Month: October 2020

“Maybe we got ’em demoralized.” – Aliens

I was reminded that, even though I bragged I was the Inventor of the Bikini Graph®, I had produced no bikini graph in a recent post.  My apologies.  Here is the most recent GDP of the United States.  With bikini.  How can you be sad after seeing these results???

I was on the football team at my high school.  I know the football teams on television are all above average, but they had to play someone.  And we were the ones they got to play so they could be above average.

Going from memory, I’m certain we never had a winning season in high school.  My senior year, we won a single varsity game, and that was by a margin of two points – we won 8-6.  A record of 1-8 might sound like it only took nine weeks to make, but it seems a lot longer while you’re making it.

One particular game we went into the locker room at halftime, down by some amazing deficit that rhymes with 38-6.  It was winter.  The rain that was coming down on the field was freezing creating a wet yet frozen field.  It was a miserable day, but still better than watching a Disney® movie made in the last 20 years.

Our head coach then said to the team, “Listen, guys, go on out there and play like it’s zero-zero.”

I don’t know if you’ve ever gone into a locker room, realizing you were going to have to go back out onto the field and spend the next hour of your life going toe-to-toe against another team that was, statistically speaking, certain to win.  It’s as unpleasant as spending time in an elevator with Bill Clinton and his old-man onion breath.

Bill Clinton thought that the only thing that could make him cry was an onion.  Then Hillary started throwing ashtrays at him.

Now, I may not be a math major, but our team was down by 32 points.  Playing like we were zero-zero was like assuming that we were not already getting hammered like Hunter Biden on a Tuesday morning.  To me, this didn’t make sense, I even thought it was borderline delusional.  It wasn’t zero-zero.  It was at least 32 points below zero-zero.

As I got older, I began to figure it out.  What the coaches were trying to help us overcome was simple.  Demoralization.  We weren’t winning.  We weren’t going to win, since our quarterback couldn’t throw farther than about forty feet, and couldn’t count higher than 12 without taking off his shoes.  Of course, having six fingers on each hand did improve his grip, so he rarely fumbled . . .

But there is a choice in life.  You can live, knowing that you are going to fail, and acting like you’re going to fail.  Or you can live, and just do your best in every moment, knowing that you’ve left it all out there, like a monkey in a minefield, when everything goes ba-BOON.

It’s a fact:  humans eat more bananas than monkeys.  Personally?  I find that monkeys are more filling.

Living life as a failure is demoralization.

But what is demoralization?  Demoralization is depriving people of spirit, of morale, of courage.

I don’t know about you, but I was proud to go back on the field when we were losing.  Not proud that we were losing.  But proud that we had the guts to go back out there, again and again, and give it everything we had on each play.

I’m not telling any secrets when I say that it’s the goal of some groups to demoralize the people of the United States.  The news in 2020 has been a constant drumbeat to demoralize anyone who would oppose the Leftist, globalist agenda.

If you were to take them at face value, there’s no way that Americans could ever be sovereign in their own nation again.  And certainly, we should live in fear of disease for the rest of our lives and put everything on hold because of it.  Masks?  Why not make them mandatory forever.  To me?  That sounds like giving up.  And also, Wal-Mart® may not enforce the mask policy, but they still get pretty upset when I show up without pants.

Uncle Hunter always said, “Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.”  Uncle Hunter did crack.

That demoralization is not where it ends.  Looking at the news, we have seen our cities burn for months.  Sure, I don’t live in Minneapolis, and I’ve only been there a few times.  But Minneapolis is an American city.  To watch it burn is demoralizing – I don’t live in Minnesota, but if I’m an American it does hurt to watch an American city burn.  How bad is it?  BLM® and Antifa© have made cops look good.

It also shows us how far we’ve fallen.  Just like when we see people beaten on the streets for the crime of wearing a red hat that shows support for the president they voted for is a defeat for law and order.  I even heard where a protest started because an amputee’s limb got stolen – that was completely out of hand.

How do I know this?  Despite being the very example of an iron-willed observer of American politics, I occasionally admit to being human, too.  I don’t want Seattle to burn.  Or Minneapolis.  Or Portland.  These are American cities, built with American hands and American material and American labor.  We should be proud of them – we should want them to thrive.  Watching evil people destroy them?

It’s demoralizing.

Man, I hope I can get the two gyros for $6 deal there.

Me?  I’ve done several things to stop being personally demoralized:

1. I’ve stopped listening to/reading things that sap my spirit.  I used to listen to NPR® – they used to tilt left, but still provide a decent coverage that wasn’t unhinged. Not after 2015.  I got very sick of the constant partisanship and anti-Americanism.  In one segment, an NPR™ correspondent told us how awful it was that we followed our own immigration laws and that it was immoral to report illegals.  In the very next segment?  Another correspondent told us how human trafficking of illegals was evil.    I’m gonna need a bigger scorecard for this one.  Which laws are we going to enforce this week?  Are pants optional?
2. Drudge® used to be a great source of news. I thought he was balanced.  Now, after the Chinese bought his site?  Horribly tilted to the Left.  Me?  Scott Adams put me on to Ground News (LINK).  It’s a great site that actually analyzes the news in the most nonpartisan way that I’ve ever seen.  It shows which news stories are being slanted by the Left, and which ones are being slanted by the Right.  Goodbye, Drudge.  Last I heard he had an opinion about North Korean journalism:  “Can’t complain.”

I hear Best Korea is great at geometry.  They have a supreme ruler.

2. I increased listening to/watching/reading things that add to my spirit.
   1. I like Scott Adams while I’m exercising.  There are more that I like and will share if you’re interested, but I’d love to see your suggestions below.
   2. Lots of new movies are just awful. They’re preachy, but to make up for that defect, they’re also not good.  Give me the Outlaw Josey Wales any day of the week over almost any movie not made by Mel Gibson in the last five years.  I think I enjoyed three new movies in all of 2019, and none of them were as good as Sean Connery’s home videos where he just eats crunchy breakfast cereal on camera and then asks for a bottle of gin.
   3. New books are, mostly, not as good as older ones. Missing?    Missing?  Humanity being the goal, not the problem.  Missing?  Girls in metal bras on the cover.
3. It also helps to maintain or increase positive habits.
   1. Get enough sleep. This is one where I’m a chronic offender, at least during the week.  I’ll make it up on the other side of the dirt, I guess.
   2. Eat better. That’s been off and on this year.  Sadly, more off than on.  But I have found that what food I eat is very, very significant on my mood.  Also?  Rubbing butter on my chest may not help my attitude, but it does make my skin shiny and the dog will play with me.
   3. Exercise more. This is one that has immediate payoffs and long term payoffs.  The sad part is my employer seems to take a dim view of me just hanging out all afternoon in the gym with the weightbrahs.

A Canticle for Gibson?  At least one reader will get this.

There are some other things that can help, too:

• Get rid of habits that make you feel bad. Which habits?  I know mine.  Do you know yours?
• Fix things about your environment that upset you. Or don’t let them upset you.  I have a banister that’s been hanging for the better part of a decade now.  I walk by it at least once a day.  It doesn’t really bother me.  It’s also on my list.  I’m sure I’ll have it fixed by 2030 or so.
• For me, prayer works. Your mileage may vary, and I certainly don’t criticize readers that think that all of the splendor and wonder and amazing complexity of humanity that lead to symphonies and sonnets and songs and Gilligan’s Island around us are random effects of a cosmic fluctuation.  Because all of that random probability is more likely than God, right?  Okay, maybe I shouldn’t have put Gilligan’s Island on the list, though that might be proof of Satan if it weren’t for Mary Ann.

A friend in college grew up next door to her.  She would come over and have coffee with his mom.  He had, um, conflicts about this.

We all own what goes into our minds, at least at this point in 2020.  We cannot be forced to consume media.  We choose what we watch, what we hear, what we read.  We don’t owe it to anyone, anyone at all to consume lies in the news that have more holes in them than Batman’s parents.

To be clear:  this isn’t an attempt to avoid reality.  We must face truth unafraid.  Each of us must be ready to go back onto that field in the freezing rain after halftime, down by 32 points.  And I’ll agree with you if you said we lost the game – the scoreboard would agree.  But we didn’t fail.  We played every down as hard as we could.

I’m not saying we should be deluded into thinking we’ll win every game we play, but giving in to fear about possible futures is demoralization itself.

The truth is that we cannot be demoralized without our own consent.

The easiest path?  Don’t consent.  Understand that, in the end?

We win.

“Damn straight. I always wanted to do that, man. And I think if I were a millionaire I could hook that up, too.  ‘Cause chicks dig dudes with money.” – Office Space

How many economists does it take to change a light bulb?  No idea.  They’re all still arguing over why the last one broke.

Why do I write about economics?  When people talk about economics, they have been trained to be bored.  Just talk about supply and demand curves and you’ll see eyes glaze over.  That’s why I, John Wilder, invented Sexy Economics®, because curves in bikinis rarely cause eyes to glaze over.  See, genius!

Economics is real, and it’s important.  And if you want to understand economics you’re probably more likely to learn it from a supermodel than from a Ph.D. in economics.

Catastrophes happen – heck, they happen all the time.  My first marriage was a catastrophe, and it only caused the First Gulf War and the eradication of several Bolivian villages.  That’s one of the reasons I got divorced – I didn’t want to be responsible for the thermonuclear destruction of mankind.

Some relationships are just that bad.

I just ended a long-term relationship.  Good thing it wasn’t mine!

As I look towards the 2020’s, I originally was going to write a year-by-year commentary on the coming decade, at least as it pertains to economics and the potential difficulties we face.  In one sense, it doesn’t matter who is going to be elected next Tuesday (or, a month from Tuesday if the courts get involved).  Part of the fate of the United States, and world economy in general, is already baked in the cake.

At this late stage in the American Experiment, both Republican and Democratic parties agree on one thing – spending money is exactly what each side wants.  In many cases, the spending that both sides want is identical, but differs only in very small ways:  ‘Rona stimulus bux?  Both sides agree.  Both sides (roughly) even agree on amounts:  “all of it.”  It’s easy that way – it’s not their money.

The only real difference (from what I’ve seen) is that the Democrats want to add in lots of payoffs to their favored groups and make it hard for Republicans to pay of their favored groups.  And vice versa.  Both want to open the money spigots.

Where does the money come from?

Printing it, silly.  Depending on tax revenue is for amateurs.

Printing money does, however, have consequences.  One consequence we’ve seen so far is that the previous WuFlu stimulus bills have been a money conveyor back to the richest people on Earth.  Can’t go shopping at the mall?  Your local store has been shut down by a totalitarian governor?

Bezos® can bring it!

I ordered hay for my horse from Amazon.  It upset me that two days later they wanted my feed back.

Need entertainment and can’t go out?  Netflix® can bring the latest repulsive Leftist propaganda!  Facebook®?  Twitter™?  All available.  And all ready for your stimulus bux, and all brought straight to Americans on Coronavirus-free, totalitarian-approved broadband.

How is it paid for?  Those same Stimulus bux.  The stimulus to the economy has been a conveyor of money straight to the wealthiest people on Earth.  The economy?  Well, it, at least temporarily dropped to 2008 levels.  And I shouldn’t have to remind you that 2008 wasn’t exactly a great year, unless you were John McCain’s brain tumor.

But what do the 2020s have to offer?  What trends will end up influencing our lives if we don’t end up as victims of John Wilder, Civil War Surgeon in Civil War 2.0?

• Dollar Collapse.

To be fair, I’ve been expecting this one since the late oughts.  It really took years and years and years of utter mismanagement to get us to where we are today, and we really shouldn’t waste them.  I mean, we should take the example of the Australians.  They stocked up on toilet paper during the COVID-19 crisis, and were okay down under.

The signs of this particular currency collapse crisis will be unique, and an early warning will be a general increase in prices, like going to Wendy’s® and having to pay $5 for a burger.

Oops.

Government services will actually decrease.  Taxes may or may not go up, since no one really cares how much money the government has anymore.  As of 2020, the only thing holding the value of money up in the United States is inertia.  We can spend dollars internationally because everyone on Earth . . . will let us.

Why would they do that?

Unrelated news:  Chuck Norris burped today – Dallas gone.

The United States has thousands of nuclear weapons.  Who said that was a wasted investment, eh?  The Golden Rule isn’t really, “he who has the gold makes the rules,” it’s really, “he who has a nuclear arsenal and an advanced military and navy makes the rules.”

The biggest threat to the dollar isn’t the Federal Reserve™ printing it right and left.  Nope.  The biggest threat to the dollar are the Russians, Chinese, and Europeans saying that they’re not afraid anymore.  After that?  It’s autarky, where we have to depend on our own production.  That’s been the standard throughout much of history – countries have been, through the tyranny of distance, forced to be self-sufficient for all but the most luxurious of goods – if you’re in 1500’s Europe, you won’t be importing firewood to France over the Silk Road.

It won’t be so bad – the United States is still wealthy in energy, minerals, and agricultural products, and if we’re not?  We can push Canada over in an afternoon.  Trudeau would probably surrender if we sent him a nasty email.  (I love Canada, but, really, Trudeau???)

When does it hit?  Like I said, I’ve been expecting this one for quite a while.  I’m not sure the United States makes it to 2030.  Our primary saving grace?  The rest of the world’s economists ate glue in kindergarten and rode the short bus, just the same as the economists in the United States.

Consequence?  7/10.  Life goes on.  Except shabbier.  In some cases, especially older folks, life is far worse.  Most currency collapses take place in a span of a year or two, and people rapidly adjust.  Of course, those that only had the local money are now poor.  Precious metals are still the best investment:  gold, silver, and lead.

• Energy.

The secret to American energy independence is fracking, and I don’t mean all the fracking that Hunter Biden has been doing in all of those pictures on the Internet.  But a little secret of fracking:  the fracked oil wells deplete very quickly – in some cases producing 90% of all of the oil they will ever produce in the first year.

Right now, the United States is not drilling so much.  Last year at this time, over 700 oil rigs were poking holes in the ground looking for sweet, sweet oil.  Last week there were 189.  Sure, that’s more than zero, but it’s not a lot.  Oil production is down.  That makes sense, since gasoline prices are so low you could use it instead of water for bathing in Texas.  Oil demand is down, by 15-20%.  You Texans?  Take more showers.

Hunter Biden has religion.  I heard he was a Crystal Methodist.

A nation doesn’t go from 700 active oil drilling rigs to less than 200 without sending a lot of people home.  And putting rigs in garages.  Or, more likely, losing those rigs to bankruptcy attorneys.  Heck, even my attorney was so hurt by the oil collapse he had to take a job cooking.  He’s now a sue chef.

So, if the economy ever gets going again it will hit a hard limit:  energy.  In the last few years people have forgotten that high energy cost is a tax that impacts almost every bit of physical production.  If it gets to your house, it shows up on a truck.  And you can’t cheat the system.  A currency collapse is like a hurricane or an ex-wife – it starts out crazy and wild, but in the end, it will take your house.

Imagine that, everything is starting to look good, and then?

Wham.  $6 a gallon gasoline.

That’s a great way to turn an economic recovery into an economic failure.  Regardless of Biden or Trump this will happen.  Biden will just make the response worse, because he’s like my browser:  17 tabs open, and he has no idea where the music is coming from.

When does it hit?  My bet is 2023 or 2024.

Consequences?  4/10 if Republican leadership, 8/10 if Democratic, since Leftists will use this as an excuse to put in Green Energy®, which has is not an energy program, it’s a program of social control.

 

• Healthcare.

Ironically, healthcare is probably the biggest sickness in our economy.  Even before COVID-∞ showed up, our healthcare system was set up to fail.  The reason for failure is simple:  as a compassionate nation, we don’t really refuse service to anyone.  So, if an illegal immigrant mother from Mongolia and show up in an emergency room because one of your four hundred and fifty-one goat-children has the sniffles, they have to treat it.

And they can’t charge her if she can’t pay.

That explains why Pugsley went to the emergency room and got three stitches because whittling your left hand is easier than whittling a stick, it cost me $2400.  And, yes, I have insurance.  My insurance paid zero, though it did make me wish I’d have pulled out the needle and thread.

A native Alaskan tried to convince me to become an eye doctor when we lived in Alaska.  Sadly I was suffering from an Optical Aleutian.

This isn’t just an individual problem – it’s a system problem.  The first rule of real economics is:  incentives matter.  Thomas Sowell once said that if decent economists were in charge of bringing down automobile accidents, they wouldn’t put an airbag in the steering wheel – they’d put a Bowie knife pointed straight at the driver.  Then?  The driver would have the proper incentive to not cause an accident.

Our health care system has nearly zero good incentives.  Because of that, the system is broken – it’s a hidden tax on tens of millions of people who take responsibility versus a nation of tens of millions of freeloaders.

And it will, over time, bankrupt us.

When does it hit?  For the last 20 years, but it will become unsustainable (if trends continue) by 2028.

Consequences?  5/10, but 8/10 if you’re really sick or old.  Collapse of the healthcare system as it is.  Destruction of the insurance industry (which may be a good thing).  Eventual rationing of healthcare based on either cash, government mandate, or both.  Even for seniors.

There they are:  three potential fates for the 2020’s.  And you thought things would get better after 2020.

Ha!

“To cover some hot news?  Like the Lincoln-Douglas debates?” – Kolchak, the Night Stalker

I have a lot of experience with debate – I use debate to catch defish.

This is the post where we’ll do the liveblogging in the comments tomorrow.  I know there are probably some technically better ways to do it, but I’m going this way because everyone already knows how to get here and how to hit the refresh button on your browser.  Clumsy as a pit bull doing brain surgery?  Sure.  But that’s politics.

This will be the last debate for both Joe Biden and Donald Trump.  That’s not as bold a prediction as it might sound at first.

Donald will either retire after his next term (most likely), declare himself emperor (second most likely) so he’s done.  But if he declares himself emperor, imagine the reign of Trump Barron the First, as he annexes first Canada in Operation Leafblower, then Mexico in Operation Tequila Shooter, and finally Europe.  There won’t need to be an actual military action to take over Europe, they’ll just send over six Texans with varmint rifles to handle the light work.  As long as the Texans speak the national language of Europe, Arabic, it’ll be easy.

I’m sure this was what the Resistance was fighting for, n’est-ce pas?  (used with permission)

In this timeline, we all rise and salute the birth of the American Empire where there is a burger in every mouth, and riding mowers for every butt.  But there is another timeline.

Joe Biden is obviously still good at reading things if he’s had his Ovaltine® and seven straight days in a hyperbaric Tupperware™ container.  Since there won’t be a teleprompter at this debate, he’ll have to make due with radio signals.  If Joe wins, however, there is zero, and I mean zero probability that he will be able to finish a term as president without being removed from office because he lost every memory that occurred after that time his grandpa made him a scooter by nailing rollerskates to planks during the War of 1812.

Biden is gone, mentally.  If Biden is elected, I’m expecting that President Harris will take over by, oh, February.  She and Vice President Amy Schumer will then begin the exhausting task of attempting to subvert everything that produced prosperity in America.  I predict they’ll start by introducing a strict set of regulations governing how food in breakroom refrigerators is treated, even though Antifa® will by this time have conquered Sesame Street® and have declared it a sovereign nation, with focus on the letter ‘C’, the number ‘1917’ and the month of ‘October’.

Joe Biden finished a Sesame Street puzzle in only six hours.  He was proud.  On the box it said three to five years!

In a rare scoop for this website, I have obtained internal Biden-Harris campaign emails discussing the response to the ongoing Chinese Water Torture® release of ever more damning information about the Biden family.

From:  Joe Biden
Date:  October 16, 2020
To:  Jennifer Dillon (Campaign Manager for Joe Biden – J.W.)
Subject:  Hunter’s Sex Drive

Melanie.  I mean Susan.  How do I switch this thing over to Showtime®?

Can I get some of those hard candies?  The yellow ones.  The peppermint ones make my eyes ache, which makes it hard to read the helicopter.  Butterstache are my favorite.

Did I hear someone say that Hunter’s sex drives have been found?  There were people yelling that as I was, well, I’m not sure what I was doing.  But why is everyone worried about Hunter’s sex drives?  Wasn’t him knocking up a stripper proof enough, you dog faced pony soldier?  The man’s got plenty of sex drives.

 

From:  Jennifer Dillon
Date:  October 16, 2020
To:  Joe Biden
Subject:  Re:  Hunter’s Sex Drives

Boss,

No, what they found were hard drives from Hunter’s old computers.  It seems that he took laptops from the Beau Biden Foundation (the place where we launder get money from Soros and the Clintons) and then used them for Facebook® and porn surfing.  I think he liked Netflix™, too, but it seems that he’s using your login information.  At least I hope that’s the case, and that it wasn’t you watching Cuties every night since it came out.

All we can piece together is that, incredibly high on crack, Hunter couldn’t figure out why the computers weren’t working.  The fact that he hadn’t charged them in a month was a mystery to his drug-addled brain – he kept getting new computers and using them and then, assuming they were broken, took them all in to get repaired.

He had no idea, zero, of where he took them.  Did you know he was sniffing model airplane glue again?

Looks like he did give the repair place his password, “BIDEnROX69DUDE.”

 

From:  Joe Biden
Date:  October 17, 2020
To:  Jennifer Dillon
Subject:  Re: Re: Hunter’s Sex Drives

Oh.  The n doesn’t look right.  Is that how they spell now?

I’m glad he’s making models again.  Spent enough money on that kid’s model making hobby when he was a kid to buy a Syrian child.  Funny, Hunter said he just needed the glue – he said he could make his own kit.  He was dedicated – making models until he was thirty-five!

Where are my pants?  Has anyone seen that Filipino kid?  The one who smells like jasmine in the jungle?  I need someone to rub my feet.

 

From:  Jennifer Dillon
Date:  October 17, 2020
To:  Joe Biden
Subject:  Re: Re: Re: Hunter’s Sex Drives

Boss,

Great news!  I called up our contacts at Twitter®, Google™, and Facebook© and they’ve all agreed to make sure NO ONE sees this story.  It turns out that these emails suggest you took millions of dollars of money from Hunter and then used the power of the United States Government to cover it up!

Our team did a great job on the cover up.  And I think that we can count on places like Snopes®, the New York Times©, and the Washington Post™ to bury this until after Kamala takes over you’re elected president!

We’ll just hide you until the debate.  We’ll practice on Wednesday.  And no walking outside in your bathrobe like last week.

 

From:  Joe Biden
Date:  October 20, 2020
To:  Jennifer Dillon
Subject:  Re: Re: Re: Hunter’s Sex Drives

Just got up.  Man, I feel better.  What was in that blue pill?

The Facebook® is that button on my Blackberry™, right?  I just press it.  Then my snap chats, right?

How did you fix the button on my thingamabob so that it doesn’t talk to me about Hunter’s sex drives?  Did you have to change the floppy drive?

Oh, and if we want to practice debating, we should get Jeffery Toobin in here.  I hear he’s a master debater.

I hear Jeffrey Toobin wrote a romance novel – it was a real tearjerker.

Okay, these aren’t really their emails.  I don’t know about you, but I’d love to see the real emails.  They’re probably higher in actual humor value than these.

See you tonight.  I’ll even drag The Mrs. downstairs for the final debate.

“First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek?” – Silence of the Lambs

The local bank in Modern Mayberry was robbed by a ghost – it was a polterheist.

Blog note:  I will be live blogging the debate on Thursday night along with The Mrs. but I cannot promise to drink as much as last time.  I’ll be here 15 minutes beforehand.  I’ll put up a post tomorrow for the liveblog.

As careful regular readers have probably noticed, I’m generally a strong advocate of living within your means.  That means not blowing all of your money on PEZ®, fast women (or slow men), and anything related to the movie Highlander II when your paycheck hits the bank.

If you look at life as a road, debt is a great valley.  Once you drop in, it’s very hard to get out, because the deeper you get in the steeper the valley walls are.  I mean, yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death Debt, at least it’s nice to get some time outside.

Even though I’m against debt, there are exceptions, unlike my “no exception policy” about dating married women.  The Mrs. gets a little irritated about that one.

Never date a girl with a lazy eye.  They’re always seeing someone else.

Houses don’t count, as long as you live in them and don’t consider them an investment.  I understand that few people have the cash to buy a house, so everyone gets a pass there.  Heck, I’ve paid off most of my mortgage, so now it’s officially lessage.

The other debt that is (again, generally) acceptable is a marketable education.  Does this include a degree in Grievance Studies, X-Box Couch Engineering or Snack Maintenance?

Of course not.  No business wants to hire those people, unless their HR department needs drones to be sacrificed to feed the Queen HR Bee her nectar.

The biggest killer to a happy life is debt.  It hangs over you.  When I was in debt, I thought about it several times a day, wondering how I could ever get out of debt.  Thankfully, no one really needs both kidneys.

Even worse than debt is the interest you have to pay on debt.  Not only do you have to pay back money you didn’t have in the first place, you have to pay more back.  Probably the only weapons greater in destructiveness in international relations than nuclear bombs are interest rates.  Oddly, it isn’t listed as an act of war to send in the International Monetary Fund to make loans to nations who can’t afford toilets.

My mother-in-law said her dogs liked to drink out of the toilet because the water was cool and fresher than the water in their bowls.  Then I began to wonder – how did she know that?

As an aside, I indicated once that I thought that a moratorium on all interest payments was worthy of consideration.  There was a huge pushback from readers indicating I didn’t understand how the modern economy worked.  In the meantime, European Central Banks have issued debt with a negative interest rate.  For those not paying attention, that means if you deposit money, you have to pay the bank for the privilege of depositing it.  It just shows the old story is true, give a man a gun and he’ll rob a bank.  Give a man a bank?  He’ll rob everyone.

Hmmm.  And I was told that I don’t understand how the modern economy works.  I think I’ll win this one in the long run.

Debt is a killer.  Many Americans borrow money for a cool pickup truck to drive to work to have enough money to pay for a cool pickup that they can drive to work so they have enough money to pay for a cool pickup so they can drive to work so that they have enough money to pay for a cool pickup . . . .  (Lather, rinse, repeat.)

Hmmm.

What do you call a fight between loan sharks?  A conflict of interest.

I did tell an employee that was reporting to me that I suggest that people never buy a new car unless they had a cool million, cash.  I stand by that.  There are reasons for that:

• Older cars last longer than almost every Hollywood marriage. Especially to Angelina Jolie and her coven of children stolen from each continent on Earth, except Antarctica, because there are some things that even penguins won’t put up with.
• Generally, older cars cost less to maintain than a Hollywood starlet. And they maintain their value better, too.  Ever try to trade Jamie Gertz for a ’67 Camero?  Zero takers.
• If you follow the N+1 rule (one car for each driver in the house who has to go to school or work plus a single spare for the whole family) your job is safe. You always have a car that works even if that car is older than Madonna’s first facelift.

Following this rule has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in car payments.  It has saved me tens of thousands of dollars in car insurance payments, tens of thousands of alimony payments to disgruntled starlets, and thousands in car taxes.  But it’s also a lifestyle – you have to be comfortable not having your ego wrapped up in cars.

That’s just one facet of turning down luxury.

My friends say I have a big ego, but enough about them.

Your income will fluctuate throughout your career.  It’s really okay to indulge from time to time, based on that income.  For me, that indulgence has been reflected in:

• Nicer wine. Not great wine, but not pruno, either.
• Amazon® doo-dads. If I saw a sphere of tungsten on Amazon™ and it was 2AM and I had a few beers, maybe I’d buy it (it’s on the sitting room coffee table).  For those not in the know – tungsten is extraordinarily dense, somewhere close to gold, but not as dense as a CNN® contributor who can’t tell if the Zoom© call is on “mute” before defending Sparta all by himself, if you know what I mean.
• Not questioning every purchase of The Mrs. When dollars are tight, the marriage has to be tighter, since every purchase is a joint decision.  Then I become, “why did you have to use two sheets of paper towel on that” man.  For reference, Jeffery Toobin only needed one sheet of paper towel.

But built into this is that purely fun purchases happen only if you’re debt-free with a good income stream coming in.  If not?  It’s a joint decision.  With projections.  And charts.  It takes a good marriage to deal with that.

The most important part of luxury is making sure that you can walk away from it.

Is my pride in my car?

Well, no.  Obviously.  My newest car is five years old and that’s The Mrs.’ daily driver.  The one I drive regularly was built just after they found Saddam Hussein hiding in a hole in the desert.  My ego isn’t wrapped up in my car.

I bought a cheese grater that was owned by both Josef Stalin and Saddam Hussein.  It was the grater of two evils.

One of my favorite stories revolves around a group of Dallas housewives who were at a kid soccer game.  All of the mothers are there with the latest models of cars from Lexus® and Mercedes™ and Audi©.  But one mother drives up in a ten-year-old Buick™ and drops off her kid.

“I wish I was like her,” one mother said to another, “so rich that she can drive an older car.”

I read a statistic a few years ago – I’ve never been able to find it again.  But it said that something like 70% of people driving around in a Mercedes™ had a loan on it.  Think about that – me in my old car with one light-second of miles on it, owned free and clear, has more money than the average Dallas housewife.

Pursuit of life for the pursuit of pleasure is, in the end, a meaningless pursuit.  The idea isn’t that the road is easy, the idea is that you have the strength for the road.  Pleasure isn’t a goal, it’s a side trip that should last a few days.

Then, back to the road.

“Tomorrow the world will watch in horror as its greatest city destroys itself. The movement back to harmony will be unstoppable this time.” – Batman Begins

H.P. Lovecraft walks into a bar, and the result was such that any man would be driven mad by the events that followed.  Oh, and there was a rabbi and a horse.

When I was a kid, as I’ve established before, I read.  A lot.  At least an hour a day on the school bus.  I’d read at home, too, since the nearest kid lived miles and miles away from Wilder Mountain, and occasionally Ma Wilder ran out of pork chops to tie around my neck so the dog would play with me.

Reading, though, held a very special place around our house, and was something that was revered by both Ma and Pa.  One example?  While I technically had a bedtime, Ma Wilder actively encouraged me to stay up as late as I wanted to if I was reading.

Game on.

What did I like reading?  Science fiction was number one on the list, and horror was number two.  (I also read a few fantasy novels, mainly Tolkien and Robert E. Howard, but that’s a can of worms I don’t want to open when I say most fantasy outside of Tolkien and Howard is just junk.  Oops, I just did.)

Stephen King named his son Joe.  No, I’m not joking.

The problem with writing horror is that it’s even harder to find good horror authors than it is to find good fantasy authors.  Stephen King was just about the best – it’s important to remember that at one point the guy really could write a good story that was scary.  I lost more sleep to ‘Salem’s Lot than any book, ever.  Even though there were approximately twenty people in a ten-mile radius of where we lived, I was pretty sure that at least five were vampires when I was twelve.  And most of the people were old – can you imagine the sound when the dentures with fangs sloshed around on their gums?  And then they’d offer me hard candy after they exsanguinated me.  I still shiver when I think about it.

I found Edgar Allen Poe disappointing.  Not scary.  I think it was his enormous head, which was counted as the ninth planet until astronomers had a vote.

Perhaps the greatest disappointment to me?

H.P. Lovecraft.

Lovecraft had such a reputation for being scary.  Sadly, the man just couldn’t write.

H.P. Lovecraft’s cookbook was called the Necro-nom-nom-icon.

I bought several Lovecraft books while I was growing up, and perhaps because of the prose in the format of “great creeping masses of undulating nouns that, if stared at, would drive a man to madness,” the stories just never caught my imagination.  They weren’t scary to twelve-year-old me.  I never felt that I’d die because of a “color out of space” or that creatures from the “mountains of madness” would ever threaten me, except for boredom.

As I got older, I discovered that there was one thing that Lovecraft was good at:  amazing ideas.  And when good writers finally took his work, they produced some amazing fiction and movies.  I rented the VHS tape of Reanimator without knowing that it was a reworking of an old Lovecraft tale.  It was amazing, though I don’t recommend it AT ALL if you’re a horror lightweight.  Of people who figured out how to really bring Lovecraft to life, Brian Yuzna is the winner.

But Lovecraft’s ideas remain.  Those are actually interesting to read about, even though he didn’t do a great job executing on them.  Perhaps Lovecraft’s most famous idea is that of Cthulhu.  What’s Cthulhu, besides the sound my toilet made after Pugsley flushed 142 novelty-size bars of soap (this really happened) when he was three?

I read a horror book in braille once.  I could always feel when something bad was about to happen.

For those of you that aren’t familiar, Cthulhu is an Elder God – one of the creatures of the distant past.  I’ll let Lovecraft himself describe Cthulhu

There had been aeons when other Things ruled on the earth, and They had had great cities. Remains of Them, he said the deathless [Chinese guy] had told him, were still to be found as Cyclopean stones on islands in the Pacific. They all died vast epochs of time before men came, but there were arts which could revive Them when the stars had come round again to the right positions in the cycle of eternity. They had, indeed, come themselves from the stars, and brought Their images with Them.

The really scary idea, to me, is that these Elder Gods are amoral.  They couldn’t care less about men.  We are, for the most part, as insignificant as the wrapper on a Whopper® to Oprah when she’s in an Oprah Whopper™ Frenzy© – trust me – keep your arms and feet away from the Whoppers™ when this happens.

Face it, we all knew that the Zuck wasn’t really from this time and dimension, right?

And, these Elder Gods couldn’t even live in our time, because the “stars weren’t right” and had to wait until the stars were right again.  That was an especially creepy thought, because who knew when that was going to be?  Was it next week?  Next year?  It was certainly going to happen, but when?

Lovecraft may be long dead, but our current economic situation makes me think that we’re living in what I’m calling the Cthulhu Collapse.  It’s a collapse that’s out there, frozen as the guy who went to absolute zero – but don’t worry about him, he’s 0 k.  Just because the Cthulhu Collapse isn’t living and breathing right now doesn’t mean it’s not real.

It’s just waiting for the stars to align.  Here are some of the stars moving into position:

• In the fiscal year just ended, we had a deficit of over $3 trillion. This is more than all of the last three years.    Heck I know some people that don’t make $3 trillion in a whole year.
• The overall public debt increased from somewhere around 75% of GDP to over 100%. Also in just one year.  The current public debt is higher than the highest year of World War II, and we didn’t even invent a cool new bomb or 99,465 fighter planes.  I’ll go on the record as saying that producing 99,465 prop-driven fighter planes would much more cool than bailing out a Wall Street firm.  Any Wall Street firm.
• The balance sheet of the Federal Reserve® (which is neither Federal nor a reserve, discuss) has increased by $3 trillion.   Wonder where all that money went?  PEZ®.  That must be it.
• For those of you keeping score on our home game, that’s a total of at least $6 trillion in additional money sloshing around. This year.  No wonder they didn’t have enough cash left to pay to make coins.

The shortest horror story so far?  2020.

• Gross Domestic Product has dropped by 5%, at least. That means the economy produces less than it did last year, by at least $1 trillion.  But real math says you have to subtract the deficit and the Fed balance sheet gains, so my money says that the economy really dropped by 35% last year if you drop the financial steroids that have been pumped into it.  But a plane isn’t like an economy, since planes only crash once.
• At least 80,000 small businesses shut down between March and late July, 2020. Small business’ fail, a lot, right?  This number is at least 36% higher than normal.  One report I heard said that more than half of San Francisco’s small businesses closed so far this year.  The theaters are re-opening as libraries filled with novels that have been made into movies – they’re calling it paper-view.
• Businesses that are staying in business don’t need to rent (as much) real estate anymore. Put simply, it’s far cheaper to have the wagie workers go home and work than rent the 37^th floor of the Hastur The Unspeakable Tower in downtown Chicago.  Or was that the Chase® Tower?  I get confused when I compare monsters of unspeakable horror and fictional creatures that Lovecraft wrote about.  Regardless, the lowered occupancy rates have knock-on effects.  Lowered car and transport consumption.  Lowered gasoline consumption.  Lowered tire use.  Lower number of excuses on what you were doing late on Tuesday night.  The result?  Even lower GDP.  Even more lost jobs.  Lost lingerie sales for mistresses.
• As Federal funding (giveaways) to businesses dry up, businesses are cutting workers, permanently. In many cases, these are very good jobs.  The bright side of having your financial life collapse?  I heard about a guy who lost his wallet and then had his identity stolen.  The crook sent him a note in the mail:  “It sucks to be you.”

Do I think the economy is in serious trouble?  I do.  I’ve said that for years, and this is nothing but an acceleration of trends that were already in place.  The general consensus is that the printing presses should go into overdrive to print more money to give to people:  this is nearly the only thing that nearly every politician agrees on in 2020.

The Mrs. wants me to make more money.  Turns out you need a special paper for that.

Part of the problem is that so much of the money is sloshed into the stock markets in ways that aren’t at all clear.  This is on purpose.  How many dollars have been pumped into the market to keep it stratospheric?  It’s not a coincidence that this is the year that the billionaire class has seen the biggest gains ever in their wealth.  Elon Musk alone gained enough money this year to buy Albania.  I’m hoping he reforms the Albanian Navy – their submarines have to resurface every two minutes so the rowers can breathe.

So, even though Lovecraft’s ideas are great, his stories aren’t scary.  But when the Cthulhu Collapse hits, after the stars align?

Lovecraft put it this way:

When the stars were right, They could plunge from world to world through the sky; but when the stars were wrong, They could not live. But although They no longer lived, They would never really die. They all lay in stone houses in Their great city of R’lyeh, preserved by the spells of mighty Cthulhu for a glorious resurrection when the stars and the earth might once more be ready for Them. But at that time some force from outside must serve to liberate Their bodies. The spells that preserved Them intact likewise prevented Them from making an initial move, and They could only lie awake in the dark and think whilst uncounted millions of years rolled by. They knew all that was occurring in the universe, but Their mode of speech was transmitted thought. Even now They talked in Their tombs. When, after infinities of chaos, the first men came, the Great Old Ones spoke to the sensitive among them by moulding their dreams; for only thus could Their language reach the fleshly minds of mammals.

Horror movies don’t scare me.  What scares me?  Looking down at my phone and seeing five missed calls from The Mrs.

See?  Not scary.

But the Cthulhu Collapse?  That’s something that’s scary.  Have fun getting some sleep tonight – I hear the stars are simply lovely!