Month: March 2020

Another Way Politics Messes Things Up, Complete With A Bikini Picture

“Though in war, you only get killed once; in politics it can happen over and over.” – Battlestar Galactica (2000’s)

confuse

“The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.” –Will Rogers

Politics is not a great tool for a real, actual crisis.

Politics is, like our economy, about motion.  It’s about creating fear enough to spur people into an emotional frenzy, or bully bureaucrats.  One of my favorite stories along this line was when Amy Klobuchar, D(emon)-Minnesota, wrote to the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) about . . . Buckyballs®.  Buckyballs™, if you don’t remember them, they were small strong spherical magnets that were fun to play with.  They were generally marketed as a desk toy for adults.

One toddler died from swallowing seven of them.  Apparently, during the life of the product, there were 19 other injuries as well, though I don’t have details on those, but I have it on good advice (Ma Wilder) that nearly anything will put your eye out or result in a severed limb.  Maybe I would have taken her more seriously if we had more adults who looked like Captain Hook.

But there were hundreds of thousands of Buckyball® sets sold, and MILLIONS of little magnetic balls in circulation.  Cars, for example, are at least 287 times more deadly than Buckyballs©.  100 kids a year die on bicycles.  The biggest cause of death for toddlers?  Backyard pools.  Most dangerous food product for toddlers?  Hot dogs.

But dying because of small magnets?

buckyb

Clearly, common sense assault toy safety should be important to all of us.

That’s somewhere lower than “being hit by lightning while holding an aluminum replica of Celine Dion above my head on a pole while covered in barbeque sauce and crushed potato chips.”

Did Amy go after those bicycles or pools or hot dogs?  No, that would make her look crazier than usual and give her bad press.  Instead, Amy went after Buckyballs™.   And Amy got her way.  The CPSC shut down Buckyballs™, and went after the owner of the company with particular zeal.  Why?

Amy asked them to.  You see, in 2012, despite the looming Mayan Calendar Apocalypse™, Amy needed something to complain about.  So she found her reason in the newspaper and built her grandstanding off the back of that unfortunate fatality.  I can hear her complaint now.  “Children are dying in a very rare yet odd and public way that puts them in the newspaper!  The only thing that can save them?  Senator Amy to the rescue!”

I’m just sad that Amy didn’t volunteer to catch the Jarts© when her brothers were playing and she was a kid.  Seriously, Jarts™ were fun.  Jarts® child death toll over a span of 35 years before the CPSC banned them?  3.  Thankfully, you can still buy them, but to beat the CPSC, the company asks that you assemble them yourself.  It’s a kit.

Ha!

Jarts®, when played right.

The problem wasn’t with Buckyballs®, the problem was that there wasn’t anything else pressing that Amy could complain about and get away with.  Her party held the presidency, so most national issues were out of the question because if they failed, the Democrats would own the failure.  But she could complain about a tiny toy company.  The only victims would be the owner and the people who liked the toy.  Confession:  I bought six sets of Buckballs™ in their going out of business sale to help contribute to the owner before he lost his business.

What does one stupid senator’s quest against a (mostly) harmless toy have to do with today and the COVID-19 virus?

Everything.

schumer

Chuck saved me some joke writing.

Politics in 2020 is still about doing something.  But, more importantly, it’s the art of been seen to be doing something.  One day when I came home from work, The Mrs. was incensed.  “Schumer wants to allocate $4 billion to the Corona virus!  He’s insane!”  The Mrs. was skeptical at that point, primarily because we’re used to the media crying wolf about every little potential crisis, and secondarily because the Corona death toll was smaller than Jeffery Dahmer’s.

My response was simple:  “$4 billion?  Trump should say, ‘Make it $8 billion, Little Chucky, think big,’ but put in an asterisk that we’ll spend the money only if necessary, and in ways deemed by the President to stop a pandemic.  Heck, he could even get a few miles wall out of that.  Aren’t you tired of the Canadians, dear, coming in with their beavers and maple syrup asking ‘aboot’ everything?  Initiate Operation Leafblower*.”

“But John,” she replied, “the country doesn’t have $8 billion to spare.”

“So what?  We don’t have $4 billion, either.”

*I actually love Canadians.  And Canada, ever since I discovered Bob and Doug as a kid, beauty, eh.  It’s a joke, you hosers.

bikini

And this should add back in the RDA of bikini as suggested by the FDA . . . .

The Corona Virus, Chinese Virus, MOVID-19 (named after MOre streaming VIDeo in your basement) or whatever you want to call it is still an enigma.  Those that say it is not any worse than the flu really should look at the real-time consequences we’re seeing in hospitals, especially in New York.  However, is Corona Chan a wrecking ball like Joe Biden at a hair sniffing contest that, unless it was stopped, destroy civilization?

Nah.  We’ve lived through, and thrived through, worse.

But are we the same people who did that?

Right now, people no longer hold the idea of sacrifice highly.  Instead, the idea is the no one should ever be inconvenienced for the greater good.  Which is because in the mind of most people, there no longer is a commonly recognized greater good.

You can see this in the stories of the infantile people licking products, spitting on food, and stating that if they came down with Corona, that they were going to go to Trump rallies to infect as many people as possible.  There are people who think, “Well, the rules on staying home don’t apply to me.”  There is no us to them, no commonality, only the idea their needs, right now.

biden

I’m Joe Biden, and I forgot this message.

Why isn’t there a greater good?  It’s primarily being driven by the political rift between Right and Left, though there are other factors, as well.  Decisions are made not on the basis of what is for that greater good, but on the basis of what looks good for the cameras and can get more money for “my” group of constituents, and get more votes for me.

As such, every decision is a political one, meant to obtain or maintain power.  And every opportunity should be made to attack an opponent, whether or not they deserve it.  This means that every action taken in the muddled and unclear past is subject to criticism based on the perfect knowledge of the future.  Political attackers are looking for errors.

Let me explain, using a discussion of Type I and Type II errors.

The best way to explain what these errors are is to use an example that always stuck with me:   prescription drugs.  The two primary jobs of the FDA are to approve drugs for sale in the United States and surf social media during the day.  When the FDA approves a drug that it shouldn’t have approved, that’s a Type I error.  What happens with a Type I error is that there is a body count.  Drugs that show up on the market that kill people (even terminally ill people) make the FDA look bad, so they just won’t do it, and will go to ludicrous lengths to keep drug company profits high.

HOT DOG

So, the cat did warn the dog not to eat out of it’s bowl.

What happens when a bad drug gets through and into the market?  Does anybody at the FDA lose a job?  No.  Does anyone get demoted?  No.  But they look bad, which I guess is similar to public execution for a bureaucrat.

That leads to the second type of error, the Type II error.  That’s when the FDA doesn’t approve of a drug that it should have approved.   People still die, and maybe a lot of people.  But since they really died of the condition and not the lack of a drug that legally doesn’t exist, you can’t get to a body count.  You can’t convict without a body count, or at least that’s what my lawyer tells me.

Let’s go into an alternate universe where President Trump hears of the Wuhan Flu and shuts down access to China immediately.  Not only that, he shuts down access to secondary nations that have contact with China, and perfectly protects the United States from Corona.

Does he get any credit if he does this?  No.  No one will count the dead bodies that didn’t exist because he took decisive action.  In fact, he’d be called a racist xenophobe abusing his powers by the media.  You can read various articles making exactly this point that were written around the end of January and the beginning of February.    My favorite of these articles is one written by an avowed communist that includes the line, “The Trump administration’s ‘state of emergency’ should be regarded as a piece of more substantial and systematic hostility in its relations with China.”  The author then complains that people should move freely.  There’s a lovely comment at the bottom, “Well, this article aged poorly.”  I expect articles like these to be scrubbed from the Internet as people get around to it.

Trump’s critics kept complaining he was doing too much, until there was a body count.  At that point, the problem became a Type I problem – people dying because of choices that were made in the past.  So, with that upward ticking clock of bodies available live on the Johns-Hopkins Pandemicvision™, we are in a continually unfolding crisis complete with rolling odometer of sick and infected that, from a political standpoint, require visible action.

ISOLATE

To get a quick test result, touch Johnny Depp’s face and see how soon his test results come back.  Bonus?  Contact high.   

Or at least people pretending to take action.  Is the current policy of shutting down huge chunks of the economy the best one?  I’m not sure.  The information we have is very poor – we simply don’t have sufficient information to make great decisions.  I’m thinking the President has better info, what with deciding to put the Northern Command (the bit of the armed forces that’s concerned with North America) back into the nuclear bunker under Cheyenne Mountain, which is always the sign that things are going well.

The initial death rate was estimated to be up to 10%.  I think it’s clear that’s not the case at this point.  Some hack said that it’s so mild that, “half of Britain may have already had it.”  It’s also clear that’s not the case.  But every credible report I’ve heard says it’s big – intensive care units being swamped.  Time and data will tell.

But politician response has to be played for the crowd:  Nancy Pelosi is already blaming everything on Trump’s past decisions.  Her quote, “But as the President fiddles, people are dying,” seems to ignore Nancy’s own banjo lessons during the impeachment.

knuckle

I’ve never seen a more non-essential employee . . .

In a sense, we are where we are as a society because there isn’t anything that can ever be simple bad luck.  Blame must be assigned.  Every accident must have a cause, and every person at fault must pay, even if the outcome isn’t one that was intended, or even remotely likely.  The lady spilling coffee in her lap for hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from McDonalds is the norm now, not the outlier.

All political decisions are coming through these filters:  Type I Errors and Assigning Blame.  Don’t be surprised by the mindboggling amounts of money and silliness that will come shortly.

But sometimes sanity wins.  Buckyballs™ were made legal again when the CPSC got thrashed in the courts back in June of 2018.

How I Learned To Love The End Of The World

“We estimate between two and four megatons.  Everything within a 30 kilometer radius will be completely destroyed, including the three remaining reactors at Chernobyl.” – Chernobyl (HBO®)

Shelves

Thankfully, everyone is equally hungry under communism.  Bernie’s job is done.

I think I’ve always thought about what’s known today as “prepping” – even at a young age.  When I was young, we lived deep in the mountains.  How deep?  The next closest kid anywhere near my age was ten miles away and probably 2,000’ lower in elevation and was actually a yeti that had moved there from Tibet to get away from the crowds.  The nearest grocery store was twenty miles away.  The nearest movie theater?  Fifty miles.

When you live nearly so far from civilization that tourists try to pay you in beads and pantyhose, you have to think ahead.  Ma Wilder did.  Ma had designed the house with remoteness in mind.  Her pantry was always full, and it was huge.  She built in a pantry that consisted of one entire fifteen foot wall, floor to ceiling, a foot deep.

The pantry was always (and I mean always) stocked from floor to ceiling with canned goods.  Freezer?  Not one freezer.  Two.  And they were always packed to the brim with food.  Well, with the exception of when Pa would let the inventory go down so there would be room to fit half a cow.  Literally.  He’d buy a “side of beef” which was half of a cow.  Minus the hooves, of course.

Ma Wilder had also designed a root cellar that the contractor built.  For those of you not in the know, a root cellar is a small building (8 foot by 8 foot by 8 foot) that is 90% buried to keep vegetables so they will neither sprout nor spoil.  In order to do that, the cellar is dark and cool, like Nancy Pelosi’s heart.  Ma Wilder kept hundreds of pounds of potatoes there.  I should know – I was often the guy taking them down in fall and hauling them up in winter.  And to be clear, we kept the potatoes in the cellar, since Nancy Pelosi’s heart isn’t big enough to hold a French fry.

FRY

Exercise?  No, with COVID-19, it’s extra fries.

The house was designed to be heated in winter with firewood.  Since electricity was incredibly expensive up there, Pa Wilder made gathering, cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood his summer hobby.  As it was Pa’s summer hobby, it turned out to be my summer hobby, too.  It was hard work, and paid poorly until it came time to hit the blocking sled for football when it paid off with massive thighs of steel.

There is no jean size for “massive thighs of steel.”

But it wasn’t just the remoteness that drove Ma Wilder to be prepared.  First, I have to explain a little bit about the family.  My parents were older than I was.  Oh, sure, that’s normally the case, except in some places like Hollywood, but in my case my parents were a LOT older.

Why?

It turns out that I was adopted, despite the original story they told me of finding me as an infant in a crashed space capsule in a wolf den near the summit of Mount Olympus.  In reality, Ma Wilder was my biological grandmother and not who hiked around Greece looking for wolf-raised space babies.  Apparently, as a child the only super-power I had consisted of making my biological mother and father both disappear.

I blame the heat ray vision.

ORPHANS

I made a website for orphans, but it doesn’t have a home page.

So, I was adopted.  Since my parents were not only older than me, but also much older than even standard issue parents, they had hands-on experience with the Great Depression and World War II while they were young.  Apparently, those were events that may been somewhat memorable.

I do remember sitting down in rocking chair in the kitchen while supper was cooking.  After Pa Wilder had finished his chores for the day, he and Ma would sit down to talk about life, most often with a libation, as Pa Wilder called drinking.  I believe it was mainly bourbon, but I can’t really say since they were quite poor hosts and never offered me any.  Often, Ma and Pa discussed people I didn’t know.  This was so boring it made me want to go to and stick forks in outlets to test breakers.

Especially when they talked about people, I was often admonished that “what we discuss stays within the family” though it was implied that that admonishment probably counted for every topic.  I can see how it might be considered controversial how irritated that they were that the neighbor dog kept peeing in the snow by the back porch and they didn’t want me to tattle to the neighbors.   Or how economic collapse might be a thing.  Or how we might be headed towards nuclear war, and had Pa thought about buying dynamite so he could blow up the road leading to our house so we weren’t the victims of marauding, murdering gangs?

Yup.  That was an actual conversation that Ma and Pa had.  I think they only mentioned that idea once while I was in the room, but when your mother is calmly talking about having your father blow up bridges to save you from hordes of people (the parents of the kids you go to school with) ransacking your home after the Soviets gave America a “just thinking about you” bouquet of 10 megaton fireballs?

You tend to remember that sort of conversation when you’re 12.

MADMAX

I heard that after a nuclear war, there are high radiation levels, then only the politicians will be left.

Ma and Pa were acutely aware that all of their material prosperity could evaporate in an instant.  Ma and Pa had both seen rich men laid low by the Great Depression, and Pa Wilder had fought in World War II.  He had driven all through northern Europe, having been on Omaha at D-Day +3.  I can’t even imagine what he had seen.  Of course I asked him the obvious question, “Did any Germans shoot at ya, Pa?”

“No, son, they never shot at me,” he replied with all the coolness of a Steve McQueen, “but I was with a lot of people they were shooting at.”

I’m ashamed at how long it took me to figure out what he was really saying.

PA

That’s not impressive, though.  One of my friends had a grandpa that brought down 15 German planes during the war.  Worst mechanic the Luftwaffe had.

I’m not sure that they ever mentioned the idea of nuclear Armageddon more than once or twice, but it doesn’t take long to make a kid connect the dots:  “Oh, that’s why we have all the food.  And all the guns.  And the 500 gallons of gasoline.  And the 250 gallons of diesel.  And Ma’s amusing utter failure to raise vegetables in the backyard, repeated year after year.”

My parents were preppers before it even had a name beyond “being prudent.”  It’s probably justifiable, especially on Ma Wilder’s part.  She had seen her family make it through the Great Depression okay, but her family had also raised several children whose parents weren’t well off enough to feed them.  I know that sounds crazy in the year 2020, but in the year 1930, sometimes parents couldn’t even figure out where to get enough money to feed a child.

I think those experiences were a driving force in Ma Wilder’s life.  She saved aluminum TV dinner trays.  She saved old clothes.  She could sew (fairly well), make soap (that was more like a caustic chemical burn in a bar), knit (very well), or ferment wine (she gave me a sip and to 12 year old me it tasted of pepper, hate and despair).  Back when she grew up, prepping wasn’t a hobby.  Prepping was what everyone did.

As I mentioned, one factor that made all the preparation seem even more normal was being so far away from anything.  Also, being so far away from everything meant I was pretty far away from the middle school.  I was the last one on the bus route.  That also meant I was the first one on, and the last one off.  It gave me a lot of time alone on the bus to read – a lot.

All of this might explain why I developed a love of fiction that featured the end of the world when I was growing up.  Lucifer’s Hammer, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Earth Abides, The Stand, On the Beach, The Postman, and I Am Legend were all novels that I read as I rode the green pleather seat on an endless loop back and forth to school.  My classmates might have been looking at the trees and houses or talking to each other, but I was living in a world where everything had changed, all at once and strong men did what they could to rebuild.  And without communists this time.

BALTIMORE

I think Baltimore jokes are just a riot!

My middle school’s library was filled with books that were older than me – many from the 1950’s with pages already becoming yellow and brittle with age.  There were dozens of science fiction anthologies.  Science fiction in the 1950’s was filled with the paranoia of a country that was just coming to grips with the concept of being able to destroy an entire planet and wrestling with the now obvious fragility of the human species.  One of the short stories I remember was A Pail of Air, by Fritz Leiber.  You can read it for free here (LINK).  It’s worth it.

If you’re not a fan of apocalyptic stories, you might think that the attractive part about reading the end of the world was about death – and you’re wrong.  Reading that literature was, for me, a celebration of life.  In most of those books and stories the human race didn’t die out.  To me, apocalyptic books weren’t about gloom, they were about hope.  No matter what was thrown at humanity, we would find a way through.

I am unabashedly pro-human, and most fiction in the 1950’s was pro-human.  Somewhere after that, we became a bit more self-loathing and reveled in the idea of our destruction.  I can’t help but think that self-loathing started with Doogie Howser, M.D., but I might be wrong.  Much of today’s literature isn’t fun, and isn’t optimistic.  Sure, I see tough times ahead.  But I feel quite strongly that we can make it through them.

Trust me.  We will.

What, you don’t think I developed psychic powers on Mount Olympus?

Eight Phases of Crisis: COVID-19 Edition

“You had a dishwasher box to sleep in?  I didn’t even know sleep.  It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.” – Deadpool

BATSLAP

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.  I replied, “Dunno, depends on if you are trying to kill Batman®”

“Great, now it’s the end of the world and we can’t get a new dishwasher,” The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost.  Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.  I call that a win-win.  Besides, Amazon® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See?  You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.  When it was lunchtime, I wasn’t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch.  Good times.  I do have a concern – The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, “nice butt” so I’m thinking of bringing this up with HR.  I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.  I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derrière, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.  While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people don’t change all that much, even though circumstances do.  Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.

Okay, I’ll stop.  Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.  I don’t want you to think I’m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned?  Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisis™, a level at which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the other – this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.  This is like the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind.  Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind?  It’s so nice and cheery.  The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

FRANZ

Who would he assassinate for a Klondike® bar?  Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.  It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I.  Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say “no.”  The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment.  With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?  We don’t trust the media very much.  Why?  They don’t seem trustworthy.  Example:  when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNN® says it’s racist.  When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNN™ says it’s a wise and prudent move by China’s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNN™ and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf:  in the end, wolves really attacked.

DINOS

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be.  It’s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War.  The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was.  It’s the spark that lights the fire.  When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards – The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently.  It is disruptive.  It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system.  In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant.  COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy.  Was it poised for a fall anyway?  Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts:  what if we haven’t seen The Event yet?

DISB

I’m not sure he’s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.  When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch.  Why?  Habit, partially.  But there’s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesn’t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isn’t a coping strategy, and it’s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.  It’s more inertia.  You’re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isn’t, part of your mind isn’t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction – COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.  But that isn’t explained by the reactions we’ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.  Italy is locked down.  In two weeks, we will know more.  In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

PANIC

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it.  But the rules are new, and unknown.  What to do?  One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?  One could Panic.  Panic is easier, and doesn’t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality.  So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile you’ve accumulated over time?  Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain Dew®?  Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you don’t know what to do or have any independent thought?   Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

HERO

Not all heroes are able to walk.  I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.  Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.  Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism – realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.  Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because it’s the right thing to do.

There was a family story – Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.  She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.  Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Why ration needles and sugar?  To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part.  To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasn’t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we aren’t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch Netflix® unless we’re keeping vital industries going.  Here’s a link to Aesop’s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).  Read it all.

CLIFF

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners.  My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.  Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.  In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didn’t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.  Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, there’s The Cliff.  I wrote about it here: Seneca’s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.  Is it certain that there is one?  No.  But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like it’s there.  I believe we will see it.  The new normal will be grow from events moving quickly.  Already at Wilder Redoubt, we’ve had nothing but home cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that we’ll see The Cliff soon enough.  How deep will it go?  As I’ve mentioned before, no one knows.  The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.  Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.  80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.  The average monthly car payment is $800.  Me?  I’d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole.  But the businesses that employ those people aren’t much better off.  The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.  The second best restaurant didn’t survive.  There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this won’t just be for small businesses.  I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.  Overall loss to the economy?  40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?  Sure.  We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.  We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up.  That’s the best case.  And that’s just in the United States.

I’m not kidding, that’s how deep The Cliff is.  If we’re lucky.

EMPEROR

Something, something, Dark Side®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.  We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.  Disillusionment sets in when things don’t snap back to normal.  Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.  The more government “helps” during this phase, the worse recovery will be.  Roosevelt “helped” so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they can’t help themselves.  The length of time Disillusionment lasts?  Months to years.

FIX

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.  Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.  Rebuilding the economy will take years.  If we do it right, we’ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly?  The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.  Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.  Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

DISHWASH

So, I guess I’ll get a jump start on rebuilding.  Dishwashers on the Internet.  Amazing.  My only problem is that there’s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time.  Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her!  They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

Essential Decisions: Coming to a Town Near You

“They call it a panic room.  I know that’s a difficult concept for you, because for you, every room is a panic room.” – Monk

TP

I hear that the Australians have really started hoarding toilet paper – they are superstitious about problems down under.

What’s essential?  Right now, there are hundreds of Federal bureaucrats asking exactly that question.

That scares me.

Why?  The Federal government could cause an ice shortage in Antarctica if they were given a mandate to make more ice, so I’m not hopeful that they’ll make the right decisions.  It should probably scare you, too.  When Hurricane Ike hit Houston, we were there.  Here are some examples of the great competence that was on display from our Federal, state, and local governments:

  • Radio telling us to go the FEMA website for crucial information. During a power outage.  Where cell phones weren’t working.  So, I assumed we were to access the FEMA website psychically.
  • Radio telling us to go and bail out “first second responders” because they didn’t have food or water, because no one can plan for a Hurricane in Texas, right?
  • FEMA water showing up over a week later after power was nearly completely restored. Oh, and you could get one case.  In contrast, a local radio station had a semi-load of bottled water delivered for distribution in only two days.

america

Okay, I may have yelled at a hurricane like this during Hurricane Ike after a wee bit of wine.  No flag.  But there was a bathrobe and it was after midnight.  Does that count?

Federal response is good for, oh, responding late and poorly to any real event.  And why did I call government people “second responders” up above?  Because they are generally the second (or later) person to respond to any crisis.  In most cases, you’re the first responder.  Fire at your house?  It’s you and your trusty extinguisher or cell phone.

Bad guy in your hallway?  First responder is you, because the average police response time in the United States is ten minutes.  Then?  They’ll generally not run into the house like Rambo on steroids, they’ll come in slowly so they can go home that night.  It’s not unlikely that you’d be alone with that robber for fifteen minutes after you made the call to 911.

Do you think you’ll have time to take selfies with the burglar?  Maybe share photos of your kids and amusing anecdotes?  The old saying is right:  when seconds count, the second responders are minutes away.

burglar

One burglar stole all my lamps.  I was upset, but I was also delighted.

It’s not that I dislike the government, I think their inefficiency is cute and endearing in the same way that dealing with a young child is.  If government were actually efficient at anything that would scare me.  The government (at every level) is horrible at coordination and planning, as illustrated by my examples above, with the exception of taxation, where money is on the line – they won’t even give fishermen a break on their net income.    Individuals that are motivated by profits, however, are exceptional at planning and fixing bad situations.  Plus, do you really want to be 100% reliant on government for anything important (besides national defense)?

Let’s take an example:  food lines are a constant theme of Socialism.  I know Bernie Sanders says, people lining up in lines for scarce food, “is a good thing.”  But in capitalist systems, the food waits for you, in abundant variety.  Why?  So people can make a buck.  That’s why we have more than one kind of beer, and one kind of ketchup.  Heck, in the local Wal-Mart® there are like 8 different kinds of Heinz™ ketchup in five different sizes.  The market works to satisfy you, in ways great and small.  Especially if covering yourself in ketchup is what satisfies you.  Mmmm, jalapeño-ranch ketchup.

smooth

I got some Heinz™ ketchup in my eye, and now I don’t need glasses anymore.  My optician said that Heinz®-sight is 20/20.

The profit motive is at work even during this COVID-19 panic.  I heard this week an amazingly Good Thing.  At work, I heard we were waiting for some widgets and some polishing compound for a racknpinion molecule, and heard that there was no shipping on some of the stuff we wanted.  None.  Every single truck that normally shipped gizmos and lefthanded-transaxle wax was being put into hauling food.

That’s a lot of trucks.  As confirmation of this, The Boy went to go retrieve his things from his dorm, college having been cancelled for the End of the World®, and noted that there were huge numbers of trucks moving on the interstate.  The Boy estimated there were probably 150% of the number of trucks he normally sees, and this was on a Saturday.  State Troopers were entirely absent.  Even the cops want the food to move.

hillary

So, next time you get pulled over, just roll down your window and start a nasty dry cough.  I’m betting the lights go off and the trooper heads out . . .

This was accomplished not by bans.  Not by government edicts .  Just, “the people are scared and want more food?  Give it to them.”  This is easy because there’s plenty of food in the system.  The corn that’s being turned into Tostitos® was grown with sunlight from 2019.  Next year’s Tostitos have yet to be planted.  Rice?  We have tons.  Fuel?  As I told you several weeks ago – it’ll be the cheapest in the past 20 years.  Taking inflation into account, it may be the cheapest in history, so cheap you’ll be able to start bathing with gasoline instead of tap water, like Jeff Bezos does to clean grease from his moving parts.

You can shut down some parts of the free market because they’re non-essential – we did that in World War II.  My folks tell stories of rationing of sugar and sewing needles and tires.  And at some point those semi-trucks hauling the radishes and rutabaga and rhubarb and redfish will need new tires.  They’ll need oil changes, and wiper fluid, and the drivers will need coffee and meth.

And farmers must farm, and ranchers must ranch, and people must be ready to pick the pizza rolls from the pizza tree when they are ripe.  Someone has to milk the mice.  But farmers live for that, so as long as they have gallon milk jugs, they’ll keep filling them.  Economic incentives are still working.

The longer we go on with “nonessential” businesses being closed, the more businesses will become essential.  In Modern Mayberry, we regularly close down non-essential businesses.  It’s a day we refer to in our local dialect as “Sunday”.  On Sunday, if Wal-Mart® or a fast food restaurant doesn’t have it, you’re not getting it.  That was one of the bigger changes in moving here from bigger cities – businesses close down on Sunday, and the hours aren’t all that long on Saturday.  Most businesses close at 5pm.

So, we live with non-essential shutdowns all the time.  It’s hard to argue that the steak restaurant is essential to the public, though it’s certainly the opinion of the waitress and the owner that it’s essential, but even they agree to close it down on Sunday and Monday.

SUNDAY

It’s the first five days after Sunday that are the always the hardest.

In a true governmental paradox where bureaucrats live on a different planet than the rest of us, schools are closed but daycares remain open.  Having the grimiest, most germ-laden creatures on Earth (first graders) congregate for seven hours at school is wrong, but having those same infested viral fermentation pots play together for eleven hours at a daycare is okay.

I guess daycare workers need better unions.

But reasonable people could work together and come up with a definition of what’s essential.  My job isn’t.  Not today.  In a few months?  Maybe, but probably not.  In a few years?  Yeah, somebody needs to do it, for sure.  And most jobs, even within essential industries aren’t essential.  HR?  Let them work from home, or better yet, work from Nome or the bottom of the ocean for the next year.

Heck, I’d be surprised if productivity of home workers wasn’t greater than working in a traditional office setting.  I had read a statistic when I was starting off at work after college, and it said that up to 2/3 of the average office worker’s day was wasted.  But how do office workers waste time?  I had one boss who would just pull up a chair and talk.  For sometimes two hours or more.  About, well, whatever.

Before you snicker, around the same time I read a statistic that said something like 40% of industrial repairs fixed the wrong thing.  But it’s hard to take a steel smelter home to fix it, unless you sneak it out in your big lunchbox.

Anyway, we’ll soon be seeing what government bureaucrats feel is essential.

I’m just hoping it involves beer . . . .

17 Thoughts Related to COVID and 1 Related to Nic Cage

“Tonight is our annual Flu Season Dance. I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but if you have the flu, stay home.  The Flu Season Dance is about awareness, not celebration. You don’t bring dead babies to Passover.” – Rick and Morty

TONY

If my COVID-19 test came back positive, I would say, “Doctor, you don’t understand, I have 3,000 rolls of toilet paper, that can’t be right!”

I try to plan these posts out in advance.  It allows me time to think about the subject at hand, as well as do research.  As of right now, the singular story is the Kung Flu.  I’m skipping my previously selected subjects, and here are some random thoughts.

  • Whether or not you believe that the Kung Flu (or Shanghai Shivers, Wu Ping Cough, Wu Flu, Flu-Manchu, Chopsick, Sweet and Sour Sicken, Mi Lung Flu Long Time, Boomer Entomber, Great Cough Forward, Communist Lung Herpes, General Tso’s Revenge, Ming’s Ko-Feng or whatever you call it) is real, the economic and cultural impacts are real. As Ayn Rand said, “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”  But you can ignore about 87 straight pages of Atlas Shrugged, because that woman could not stop repeating herself.

RICHARDS

If the plague Moses brought down upon Pharaoh didn’t bring down Keith Richards, neither will COVID-19.

  • Aviation companies have entered a huge financial crisis because COVID-19 has stopped travel.  My idea:  Boeing® could exit the dying aviation business and enter the growing medical market. I bet that their COVID-19 vaccine would be 100% effective, what with anyone who took it exploding before they could catch COVID-19. (Inspired by Eaton Rapids Joe post here LINK).
  • Social Isolation: The Mrs. can cancel appointments faster than I can make ’em, so we gave up on social events years ago – in her mind the best invention of Western Civilization is the Pizza Hut® app so she can order pizza hut and not have to talk with an actual human. The Boy?  He disappears in the house for hours at a time. Pugsley is the needy one, but he and I like the same shows.  As a family, we’re awfully good at ignoring each other.  Plus all that maintenance I deferred going to The Boy and Pugsley’s practices and games and matches?  Here’s the paintbrush . . . .  (Inspired by Steve’s Dog Meeting Deer Poop Story here LINK)

introver

The first rule of Introvert Club?  There is no Introvert Club.  And that makes them happy.

  • Just read that 56% of the population in California is projected to be infected with COVID-19 in the next eight weeks. 56% of Internet streaming video users admit to sharing their login information.  Coincidence?  I thought so, too, until I realized that 56% of Netflix® movies feature Nic Cage.  Are they secretly telling us California is a cage?  Or that Nic Cage has a projector?
  • In a panic, cheap calories disappear from the store first.  The meat counter at Wal-Mart® was empty, except for $9+ per pound steaks. There were enough ribeyes to feed the Chicago Bears®.  25 pounds of sugar has 45,000 calories, but costs only about $8.98.  25 pounds of steak has about 30,000 calories, but costs about $200.  Thus, sugar disappears faster than steak.

STEAK

Being a vegetarian is a big missed steak.

  • Will we as a nation be better prepared on the other side?  I think rural America already is, and this lesson won’t be forgotten for a while. And I’ve heard some of the royal families in Europe have gotten it, which for some of them would be the first new DNA in their blood for several hundred years.
  • When I go in to town to Wal-Mart® to buy a few items, I always run into two or three people (minimum) I know well. In general, we’re horribly polite in Modern Mayberry, because we all know each other and we know that we’re all in this together.  Except at Harvest Festival, where we ritually sacrifice one of our own picked at random through a lottery.
  • High prices are the cure for high prices.  Low prices are the cure for low prices. High priced toilet paper will cure itself soon enough.  Low priced gasoline will cure itself soon enough.  Supply changes to meet demand if free market prices are charged.  This is the one sentence that describes why even True Communism® (Never Been Tried!™) will never work.  That’s why when ice was going for $20 a bag right after Hurricane Ike, I was happy for the people that really needed it.  If ice is worth $20 to store medications, for instance, the $20 isn’t important – you need that ice.  High prices meant there was enough ice for people who really needed it.
  • Just because platinum is priced at $650 an ounce doesn’t mean there is any you can buy at that price. I tried to buy some, but all of the online stores are sold out.  That means that the cure for low prices is already in progress.  Same with silver.  Always remember Olivia Newton-John’s investment advice when it comes to metals:  let’s get physical.

john

I believe that in the 1980’s, there were no chairs, so everyone would sit just like that to talk.  And everyone wore tights and leg warmers, because the Earth was covered in knee-deep snow, but was really hot, like 800°F, three feet above ground.

  • There is risk in who you do business with. Many businesses are like most people – they only have enough money for a few weeks if money stops rolling in.  One sign:  if you see bread on the doorstep of a business, beware.  The business is so poor that ducks are throwing bread at them.
  • Eggs disappeared first from the store, along with ramen here in Modern Mayberry. If you own chickens, you have eggs.  But you still have to own chickens, and I don’t like chickens because the only music they like to listen to is Bach.  Bach, Bach, Bach, Bach.  If you have a problem with that, well eggs-cuse me.
  • Saying the flu came from China isn’t anti-Chinese. Lots of diseases come from China, including the Black Death®.  And they’re at least China is better than Canada, which inflicted a far worse horror on the world:  Jim Carrey.

MILEY

Is it just me, or does he look a lot like Miley Cyrus?

  • I was right about the risks that Just-In-Time inventory management pose to the economy (How Auto Manufacturing Makes You More Likely to Die in a Crisis, Plus, Ironman is a Mass Murderer.).  Efficiency is the enemy of resilience. Nature gives us two of many organs because they’re important.  Two eyes.  Two lungs.  Two kidneys.  Two hearts.  See?
  • You never know what the bottlenecks are in a system and how it will react to a disturbance until you disturb it. Resilience comes from inefficiency, so the Soviets at least had that going for them.  They had stores that specialized in not having meat, and stores that specialized in not having bread.
  • Nic Cage is an awful actor nowadays. I saw him in three movies in the last week and, though he might have been good back in the Raising Arizona and Leaving Los Vegas days, he was horrible.  Maybe his only good movies involve geographic references?  On the plus side, he’s owned a dinosaur skull that was stolen from Mongolia, which I guess is pretty cool.  But then again, he named one of his sons after Superman’s© birth name, Kal-El™, which is not cool.

LINCOLN

If Nic Cage can still get work, you, my friend, can do anything.

  • When The Boy was still new, we were sitting around the table eating. The Boy had milk to drink.  I said, “It’s amazing how good this tastes, what with coming out of a cow.”  He was udderly (sorry, couldn’t resist) stunned.  He had been convinced that milk was manufactured by a machine in a factory.  There may be some adults under a similar decision today.
  • Life is sometimes numbers: the number of calories you have divided by 2000 divided by the number of people you want to feed is the number of days.  Advanced math realizes that 3600 calories per pound of body fat is available to the owner.  I mean, that’s why my body makes it, right?  That and all of the cheeseburgers.
  • Taking notes in the hot tub in the backyard under the canopy of blue skies and budding trees is awesome. There is no better vantage point to contemplate the fate of civilization.

TUB

The last time Cage showed up at my house, all he did was try to convince me to steal the Declaration of Independence with him, drink all of my booze, and then he shaved the terrier.

If . . . Then . . . The Two Words That Allow You To See The Future

“And so, Arthur, we learned that gambling is bad and yet in a certain sense, isn’t life itself a gamble?  You can never be sure of anything.  Like who would have thought that dolphins could go bad and that fish were magnetic?  Not me, no sir, not me.” – The Tick (Animated)

coyote

But you were expecting the Spanish Inquisition?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is most famous for his 2007 book The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  It’s a great book – I wish as many people read the book as bought it.  Then they might have at least understood why home prices plummeted faster than California’s self-respect in 2008-09.  Heck, if people would just retain a little bit of this book after they read it, they’d be better off than most MBAs.  The title of the book comes from Taleb describing Europeans touching down in Australia, and seeing something that they never thought possible:  a black swan.  All European swans are white.  Therefore?  All swans are white.

Until you see a black one.

Taleb defined his “Black Swan” events as having some important characteristics:

  • Black Swans are extremely rare. Standard techniques (like normal probability distributions) will never predict them.
  • Black Swans have huge consequences.
  • Everybody looks at the Black Swan event (after having gone through it) and concluded it was obviously going to happen.

I’ll throw out one other idea to mix with Taleb’s Black Swan concept – this one was from James P. Hogan’s wonderful 1982 book (that Hogan says helped topple the Soviet Union, and he might be right – LINK) Voyage from Yesteryear.  In this book, Hogan has a character talk about the difference between a phase change and a chemical reaction.  When you freeze water or melt ice, it’s just undergoing a phase change.  Warm the ice up, and you get water.  Make the water cold enough, and it’ll change back.

Phase changes are simple and reversible.  It’s only a matter of energy.  But burn a piece of paper, and like the girl you had a crush on your freshman year in high school?  It’s never coming back.  Burning the paper is a one way trip.  It’s a chemical reaction that you can’t reverse.  Or a restraining order in the case of the girl.  It turns out they don’t like you standing outside of their house holding a boom box over your head in real life.

CUSACK

In real life, John Cusack blocked me on Twitter®.  I probably deserved it.  I just wanted my two dollars.

Changing the guard from Republican to Democrat and back to Republican is a phase change.  Same stuff, different day.  But the American Revolution?  That was a chemical reaction – after the war we could never go back to being British subjects – the ideas of independence, freedom, and self-governance were too firmly rooted.  9/11 was another phase change.  Despite W’s desire that we “go on as normal” we never have been normal again and conventional ideas of privacy, freedom, independence, and self-governance are dead.

Oops.

All Black Swans are chemical reactions – they are irreversible, even though people expect a return to the “way things were” it never happens – you can’t unburn the paper.  The change is a one-way event.  In one (for me) particularly striking story in The Black Swan, Taleb wrote that his relatives from Lebanon were still waiting for things to return to normal, even though it had been thirty years since the war had ripped Lebanon apart.  No, they weren’t crack dealers, and they weren’t alone.  Even as late as 2012, 76,000 people were displaced within Lebanon, waiting for things to get back to normal.

Wuhan Flu, COVID-19, is a Black Swan.  It’s not quick and immediate like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or the Great PEZ® famine of 1986.   This Black Swan is unfolding in slow motion across the economy and the world.  When this is studied in classes in fifty years, the students will think it happened all at once, rather than unfolding, day-by-day over the course of a year.  In a week, we’ve gone from business as usual to shutting down restaurants.  It’s the new normal.  And yes, I said a year.  We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t last a decade.

waterloo

A woman born at the beginning of the French Revolution would have already had kids by the time Napoleon was booted off stage permanently after Waterloo.  But history teaches it like it happened during the two minute warning at a football game.

As I’ve written about before, the economy is facing a crisis that’s at least twice as big as the 2008 Great Recession.  The stage was set beforehand for a phase change – from functioning economy to recession and then back again.  Trump had really juiced the economy in an unusual way:  clearing out regulations.  Sure, he pumped money back via tax cuts, but those tax cuts were targeted toward non-millionaire types and businesses.  This was, perhaps, the most wholesome way to grow the economy – by people making money rather than by government choosing who got to win.  Bernie, I’m talking about you.

In due time, we would have had a recession anyway.  Probably a big one, since the economic expansion has been going so long.  But just like Wuhan isn’t really the flu, this economic upset really isn’t a recession – it’s far worse.  Dow® 8,000 or less isn’t out of the question on the downside.  Really.

It’s that bad.

The government is going to take unusual actions.  I mean, more unusual than usual.  Today, it was floated to just start writing checks to most people.  “Millionaires” were excluded.  Free health care will come on the table soon enough.  We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s going to happen.  And we will never go back to the way things were.  This isn’t a phase change.  Like a board game that you let a toddler open, things just won’t go back in the box the same way, ever, and all of the pieces are covered in cookie/saliva mix.

TODDLER

Honestly, I don’t miss toddlers, what with them trying to poison you or cut your brake lines or eating all the Cheeze-Its®.

Once upon a time, I got paid to think about disasters as a short time gig at a company I was working for.  It was a lot of fun.  I researched probabilities of things like civil wars and floods and tornadoes and visits from my ex-wife demonic manifestations.  My life for those months included a LOT of surfing of doomer porn sites and thinking about how the world could go to hell.  So, I guess that makes me sort-of a retired professional doomer.

And my thinking pattern developed a rhythm . . . If (generic disaster) happened, Then (outcome).

It was thinking about the outcome that was the most fun.  If a tornado hit the headquarters, Then what?  Well, based upon the statistics that I could find, it was an average wait of 500 years for a tornado to hit any given spot in the geographic region of the HQ.  Even for someone as old as Ruth Buzzi Ginsburg, that’s not very often.  I tracked down and tried to figure out how much money the company would lose if it got hit by a tornado, volcano, hurricane and earthquake all on the same day – a Torcano Hurriquake™.  After researching with every department, it was concluded that we might not be able to collect on a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of payments that people owed us.  As this company was a multi-billion dollar company where the executives had BMWs® that were designed to stop an RPG strike, that was less than the company spent on Featureless Grey Wallpaper® in a year.

BONUS

Hey, everybody who thinks exactly alike gets a bonus, right?

They didn’t think it was funny when I told them that a Civil War was 10 times as likely as a natural disaster shutting down operations.  When I showed them the math, they couldn’t argue, but they weren’t happy.  They didn’t like it even more when I pointed out that they could afford to spend about $100 a year in disaster prep – most of their systems already had offsite backups.  And no one was even slightly interested in shooting RPGs at the executives.

What the executives were interested in was things that they were used to, floods.  Torcanos. Hurriquakes.  Civil War?  I’m not sure I even brought up a pandemic, but they would probably have looked at me like I had six eyes.  “Just not credible.”

No Black Swan event is credible when you try to describe it to someone who is stuck in thinking normally.  Just like Taleb’s relatives looking for stability in Lebanon or me wondering when TSA will stop fondling my man parts, it’s not going to happen.  But describe trying to get on a flight in 2020 to an American in 1995?  They’d think it was a silly science fiction story.  If only we could convince the TSA to fondle Lebonese?

Which brings us back to COVID-19.  How do you discuss it with someone who is stuck thinking normally?  It’s difficult.  Their minds aren’t even playing in the zip code as people who prepare.  But even to them, it is undeniable that things have changed.  They just don’t realize it’s like herpes:  forever.

When I went to school, school lunches were something to be avoided.  The Lunch Ladies did their best with the USDA Approved sources of, I guess I’ll call it protein.  Now, school food is deemed to be a requirement even when school is out of service.  And they say that there isn’t a hell.

Yes, it was just Spring Break, and the school kitchens were closed.  And they close during summer, last I checked – every summer.  But now?  School food is a must.  Here in Modern Mayberry, they’re offering the school lunches for free to anyone who comes to pick them up.  I think it’s because at least someone in Washington pulled their head away from the bacon-wrapped-shrimp trough long enough to realize that we’re in trouble.  One of the brighter ones probably had the following thought:

If (Lunches are Free) Then (How Long Until They Become Free Community Lunches)?

If (Free Community Lunches Exist) Then (How Many People Remember Typhoid Mary Was A Lunch Lady Cook who spent 30 years in prison isolation because she wouldn’t stop killing people by infecting them with typhus cooking?).

Oops.

typhoid

If you cook them too long, they get all crunchy.

Schools are being closed.  This, in my opinion is good.  But If (Schools Close) Then (Are Daycares Any Safer?)  Your takeaway should be this question:  how long until daycares are closed?  If they can close the NBA, Then they can close daycares.  But I repeat myself.

What can you do?  The best time to prepare was last month.  The next best time to prepare is now.  I can’t tell you if you have enough cans of corn in your pantry.  And, no, that’s not a creepy metaphor referring to some orifice you may or may not have.  I mean actual corn.  Or tuna.  Still not a metaphor.  Or mayonnaise.  Whatever you normally eat, you have some extra, right?

As of now, the supermarkets are functioning.

If (Supermarkets Close) Then (what)?  The average supermarket used to have inventory for three days.  The average house, food enough for three days.   Add that up, and American is pretty close to being hungry.  What happens Then?  Martial law?  Food distributions?

If (Your Job Ceases to Exist) Then (what)?

That’s the key to preparing yourself, not only physically like those people building blanket forts with a semi-load of toilet paper in their basement as structural wall material, but also mentally.  To understand what’s going on, to be one step ahead, you have to imagine what could happen.  You have to let your mind make it real and run it to a logical conclusion.

Then you have to see if it makes sense.

TOM

Okay, not everything bad can happen.  I mean, cats with thumbs?  Silly.

When an idea makes sense, follow it through.  If so, Then what’s the consequence?  Don’t limit your thinking.  It’s a fun game.  Sure, sometimes it ends up in global thermonuclear war, but so did The Terminator™, and look how much fun that was.  But when you really think about it, you’ll look to see what happened in the past.  While the future won’t look exactly like the past, it will rhyme.  The cause and effect of many things doesn’t change.

If we’re quarantining, Then we won’t drive as much.  If we don’t drive as much, Then we won’t use as much of that sweet, sweet gasoline.  If we don’t use as much of that sweet, sweet, gasoline, Then the price of oil, refineries, and oil producing companies will drop and some will go out of business and lots of people will lose their jobs.  That’s exactly what happened last week, and will happen in the next month.

If.

Then.

COVID-19 wasn’t in my projections – I was expecting cake.  It wasn’t in the mindset of the people of the world.  Then it was.  So what happens next?  What chains will snap, further unraveling our civilization?  What changes will be permanent?

  • If you want to keep your doctors alive, Then how will you protect them from COVID-19?
  • If you want to save the people with the most future, Then how many over 40 will get one of the 60,000 ventilators? Besides me, I mean.
  • If your customers are being impacted, Then will they fail?
  • If your customers fail, Then who will pay you?
  • If government wants to control people and how they move, Then they’ll start using the tracking information from cell phones.
  • If the government tracks cell phones, Then why would they ever stop? About the time they stop touching your no-no areas so you can go to Cleveland?
  • If the clerk at Wal-Mart® tells you that “they” have been telling her to have a minimum of two weeks of food, Then will you listen?
  • If you hear from another Wal-Mart© employee that they are setting up special hours for employees to shop after the store is closed, Then will you pay attention?
  • If the government starts paying people just to breath, Then will they ever stop?
  • If I tell you that hope is not a plan, Then will you . . . plan?

We are in a Black Swan event, probably the biggest of your life, and 9/11 was no slouch.  Neither I, nor anyone else can tell you exactly what the future will bring.  But as I mentioned in my last post, the universe is a harsh grader.  The final exam is pass/fail.  And passing means you live.

Until the next exam.

If.

Then.

COVID-19: A Brave New World

“Because if just one of those things gets down here then that will be all!  Then all this – this bulls**t that you think is so important?  You can just kiss all that goodbye!” – Aliens

NEWT

I can’t stand people who are xenophobic.

Corona.  COVID-19.  There’s a catastrophe always lurking, but it’s never what you think.  But it’s always something.  Beer Flu.  Kung Flu.

Do you understand the magnitude?  Most people don’t.  I’m not even sure I do.

The last few nights here at Stately Wilder Mansion Redoubt have been especially enjoyable.  I took off some time last week, and plan on taking some time off this week, as well.  It’s a great time, especially if you’ve never read Poe’s Masque of the Red Death (LINK).

Rarely do things change so quickly:  we Wilders were preparing to go to a state-level event where Pugsley was going to compete.  Competing was an honor – it means that he was one of the very best in the state at competitive freestyle dramatic baking rhythmic knife combat.

The championship was cancelled – 6,000 people in the same place probably doesn’t make sense.  Why?  Mathematically I’m betting that at least one of the competitors or spectators would have been COVID-communicable.  6,000 would have been a wonderful place for one person to donate billions of virus fragments to thousands of others, just like one South Korean was responsible for over 1,000 cases.

batstew

Ahhh, panda.  So very tasty.  I like it with a side of bald eagle.

One of my friends and I were talking before the event was canceled and said to me, “John, it’s cancelled.  There is no way that’s going to happen.”  There was no uncertainty in his voice – it was clear he was 100% certain.  In my mind, I thought that somehow this event would sneak under the radar.  It did not.  And in retrospect, I found myself guilty of one of the chief sins of the universe:  thinking that normal can win in abnormal circumstances.  Thankfully, the penalty here wasn’t the usual penalty for such a sin:  death.  Okay, that was dramatic.  Mainly it’s feeling stupid.

Pugsley was disappointed since he had his katana sharp, his Hamlet memorized, and his recipe book tattooed on his left thigh, but cancelling the event was the right call.

The Boy was back in town for spring break, so the four of us Wilders are hunkered down in the basement as I write this.  The other three idiots have been taking turns invading my writing space playing a video game.  Thankfully, we like each other and have a reasonable supply of deodorant and soap.  If the soap runs low, I volunteer to try to make some out our fire pit ashes and the cat.

SOAP

But is it made from cat?

The Boy and Pugsley have been out into the world since COVID-19™ hit more than The Mrs. and I.  The Boy went back to his college on Saturday.  They say that the college will open at some unspecified time in the future, but sent a note out that maybe you should think about coming to get your stuff.  The Boy and Pugsley took a road trip for just that purpose.  While The Mrs. hasn’t had her job officially cancelled for the foreseeable future, I expect that will be the case.  I don’t expect either of the three of them to be required to be outside of the house in the month of March except for runs to Wal-Mart®.

TRIPS

Okay, it wasn’t that bad.  They didn’t even ask me for gas money.  Hey, have you guys seen my credit card?

My job?  It’s probably not directly required for the United States to keep going on a daily basis, so I could see myself being restricted to working from home unless I absolutely had to be somewhere to defuse a bomb or perform a circumcision an alien.  As it is, if I have symptoms of Corona, I can’t come back to work unless I’ve been cleared via a doctor’s note.  Assuming I can find one of the six doctors in the county, but, hey, I can sign a signature that might look like a doctor?  It looks just like an Ebola© virus, right?

I’ve really enjoyed the time at home.  It’s surreal, since as I listen to the Internet radio, I can hear everything crumbling as the news gets weirder by the day.  I dumped my 401k (the part that was in stocks) into the money market fund this morning on Sunday.  That means they’re supposed to dispose of it tomorrow.  But as the market is lock-limit down already, what does that even mean?  Can my money even find an exit point?

I’m betting the Fed dumps a trillion dollars, or maybe even two trillion into the market.

Tomorrow.

It’s that bad.  I hope I’m wrong, but I think it’s going to be October in 1929 bad.

COLLAPSE

Maybe this will work.  Seems stable, right?

It’s obvious that the world around us has already changed.  As we drove to Wal-Mart© on Friday for a scouting expedition, I looked at a parade of businesses that would soon be closed as I drove by them one by one on the street.

  • Move theater? Who’s going to go, especially since the movies are crap?
  • Diner frequented mainly by old people?   Old couples are going to be self-quarantined watching the Price is Right® until they welcome COVID-19 to escape each other.
  • Car dealerships?   I’d like to buy that new Jeep® Coronaâ„¢ Wagon.
  • Scented candle places? Okay, I’m not sure how they stay in business anyway in 2020, unless they launder meth money.
  • Insurance companies?
  • Laundromats?
  • Thrift shops?
  • The VFW?
  • Churches?
  • Bars?
  • Liquor stores?   Let’s not get crazy here.

People don’t really need those things.  Except for liquor stores.  From start to finish, what do people need in a modern society?  I left off Law Enforcement because they keep people I don’t like away from me.  Yeah, some of them are tools, but for the most part we really do want them around for a modern society.  Or, if we don’t have Law Enforcement, a lot more ammo.

HILLARY

But the FBI seems reluctant to stop them.  Even for speeding. 

And need is not for the basics of life, it is for the basics of life for a modern society.

  • Water
  • Transport
  • Grocery Stores
  • Electricity
  • Their Bank
  • Pharmacies
  • Internet
  • Gasoline/Fuels
  • Natural Gas

But each of these requires people going to work to make things happen.  The people who run the water system have to purify the water.  The farmers have to farm, ranchers have to ranch, and dairy owners have to, um, dairy?  The systems that provide water, milk, eggs, meat and corn are fundamental.  They keep us in Doritos® and salsa and Monterrey Jack™ cheese.

What will keep the system going?  The city water department needs chemicals, so we need a chemical plant to make chlorine.  But will we open the potato chip factory, or expect people can figure out how to cook potatoes?  Will we open the frozen food factory, or assume people can make their own pizza?  We move from a market economy to one where “shortages” are created based upon allocations – what’s the best way to minimize the number of people that congregate while minimizing the spread of CoronaChan?

I don’t know.   But I do know that some foods will be considered so frivolous or interpersonal contact intensive that good sense won’t let them be made.  Eating at a restaurant?  That involves additional people, from cooks to servers that are potential additional viral vectors.

BEAN

And as far as the tip, wash your hands.

What else don’t we need?  That’s a tough question.  Do we need the latest spring fashions shipped in from China?  Do we need the latest iPhone®?  Do we need Stephen Colbert?  Definitely not.  Heck, I’m not sure we need most of those things on any given day at all, let alone during a catastrophe.

And that’s just consumer products and a lame late night host.  How much gasoline do we need if we’re not travelling to and from work?  Not very much.  Lots of diesel is needed to move products in semi-trucks and on trains.  In the United States, about 9 million barrels (42 gallons per barrel) are used each day as motor fuel.  After Corona?

Three quarters of that?  Half?

This weekend I would have probably used 30 gallons.  Instead?  None.  Multiply that by millions of people, and gasoline demand is sunk.  Get ready for the lowest gasoline prices you’ll ever see in your life.  And, since we’ll not be transporting a lot of “stuff”?  The lowest diesel prices, too, and unlike the hoarded toilet paper, they’ll hit bottom.

ESSENT

Maybe there will be new markets???

I look at this from a standpoint that I’ve got some food in my house that I’ve bought for times just such as this.  I don’t owe much to anyone.  As I’ve indicated before, if you have money (and if money is still good, which may not be a given) you’re in for the buying opportunity of a lifetime.  Want an oil well?  You’ll never have a better chance at getting a good one, if you have money.  Especially the baby oil wells.  Contrary to popular opinion baby oil isn’t made from babies, but from toddlers.

But it’s the people who don’t have money that I’m concerned about.  The theater owner can’t keep the theater going if there are no butts in seats.  The diner waitress can’t make the payments on their car if they can’t bring plates filled with eggs and bacon with a side of biscuits and gravy to Grandpa Verne.  She depends on the tips that pay the bank for that car, since Virgil can’t hold a job now that he’s in the county lockup for fighting Clem again.

Most people depend on this week’s income to pay this month’s bills.  I’ve been there.  I lived several years of my life one month and one lost job away from bankruptcy.  Thankfully, now I can live without a month of income.  Most people can’t.

How does that end up?  It’s simple enough to say, “Well, let the banks take a hit on a month of payments.  They’re greedy and don’t need that money.”

But . . . it’s my money you’re talking about.  My money is in the bank.  How does Hells Wargo® pay me back if my money isn’t collected from the waitress and the theater owner?  For every transaction, there’s another party.  And if you have more money than zero, you’re impacted.  That money of yours that your bank has?  You loaned it to them.  And if the loans that they made don’t pay back?  What happens then?

Another system failure.  I’m expecting that the Federal government will just pony up several trillion to make it all go away.  They have a printing press, ink, and paper.  Why not?

INFLATE

It worked out okay for Zimbabwe and Venezuela, right?

From the best available information I’ve seen slowing down the WuFlu® isn’t enough.  It has to be stopped.  COVID-19® isn’t the flu.  All available data indicates that it is far more deadly, and far more contagious.

At the high end of mortality, it would kill up to 7,500,000 Americans, assuming half of the people in the US get it.  What else is a factor?  How quickly we get it.  If you want to live, having a ventilator will be an issue for some percentage, say, 5% of people who get it.  No ventilator for that 5%?  They die.  Mortality rate skyrockets without care – it’s the difference between as low as 0.5% (as observed in South Korea) to as high as 5% in overwhelmed countries.

My trigger for “not the flu” is 30,000.  That seems like a big number, but when you divide it by the number of people in America, it’s really not.  The flu (as near as we can see today) is a LOT less fatal.  And, unless I missed a day in kindergarten, 30,000 is a lot less than 7,500,000.

heaven

Okay, not me.  I have to write.  And I have HBO®.

But until we see how it pans out, I guess I get the big prize:  spending time with Wilders.  And I’ll enjoy spending time with each of them.

Except the cat.

Celebrate National Blame Someone Else Day With A True Story About The Cat and I In A Duel To The Death* (*Death Not Included)

“Blame Canada!  Blame Canada!  It seems that everything’s gone wrong since Canada came along.  Blame Canada!  Blame Canada!” – South Park:  Bigger, Longer, and Uncut

CONNERY

God Shave the Queen.

In honor of National It’s Somebody Else’s Fault Day (the first Friday the 13th of the year, and no, I’m not making this up, it’s an actual holiday), I provide the following true story that happened to me last week:

It started with the cat.

Actually, our cat.  The Family Wilder has a cat.  Sort of.  This particular cat started out, optimistically, as an inside cat.  When The Mrs. and Pugsley “found” it at the pet store and brought it home, I understood.  They were sad that we were catless.  Without cat.  Feline free.

We had previously had two cats, Cisco® and Frisco, but over time they disappeared when adventures that they were attempting went tragically wrong off screen.  The cats went out, and never came back.  That’s why I understood that they wanted another one, especially since Cisco© and Frisco were great cats.

Cisco® and Frisco were nice, polite, clean, and calm.  The Boy had named Cisco™ after our wifi router, which at least is better than naming the cat Ford Taurus®.  Frisco got his name because it rhymed with Cisco™.  I was okay with that.  Why was I okay with naming cats with names that sounded so much alike?  Because they’re cats, and I have learned that with long hours or intense focus and training, you can train a cat to do exactly what it was going to do anyway.

TOUCH

You could tell – he was always having hissy fits.

This new cat, Rory, was a mess from the start.  Instead of a bundle of fur and purr as a kitten, it was instead a bundle of hate and spite and peeing in the hall closet.  If Satan had a cat, it would be afraid of Rory.  So, we hung garlic ‘round the doors and crucifixes ‘round the window sashes and banished Rory to being an outside cat.

My family, however, has the weak will of the type that doesn’t allow people to tell Madonna that what talent she had left her just like Sean Penn did, and at the same time back in the 1940’s or whenever.  The Mrs. especially lets Rory in from time to time.  Either that or Rory has developed a ninja-like ability to flow through the shadows and silently through the doorway when we go in and out.  I don’t believe it’s a ninja since essentially it’s just a big orange rat.

RORY

The Mrs. buys Rory soft cat food, yet won’t allow me to buy him a trebuchet.

One morning, I was on a vacation day, and was alone in the house.

Or so I thought.

Inside there was also . . . Rory.  I saw it dart through the kitchen.  Rory avoids me because whenever I see it, I throw it out.  This is exactly what I decided to do right then and there when I saw it – throw it out.  I chased it, and it ran downstairs.  Since the kitchen has baby gates to keep The Mrs. barking-minions inside, I closed the baby gates to better corral Rory if it had the bad judgement to try and return upstairs.

After a few minutes Rory came back upstairs from the basement.  It ran into the dining room.  I got it to run out from under the dining table.  It was spooked, and was just a furry flash across the kitchen tile away from me.  Now, the first time Rory ran through the kitchen, the baby gate was open.  Not this time.

The maximum speed of a housecat is approximately thirty miles per hour.  This was the speed at which Rory ran head first into the bars of the now-closed baby gate.

The thunk of metal and skull attempting to occupy the same space was exactly as you’d expect.  If you’ve ever seen a cartoon cat run directly into a dirigible mooring tower owned by the Kaiser and then sit with stars orbiting around its head, well, this was exactly that.  Rory sat there, dazed, just long enough to tease me into thinking that I could catch him.

BABY

Okay, I couldn’t really see the stars, but I knew they were there.

Realizing the large bald man was still chasing him, Rory looked back at me through the haze of concussion and then jumped over the baby gate.

Or, it would have jumped over the baby gate had the stars not been obscuring its cat vision.  As Rory lept in the cat-addled state it found itself in, it didn’t jump quite high enough to clear the baby gate, and as a result, Rory’s back left leg got stuck in the bars of the baby gate.

If you’ve never seen a disoriented cat stuck half over a baby gate, well, you haven’t lived.  I’ll give you a hint – they’re rarely happy cats.  I tried to extract Rory from his predicament, despite having read what Mark Twain wrote about exactly this situation:

SHANIA

Okay, it was really Mark.  But he didn’t look this good in leather pants.

Trying to free a near-feral and likely demonic cat summoned from another dimension where Cthulhu slumbers until the stars are right for its terrible return is necessary.  Especially if said demonic cat has a hip that is stuck on the side of the baby gate opposite of the demonic cat head.

You may not realize it, but angry cats can be pointy even if you are holding on to them by the scruff of their neck.  For some reason, cats don’t like having a concussion and then wandering into a cat version of a torture device and then being lifted by their neck skin by the human that chased them into the concussion in the first place.

Go figure.

Did you realize that a cat can move its front leg just like Michael Phelps swimming through a bathtub filled with mayonnaise?  It can.  And did you know, that in addition to the four claws on the paw, that cats have a fifth one, sort of like a thumb a just behind the other four?

They do.

And as a cat swims that claw flail-ingly into the air trying to get free, that it can reach all the way back and connect to the hand holding it by the scruff of the neck?

When that claw entered the exact center of the back of my hand, it was connected to a cat.

The cat seemed to be bothered even more that, in addition to having a concussion and a nearly dislocated hip that it found its right paw paralyzed, because its claw was firmly stuck deep in the back of my hand.  What did the cat focus on?  Freeing the claw that was firmly stuck in the back of my hand.  Rory jerked his leg back and forth, but found that it the claw was still firm stuck in the leathery sheath that is my skin.  Inside the skin, the point of the claw sliced back and forth against all the internal bits, especially that internal tube that moves the blood into (or out of, I don’t have them labeled) my hand.

SCRATCH

He wore paw-jamas to bed.

I reached with my free hand and pulled the claw out of my flesh.  After freeing the claw I realized immediately that the claw was the only thing that had kept the blood on the inside of my body.  Freed of the stopper, immediately the rich, dark blood started gushing like Dracula’s Super-Soaker® at summer camp.  I took three quick steps to the sink, and turned on the faucet.  There I was confronted with a dilemma.  In one hand, I had a cat that was behaving like a jackhammer attached to a cactus.  In the other?  The water from the faucet was washing the amazingly large amount of blood away from my hand.  Whenever I pulled my hand away from the water?  Rivers of blood formed.  But I still had a cat attempting to imitate John Travolta being electrocuted in the other hand.  I was one hand short.

Without really thinking, I grabbed with the cat hand (as opposed to the blood hand) and grabbed at the paper towels.  Of course, they didn’t rip but instead the whole roll spun away on the tile, leaving me with a carpet of paper towel connected to the bunched up, blood soaked paper towel that I was holding to the back of my hand . . . with my cat hand.  Thankfully, the combination of paper towel and cat soaked up enough blood so that the path to the back door didn’t look like young Jack the Ripper’s path on the playground slide.

HAND

I really nailed woodshop in junior high.  I really liked the teacher, Coach Sevenfingers.

At the back door, I used my bloody hand to open the door, and threw Rory out with my paper towel hand.  I then slammed the door.

There was a sickening thud as the door attempted to close and then bounced back.

Oh, crap.  I had slammed the door, but I had slammed it on the cat.  I looked down, expecting to see an angry cat that was now paralyzed because I had inadvertently crushed his spine with the door.

No.

It was an oven mitt.  Even despite the blood, I was relieved to see it was an oven mitt and not the cat.

Somehow, in grabbing the paper towel to stop my house from looking like Hannibal Lecter’s kitchen, I had accidentally grabbed an oven mitt along with the paper towel, and partially threw the mitt out of the house when I attempted to give the cat an orbital velocity out of the house that Elon Musk would be proud of.

I looked down at my wrecked hand.

Amazingly, there was only one, tiny hole in the back of the hand after it stopped bleeding.  But the flesh on the back was swelling like Johnny Depp’s ego as I watched.  I got some more paper towel, soaked it in hydrogen peroxide, and elevated the hand and applied pressure so it didn’t swell to the size of Robert Downey, Junior’s ego.  I even (briefly) considered emailing my certified medical adviser, Aesop (LINK).  Instead, I remembered that this was (more or less) exactly the place where people got intravenous thingies put into their hand, so it would probably heal.

A week later, it’s still tender.

In honor of National It’s Somebody Else’s Fault Day, I blame Rory.  Your mileage may vary.

And I’m sticking to that story, just like a cat claw in the back of a hand.

Buy Gold? Is There a Downside?

“Calm down, Doctor.  Now’s not the time for fear.  That comes later.” – The Dark Knight Rises

gold

When I retire, I’ve discussed with The Mrs. that I just might become a gold prospector.  She doesn’t think that will pan out.

What’s happening right now in the financial markets is panic.  Panic comes from uncertainty.  This sort of thing was seen back all the way to the Japanese financial crisis starting in the late 1980’s.  Their banking industry was a mess.  Origami Bank folded; First Sumo Bank went belly up.  Even Bonsai Bank had to cut some of its branches.

We’re in a different place in the United States in 2020.  If I’m right, the world markets are just beginning their trip down.  I’m not sure that anything saves them at this point except for raw panic causing markets to plunge enough that Wall Street hedge fund managers have to consider the idea of flying commercial.

Different sectors will be impacted differently by the Coronavirus.  Bonus points if you understand that insurance companies make money by investing in stocks and such, and the insurance is just a way to get your money to invest to make profit, until you have a claim.  What do you think will happen when insurance companies start taking losses?  Extra credit:  what do you think health insurance companies will do when faced with huge numbers of patients that weren’t in their projections when they set their rates? There will be several pop quizzes as events unfold.  Eventually, though, the class is pass/fail.

CORONA

I’d like to self-quarantine for, oh, 20 years or so?

We’re experiencing the economic dislocation brought on by the Coronavirus, it seems like a good time to talk about some basic principles.  As I’ve noted in previous posts, my expectation is that if we see a panic, that’s the time to buy assets.  Crude oil dropped to $30, and if that price stays for six months, oil rig hands will be begging to offload their Ford Shelby GT350® at bargain prices.  If it stays that low for a year?  Texas oil execs will be offering to sell you their $281,000 Lambo Hürącán Pérförmånté™ for a handful of magic beans.

Which brings us to gold.

I regularly correspond with several folks who are commenters here or fellow bloggers.  Feel free to drop me a line:  movingnorth@gmail.com.  While I look forward to being so big that I say, “I don’t respond to every e-mail but I read them all” and then whipping an unpaid intern while yelling “be funnier!” while I lay in a hammock in the shade not reading your email on the marble patio complaining that the pool’s too hot, well, that hasn’t happened yet.

But a man can dream.

time

The best thing about the future?  No more Bon Jovi.

Anyway, folks that write get responses, and some of them lead to lengthy conversations.  One of people is Frequent Commenter Ricky.  Ricky sent me a piece he was working on, and I thought it was brilliant.  With his permission, I’m using it as a jumping off point to make a few points about our current economy.  To the extent it’s not as good as his original, well, that’s on me.  I’ll give the intern “motivation” to be better with a few nights in The Box if you guys don’t like it.

Ricky used a metaphor of Back to the Future to explain how currency has moved relative to gold, but I’m going to mangle it right from the start, which is on me, not Ricky.  Let’s say that you were going to use the DeLorean® from Back to the Future to go back to the year 2000.  That’s a nice, round number.  Why 2000?  Well, you only wear underwear from Montgomery Wards®, and they went out of business in 2000.  So, if your tighty-whities are looking more like exclusive Swiss underwear since they are holier than St. Peter’s Basilica, it’s time for a new pair, and you should probably stock up.

So, off to Wards™, and let’s say you took $300 with you.  I mean, it’s not like there’s a Wards® in every timeline, right?

When you get to the mall, you find that there’s a nice coin shop right next to Wards©.  You stop in.  You see that you can buy, for $300, an ounce of gold.

wards

I hear these were featured in the 1983 Victor’s Secret® catalog, back when men used to just walk around the house proudly in their Wards™ underwear.

What?  Why would you do that, man!  You were after the gold standard of underwear, why settle for gold?

Because, with that same $300, you could buy an ounce of gold that in March of 2020 is worth $1675.  You could buy a LOT of underwear in 2020.  So, given the choice, what would you send back from the past?  An ounce of gold, or $300 in cash, or $300 in Montgomery Ward© underwear?

Of course, the underwear.  But if you’re like me, the number two choice would be the ounce of gold from the year 2000.

Ricky then asks the question:

If you could use that time machine to send yourself a gift in 2030, what would it be?

  • $1 million in cash?
  • Or $1 million in 2020 gold?
  • Or $1 million in underwear. Ricky is sane, he didn’t ask this question.

I can certainly come across a time when, if I bought gold, it would have been a bad investment.  On an inflation-adjusted basis, had I bought gold in 1980, I’d be at about a breakeven today – and a breakeven, even including inflation, isn’t a great investment.  But at least money wasn’t lost.  But that doesn’t mean that gold can’t be a losing investment:  had I sold that 1980 ounce in 2000, I would have lost about $1500 in today’s dollars.

Ouch.

80s

If these two married, it would be a constant fight over the hair products.

But why did gold peak in 1980?

The United States was a mess.  The market was a mess.  The Soviets looked unstoppable, as did inflation.  Air Supply was on the radio, until it was declared a terrorist organization in one of the best moves the Reagan administration ever made.  Gold looked like a good investment while the world looked like it was falling apart.

Would I buy gold today at these prices of $1600+ an ounce?  Probably not.  Would I buy gold in six months after the market had crashed and gold was around $1200?  Probably then.  When (if) gold hits $1000?  Certainly.  And platinum?  Hmmm.  That looks interesting.

The long-term trend is clear:  countries are attempting to devalue their currencies to make them more competitive, and this will increase as economic tensions increase.  The Fed will actively seek to lower the value of the dollar.  What does that imply?  That the dollar will continue to inflate away until it becomes worth much less.

japan

Ah, the good old days, when Japan was going to take over the world . . . . 

But an ounce of gold will still be an ounce of gold, even if we run into problems like Japan had, where Samurai Savings and Loan faced sharp cutbacks, and investigators found that Bank of Sushi was up to something fishy, and in the end customers got a raw deal.

Warning:  I’m an internet humorist, not an investment adviser.  Most mornings I’m wrong six times before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee.  I don’t plan to change any investment position in any listed commodity in the next three days, and haven’t made any changes in the last three days, mainly because I’m lazy. 

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, #10: Economy on the Brink?

“The reason I’m going to Santa Corona, Steve, is the worst thing that can happen there is that I run out of suntan lotion.” – Wonder Woman (1978)

clock10

This year, International Woman’s Day was on Sunday, March 8, which is when we moved the clock to daylight savings time.  So now they’ll complain that they only get 23 hours for every day, while a man gets 24.

  1. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  2. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  3. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.

The clock didn’t move this month for the second month in a row.  Will Leftist state governments support Antifa violence this spring and summer?

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Virginia:  Imposing Costs – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona – Links

Welcome to Issue 10 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.  Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK), Issue Seven is here (LINK), Issue Eight is here (LINK), and Issue Nine is here (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

Generally, this section reports on either violence or censorship:  it’s one of the other.  This month, it’s both.  We’ll start with Violence.  Arthur (LINK) sent a link to a story that got some coverage – the attempted murder of people just because they supported the other side of the political spectrum.  To be clear – this man (LINK)was attempting to kill old people who were expressing support of President Trump.  Thankfully he was incompetent – driving wasn’t something they studied in Marxist theory class.

I’m amused when the Left talks about “Right Wing Extremist Violence®” because it’s generally either propaganda or a funding ploy by Lefty organizations to frack the pockets of liberal donors on the Coasts who want to be “doing something” to stop the Hate®.  At every level in the last four years, Leftist violence has greatly exceeded violence coming from the Right, and if you don’t believe me, I can point to a few congressman who were shot at (and shot) by a deranged Sanders supporter who might beg to differ.

antifa

The difference between a Leftist and a puppy is a puppy stops whining when it grows up.

As the country continues to unravel, I expect a significant uptick in violence from the Left.  If Bernie loses his shot at the presidency, I fully expect that the very first target will be the Democratic Party, with riots in Milwaukee at the Democratic National Convention.  Leftists hate the Right, but they hate mainstream Democrats even more (see links below).  And with enough practice, sadly, Leftists might become proficient at hurting people other than their parents.

Moving on to censorship, Leftists should be pleased that censorship is still in fashion.  Because there isn’t a comprehensive list of bans for YouTube®, I can only report what I’ve seen in the news or that were mentioned in passing by other sources.  Several Right-ish content producers were banned recently, and probably the most prominent one I know of is I, Hypocrite.

When I heard about the banning, I went to his Bitchute® site and watched the video he felt was responsible for his banning.  It was tame, mainly just him arguing that the Left-Right violence statistics as reported by another YouTuber™ in a debate were wrong.  He also spent a great deal of time criticizing his own debate performance and preparation.  It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in a typical political debate except he admitted when he was wrong and his opponent had a strong point.

Now his voice is silenced.

YouTube© has also started demonetizing channels that feature content that’s favorable to the Right, like Sargon’s channel.  Sargon’s biggest offense?  Dunno, having a keen beard?  I can’t seem to find anything offensive.  But demonetization is generally just the first step before deplatforming.

On the Twitter™ front, they recently permanently banned the news website ZeroHedge© for a tweet popularizing a story that the Coronavirus may have been a result of genetic engineering.  The most recent mainstream stories I’ve heard seem to confirm that’s an opinion that’s not out of the question.  So, a news story that’s (admittedly) fringe?  Instaban.  That may be one reason a “conservative” buyer is looking to shake up leadership at Twitter®.  I’m not certain that would change a thing, since most “conservatives” seem to care more about the opinions of the Left than either the truth or honest dissenting opinions to the prevailing Leftist opinions.  Crazier parties, right?

Virginia:  Imposing Costs

Last Weather Report, I wrote about the concept of imposing costs, as in the Right wasn’t imposing costs on the Left.  Here’s what I said:

. . . no politician had to pay any price for their support of the votes, nor do they feel that they’ll have to pay a price.  And, no, to be very clear, I’m not suggesting violence on them or any illegal action.  But what I am suggesting is that if they pay no personal price, they’ll never change.  What are legal ways to influence them? 

  • First – make sure that they aren’t re-elected. That requires organization and planning.  Oh, and voters.
  • Second – go through their histories thoroughly. Don’t blackmail them – find (legally) all of their dirty laundry and air it – imagine what Ralph’s browser history looks like.  Isn’t that a public record? 
  • Third – make sure that that people are rude to their wives and shun them at social functions. How will Governor Northam’s wife, Pam, feel if people tell her what they think of Ralph when she stops in to get a Starbucks®?   What if her public meetings were peacefully protested?
  • Fourth – remove their privacy in every public space. Park vans outside of their houses with billboards that advertise what a horrible person lives within – they’ve done this with Susan Collins in Maine, so it’s a tactic that’s fair game.  But the Geneva Convention does categorize playing Twisted Sister® 24/7 at their house a crime against humanity.

I’m sure that there are people who are far better at this than I am who can come up with dozens of legal ways to make a vote against Constitutional rights pretty uncomfortable. 

Well, someone did come up with a legal and peaceful way to make Virginia State Delegate Mark Levine, Leftist, uncomfortable.  Levine is the author of the bill to confiscate semi-automatic guns from law-abiding citizens of Virginia.  Brandon Howard, American, showed up in front of Mark’s house.  With a protest sign.  And a rifle.  Here’s a link to the story (LINK).

In no way did he use his rifle in a threatening fashion, but Howard did protest.

Delegate Levine’s panties got very much in a twist.  He immediately called the police, but was quite upset to find out that Mr. Howard had done nothing to violate the law.  Levine was quoted by the article by saying that “. . . if they cannot prosecute him (Howard) because of the way our Virginia laws are, well then that’s the advantage of being a lawmaker.  I intend to come back to Richmond and introduce legislation to make sure that anyone who threatens a lawmaker at the point of a gun and says I’m coming to your home with a gun unless you change your mind on legislation.  I want to make sure that person can be prosecuted.”

Mr. Levine’s sense of irony must be broken to not see how his sense of having his rights violated would result in him writing a law to enable cops with guns to stop citizens from peacefully protesting in a way that he doesn’t approve of.  The research I saw indicates that Mr. Levine has a copy of the Constitution that he keeps in his pocket.  The only conclusion I can come up with is that Mr. Levine is illiterate?

This will not be the last time that costs are imposed on the Left as they try to restrict rights.  Assume as the Right gets as sophisticated and as active as the Left in this type of work, it will increase rapidly.

Hank Curmudgeon left a link (LINK) to this guide last month and suggested I print out this figure and include it.  I’ll just leave it here, since it seems to fit:

Insurg

Updated Civil War II Index

More graphs.  February was a kind month, but the seeds were set for turbulent months to follow.  In keeping with the journalistic standards of Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise, I’ll note that I did make sure that all pictures used resulted in no harm or mistreatment of any bikini, anywhere.

Violence:

violf

Up is more violent.  Violence remains steady.  My prediction?  Peaks in June-July-August as political violence coming from the Left peaks.  That may make a strange graph, but I’ll do my best to find a fitting match in a bikini if and when it happens.

Political Instability:

politf

Up is more unstable.  Instability skyrocketed with impeachment, and then got better before bouncing slightly this month.  Expect increased instability as we move to November, with August being secondary peak during and after the conventions, and bikini’s flash red.

Economic:

econf

Down indicates worse economic conditions.  The economic indicators began to turn in February.  Based on the way this index is calculated, it does not yet show the impact of the free-falling stock market, which (as of this writing) is limit-locked down on the early futures, with oil collapsing to the $30’s.  Expect March numbers to collapse, which is in keeping with the chaotic nature of the way her hair is displayed.

Illegal Aliens:

borderf

Down is good, in theory.  This is (thanks for the terminology correction, 1chota) a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.  One would assume we’re catching fewer because there are fewer to catch.  And those aren’t legs that last forever, since they obviously end in October.

Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona

It’s rare that a society devolves into civil war when everything is going along fine.  Part of the recipe for trouble is economic instability.  The second part is hating each other – and we already have that in place.  What keeps us from killing each other is the day job, and the fact that most of us have all of the Twinkies® and Ho-Hos™ and Strawberry Starburst Piña Coladas© that our sticky fingers and sugar addled brains can pay for with our nearly maxed out credit cards.

But then enters Coronavirus:

Ooh, my little viral crop, my viral crop
When you gonna give me quarantine, Corona
Ooh, you make my economy stop, my economy stop
Got stop the production line, Corona

Never gonna wash, cough it up, such a dirty hand
I always buy the TP, hoard the food that is canned
My, my, my, aye-aye, whoa!
M-m-m-my Corona

corona

The Boy did a fine job photoshopping this.  I guess he has the knack.

As I write this on Sunday evening, March 8, 2020, the stock market has already tripped a stop-loss trigger before opening.  Oil prices are collapsing.  The Everything Bubble is imploding.

What’s next?  If this economy follows every other collapse in recent economic history, job losses start soon.  Businesses collapse.  Banks?  They’re in the business of generating profits in good times, while having the government and taxpayers pay for the bad times.  This is, for some reason, referred to as the free market.

Economic recessions can happen when the economy has been growing too quickly, too long, or both.  Sometimes they end just because it was time.  Other times, an event occurs that causes the growth to stop.  Corona has the ability to be that event, and even if the economy was in peak condition, Corona could have started a recession.

Given a recession, the political landscape will be in turmoil.  On the Democrat side, I’m not sure that Bernie can get the nomination – that’s the conventional wisdom – and I dearly hope that’s right.  A hard Leftist leading a country in times of economic trouble always provides the worst solutions, and always prescribes more of the same solutions when they don’t work – it’s like a medieval doctor performing more bloodletting when the first bloodletting didn’t work.  It’s that we never did true bloodletting.

Joe Biden isn’t really certain what planet he’s on most days, and Donald Trump will go through him like a velociraptor in a room full of kittens.  President Trump’s recent tweet that “Biden will be tough to beat” was the 2020 version of “don’t throw me in that briar patch.”

joe

And that’s no malarkey, you frog faced bony soldier.

That’s my take – but the range of outcomes is so very wide with Corona, it’s nearly impossible to make a good prediction right now.  Give it two months.  Then we won’t have to predict, we’ll know.

Buckle your seatbelt – this definitely increases the odds of conflict happening sooner.

Links

link

Most are from Ricky this month . . .  enjoy!

NBC Misunderstands Boogaloo.  Probably intentionally.  But they can’t do math, so maybe not intentionally.

Clickbait on Boogaloo.  Strangely, no Antifa reports?

Salon admits that they feel their side is Leftist.

More Leftists Boogaloo afraid.

Progressive Magazine is worried that Ed Asner is worried about people on the Right having guns.  Or something.

Globalists want Trump out.

Daily Dot revisits Electric Boogaloo, adds even more stupid than NBC.

Doug Casey talks Fourth Turning.  Good read.

Vox Magazine thinks Identity Politicsis awesome.  But only for the Left, not for the Right.

Salon is ecstatic that Bernie is a symbol of people turning hard Left.

Must read:  Roots of the Divide.

The Left . . . looking for segregation.

What is an American?  Hint:  no one can agree.

The Week talks about Ross Douthat having a stupid opinion about the divide in America in a new book review.

Socialists hate the Democrats.  See, I told you.

Auntie Beeb writes about Sanctuary Counties in Virginia, still butthurt about 1776.

Michael Lind wants bigger government, more control.