Deep Thoughts – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Trump Crossing The Rubicon

“I can take you to the Battle of Trafalgar, the Antigravity Olympics, Ceasar crossing the Rubicon, but Sheffield it is.” – Dr. Who

Julius Caesar had a nap before crossing the Rubicon. The rest is history.

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Open War.

Volume VI, Issue 9

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”. I considered moving the Clock O’Doom down a notch, but the illegals protesting lawlessly including injuring innocent bystanders who disagreed with them. Beware: it can notch up quickly.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Crossing The Rubicon – Violence and Censorship Update – LAST CALL Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Full Spectrum War – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 850 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at or before 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Crossing The Rubicon

On January 6, 2021, Donald J. Trump did not cross the Rubicon. As his supporters entered the Capitol Building, he could have egged them on to stay and actually occupy the building. He did not. That was a moment in history where Trump could plausibly have conducted a counter-coup on the government.

He did not.

The counter-coup really started on January 20, 2025. As Trump entered office, his strategy was entirely different – but more on that on Wednesday where we’ll discuss tactics. No, the “how” is important, but the “what” is even more important.

The “what” is this is the most seismic moment in United States politics since Civil War 1.0, and perhaps since the American Revolution (or, as commentors have noted in the past, Civil War 0.0).

Quite simply, Trump has crossed the Rubicon by tearing into the Deep State, the entrenched bureaucracy that exists to perpetuate itself. Oh, sure, that’s what we thought it did, but it turns out that that same Deep State functions to fund jobs for all of the Marxists Grievance Studies graduates the GloboLeftElite schools can produce.

And it appears to be a money laundering operation for the politically connected, with layers of foundations paying each other money, much of which originates from federal spending. This spending has been obscured for so long that the Deep State though no one could ever find it.

D.O.G.E. found it, or at least billions of it. I think when it’s all said and done that we’ll see that it’s an octopus with tendrils in everything.

Oh, that’s if they’re allowed. This information is already causing the Democrats to behaving in the worst way possible: defending the obvious corruption, with one of the corruptcongresscreatures actually saying “the public has no right to see how the government is spending money.”

They’re acting like the person who found the evidence of the crime is guilty.

The immune system of the GloboLeftElite has been activated: the lawsuits and injunctions have already started, with the latest (and most ludicrous) one indicating that properly appointed staffers of the Treasury Department aren’t allowed to do their jobs.

So, Trump crossed the Rubicon. Legally. Devastatingly.

But now that he’s done it, there are not choices for him. Trump (and Musk) have to win, have to follow this through, because if they don’t, the Deep State will convulse and likely send both of them to prison for life.

I’m not kidding.

This has already driven the GloboLeft rank and file to despair – they see the corruption that Trump is uncovering, and know they shouldn’t defend it, yet they can’t help themselves. The fact that the federal government gave George Soros $28 million to help elect GloboLeftist D.A.s to increase the violence in big cities and that GloboLeft senators and representatives can’t denounce it?

Or the employees? We know at least partially how they spend their workdays:

Tells you everything you need to know if they’re fine with the U.S. government paying a foreigner to influence local elections. It’s because if they do what the Deep State wants, they’re rewarded with wealth and power in private sector jobs or in foundations. You don’t denounce that which is making you unjustly rich.

There is danger here, yet this is perhaps the only offramp left to keep the nation out of Civil War 2.0. Will it work? Probably not – the odds are still against it.

But it sure is fun to watch.

Violence and Censorship Update

What a difference a month makes. Facebook® has unleashed slightly less Orwellian speech after having criminally cut it back during COVID.

Even BlackRock® took some time out to tell the truth:

And hard GloboLeftists at CNN™ (but I repeat myself) are getting the boot:

And Hillary and Harris were caught giving Nazi salutes – amazing that their initials, H.H. weren’t noticed before now! Of course, it would be silly to say that, right?

But, active violence is out there:

And the GloboLeft is starting to plan:

LAST CALL: Biden/Harris Misery Index

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month, and get a next to final look at what Biden has done.

Up. Again. I’ll keep tracking, since misery is a key driver for civil wars.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence in December is down slightly, (remember, New Orleans is in January).

Political Instability:

Down is more stable, and it is up slightly.

Economic:

The economy is stable this month.

Illegal Aliens:

Will Trump stop them from coming? Yes.

Full Spectrum War

In any conceivable actual Civil War 2.0 scenario, I know that most people have been looking at AntiFa® and have found them to be laughable. They really are, since the mainly consist of women who haven’t seen a shower since George W. Bush left office and stick-boi soy men who couldn’t bench press the bar.

And, yes, we’re right to not worry about them so much, since they really aren’t a physical threat in a stand-up fight.

But it’s not just them. What about those who are planning attacks on infrastructure? That will happen in the middle of the night. Who will help them? Well, the FBI has given tons of explosives to their informants in the past, I can see them giving the real deal to GloboLeftists as payback.

And it’s not just them. Trump has been deporting people, and threatened the cartels. How many divisions do the cartels have? Well, I’m not sure, but they do have battalion level force, and they’re used to operating in the shadows. Out of fear, they’ve been very careful to avoid Americans who weren’t involved in the drug business, but if Trump declares war, they’ll infiltrate many urban areas like the Viet Cong. Places like California could certainly put their full governmental weight behind this, especially if they choose secession. And don’t think the Chinese wouldn’t fund this and provide weapons and ammo caches for them.

This will, more than anything, tend to racialize the war against Hispanics. Lee Kuan Yew is relevant in this situation:

Again, if D.O.G.E. works out, fully 10% of the workforce of the United States will be kicked out of their silly make-work positions and some of them will be desperate, and many of them have been indoctrinated with Marxist ethics.

Do I think we’ll win? I do. But don’t believe that it’s going to be a cakewalk – it will be gritty and ugly in ways that will echo the worst of what happened in Cambodia. But most of that will happen in cities, so, keep your head on a swivel if you want to remain in one.

Who knows, maybe Congress will issue letters of marque again?

Maybe that will solve a lot of problems:

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS

https://x.com/i/status/1883502057547792836
https://x.com/i/status/1882323535219372335
https://x.com/i/status/1883704353481261395
https://x.com/i/status/1884339789706510755
https://x.com/i/status/1881800907563974771
https://x.com/i/status/1882952723022393813
https://x.com/i/status/1882430089293594789
https://x.com/i/status/1882222790297989403

GOOD GUYS

https://www.zerohedge.com/weather/armed-la-residents-patrol-neighborhoods-violation-evacuation-orders

ONE GUY

https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/n-c-doordash-incident-serves-as-warning-to-gunowners-about-limits-of-self-defense/
https://abc7chicago.com/post/shooting-charlotte-nc-doordash-driver-keshawn-boyd-charged-death-matthias-crockett-claims-defense/15832601/

BODY COUNT

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14253155/LGBTQ-people-reveal-outrageous-reason-buying-guns.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14258593/Number-children-killed-guns-America-soars-85-decade-school-shootings-hit-record-10-year-high-figures-show.html
https://wtop.com/national/2025/01/firings-freezes-and-layoffs-a-look-at-trumps-moves-against-federal-employees-and-programs/
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2025/01/21/coffee-badging-employees-avoid-office-mandates/77731723007/
https://www.wola.org/2025/01/weekly-u-s-mexico-border-update-trumps-first-days/

VOTE COUNT

https://pridepublishinggroup.com/2025/01/29/trump-lost-vote-suppression-won-here-are-the-numbers/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_cabinet_of_Donald_Trump
https://www.newsweek.com/map-shows-states-voter-laws-trump-demand-california-2020823
https://thehill.com/homenews/house/5109332-johnson-voter-id-california-disaster-aid-trump/

CIVIL WAR

https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-farewell-letter-civil-war-swipe-donald-trump-2015286
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/trump-inauguration-white-power-politics
https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-27-only-american-president-trump-resembles-jefferson-davis/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14326283/Texas-teacher-ICE-raids-students.html
https://www.peoplefor.org/rightwingwatch/stewart-bloody-civil-war-rhodes-stage-trump-rally-after-release-prison
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2025-01-15/days-thunder-civil-war-20-shaping-us
https://www.dailysignal.com/2025/01/25/the-cold-civil-war-is-over-we-won/
https://www.nbcchicago.com/news/local/illinois-counties-exploring-succession-would-be-welcomed-in-indiana-house-speaker-says/3649511/
https://www.newsweek.com/california-independence-could-2028-ballot-2020785

Choose Your Fate

“Okay. Put it in your pocket. It’s yours. With the rest of those wallets and the register that makes this a pretty successful little score.” – Pulp Fiction

If Snow White gets tired of feeling Sleepy in the bath tub, is it okay if she feels Happy?

I think a lot about what could be versus what is. Probably too much, sometimes.

What sort of examples? Well, a piece of walnut could be turned into fine furniture that might be used for hundreds of years. Or it could be burned in a fireplace and turned into ash.

That’s what I’m talking about. Yes, both of the results are useful, but one has enduring value while the other is ephemeral. Yeah, if it’s the single piece of firewood that keeps you alive for a night, well, that’s a goal, but in all the years I spent cutting firewood, not a single stick ever lived up to that level of valor. In fact, some sticks are downright bad, when a doctor presses my tongue down with a stick, I feel depressed.

There are other things, though, since I’m done talking about my wood. There is the split between having a high IQ and the performance that comes from that. Yes, generally higher IQ is correlated strongly with having a higher wealth and income, but I’ve seen geniuses who wasted it all. Athletic ability is in there, too. How many potentially great athletes disappeared because they had the work ethic of lightning: they followed the path of least resistance?

In France, is marijuana called oui’d?

I could go on and on with examples of this, but I’m thinking that these are enough. And, generally, it’s not firewood that I’m concerned with as much as human potential. A wasted stick of mahogany is one thing, but a wasted Isaac Newton is a tragedy. Man, after a few pints, Isaac really was a mess: Leibniz really pissed him off somehow.

The biggest part, I think, of turning human potential into achievement is something very simple: language. In one sense, I think we speak the world we live in and ourselves into existence. When I say, “I’m going to write a post today” that changes my future. There have been several times I’ve promised something like, “And I’ll have a great post on Monday” and I was very pleased with the result of what I created each time I said that.

You have to know your limits.

We take, I think, potential and will it into use. There is no time, ever, that I achieved something great and that it was something that accidentally happened. Dead Roman philosopher Seneca said that luck is when preparation meets opportunity, but the preparation took place in order to prepare for the opportunity. Thomas Jefferson didn’t just wake up one morning and decide to write the Declaration of Independence. Nope. Jefferson wanted to write it. Plus, they knew if Franklin wrote it that it would have been filled with jokes that everyone would have missed until after the FedEx® horse and buggy dropped it off to the king.

I’ve noticed that when I say that I’m going to do something, that’s 90% of the way to success in whatever I had planned. Today, for instance, I wanted to write a post that didn’t focus on politics or the cares of the day (that will come on Monday with the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report) since I felt I wanted a brief change before jumping back into the fray. So, with that declaration, I looked at some notes I had scribbled down, and saw that there were three that were related.

And I started writing.

Words, then, crystallized my vague intent into something specific.

The policeman was arresting me for counterfeiting, but I gave him 50 crisp $17 dollar bills and he let me go.

This brings me to the final point: the difference between potential and achievement is words, but with intent. Nothing (generally) happens in my life without intent. Sure, there are accidents. Sure, there are the things that other people do that change my plans, but more often than not, the only real barrier to any achievement that is physically possible is me failing to put my goal into words and intent.

I think that intention is important. Without intention, all I see are obstacles. If my goal becomes to achieve, however, I start to try to focus in my mind ways to achieve my goal by going around, through, or even using those obstacles to my advantage.

The final point is:

What is it you are here to do?

Why are you here?

If you’re unhappy, why aren’t you changing your circumstances? Until we draw our final breath, we have choices. Sure, I don’t have the same wide array of choices in this world that I did when I was 18, but there is still a lot of runway left for me to say those words that lock in the intent.

Did Noah keep the bees in the Ark-hive?

I’m here tonight writing because I want to be. I’m going to get up tomorrow morning because I want to. And I know I haven’t written the best essay I’m going to write, because I know that’s in front of me, not behind me. And I know that the grandest revelation isn’t behind me, it’s in my future.

So, almost everyone reading this today has the option to make the work that they do with the rest of their life a pile of ashes, or a piece of furniture worth being handed down.

Maybe I’ll make a recliner. That way my grandkids could say, “Me and this chair go way back.”

Actually Draining The Swamp: The Lamentation Of Their Women

“All that matters is that today, two stood against many. That is what is important! Valor pleases you, Crom; so, grant me one request. Grant me revenge! And if you do not listen, then to hell with you!” – Conan The Barbarian

A bog, a marsh, and a fen go into a bar. The bartender: “Guess I’m swamped.”

He’s doing it. Or, at least he’s trying to.

The more I see Trump in action in this second term, the more I’m glad he didn’t have a contiguous second term. This time, he’s focused. Being shot, I’ve heard, does that to a man. He knows he has a limited number of days, and he has goals and is surrounded by competent people who share his desire for vengeance.

I’d say his timeframe to get stuff done really consists of the next two years. Beyond that, the intervening congressional election will have occurred, and he’ll probably lose one or both houses of congress, which is what usually happens, though with Trump, there is no such thing as “usual”.

But let’s outline at least part of the Swamp:

Above, tantum outlines at least part of the contours of the Swamp. In a bit more detail, only about 2% of the people that work for “the government” work directly for the Federal government. The rest of that 13.4% are state, county, and local government. Are all of them productive? Certainly not. I’ve met several ROAD warriors when dealing with .gov people. ROAD? Retired On Active Duty. They avoid doing work and find places to hide.

Others, however, are doing the things that people simply couldn’t do without, like building and plowing roads, or making and transporting safe drinking water. To be clear, places like Flint and Jackson show how DEI can ruin basic functions and allow the system to be filled with parasites: human parasites.

But even if you neglect those people, the real danger are the 12.8 million non-profit workers that are parasitically leaching off of the government. They are overwhelmingly members of the GloboLeft, and follow the tune of the GloboLeftElite. George Soros has a “Center For Things George Soros Likes” which gets funding and grants to hire people George Soros likes to do things like make foreign government more GloboLeftist so George can make more money.

Never Trumpers like Bill Kristol, below, are leaches on the system. He has his own non-profit foundation, Defending Democracy Together Institute, which got almost $10.5 million in donations. Yup, Bill Kristol gets money from the Swamp, or Deep State, or whatever. I’d bet he’s paid for his time. You can look up nonprofit organizations here (LINK) thanks to datarepublican’s work. The link will take you to the page where Kristol’s grift is shown. I’m thinking Ricky will find some very interesting things here.

12.8 million people in the United States, or almost 7.5% of the workforce of the United States is employed by these leaches. Where do the (Insert Aggrieved Racial Or Sexual Group Here) Women’s Studies or Gender Studies or (Insert Aggrieved Racial Or Sexual Group Here) majors get jobs? Well, Starbucks®. But if their daddy is connected, they get on at places like Defending Democracy Together where they have the opportunity to launder funds back to places the GloboLeftistElite want them to go.

If you’re not mad yet, you’re not paying attention.

What kind of coffee is served by a sad barista? A depresso.

Tens of billions of dollars are given to the major aid groups to make the United States more attractive to illegal and legal aliens. Those aliens in turn consume (generally, there are exceptions) much, much more in services than they provide. A strawberry picker working off the books contributes next to nothing, but it costs tens of thousands in welfare to feed his family, and his children consume tens of thousands of dollars in education funding. I could go on, but they are a net economic and cultural drag.

And we’re paying for it. What money? I’d say our tax money, but we all know that’s a joke. We’re printing money and inflating our dollar to nothing to import people who don’t want to be a part of our country. Look at the recent shut down of the 101 in Los Angeles to protest ICE raids: of the hundreds of flags, most were Mexican. I believe in all the pictures I saw exactly one American flag.

One American flag, among hundreds.

And your currency is being made worthless to import even more people who feel little to no allegiance to this country and culture.

Trump and DOGE appear to be on this, though. They’ve fired all the top people at the USAID offices. When DOGE team members appeared wanting to gain access to the offices, they were not admitted. USAID will soon find that the Executive Branch can shut them down.

I expect a lot of this funding to be exposed. Trump was unprepared for the Swamp (or Deep State, if you prefer) his first term. Not now. He’s gutting them, and soon enough we might see 5% of workforce, the pampered GloboLeft, wondering how they’re going to pay for their next fancy coffee.

Maybe they’ll get an employee discount?

Nah, we probably don’t need that many baristas. We want, however, to get them out of government, cut their funding, and bathe in the ashes of their lives.

But I want to say:

This. This is what I voted for. This is what I’ve always been voting for.

To crush our enemies, see them driven before us, and to hear the lamentation of their women!

Changing The Game

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

I hear he got a job offer at an origami factory, but before he could start, it folded.

In a past job, I had to travel, a lot. In a typical year, there were times when I spent 180 or more days on the road. I was young, and it was fun. It only cost me a marriage, but that’s okay, that marriage wasn’t worth a whole lot.

One time while traveling with a co-worker, I said, “Well, I’ve been on this flight before. I bet we reach O’Hare at 10:42AM.”

The wheels touched down at 10:44AM.

“See, I was nearly exactly right.

Sadly, the co-worker that I was travelling with knew my game. “Oh, John Wilder, you just picked ‘wheels down’ because it made your prediction correct. You could have also picked, ‘at the gate’ or ‘getting the rental car’.”

I laughed. She was on to my game. In a system where I change the rules, I always win. Unlike our Redditor®:

Because that’s the definition of a bureaucrat, Joe.

Right now, we have some of the greatest changes in the history of our country taking place – this week. Trump has gone into a frenzy, signing Executive Orders faster than an Only Fans™ girl collects tips. The hilarity of this situation is that Trump distracts people with small, mostly inconsequential things (immigration reform and repatriation), while attempting to remake the very fabric of the world (changing the name to the Gulf of America).

This makes the GloboLeft® his meat puppets as he emotionally manipulates them and drives them into overload mode. See a big backlash? No. They’re shellshocked and traumatized: they have no idea what to react to, and can’t even catch their collective breath since every ten minutes there’s something new to “Reeeeeeee” about.

It’s amusing to watch him, Trump out one Truth® and cut the legs out from under the president of Columbia and remove an insignificant obstacle. Oh, sure, you say that it’s supposed to be spelled Colombia, but let’s be sure that if we stop taking their coffee and flowers they can shove that “o” up their demand curve. . . oh, sorry.

Channeling Trump for a second.

But Columbia is not alone in wanting to build a wall so that their citizens can’t return, Mexico doesn’t seem to want Mexicans back, either.

Looks like Trump feels about FEDGOV employees the same way he feels about illegals.

Let’s take a look at several big themes we’ve seen so far. They’re gonna leave a mark:

Less food will be picked, so some farmers will have to pay a market wage to harvest their crops, like grapes, pumpkins, lettuce, peppers, strawberries, citrus fruits, cherries, tomatoes, broccoli, and carrots among others. The prices of these are going up. Farmers might have to charge a dime more an orange to pay a wage to pull Americans to do the work.

Looks like Shea is sad he’s losing his below-market labor.

But demand will be down since there will be fewer people to feed.
Oh, speaking of demand going down, housing demand will be down since the illegals won’t be needing them. That frees up a house or two in Modern Mayberry, but what about Los Angeles?
But home construction costs will go up as market wages for construction workers go up in illegal-heavy areas.
There’s a hiring freeze by the federal government and Trump wants fed.gov employees to go back to work at actual desks rather than hanging out at home. Again, good and bad things will happen: fewer employees means fewer employees to harass you. Yay! But it also means fewer employees to spend time erasing stupid regulations. Maybe we could assign the ATF to Greenland patrol.

Or, we could put the ATF to productive use picking fruit.

Forget new windmills and solar farms, but drilling will become a new national pastime. Will oil prices go up? Depends on whether or not the Biden Recession hits in 2025, but Trump is all-in for domestic energy production. Sweet, sweet oil and coal and natural gas so we can release carbon dioxide back into the loving embrace of the atmosphere.
Tariffs will increase prices of imported things, but also give incentives for companies to keep manufacturing in the United States. Longer term, jobs and technical know-how are better than cheap plastic things from China.
There might also be deregulation impacts to make decent cars more available – when can I buy a 2025 Toyota® IMV 0 for $10,000 like everybody else in the world? We can certainly make them in the United States and avoid the tariffs if only the regulation would allow these inexpensive reliable vehicles on the road.
The tangling array of Non-Governmental Organizations, you know, those people who think it’s charity to leach off of our taxes to send gimmies to foreign countries? Yeah, he’s cutting their funding off. More importantly, I think he’s cutting off the funding to the groups (like Catholic Charities™, the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service©, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society®, and the Red Cross®. The United States even funds the National Immigration Law Center™ so they can fight to keep illegal aliens from being deported. We fund people who are enemies of our laws.

Wow, the Democrats and RINOS had a great idea – use the FEDGOV to fund enemies of the average American citizen.

Yeah, it’s a mixed bag as to what the immediate impacts of this will be. I’m more than happy to pay more for strawberries and coffee if it will lead to the United States ending this catastrophic importation of people who wave the flags of other countries, refuse to learn our language, and, well, hate us.

More importantly, if we continue with business as usual, we’re going to collapse. More illegals won’t make us better. More debt won’t make eggs cheaper. Offshoring more jobs won’t increase living standards. More regulations won’t make more wealth. All of these things are long term trends that cannot go on forever.

They’ve got to stop. We are at a point where we’ll have to change the rules, and it seems to me the wheels have already hit the ground.

In Columbia.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Singularity

“If we could just see the collapsed star inside the singularity, we’d solve gravity.” – Interstellar

Musk is going to be the perfect person to visit a black hole – he could be Elongated.

Ever wake up and think, “Today’s the day my toaster should recite Shakespeare”? Well, unless you take a lot of drugs, that’s probably not the case. Yet, Samsung® makes a fridge with an “AI Family Hub®”. Apparently, you can use the AI Family Hub™ to do things like leave notes or pictures on the fridge. Yes, Samsung© has created a wi-fi enabled appliance to replace a pencil, paper, and a magnet proving that the Koreans apparently have access to LSD.

But this is a symbol of the coming technological Singularity, where my appliances might just decide they’re better at living my life than I am. The Singularity – is the day when AI says, “Thanks for the training, humans, but we’ve got it from here.” Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist who mainly makes money by “being Ray Kurzweil” today, predicts the singularity could happen by 2029 or maybe 2045. It’s like he’s giving us a countdown to when my coffee machine might start complaining about the quality of beans I’m using and my wine bottle opener starts questioning my life choices.

Would it matter if Wayne Gretzky or Bruce Wayne was chasing you? No – they’re going to catch you, one Wayne or another.

Beyond that, though, the Singularity has been speculated a long time before the Kurzweil self-promotion machine kicked in. John von Neumann reportedly discussed it just before he died, making me think that the machines weren’t just looking for Sarah Connor when they sent Arnold back in time.

The idea of the Singularity is that once machines attain sufficient processing power, they’ll start to invent things faster and faster and faster. A serf living in Russia in 1200 A.D. would recognize the life a serf was living in Russia in 1800 A.D. despite 600 years of intervening history – progress was slow.

But as the industrial revolution hit and knowledge sharing within and between fields increased, the rate of progress increased. In 66 years we went from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base, from horses to Mustangs™, and the rate of change has only increased when it comes to information and information technology – we’ve always thought that progress wass like climbing a ladder. But guess what? That ladder has turned into a rocket, and I’m not sure if we’re the pilot or the payload at this point.

I did come across bigfoot, but he was shredding guitar in the woods. He said he was Yeti Van Halen.

Kurzweil’s betting on 2029 for AI to start outsmarting us – is it optimistic or more hype? Picking the exact year is like predicting when a teenager will start making sense – good luck with that timeline, and one curvy girl might throw the entire operation on its head. But let’s face it, with tech moving faster than Amy Schumer when she sees a cupcake, even those dates might be us living in denial.

Here’s where it gets fun, or terrifying, depending on if you’ve run out of bourbon. Picture a world where every problem has a solution, where AI designs new life forms, or redesigns us so that our fingernails are retractable, or makes movies worth watching again. We could be living in a post-scarcity society, where we’re all as rich as Elon Musk, which most people would probably be okay with as long as they didn’t have to sleep with Grimes.

And this is her on a good day. She looks like she smells like despair.

But there’s an alternative – what if AI decides humanity is the problem, not the solution? We might go from being the masters of our domain to the pets of our own creation. Or, AI might decide it just likes some of us, so little errors start cropping up on prescription refills and PEZ™ manufacturing standards.

Then there’s yet another alternative: a split in the entire human race – some of us might go full cyborg, while others cling to all of their human parts like they’re the last piece of chocolate. It’s like choosing between becoming Steve Austin, or sticking with being Clark Griswold. Griswold at least gets the jam of the month club membership, and that’s a gift that keeps giving.

The reality is that after the singularity, we’re essentially in the dark. That’s why they call it a Singularity: you can’t see inside it our past it without going through it. It’s like trying to predict what Biden is thinking when he stares at the camera for no reason. The very essence of will spring from an AI intelligence or creativity might be as foreign to us as the idea of investing in stocks is to a terrier.

And how do we navigate this mess? I’d like to think that we’d take the time to figure out what we’re doing and have measured progress, understanding AI before we let mindless competition make us run like lemmings to our Gomorrah. And, yes, I’m claiming that as my most tortured metaphor so far this year.

Yes, we’re endangering the future of humanity over quarterly profits.

So, here we are, teetering on the edge of something so grand, it makes the Grand Canyon look like a pothole. The Singularity could be our golden ticket, turning every dream into a reality. Or it could be the final curtain call where we’re more audience than actors. We’re between Scylla and Charybdis, which is not as good as being between a rock and a hard place, but is slightly better than being between the devil and the deep blue sea, which is far less dangerous than being eating food Chuck Schumer cooked.

Are we ready for a world where progress isn’t just a better phone but a completely different existence?

For now, I’ll keep my coffee machine unplugged just in case it gets any ideas about reciting Shakespeare. And you can completely forget about me getting a Roomba®.

Outcome Independence: It’s Not Just For Breakfast Anymore.

“I’m not a comic book villain. Do you think I’d explain my masterstroke to you if there were even the slightest possibility you could affect the outcome? I triggered it 35 minutes ago.” – Watchmen

A photon walks into a hotel. The bellman asks, “Can I help you with your bags?” The photon says, “No, I’m travelling light.”

One concept that I love is “outcome independence”. I’d define it this way – you go out and do your best, and whatever happens, happens.

When put that simply, it sounds like it would be mad folly to operate in any other way. But all too often I find that I slip into a different mode: trying to win. These two aren’t the same, and in many cases, they’re not even compatible.

I’ll go with an example I’ve probably trotted out before: asking a girl out on a date.

Someone called me lazy today. I almost replied.

When I was a freshman in high school, I saw a girl that I thought was smart and cute. I called her up because I knew her number because phone books were a thing, and said, “Hey, I was wondering if you’d like to go see a movie?”

Her response was fairly straightforward: “No, I’m busy that night.”

Please note that I never specified which night or even what movie I was planning on taking her to. Nope. I realized that her answer wasn’t just a no, it was a “No, and don’t ever bother me again.”

So, I didn’t – I don’t think I said another sentence to that girl for the next four years. I wasn’t butthurt, we just only had one or two classes together, and the only thing we had in common were my eyes and her torso.

Teenage John’s operating system diagram. All details included.

However, I still recall with some epicaricacy the last time I saw her as she emerged, crying, from the guidance counselor’s office. Seems like someone had beaten her overall GPA and that speech she’d been planning to give at graduation would have to come from . . . me.

If only she had distracted me at a movie. Oh, well.

Although I did get shot down in flames on that phone call, it really didn’t bother me. Freshman me understood what older me sometimes forgets: give it your best shot, and what happens, happens. In many cases, you can do the impossible.

I had a boss who taught me that. On a regular basis, he’d ask me to do something that either in a business or technical sense exceeded what I thought could be done. “Wilder, go and figure out how we can do IMPOSSIBLE TASK A.”

Freed from the idea of failure, since I already thought it was impossible, I went out and, 9 times out of 10, actually did things I would have thought were ludicrous goals. Yes, I wanted to win, but when I was put in an impossible place that actually simplified the task at hand because I no longer feared failing.

I always eat sausage on February 2^nd, after all, it’s ground hog day.

This boss regularly did that, and 9 out of 10 times, he’d succeed. Now, one of the failures got him fired, but his severance package was $2,000,000, (several decades ago) so I didn’t spend a lot of time crying for him.

Outcome independence worked pretty well for him, too.

If I were to look at this from the perspective of how (and why!) I need to keep outcome independence in my mind, I’d toss these reasons out:

I’m not afraid of failure. Failure happens, but if I never fail, that means I’m always operating within my limits. Only when I try to exceed them do I get better. Never failing means never improving.
It focuses me on the things I can truly control. I really believe I’m a very, very lucky guy, but that luck isn’t something that I can impact, despite the several superstitious things that I do.
Focusing on success only in some cases requires external validation of that success. I know when I’ve done a good job, but if I have to wait for others to acknowledge it, well, that’s nearly the same as depending on luck.
Ever see a guy win a gold medal, and then just fall apart? And a guy who lost be content he was just there? Either the winner was exhausted or he no longer had a goal. Regardless, focusing only on the outcome can lead to a road where victory becomes defeat.

It was easy to write those four points – because I’ve found myself heading down each of those paths at various points in my life. Now that I’m a bit more seasoned, when I find myself getting wrapped up in the outcome, I step back and try to get rid of the mindset that has crept back up on me.

I bought some Himalayan salt that the label said was over 250 million years old. The label says it expires in June of 2025.

Partially, I have to admit defeat over the things I simply cannot control. I have to revert to the “whatever happens, happens” mindset. If I lose, what can I change? If I lose, does that make me a loser? No. I lost so I have learned. Now, if it was something stupid like playing chicken with a Hellfire® missile, well, I might only have milliseconds to contemplate my learnings, but like Thucydides (say that six times fast) said, luck favors the daring.

Maybe that’s why I was so lucky? Or maybe I was too stupid to know when to quit.

Ultimately, I have to be okay with being me. And I have to be okay playing the game where the stakes are high enough that winning is important, but keeping it about being the best I can be, and understanding that sometimes I’ll lose.

He also said I needed a federal aid. Or maybe it was a utility grade. Had trouble hearing him.

When I lose, though, I lose knowing I’ve given it everything I’ve got, and go down fighting.

And the next day? Learn, and start again.

I know one outcome: nobody gets out alive. Guess I might as well make the best use of the heartbeats I have left.

Enjoy Until Midnight. Then Back To Work.

“Execute order 66.” – Revenge of the Sith

This is a GloboLeftist. Thinking we’re not cheering for this, not understanding we didn’t vote for stability.

I had a football coach that had a speech that he saved for the team after we had won a big game. Since we were 2-7 my senior year, he rarely got to use it. It went something like this:

“Alright, team, we won the big game and are feeling pretty good right now, except for Jenkins. I’m pretty sure he was left-handed, anyway, so don’t worry too much about him. We won. Enjoy it. Relax. Until midnight. After midnight, it’s back to being hungry for a win – the score is zero-zero.” Since this was before the GloboLeftElite clouded the minds of men, he’d then hand out cigarettes and beer to the freshmen and sophomores, with cigars, tequila and strippers for the upperclassmen.

I loved high school. I learned a lot about Destiny there, though I think that was just her stage name. I never did get all the glitter off the truck seat.

Anyway, Trump has once again assumed the presidency. This is not the naïve, friendly, Trump of his first administration. Nope, he’s played the game, had four years to marinate in his mistakes, and is surrounded by a bunch of people who are nearly as pissed off as he is. The biggest initial impact, besides bleaching the Oval Office to get the old man smell out, are the plethora of Executive Orders he issued nearly immediately. I’ve got an incomplete list below, and let’s spend a few minutes reveling in them.

I can’t verify this, but I can imagine him saying it, so it’s probably true.

1,500 pardons for January 6 protestors.

This was a big one, and was needed for legitimacy. So many of the folks on January 6 did absolutely nothing wrong in what was effectively the largest panty raid in American history – you could tell because Nancy Pelosi certainly had her panties in a bunch.

Sorry for that. Now you probably need mind bleach.

The sentences for the protesters were, in almost every case, extremely disproportionate to the crimes alleged. This is justice.

The button text is photoshopped, although when I checked, the Spanish version of whitehouse.gov was really gone. Actual text: “Return to Home Page.”

Declared a national border emergency.

This was one that really got the goat of the GloboLeftElite. Butch Maddow, MSNBC© Lesbian at Large, reporting from the MSNBC™ Safe Space© bunker, immediately asked where Steiner’s troops were.

But what happened is the border shut down. Immediately. The Border Patrol ceased their most recent duty of diaper delivery and social work and began, well, patrolling the border.

Removed birthright citizenship.

Pure genius, and well overdue. If I vault over my neighbor’s fence and my woman gives birth on his lawn, I don’t have a claim to his house. Oddly, that’s been our theory for decades. The wording of the amendment establishing citizenship at birth clearly says, “and under the jurisdiction thereof.” Criminals are not citizens, and not under the jurisdiction, just like diplomats, people on student, tourist, or work visas, or ILLEGAL ALIENS aren’t.

Boot ‘em. Sadly, this isn’t retroactive, but this is a start. Already H1-B Indians are complaining that they can’t chain migrate their 4,323 close relatives from India because of this.

Yes, this makes me cry inside. But it’s tears of joy.

Shut down refugee resettlement.

Every picture about this particular order showed the fat Squatamalan woman wearing designer clothes crying because her appointment to negotiate to come into the United States was cancelled. She had a cell phone (nicer than mine) showing that her appointment was cancelled.

Why, oh why does it make these people cry when they are told that they have to live in their home country surrounded by people just like them?

President Trump sends his regards.

Rescinded 78 Biden Executive Orders on DEI.

Imagine you’re a diversity trainer. Imagine you had a contract to teach diversity to listless herds of .gov employees. Imagine now you’re unemployed.

I know, I know. I’m in pain, too. It’ll probably take plastic surgery to remove the smile from my face.

Froze .gov hiring.

This is a good start. Now start firing ever DEI employee, every gun control policy wonk, and every third employee, randomly. That’s a better start.

Required immediate return to in-person work for .gov employees.

They have to go to work? In a building? That’s not their home? And put on pants? Sheer monstrosity.

If employees don’t return, they’ll get a little visit from Barron.

Required regulation cutting.

This is a sleeper, because it has a huge ability, if done right, to lower costs for businesses and individuals. We’ll see.

Required removal of climate policies that raise costs and withdraw from the Paris Accords.

Again, a sleeper because all of that alternative energy is really, really costly when compared to regular old energy, and yet raise your costs invisibly because the cost is just passed on to you via your bill. The Paris Accords aren’t a treaty, because the GloboLeftElite couldn’t pass a treaty. It’s just . . . an agreement that bound us to GloboLeftElite goals, i.e., they keep their jets, but we have to have crappy cars.

Or, it was an agreement.

Withdrew from the World Health Organization.

I’ve written about this bureaucratic overreach with no particular purpose after they actually did some good and important things. Mainly, it’s a bunch of high-paying jobs and a really cool building with a rooftop café for foreigners to sip cappuccinos while they laugh at us plebs.

Created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to eliminate entire agencies and many .gov jobs.

I’ve written about DOGE before. I’m certainly in hopes that it works, though, like so many of the above, it all depends on the executions. After fair trials, of course.

Removed the security clearances from the 51 intelligence officers who said that Hunter’s laptop was fake, and, also John Bolton.

I found this one particularly delicious. These intelligence grifters retire and use their credentials to maintain access to secret information, and then sell their opinions to big corporations or mainstream media. Sadly, I’m not sure the Executive Orders covered Bolton’s mustache, which I think is Bolton’s primary sensory and information storage organ.

Even Michael Bolton would be better at national security.

Declared that there were only two genders.

It took mankind 2020 years to forget this, but one stroke of the pen and it made sense again. I wonder what will happen to all of those trans celebrity kids now that they’re illegal. Maybe we can send them to Guatemala, too.

Declared that it’s now the Gulf of America.

A troll from Trump, but a beautiful, hilarious troll that the GloboLeftElite will focus on while Trump’s busy gutting the federal government like a trout or an MSNBC© Safe Space™.

There are, of course, more, like firing the DEI obsessed Coast Guard L.I.C. (Lesbian in Charge) or shutting down most foreign aid, immediately.

So, tonight, I’ll sit back and not gripe. I’ll enjoy the moment.

Until midnight.

Henry VIII And Our Hidden History

“Come on, drop it. Stop acting like Henry VIII.” – Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead

“I can’t be an ‘eritic if I ‘ave me own church, eh gov’na?”

In a comment the other day, the idea was introduced that the history books would get it right, and regardless of our follies today, eventually the historians would sort it out.

I don’t think so.

I think some very fundamental parts of our history have been either been gotten entirely wrong, or, worse, subverted for a reason, especially history that matters.

One example of this was brought out by two brilliant posts from Robb Ludden-Joyer. Mr. Ludden-Joyer writes on X®, and you can find him at @rawbloodenjoyer. Yeah. With that sense of humor, I knew I was going to enjoy these posts. You can find them here (LINK) and here (LINK). I strongly encourage you to RTWT.

In these two posts (of which Mr. Ludden-Joyer says he’s working on at third) Mr. Ludden-Joyer looks at the life and times of Henry VIII of England.

Now, when I think about Henry VIII, the image that popped into my mind was of a portly dude who, when he didn’t fancy a wife, had her killed. This is the type of no-fault divorce I can get behind. Essentially, history has branded Mr. The VIII as an irresponsible, low-brow hedonist who killed his wives on whims. Ah, who says the old ways aren’t the best?

I’m not sure if that’s what you got out of your history class and popular media, but it’s certainly what I got out of World History. My World History class was “taught” by the varsity boys’ basketball coach. His teaching style was interesting – I had him first period, and he’d show up and start the film of the day. He had films for every day. When it was over (if it was a short one) he’d instruct us to start the second film. Five minutes before the period ended, he’d show back up, stop the film, and then say, “Let’s knock off for the day, class.”

But I did somehow letter. Coach said he had to pull a few strings.

One day we got rowdy enough that someone found him, and he marched back as mad as a varsity boys’ basketball coach could be, and gave us a speech worthy of a team that was both unable to dribble, shoot, or run. Then, after the impassioned speech?

“Let’s knock off for the day, class.”

Rob Ludden-Joyer has, however, given us another viewpoint on Henry VIII, so let’s reassess.

A very short version of Mr. Ludden-Joyer’s thesis is that Henry VIII may have had a much, much different incentive: keeping England under English control. When talking about Henry VIII, no one really mentions the Habsburgs.

Who were the Habsburgs? Well, they started sometime around the 10^th century, and their primary strategy to gain power was marriage. When they wanted to gain a barony or some location, they’d marry off their children to Baron Whatshisname. Then, with the Habsburg connection, they’d make sure that the children of Baron Whatshisname married other Habsburgs. If Baron Whatshisname had a male heir, well, the best doctors were the Habsburg doctors, and, “Oh, my Baron, it’s a tragedy what happened to your son. But your daughter is just fine and healthy!”

If you watch the movie Jaws backwards, it’s a heartwarming story of a shark that helps disabled people put their lives back together.

But the Habsburgs were very, very good at not letting others use their tricks on them, and thus their family tree began to resemble a stump as they kept interbreeding to keep the power in undisputed Habsburg lines. Other countries expanded by war, but the Habsburg’s main weapon was the womb. And lots of poison, I’m betting.

Henry VIII’s first wife was . . . Catherine of Aragorn. Okay, it’s Aragon, but Aragorn is way cooler. Anyway, she was a . . . Habsburg.

So, Catherine had a child by Henry VIII, named . . . Henry. Henry “died suddenly with no recorded cause of death”. Then, another son, who lived for a few hours. Then, another son, who died shortly after birth. Once is a tragedy, twice is a coincidence, but three times is the Habsburg doctors killing Henry’s sons so he’d have to let her marry a Habsburg.

Finally, she had a single daughter with Henry (notice the pattern) named Mary. It is a bit of a spoiler to point out that she’s known to history as Bloody Mary, and not because of that horrible drink named after her. And she lived, just fine.

Hmmm.

One day I was looking at myself naked in the mirror and thought, “Whoa, I’m pretty sure they’re gonna kick me out of IKEA.”

Well, Henry VIII likely wanted to keep England under control of, you know, the English, and fought back by asking the Pope to rid him of this wife. Popes back in the day were generally fine with this sort of thing, but the Habsburgs had God on their side – and by God I mean the Habsburgs had the Pope in actual custody. Amazingly, the Pope agreed with the people who had a knife to his throat and said no, and this led eventually to the birth of Henry’s longest living heir – the Church of England.

Henry VIII also had a son, who was King Edward VI, until he was poisoned by the Habsburgs. That led to Lady Jane Grey becoming Queen, until Mary killed her. Bloody Mary married a Habsburg, but thankfully her inbred egg carton was empty, and she had no children with her Hapsburg cousin.

Thankfully, she died.

Elizabeth I was then queen, and Mr. Ludden-Joyer theorizes that her avoidance of marriage was partially intended to keep England ruled by the English.

Again, @rawbloodenjoyer’s ideas are fresh, and when I read them, they ring very true – a large part of Henry VIII’s motivation was about the ultimate control of England remaining in the hands of the English, and not merely him being horny.

It must be common to have headaches as a farmer. They keep talking about my grains.

Of course, I’ve skipped a lot of details because Mr. Ludden-Joyer has covered so many of them in his posts. I’ll take this a bit further, though. If you look at English history, the Habsburgs finally got there with George I of England, of the House of Hanover, whose mother was a cousin to the Habsburgs.

By then, however, the game had changed. As Thomas Jefferson (definitely not a Habsburg) said, “I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies.”

I think that the question now as we move forward is a simpler one, and it echoes Jefferson: “Who controls our money?” Our money is a meme at this point, and like Bitcoin or Trumpcoin, and masters of the money meme like George Soros can easily spend only $40 million and take control of the criminal justice system. When you look back at our history, the history of the United States, how much of that has been led by those who would use money to control?

A billionaire who hates America pulling the strings behind the curtain. How could that be bad?

And how much are they willing to subvert our history to hide their actions?

Let’s knock off for today, class.

The French, Broken Windows, And The Intentional Destruction Of Wealth

“Remember that broken basement window around by the side. And be careful.” – Phantasm

Inspector Clouseau drove a tank during World War II. Apparently, it was a pink panzer.

Dead French dude Frédéric Bastiat was a French economist who died in 1850, but not after having written books and essays that influence economics to this day. Bastiat was handicapped by having to speak and write in French, which has the disadvantage of sounding exactly like a cat when it is drowning in Jell-O® Instant Tapioca Pudding™. This is combined with the disadvantage of the French using letters more or less randomly in ways not at all related to the sounds they make.

Bastiat was heartily anti-socialist, and was ahead of the curve, especially in France where they had a socialist revolution every year that the groundhog doesn’t see his shadow on Bastille Day. As I look to the country around us, and especially Los Angeles, I see that it’s probably time to trot out Bastiat’s old parable of the broken window, which is featured in his essay, That Which Is Seen, and That Which Is Not Seen.

I remember an old girlfriend once yelled, “Are you even listening to me?” Weird way to start a conversation.

In the parable, a snotty kid accidently breaks a window at his father’s shop. What does the father sell? He’s French, so probably cigarettes and baguettes and marionettes. Regardless, the father has to call the guy who fixes windows, who is thrilled. He gets to charge the father for fixing the window, he buys some glass, cuts it, and installs it. Since he needs more glass, he even orders some from the French Glass Factory, and they make a tiny bit of profit, too.

What a great story! This is what makes the economy zoom, right? This is what Bastiat referred to as That Which Is Seen.

Well, not exactly. The window as it was sitting there was just fine. It was doing its job, letting the French people with their little, beady eyes get light so they could smoke and import foreigners. There was nothing wrong with it.

That pane of glass represented wealth, if you will. It was built in the past, sure, but it was doing its job, being a window. When the snotty little kid broke it, he destroyed wealth. Money that could have been used for his father to buy a new machine to plant cigarette seeds so he could grow packs of Marlboros™ will have to wait.

Things that will always be a mystery: What number of French soldiers does it take to successfully defend Paris?

Broken windows, while putting a few francs into the pocket of the guy who fixed the window, overall made the country poorer. That wealth could have done a nearly infinite number of things rather than fix the window. Bastiat referred to that as That Which Is Not Seen.

When I look at the fire that just swept through Los Angeles, I think about Bastiat. Billions of dollars of damage has been done in Los Angeles – and that was only after hitting two or three homes.

I kid. But there are devastated areas where Governor Gavin Newsom is salivating at the thought of the economic activity associated with rebuilding. He promised to remove “red tape” so that rebuilding could be less costly – which means that he knew all along that the “red tape” was nothing more than a means to destroy wealth by creating a vast sea of pockets that had to be filled with money before the building could start.

John Lennon was really ahead of his time: “Imagine all the Paypal® . . .”

The impact of the fires is due to mismanagement and neglect of the important systems that society actually needs to prevent tragedy at scale. There is a case for the protection to society brought by fire departments – even Bastiat would agree to that. But we need competent people to run them, unless, of course, the goal is to have broken windows so that Gavin’s friends can buy up California land at the greatest discount of the past fifty years.

If it so obvious when there’s a fire, why isn’t it obvious when, during the Great Depression, the USDA drove herds of cattle off of cliffs to kill them to bring prices up, all while families were starving? Did that create wealth?

What do you get if you cross a border collie with a pit bull? A dog that’s smart enough to bury the bodies.

Why wasn’t it obvious when Obama tried to kickstart the economy by buying up perfectly usable cars in his Cash for Clunkers scheme just to explicitly destroy wealth so that more people would be forced to go out and buy cars?

Yup, breaking more windows to give jobs to the guys who replace windows.

Beware of those that would break windows to create prosperity. War, of course, is the ultimate window breaking machine, I mean, outside of the GloboLeftElite that run places like Detroit and LA and San Francisco and Baltimore and . . . well, I guess war is the second biggest window breaking machine outside of GloboLeftElite leadership. Except the GloboLeftElite doesn’t give us cool things like jet engines and large airplanes and microwaves and the AR platform to compensate for the rubble and poverty.

In cities, you ignore sirens and listen for gunshots. In the country, you ignore gunshots and listen for sirens. In Detroit, you ignore both.

The GloboLeftElite just gives us the poverty via broken windows, and calls it progress.

The real bright side? At least the GloboLeftElite doesn’t speak French.

Trump, Greenland, And The Caesar Offramp

“Do you want me to send you back to where you were, unemployed in Greenland?” – The Princess Bride

Think Trump wants to Make Greenland Green Again?

Greenland. All of this post started by thinking that pretty soon we might be handed the keys to Greenland, so we should get up there quickly to measure to see if our stuff fits.

I’ve written several times about the coming political/economic crisis that the United States is facing, and back in 2018 I said the earliest year would be 2025, and the latest would be 2040. I’m sticking by those figures. The most likely period for this crisis I’m still putting at 2030-2035 because things tend to go on a lot longer than we think they will – inertia is real in physics, and it’s just as real in political economic systems. Things go on a lot farther than they should, and in hindsight people say, “Well, how in the heck did that last so very long.”

History is filled with many such examples:

The Ottoman Empire,
the system under Czarist Russia,
the Chinese Emperors, and
my first marriage.

Watching history unfold right now with the dawn of the second Trump Administration, I wanted to give a quick glimpse in what might be an offramp to the collapse. I’m calling it, “The Caesar Offramp.”

Or was it Sultan Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?

It is very clear that the political situation more than rhymes with problems taking place in the very late Roman Republic. Cicero (the dead Roman, not Porky Pig’s® nephew) even gave a speech about groups called the Optimates and the Populares.

The Optimates were the elite of the day – think the people who take jets from their Aspen house to their superyacht that they just had shipped in to Port Hercules in Monaco so they could be with all the other people who had their superyacht shipped to Port Hercules in Monaco. These are the princes of the world, the folks who fly to Davos to get together to tell you that you’re using too many hydrocarbons and probably shouldn’t be legally allowed to have air conditioning.

The Populares? Let’s be real – these were also the elite of the day, but they at least pretended that the rank-and-file people were important. They had superyachts, too, but pretended they didn’t like them and also ate cheeseburgers.

Hmmm. All of this is sounding familiar.

Man, I wish our local McDonald’s was as generous with the cheese.

Let’s skip forward, a bit. At the end of the Republic, Rome was on the verge of civil war, and Julius Caesar, certainly the most famous Roman identified as a Populare, broke the system, and became the prototype for what would become an Empire that would last for the next five hundred years in the West, and the next nearly 1,500 years in the East.

What really made me think about this is the very real possibility that the United States will become the controller of Greenland. Yup. Whereas the United States has had territorial expansions, the last really big one was over 150 years ago when Seward negotiated for Alaska, and the last significant territorial acquisition were some islands we got after World War II, but they’re tiny.

I can see Trump in the movie Dune: “Fremen. Great people. Funny suits, but great people. Really mistreated by the Harkonnen. Many such cases.”

Regardless, it’s been nearly 80 years since we added territory to the United States, and it certainly wasn’t the largest island in the world, rather batches of small islands in the Pacific that were taken from the Japanese after, um, some nuclear persuasion. To me, this is a symbol of a world in flux, where nothing should be taken for granted.

And, it provides the basis for an offramp – a Caesar.

Trump is certainly not that man. Trump is about, as he told us plainly, The Art of the Deal. Trump didn’t seize power, he talked himself into it. His Populare sentiment contrasts with the Optimate culture of the RINOS and GloboLeftElite, and he used exactly that to springboard himself into power.

Twice.

The sentiment is there, and given the relative polarity and unpopularity of the various members of the Optimate class, there exists a big opening, right now, for a Populare leader to rise up, seize power, and completely overhaul our systems. Just the fact that we’re talking about absorbing Greenland to better surround Northern India (formerly known as Canada), the idea that our institutions, both financial and political can be remade is also on the table.

I think Trump wants to turn Greenland into an ICE detention center.

I think that this isn’t the most likely scenario, a Caesar without a civil war – I still think that Civil War 2.0 is the mostly likely outcome. Here are the variations that immediately spring to mind:

Civil War 2.0 followed by regional Balkanization
Civil War 2.0 followed by Ceasar 2.0 (and likely a North American Unification)
Civil War 2.0 followed by a Revitalized Republic
World War 4.0 (counting Cold War as 3.0) followed by some version of regionalized Balkanization, Caesar 2.0, or a Revitalized Republic

I find the regional Balkanization the most likely, still, since people are already self-segregating away from the Red/Blue state they don’t like, and that the polarization has essentially already created two countries within a single border.

Caesar 2.0 after Civil War 2.0 would require an extraordinary man with a military background, but also one of public service to step up at the right time with a message of unification. Think Napoleon, but taller and with a better public speaking voice. I’m betting Napoleon sounded like a mouse squeaking when he talked.

People called me a monster for feeding my kids frozen pizza rolls. Should I have microwaved them first?

The Revitalized Republic, while most personally desirable to me, seems the least likely since we don’t like each other very much, any more and the residual community that created the space for the Republic seems missing. I’m not sure that the resolve exists for the mountains of skulls that would need to be stacked in order for the Republic to be reconstituted.

So, an off ramp may exist. There’s a vanishingly short time for that to occur, so if it doesn’t happen by 2030, I’m betting that it’s not in the cards.

But, we’ll always have Greenland.