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.

When It Comes To The Country, What Does Winning Mean?

“Fight Club wasn’t about winning or losing.” – Fight Club

What do you get for winning a muscle loss competition?  Atrophy.

One of the things I thought about after the Big Christmas H1-B X® Debate is this simple question based off of Elon’s now famous Drunk Christmas Xeet (above):

What’s the price of winning?

First, I guess I’d ask the question – winning at what, exactly?  There are lots of things that a country could win at.  Here’s a stab at some things that I think would be fairly nice for a country to win at:

  • Liberty
  • Trust
  • Happiness
  • Low Corruption
  • Low Crime
  • Health
  • Standard of Living
  • Educational Achievement
  • Cultural Accomplishments
  • Innovation in PEZ® Delivery Devices

That’s not a very bad list, at all.  A country that scored highly in these indices would be a pretty darn nice country to live in.  It looks, hang with me for just a second, exactly like the United States through much of its existence prior to 1960.

Most people know about Karl Marx from his political philosophy, but few know about his sister, Onya, who invented the track race starter pistol.

Will bringing in more “people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated” help any of that?

Maybe.  A little.  The United States was a center where smart people wanted to come for years, especially in the post war era.  We got a few that did really help – Von Braun and Fermi, for instance.  However, some of the greatest prosperity the country had ever seen was when it was at its most restrictive in immigration.

I don’t think that was a coincidence.  The Immigration Act of 1924 was ushered in based on the huge slug of mainly non-Western European immigrants hitting our shores – people who little in common with the existing peoples of the United States, other than having two eyes and butts and such.  Having a never-ending stream of legal immigrants made the Act very, very popular.

How popular was the Act?  308-62 in the House, 69-9 in the Senate.

Remember, it’s not gay if it’s TSA.

The Act stabilized the existing ethnic makeup of the United States, with over 54% of allowable immigrants coming from English-speaking (this includes 11% from Ireland, which I assume counts) countries.

Imagine!  Over half of the immigrants to the United States speaking English on day one, and 94% coming from nominally Christian countries.  Oh!  And only 150,000 a year.

The result was a Depression.

Just kidding – that was going to happen anyway, thanks to the Fed®.

No, the result was that during the Depression we weren’t swamped with millions of jobless imports every year to make the situation even worse.  Oh, and it certainly didn’t hurt our own industry.  It was ready to hire actual Americans when World War II hit.  Did we need to import more people to build bombs and tanks and ships and planes?

No.  We did just fine, thank you.

Grandma Wilder fought during World War II.  She ended up getting a divorce.

And we were a much more unified country than today, leading in many of the categories I’ve put in the list above.

So, how is that not winning?

Elon imports Process Engineers on H1-B visas to work at his factories.  He pays them less than the median wage for Process Engineers – only $0.86 on the dollar.  Oh, and they can’t quit or they’re shipped back to India.

Is that winning?  Is it winning to have people work like virtual slaves for 86% of the median wage?  This doesn’t sound much like a rock star that we need to help us “win”.

Unless “win” means something else:

  • Lower Worker Wages
  • Higher Quarterly Profits
  • Importing More GloboLeft Voters
  • Higher House and Rent Prices
  • More Inflation
  • Increased Health Care Costs

I wonder how we got lulled to sleep?

Illegal aliens are bad enough, but legal ones can be just as economically corrosive, especially in the massive numbers that we’ve seen over the decades since 1965.  The fact that many of them

  • don’t speak English,
  • have political views antithetical to liberty,
  • are often openly hostile to the existing American population, and
  • come from philosophical backgrounds entirely alien to Western Civilization

doesn’t help.

A few, sprinkled here and there?  Yeah, in three or so generations they’d not stick out.  But over (as of 2018) 26% of Americans are first or second generation, and I’d bet that number vastly undercounts illegals.

The goal, I think, was for Americans to not be able to speak out about the idea that they’re being replaced by cheaper foreign labor that is more amenable to living under totalitarian conditions.  To want to defend the future of the continent where you and your forefathers built a civilization out of an untapped wilderness is somehow supposed to be wrong.

Oh, and the GloboLeft have been conditioned to hate Americans and those close to them.  Their idea of empathy is horribly skewed.  In the graph below (which I did a post on, but am too lazy to look up right now), the TradRight (on the left, oddly) has their highest concentration of empathy to those that they know – their family and close friends.  The GloboLeftists have their empathy skewed out to . . . all lifeforms in the universeThe GloboLeftists don’t much like themselves, their family, or those that are close to them.  They hate themselves and actively love people who are more foreign in ideology and genetics than their actual brothers and sisters.

The meme about my political philosophy above being a wholesome family wasn’t a joke.  It’s actually a real thing. 

If we want to win, well, first we have to define exactly what winning looks like.  After that, it’s up to us to really look at what it is we need to do to win.  My suggestion is that investing in our own people is probably better than treating them like a commodity to be bought and sold, or a horse to be worked to death pulling a plow to raise the children of people who hate us, who came here only as economic tourists.

Americans aren’t weak.  We’ve proven that time and time again.  Don’t let up, and don’t stop the pressure.  Winning is important.