  They simply won’t open their eyes to the possibility of something different, or feel guilt, and also can’t see a way, even if it’s abundantly clear to others.

Apathy:  They don’t care.  Curly fries are easy.  Work is hard.

Sometimes change is a conscious choice, but I’ll also admit that sometimes change is forced upon you like the Alaskan husband from Tim’s story above.

If you have something you want to change, change it.  You can’t make yourself younger, but you can make yourself stronger than you are today.  If you want more money, you can’t write yourself checks based on an IOU that you wrote to yourself (like the government does) but you can earn more or save more or both.  I guarantee it.

My grandfather once told me it was worth it to spend money on good stereo speakers.  That was sound advice.

Once I asked a friend (not Tim) to write a sentence of their choice as small as they could.  They did.  Then, I said, write it again, and make it smaller this time.

They did.  Generally, the power is within us to do amazing things, but we have to first believe.  You can choose change, or it can choose you.

But what you and I do with that?  It’s up to us.

Is Everything Worse Than It Was In 1900?

“Jefferson Public School.  Fort Wayne, Indiana.  Back on that planet you say you came from?” – Planet of the Apes

I went into a bar for time travelers and they were upset I haven’t paid my tab from next week.

For large chunks of human history, things didn’t change all that much from one century to the next.  Oh, sure, there were innovations and social changes and cyclic government transformations (Roman Republic to Roman Empire, for instance) but life was such that in many cases, dropping a Frenchman from Paris in 1300 A.D. into Paris around 1400 A.D. would have been a fairly comprehensible change for the resident, except he would probably have had to get a different color beret.

Let’s go back to 1900, though.  What changes might have seemed like science fiction (dystopian or otherwise) to a time traveler from Fort Wayne (let’s call him Taylor) if he showed up in the year 2024?

I guess Joe is happy he finally made a banana republic.

Lets start with . . .

Social Changes:

  • Elevation of sexual fetish to that of a sacrament rather than that of a criminal offense.
  • Unromantic sex with large numbers of partners for unmarried teenage girls and women is the norm.
  • Sex changes for children are not punishable by prison time.
  • Universal, free availability of pornographic images and videos.
  • Women working. Sure, some worked, but it wasn’t the norm.
  • Women voting. Yes, it was allowed in some places, but certainly not all.
  • Criminals being treated with non-judgement, except when it comes to “hate crimes” – the concept of saying a “bad word” as being worse and less forgivable than murder.
  • Rap music. I still can’t believe it exists.
  • The fall in popularity of churches.
  • Staggeringly low birthrates in developed countries.
  • Credit scores as a primary measure of suitability coordinated by large, faceless financial companies.
  • Working for large corporations as the norm, rather than a rare exception, like the dude who worked for the railroad.

My grade on how Taylor would rank these?  Utterly dehumanizing for most of them.  I think he’d be shocked at the collapse of the morality required to run a just society in the absence of tyranny.

Why do I hate the metric system?  I’ll never accept a foreign ruler.

I think the sexual stuff would be the most shocking.  Sure, humans have been boinking each other in all sorts of ways since Adam’s third night with Eve, but the celebration of things that were called degenerate (or worse) in nearly every Western civilization for thousands of years would be the most shocking.

The criminal change would be a big thing for Taylor, since he was probably used to speedy justice of a trial followed by a fairly quick hanging.

World Power Changes:

  • The complete dissolution of the British Empire into a proto-Islamic Caliphate.
  • The complete collapse of the Major Power colonial system leaving many colonies adrift in a state of partially collapsed civilizations that can’t care for themselves.
  • Western government essentially declaring war on their own citizens in order to import aliens who don’t really assimilate, and importing those aliens in staggering numbers.
  • Near universal, real-time information gathering on nearly every citizen from cameras and tracking devices that they buy and carry with them.
  • A very small number of very large companies control what news people see.
  • Drones in modern warfare cutting down the ability of troops to be sneaky, at all.
  • Nuclear weapons which can devastate cities of a larger size than existed in 1900.
  • Intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can reach any area of the Earth and devastate square miles in less than an hour.
  • Jet fighters which, although nearly obsolete, can move at multiples of the speed of sound and destroy people and planes and things hundreds of miles away.
  • Centralization of the financial systems of the world into a near-monolithic system where billions in capital could move easily from one continent to another in seconds.
  • World hunger as less of a problem than world obesity.
  • The staggering number of laws and rules from the federal level covering every aspect of life.
  • Identity theft.

The set of changes was bad, but this may be thought of as more chaotic.  In Taylor’s time, colonies certainly exploited the natural resources of a region, but in many places they also gave order and governance to areas that had (until that time) were at the mud and straw hut technology level, and are rapidly regressing back to the mud and straw hut technology level.

Do national anthems qualify as country music?

Warfare went from Teddy’s charge up San Juan Hill to remote controlled impersonal warfare that has the capacity to kill billions in an afternoon.  I’m pretty sure that would be horrifying to him.

General Technology:

  • Modern cars, including partially self-driving cars are amazing pieces of technology, and combined with modern highways provide a dream transportation system – coast to coast, in a car, in a couple of days.
  • Air travel from nearly any part of the world to nearly any other part of the world is possible in hours.
  • Humanity has travelled to the Moon. The Moon!
  • Instantaneous communication with people all around the world is possible.
  • Instantaneous video from anyplace in the world is possible.
  • Most of the knowledge accumulated by the human race is available nearly instantaneously.
  • Organ transplants are a thing.
  • Modern architecture has become ugly and soulless, with no space for beauty and humanity.
  • Creation of industrial “food” which incorporates large numbers of components that were created in a chemical plant rather than a growing plant or cow or pig.

What would Taylor say about these?  He’d probably be impressed by the first part of the list, but the last two would be very troubling.  In the last two weeks I ate a “pretzel” with cheezefoodsauce®, and it was tasty.  But compare it to a freshly grown garden tomato?  I’d rather have the tomato every time.

The Mrs. didn’t want a brain transplant, but then the surgeon changed her mind.

Wow.  I don’t think he’d like to swap his steak and eggs and butter for Cheeze-Itz™ and Doritos©, but they seem popular.

So, what color beret kufi do you think the Frenchman be wearing in 2124?

How Did It Get So Crazy, So Fast?

“It was O-Ren Ishii and her powerful posse, the Crazy 88, that proved the victor.” – Kill Bill, Vol. 1

My friends always made fun of me in high school for having an imaginary girlfriend.  Of course, the joke was on them:  they were imaginary, too.

One of the comments on a post a few weeks back asked a pretty good question:

“How did we get so crazy, so fast?”

The answer actually involves several intertwining threads, mice, Soviets, and gasoline engines, so let’s see of we can weave a web that covers at least a chunk of what has made us so crazy, so quickly.  This is a distillation of the last seven years’ worth of study and writing, so some of it might be pretty familiar.  Also, it’s not necessarily complete yet, but here are the major threads that I see that have led to what Heinlein called The Crazy Years.

First:  Societal Malaise Due to Abundance

I’ve written several times about John Bumpass (that’s his real middle name according to the Internet) Calhoun’s Mouse Utopia experiment, see immediately below this paragraph for links to two previous posts.  The short summary is Dr. Calhoun asked a crazy question:  what would happen if you gave a population of mice everything they could want:  food, water, freedom from predation, space to live, bedding material, and places to make nests.

Want Dystopia?  Because this is how you get Dystopia.

The Unabomber Teaches The Facts Of Life

The result?  The mice died out.  At a certain point they stopped mating, mother mice stopped taking care of infant mice, gangs formed, and some mice (the “beautiful ones”) just spent their time grooming themselves and not really interacting.

If this sounds like Reddit® or TikTok™ or the Democratic National Convention, well, you’re right.  For a certain subset of the population, abundance has ruined them.

My friend told me I didn’t understand the meaning of the word “ironic” which was ironic because it was Tuesday.

I think it started in the 1960s.  I’m just guessing.  I like to blame the hippies, so they’re likely the early-version.  It then continued into the wildest era of abundance the world has ever seen:  the 1990s.  If you look at any time lapse, that’s when the United States started leading the world (it has spread now, literally) in having obesity, not hunger, be the bigger (pun intended) health problem.

I think this started to manifest itself, big time, in the music of the 1990s.  We went from Warrant singing about Cherry Pie to Kurt Cobain mumbling about how living in the suburbs with all the Pop Tarts™ his fat face could eat was killing him.  Turns out that shotguns are even more deadly than Pop Tarts©.  Who knew?  We had a generation that was lost because they had everything.

I think a candidate for the hallmark phrase of this Crazy Cause is:  “Why are we even here, dude?”

Never take diet advice from a fat guy, and never take life advice from Kurt Cobain.

Second:  Societal Anxiety Due to No Challenges

I recently made the comment on X® that a lot of people would e better off if they had been bullied as kids.  Was I serious?  Yeah, I was.  One response was, “Why do you want to make things worse?”

The truth is, for me, that bullies actually helped me build my character and my resolve.  And, believe it or not, sometimes the bullies were right and the things that they bullied me about (second graders can be assholes) were things I needed to fix to be a better person.  Did I lift harder to get stronger because of it?  Yes.  Did I develop the internal resilience so that the people who (rightfully) bullied the smarmy second grader that I was eventually earned the respect of the bullies?

Yes.  Males, even young males, need to develop a hierarchy and understand their place in it and why they are inferior to Chuck Norris.

No child is born perfect, and it is the challenges in life that help define and develop character.  Without challenge, development is stunted.

I think that today’s twentysomethings have the problem that they look into a future that certainly looks grim to them, yet they’ve never had a chance to develop their character and are told again and again how perfect they are and how their choices are important.

Newsflash:  the choices of a second grader generally deserve about as much attention as the choices my dog wants to make.  Both will eat all of the cake in the house if you let them and make messes everywhere.  It’s our job as parents to not care what they think when it’s important to develop character and virtue.

Chuck Norris can recite pi backwards.

As a society we face many of the same problems:  what is it we stand for and what are we trying to accomplish?  We don’t have Soviets to fight, we’re actively encouraging invaders into our country to replace us, and we don’t have any cool national purpose like the Apollo program.

I think a candidate for the catchphrase of this crazy cause is:  “Why am I so worthless?”

Third:  Societal Atomization Due To Tech

As humans, we have minds that are built around smaller social systems, mainly.  The big move from rural to urban happened in the west only recently.  Our legacy social structure is (mainly) to live in a town for a very long time, put down roots, make friends, make a reputation.

Most people aren’t leaders, they’re followers, and want to be led.  Why else would sane people want zoning regulations?

The good news is I can have up to six Eldrich Abominations without asking for a zoning variance request.

But now, put us in a constantly churning urban landscape where we don’t know the next-door-neighbor in the apartment building?  Who do we turn to?

Well, whatever latenightjokeman says or whatever TikTik™ says or whatever InstaFace© allows to be printed.  People are defining themselves on how YouTube™ says Europeans feel about Donald Trump.

They are also allowed to pick whatever gender they are.  How do I know tech is driving this?  Back when COVID made everyone homeschooled, transgenderism dropped.  Why?  No one to identify to – which is why “transwomen” with no girl parts get offended when gynecologists won’t give them appointments.

Yes.  That’s a thing.

The iPhone™ is a big driver.  It puts connections in the hands of kids.  I talked with one Millennial, and he said that at the start of his high school career, kids “cruised main” looking for other kids.  By the end of high school, it was all phones.  Friendships dropped, and dating dropped.  Mix that with the first two causes above, and it leads to fewer kids.

Dating sites magnify this, and make every girl “4” think that she deserves a Chad ranked 9 or higher because one time a drunk Chad had sex with her.  This leads to Chads being happy, but girls being sad and hollow inside.

I think a catchphrase for this Crazy Cause is “Who or what the heck am I?”

When I was a kid I thought my dad was Superman®.  Later, I wonder why he put a cape on after drinking bourbon.

Result of these interacting strands of Crazy are a large number of people who:

  • Stand for nothing
  • Have no examples of virtue other than seeking money in their lives
  • See no point in anything other than the present moment
  • Are distracted
  • Think they’re too good for PEZ™
  • Are filled with the combination of anxiety and narcissism
  • Do and feel whatever the media tells them to do
  • Haven’t built social circles of any particular strength – clubs and churches are on constant decline

There’s good news.

All of this is self-limiting.  We’re not mice, and plenty of good humans haven’t fallen into Calhoun’s Behavioral Sink.  Many of those same people have overcome challenges sufficient to shape their character for the better.  Finally, there are enough of us that don’t follow.

We lead.  Or we choose our own path.

And?

We’re gonna win.

Get your fresh, hot, podcast here . . . .

Streams will show up at 9EDT (click the link below), that’s in just over 30 minutes!  (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts up at 8:55PM)

Mrs The Mrs – YouTube

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

In this episode:

  • Politics and Stuff
  • No Jackass of the Week
  • Conversation Street
  • Two Minutes of Guns in One Minute
  • ThinkRealFast

Kamala: The NPC Candidate

“This isn’t a video game.  There are no extra lives.” – Edge of Tomorrow

Kamala posted a commercial to YouTube®, I tried to reply, but just like Kamala the comments were disabled.  (Memes and content mostly “as found”)

Kamala Harris has invented a new type of presidential candidacy – one based on being absolutely nothing.  Seriously.  She has stated exactly one position publicly:  “No tax on tips” which is precisely the position staked out by Donald Trump two months ago.  I guess we should give Kamala this one, since she’s no stranger to a variety of tips.

Oh, sure, Mr. Trump’s trademark is being “short on details” so that he can leverage a win, but based on 2016, what really outraged the GloboLeft is that Trump actually tried to follow through on many of his positions.  One thing that Trump won’t be to voters is a surprise, but I think Kamala is so unknown as to be a surprise, and not a good one.

Kamala’s first interview question:  “Describe yourself in one word.”  Kamala:  “Vague.”  Interviewer:  “Can you elaborate?”  Kamala:  “Possibly.”

Why?

She’s pulling what I’ll call an “Ultra-Clinton” approach to her candidacy.  Back when Hillary first ran for senate in 2000, I was expecting that, finally, she’d have to address the public.  There wasn’t any way, I naively thought, that she could duck the people for an entire election.  I mean, without killing them.

Whoops.  While Hillary did do carefully staged and vetted “listening tour” events, what she didn’t do was meet with anyone but fawning press.  She successfully avoided all genuine interaction with people so she wouldn’t have to kill time.  Of course, Hillary was well known to be a GloboLeft accomplice, so it wasn’t any surprise when the New York machine churned out a senate seat for her to launch an eventual presidential campaign.

Kamala Harris, though, is another matter.  She is the ultimate in vapor.  What, exactly, does she stand for?  Apparently, no taxes on tips.  But beyond that, she is a ghost.

Is she Indian or black?  Yes, though my guess is that more of her ancestors owned slaves than were slaves.

I guess if she doesn’t owe reparations, nobody does.

Is she for or against illegals scurrying across the border in unending streams?

Yes.  She wants to be seen as “tough on immigration” at the same time she promises to “let every illegal sitting in detention out on day one”.

Is she against inflation?  You bet she is, and on day one of her administration she’ll do something (the something is not mentioned) to stop it.  Why the Biden/Harris administration can’t stop it right here and now isn’t discussed and no one asks here that question, since that would be mean or something.  As usual, the Bee nails it:

If honesty is the best policy, I guess Kamala’s normally uses the second-best policy.

Interviews?  Trump sits down to a multi-hour open and candid conversation with Elon Musk, and sits for interview after interview.  Kamala?  She might sit for an interview sometime by the end of the month.  Maybe.  If they can keep her off the gin for that long.

And Trump’s request for three debates?

Well, there’s just one on the schedule, and that’s enough for Kamala, at least in August.  Heck, in September I’m not so certain that Paperwork American Judge Juan Merchan won’t slap Trump in irons and send him to prison.  Oh, sure, he’ll get out on an appeal shortly thereafter, but don’t count that possibility out.  This election is a circus, and we’re far short of the finale.

They did a study of how often Kamala was drunk.  The results were staggering.

But what is known is that Kamala is really attempting to appeal to a select group of voters:  those who aren’t paying attention and who will vote for a candidate based on what they feel.

Kamala has no need to preen for the hard-core GloboLeftists that want to hang Trump because they don’t like his face.  They’re going to show up for her even if she changes her tune to being pro-life and wants to start distributing AR-15s to every citizen.  They’d vote for her, because what they believe in is based only on what the latest talking points are from the DNC.  These people are Non-Player Characters (NPC) because they’re programmed by the mainstream news or by whatever the talking head night joke men tell them to believe.

What, really, is an NPC?

Since humans are social creature, there is an inherent tendency in many people to follow.  In the past, this made sense.  The number of people, say, a French peasant would have seen in their life was small, and they derived their beliefs by what was presented to them other people, rather than any other source.

This variety of NPC is popular in the UK, and in the United States too!  Talk about diversity!

Women, especially, were subject to this effect.  An example proving that was the number of war brides that American troops returned home with from Germany.  I don’t have the total from Germany, but over 300,000 war brides came from Europe, many speaking little English, to the United States.  These women immediately married men of the armed forces that had bombed and terrorized them for years because everyone said they were in charge now.

See?  NPC.

But as family groups become fractured due to no-fault divorce and a system that gives women cash and prizes for divorcing men, and as people become uprooted chasing economic success in areas far from where they grew up, they became reliant on a different tribe:  mass media.

No one is entirely immune, but some are entirely dependent on mass media for their opinions.  A close-knit family, longstanding friends, family stories and novels and other idea intrusions (like this blog) serve as counter-programming to the NPC soup that many live in.  The more you’re divorced from Infocancer like The View, the greater your immune system, and the less of an NPC you are.

This phrase must have tested highly with the NPC species Karenus Manageriusspeakum.

Kamala is not for you.  Kamala is for the NPC.

Kamala has to appeal (or pretend to appeal) to the middle.  These are the people who aren’t on the GloboLeft, and aren’t on the TradRight.  They just want to grill and enjoy the sunset and consume mass media.  Be aware, this how they were built – to follow.  Immersive multi-media that’s fed from a screen and doesn’t require any critical thought is what they desire.

For the NPC the TV or TikTok™ is their tribal sense of purpose.  Along with a lot of drugs.

How the NPC class copes.

The difficulty for Kamala is that for many of these people the last four years have been hell.  Their businesses have been closed (if they own a business) and their paychecks have dwindled in the face of ever-present inflation.  They’ve seen awful riots, they’ve seen this weird transgender explosion that they don’t much like, and now they notice huge numbers of people who moved into their neighborhood and don’t speak any English staring at them when they fill their gas tank.  They know they’re supposed to like them, but also have a tingling sense that these aren’t refugees or immigrants.  They’re becoming worried that this is an invader class.

Huh.  Wrongly think.  Get on board, citizen!

Kamala has to appeal to those people to win.  She can’t do it on record, so the best option is to run against anything she has ever stood for, or at least pretend to run against that.  She can say anything in front of any group, and will wait for the networks and search engines to run interference for her so that she can fulfill her strategy to win the White House.

How?  Kamala intends to be the first NPC candidate, standing for nothing, with no real substance except a desire for power with the media as her staunchest friend and defender.  Let’s get this woman some more gin!

Göbekli Tepi: How Beer Created Civilization

“You blow it tonight, girl, and it’s keggers with kids all next year.” – Heathers

There’s also a neolithic monument to Dad jokes:  Groanhenge.

FYI upfront:  very likely I’ll not have a post at all on Monday – travelling for pleasure and won’t be back until the wee hours Monday morning.

Göbekli Tepi is back in the news.  But first?  What the hell is a Göbekli Tepi?

Göbekli Tepi is a location in the southern part of Turkey, right near the place you put the onion in, and later discover you forgot to remove the plastic bag with the gizzards and cooked it, and decide, “meh, it probably won’t kill me,” carve it up, and serve it anyway without telling anyone.

Oh, wait, it’s the country Turkey not the tasty bird.  Göbekli Tepi is located right near the border with Syria, and is one of the most significant archeological sites.  Ever.

Why?  It’s made of huge stone structures, carved intricately and realistically, and showing more artistic skill than any post-modern artist.  That’s not saying much, but, there it is.

I once read a very moving story in Braille.  It was touching, really.

Original by Sue Fleckney – https://www.flickr.com/photos/96594331@N03/20385309880/, CC BY-SA 2.0, snarky comment by Wilder.

It’s old.  Very old.  9,500 B.C. old.

That’s a really long time to try to even imagine.  I’m not sure I can, since when compared to the lifespan of any human except your mother, it’s hard to conceive.  I’ll never be able to put it in terms anyone can wrap their brain around, but let me give an example:

We’re closer in time to Jesus than Jesus was to the building of the pyramids.  Göbekli Tepi is four times farther back in time than the construction of the pyramids was from the perspective of Jesus.  This was so far back in time that pottery had yet to be invented, but, strangely, Tupperware™ was already in wide use.

Tupperware™ even made a casket with a clear lid.  It was a failure, I don’t know why.  They had a great slogan:  Remains To Be Seen©.

Göbekli Tepi is old enough that it started being built around the time the very first evidence of agriculture shows up in the archeological record.  This is such an early settlement, that most evidence indicates that it was made by hunter-gatherers for use only occasionally, like the cabin in the woods that they visited only on Labor Day.  But why did they go there?

I know the answer.  Why would hunter-gatherers meet up at the dawn of history?

To party.

I’ve written about this before – there is evidence of grain and yeast in big stone vats at Göbekli Tepi.  This is evidence of the really simple answer to the question of why Göbekli Tepi was built – the guys got together, made beer, sang songs, told lies about the big aurochs that got away, farted, and got really, really drunk.  Want more evidence?  Over 7,000 grinding stones to mash the grain into something they could brew with.  7,000 seems like a lot, but they gathered there to party and get stoned for over a thousand years.

I go to the pool every day to try to get a swimmer’s body.  But no one ever drowns.

Once a year, probably, because that’s all the beer they had because they hadn’t developed agriculture.

That last part is new and is in a paper by Dr. Martin Sweatman (chemical engineer) out of the University of Edinburgh (LINK).  It turns out that a bunch of Scotsmen (I assume it involved grad students, having been an engineering grad student myself back in the day) noodled over the carvings and started counting.  Scotland is boring, so counting the number of times a “V” (apparently the only letter the Göbekli Tepi residents knew) showed up was the only other thing Sweatman’s team could think to do after they drank all the booze in the lab.

Adderall© is dangerous.  One of my friends took it, blacked out, and now he’s a grad student.

They found that there was a pretty cool pattern on the blocks (figure 12 on page 38 of the .pdf I linked above):

  • One repeating set of the letter V (both right side up and upside down) that was either 29 or 30 days (depending on how you count the V). A lunar month is really 29.5 days, so 29 or 30 sounds right.
  • 11 blocks, right under the 29 or 30 letter V. So, 29.5 times 11 (plus the original month above it) is . . . 354.
  • Then, 10 more of the V letters. That brings us to 364.
  • Finally, one more for the summer solstice (their guess), bringing us to 365.

My guess was that the last V?  That was party day – the ultimate pre-dawn of writing stuff down beer bash.  Since they only drank one weekend a year, I imagine these folks were the ultimate cheap date, sort of like a group of high school freshmen who had scored some near-beer.

I guess Cain was Abel. (meme as found)

And, by Crom Coors®, they invented mathematics, astronomy, sculpture carving, building craftsmanship, and agriculture in a short span of time.

To get more beer.

I’ll stand by that statement.

  • Once planting started, had stick around to harvest it.
  • So, we had to build a house.
  • Since others might want our beer, we had to defend the house.
  • We can’t do that alone, so we had to band together.
  • Growing grain is a lot of effort, so, for the first time in history, humans had a use for slave labor.
  • Work went from hunting and occasional fishing and gathering to back breaking farm labor.
  • This meant greater complexity, which fed greater returns, and now beer was available all year round.
  • We built cities, so we could support the beer industry, and had increased disease issues (COVID 8000 B.C., anyone?).
  • Then, we created a division of labor, started the development of technology, and invented the fridge (the first one was in Germany, used for beer making).
  • This led to the apex of civilization the 7-Eleven®, where one could buy beer, PEZ™ and pork rinds 24 hours a day, every day.

Society was created by and for beer drinkers.  I’m not even kidding.  People needed a reason to build all of this stuff, and men were the ones who did it.  Have you ever been around men?  We only do stuff for one of two reasons – one is beer, and you know what the other one is.  Okay, three reasons.  I forgot the PEZ®.

Wait until he tries to explain Netflix®. (meme as found)

In the end, Göbekli Tepi wasn’t destroyed.  It was carefully buried.  This, my friends, suggests a great reverence for the place.  It was like the ritual burial of the frat house after all the fraternity brothers had gotten married and had a real job.

Which was probably the case, they were now all farmers and soldiers and bureaucrats that ran the small cities so they could eventually build breweries, convenience stores and refrigerators.  They gradually forgot about the place.

Then we (modern humans) found it.  Now, the people who found it were very serious people who have grown only more serious over time at university cocktail parties in the woke modern world.  They can’t, for the life of them, figure out what this was, since they forget that this was a place built by and for men to party.

I think Dr. Sweatman is totally right (there’s more in his paper including a Time Lord™ and a possible record of a cataclysmic comet, you should RTWT)– the stone is a calendar.  And it’s counting the time until the next party.

It’s the countdown to beer day.  And who doesn’t like beer day?