The Corruption Based Economy

“Look, you’re corrupt, we’re corrupt. There’s one difference. We’re honest about it.” – Get the Gringo

A hitman makes people nervous people past tense.

News came out this week that high officials of the Federal Reserve® were allegedly caught front-running trades.  I use the word “allegedly” because that’s the word you use when you are dealing with people who might be allegedly low-life allegedly stinking allegedly thieves.

What’s front-running?  Well, if you know that a client is going to buy a LOT of stock, you buy at the price before the big news.  Why?  Well, when the price goes up, you benefit from the price increase.  Duh.

Why was the Fed™ buying stock (or bonds), anyway?

The quote was that the Fed® was buying securities to “help markets function smoothly.”

Huh.  I thought, you know, actual people buying and selling stuff was supposed to do that.  Silly me.  I missed that part in Econ 101 where the professor said, “Oh, and if the market doesn’t do what the government wants it to do, it can cheat on a massive scale with money it printed just because.”

If you hear someone scream in space, does that mean the vacuum is broken?

When the “Plunge Protection Team” was originally formed by Federal Reserve® in the late 1980s, it was secret.  It would (in theory) see a down day on the stock markets and swoop in late in the day with well-timed purchases to keep the market from going down.

We can argue all day about the morality of that.  My take is that it’s about as moral as Joe and Hunter Biden teaching in a pre-school.  The market serves a function – to give prices.  Prices provide real-time data and information.  To distort prices creates artificial winners and losers.

To be clear, a stock going down in price can be a very good thing.  Bad companies should die.  If they serve a purpose, someone else will do it.  For the Fed© to purchase stocks (or bonds, or debt) to prop up companies isn’t helping them, it is rewarding financial morons by giving them more money.

Regardless, because it’s 2021, the Fed™ is out there buying stuff willy-nilly on a regular basis to manipulate markets.  And the big dogs at the Fed© know what the Fed® is buying.  So, for one of them to buy stocks in a company whose assets the Fed® is purchasing?

That’s what is normally called criminal.

There’s a show for criminal Democrats who go fishing.  It’s called, “Off The Hook.”

But why single out the Fed®?  I mean, it’s not like Federal Judges are doing it, too, right?

Sorry to disappoint you if you thought the judiciary was clean.

In the last decade, 131 Federal Judges took part in 685 lawsuits where they had a financial stake in a company that was a party to the lawsuit.  This is a violation of Federal law.  My bet?  In the world of corruption that is 2021, this will be ignored.  At most, the Federal Judges will get a slap on the wrist, perhaps a memo to their file.

Government employees are never punished unless they’re not acting in the interest of the system.  They can ignore work.  I have a friend who had been a Federal bank examiner.  His job was to go in and evaluate the systems at banks to make sure they were good.  He told me, point-blank, “If I were to get a smaller bank and find a violation, it would be okay, but a big bank?  They just wanted good results for a big bank.”

Why?  Corruption is rampant in every part of the financial system.  It’s rigged.

In Soviet Russia you rob bank.  In United States, bank rob you.

The stock market is rigged.  The Federal Reserve© has a bias that stocks should go up, just like the value of the money that you worked for should always go down.

Does gold always go down?

No.  But the value of a dollar should always decrease.

The reason for this is fairly simple.  The Federal Government has taxes on wages.  It has taxes on imports.  It has taxes on death, it has taxes on (checks list) tanning.  I’ll repeat:  there are Federal taxes on tanning.

Inflation is nothing more and nothing less than a tax on money, or, more properly, a tax on productive people who saved and earned that money.

A is for apples.  B is for bananas.  What is C for?  A plastic explosive. 

So, what is it that we know, without a doubt, is corrupt?

  • The Federal Reserve®.
  • Federal Judges.
  • Financial regulators.
  • Money.

I’ll add one more:  the overall justice system.  George Soros has bought election after election for District Attorneys that allow Leftists committing crimes to walk free.  As I’ve written before, this is the final poison for Western judicial systems.  Without the promise of a fair and impartial trial, without the certainty that we are a nation of laws rather than men, justice will fall to the hands of ordinary men.

Unlike Batman®, ordinary men will use guns.

We live in an amazingly risky time.  The problem with corrupt systems is that they fail when trust erodes.  If citizens don’t trust that the outcomes are fair?  I mean, what if the elections were fraudulent?

Failure.  Corruption breeds more corruption.  Injustice?  It breeds more injustice.

A society based on corruption and injustice will devolve into anarchy or totalitarianism.

I have some candy canes that are in mint condition.

Saving our systems requires justice.  Justice requires a moral people.

Hmmm.  However do we get that?

I wouldn’t ask a Federal Reserve® governor or a Federal Judge.  After all, Pa Wilder told me not to hang around with people of poor character.

Operation Keelhaul

“You’re the coach. Coach them so they’re as good as the dead team was. Or, I’ll have you killed, okay?” – The Death of Stalin

If you want some fun, read the Zaporozhian Cossacks’ letter to Sultan Mehmed IV.  It’s not family-friendly.

Pa Wilder was over during his 1942-1945 all-expense-paid trip to Europe, and only occasionally talked about his experiences.  One thing I remember him talking about was seeing the prisoners of war.  Mind you, he wasn’t telling me these stories, he was telling his buddies after a snifter or two of bourbon and branch water, as Pa called it.

What Pa mentioned was the ratio of guards to prisoners.  The Germans, Pa said, had a “guard for every 100 or so prisoners.  And the rifles were unloaded.”  The message I took away from this was:  for the Germans, the war was over.

The Soviets, Pa said, were different.  There was a guard for every three men, and they had machine gun emplacements continually manned watching the perimeter of the camps.

The first thing that puzzled me was this:  if they were on the same side, why did the Americans have prison camps filled with Soviets?  Why not just let them loose?  The second was:  why were the Soviets so dangerous?

The answer to these questions (which I discovered last week) is simple but horrifying.

The end of a war, any war, is messy.  That’s when massacres and atrocities happen:  the victorious troops decide that taking prisoners is optional, and the losers don’t have any way to fight back.  Of course, the looting and worse on now defenseless cities turn the tragedy of war even darker.

Sure, massacres occur during war, and throughout history, it’s been a bit of a risk to be taken prisoner – wars stress the systems that produce and distribute food.  The last people a country is interested in feeding are those who were fighting against it.  This has always been true.  It is the rule, rather than the exception, that horrible things happen to POWs.

At the end of World War II, however, there was a horror that I was unaware of, namely the forced repatriation of both Soviet and Russian citizens during and after the War.  Note that I wrote Soviet and Russian citizens, that distinction was on purpose.

The losers in the Russian Revolution, many of the White Russians and Cossacks left Russia twenty or more years before World War II, and were never, at any time, Soviet citizens.  Stalin desperately wanted these people back.  Why?

Because he couldn’t stand having anyone who opposed him breathing.

These force “repatriations” consisted of at least, (the numbers are fuzzy) tens of thousands of people who had never been Soviets to the Soviets.  Millions of prisoners of war held by the Germans, Soviet soldiers, were likewise sent back, though many didn’t want to return.  Why?  Many had put on German uniform and had fought alongside the Germans.

Stalin probably wouldn’t have approved of that.

At the Yalta conference, Stalin demanded every Soviet citizen, and every former Russian citizen be returned to him.  All of them.  And Churchill and Truman let him get his way.  Possibly that was due to revenge.  Stalin had executed generals for surrendering unless they were gravely injured.  What would he have cared for a common boy from Siberia who, surrounded by Germans, surrendered?

So, we have tens of thousands of Cossacks that were involuntarily repatriated.  How many others?

Probably millions.  These Soviet soldiers had seen the relative wealth of the West, and wanted to stay.  Obviously, the ones that fought in German uniform were especially keen not to head back East.  But it wasn’t just them – hundreds of thousands of regular folks fled to the West during the war, too.

It is likely that at least 2,000,000 if not more (I saw a number as large as 5,000,000) people were tossed back to the Soviets at the end of the war.

Many of these people didn’t want to go back.  At least 200,000 of these people went straight to the GULAG, and there is evidence that thousands of these people were summarily executed as soon as they ended up in Soviet hands.

This is a war crime – not a figurative war crime, but a “by the letter of the law” war crime.  People in the government of the United States went along with this.  Knowingly.

My takeaway is this:

Government is, at best, neutral.  In the United States, we intentionally formed our government to protect the individual.  George Washington said, “A government is like fire, a handy servant, but a fearful master.”  So, government was supposed to help the people.

Oops.  Guess that went off track.  And if you look at the manner in which the government interferes in your life today, it goes far beyond what it did in 1945.  It goes far, far beyond “the jab”.

We are living in a world where government teachers teach children that are forced to be there that:

  • government is the solution to all of their problems,
  • that Antifa® is good,
  • sexuality is the greatest god, and
  • the biggest problem is that government isn’t solving more of their problems through “charity” enforced by the barrel of a gun.

We are in a time which will be named by future historians.  If they are honest, they will call this period, “the Crazy Years,” or “the Turmoil,” or “the Years of Lies.”

The “jab” is the latest insanity.  Despite amazing amounts of growing evidence that the mRNA treatment is likely far more deadly than the ‘Rona in young people, the government is pushing it – mandating it.

But certainly government wouldn’t do something that wasn’t in the best interest of the people.

Right?

H/T TIC

 

Time: It’s The Only Thing You Have

“I didn’t invent the time machine to win at gambling. I invented a time machine to travel through time.” – Back to the Future 2

I have two dogs, Rolex® and Timex™.  They are watchdogs.

Time.

Of things that have long fascinated me, time is at the top of the list.  Even when I was a little kid, time fascinated me.

The idea that time, of all of the physical parameters of the world there was the one that we couldn’t control.  Humanity has mastered the power of the atom, at least partially.  We haven’t tamed fusion, but we can create it, and have several fewer islands in the Pacific because of it.

Humanity has dammed the largest of rivers, giving us power.  We have used technology to shrink the world.  The first recorded circumnavigation of the world took 1082 days.  Magellan didn’t quite make the whole trip, but he still gets the credit on a technicality.

Now?  The International Space Station does an orbit in 90 minutes or so at 17,150 miles per hour, which is nearly as fast as Haitians are entering Texas.

Humanity has conquered the riddle of steel – we’ve made steel buildings that reach upwards into the sky to please Crom.  We have conquered climate – people live at the South Pole in perfect comfort, as well as managing to live in Houston without melting into puddles of sweat.

Batman® couldn’t solve the riddle of steel, but he could name the worst riddle:  being riddled with bullets.

We can see at night.  We can talk, nearly instantly, with people a continent away.

My phone buzzes every time there is motion outside my front door – it’s like having a superpower of sensing where and when there is activity at a distance.  Another superpower is being able to access obscure facts anywhere on the planet that can reach a cell signal.

But time remains fixed.  It flows only one way.  And it is the most subjective of our senses.  Even Pugsley notices it:  “This summer was so short!”

He’s in high school.  That’s when the transition from the endless summers of childhood begin to transform into the fleeting, never-ending carousel of years that is adulthood.

Best thing about being in Antifa® is that you never have to take off work to protest.

I’ve long felt that I understood why this was.  Let me give it a shot.

For a newborn, the second day it’s outside and breathing is 50% of its entire life.  For a six-year-old, half of their life is three years – much more.  It’s not a big percentage, but it’s much smaller than 50%.  For a sixteen-year-old, half their life is eight years.

If you’re forty – half your life is twenty years.  1/8 versus 1/20?  It’s amazingly different.  We don’t perceive life as a line.  We’re living inside of it – we compare our lives to the only thing we have . . . our lives.  Each day you live is smaller than the last.

But that’s not everything.

As we age, novelty decreases.  When we’re young, experiences and knowledge are coming at us so quickly that we are presented with novel (new and unique) information daily.  New words.  New thoughts.  New ideas.  That’s why babies keep falling for that stupid “got your nose” thing.  They don’t realize that I can reattach it.

Three clowns were eating a cannibal.  One clown says, “I think we started this joke wrong.”

Over time, though, novelty decreases, as does the percentage of your life that each day represents.  Ever drive a new route somewhere?  When I do it, I have to focus my attention.  It seems like it takes longer because I’m having to deal with novelty.

I’ve had my “new” laptop nearly seven years.  I had my old laptop for longer than that, yet my “new” laptop still seems like it’s temporary.

There are only so many routes I can drive to work, so much novelty that I can find in a daily drive.  Even a commute of an hour begins to fade into a brief moment in time if it’s the same commute, day after day.

Work is similar.  Over time, we gain experience.  Experience shows us how to fix problems (and sometimes how not to fix them).  But that experience of taking a solution and modifying it to fix the next problem isn’t as hard as fixing the first problem.

The fact that each day is a smaller portion of my life, combined with the fact that as I get older, the possibility that I see something new dims.  I’ve solved a bunch of problems in my life.  Finding a new one is . . . difficult.

Life goes faster, day by day for me.  Every endless summer day of youth is in my rearview mirror.

And yet . . .

Each day is still 24 hours.  I can still use each day and live it with all of the gusto of a 10-year-old fishing for trout after building a tree fort, playing with his dog, and building a model of a Phantom F-4 to dogfight with the MiG 21-PF already hanging from the ceiling.

They did not see that coming.

Even though those 24 hours seem shorter now than at any time in my life, they are relentless in their exact sameness.  I get to choose how I spend those moments in my life.  I get to choose what I want to produce, and how hard I work to make it happen.

Humanity may never have the ability to crack time – it appears that even today, outside of sands falling from an hourglass, we can only describe time as a fundamental entity, something we measure against.

Does the flow of time vary?  Certainly.  But only if we’re moving at large fractions of the speed of light or are caught in a huge gravity well, but let’s leave your mother out of this.

Gravity is just a social construct invented by an English Christian to keep you down.

I have come to the conclusion that I will likely never understand what, exactly, time is, outside of this:

Time is all we have – it is what makes up life.  We measure our lives in it, because no man can buy an extra hour of life.  We have the hours we have.  The only difference is what we do with that time.

I mentioned in a previous post that (during the week) I often get by on scant hours of sleep.  That’s because I have more things that I want to do in my life than I can fit in a day that’s less than 20 or 22 hours some days.

I choose to try to do more, to try to make use of this time, because each moment is a gift.

Maybe I can settle for that definition of time:  a gift.  Each moment is a gift.

Don’t beg for more, or live in fear of losing them.  Just make each moment count.

Perhaps that’s the secret and precious nature of time.  It is the one thing we should never waste, and never wish away.

Efficiency, Collapse, And Elisabeth Shue In A Bathing Suit

“Maybe I’ll see if the reindeers like meat this year” – Aqua Teen Hunger Force

A herd of cows, a flock of sheep, a treason of Democrats.

I’ve been writing a lot about efficiency recently, and this is probably my last discussion about it for a while.  The reason I’ve been focusing on it is because it explains much of what is falling apart in the world in 2021:  the efficiency that made the world economic machine run is sputtering and it appears that our economy, as well as our culture, are headed for a cold, dark winter.  Thankfully that’s okay for the koala bears – they can still eat apocalyptus.

If I am right, the economic winter will do nothing get colder in the coming months, perhaps catastrophically.  Let me (again!) point out some of the consequences of efficiency.  I’ll pick something that used to be relatively inefficient:  a farm.

I said that farming used to be inefficient.  I never said that farming was ever easy.  There are several television series where modern folk in Britain recreate farm life in the Edwardian Age (the age of Edward Snowden, I think), the Victorian Age (Victor Van Doom, probably) and the Elizabethan Age (named after either Elizabeth Warren or Elisabeth Shue, not sure which).  They show that farming (for the farmer) has always been filled with risk and generally not really very lucrative unless you knew how to hustle.

You’re thanking me right now that I didn’t look for a picture of Elizabeth Warren in a bathing suit. 

Why do British people do this?  I don’t know.  They collect vintage toothbrushes and old tweed jackets and seem to spend most of their lives giving each other crumpets.  But the television shows from watching these modern British folk LARP as farmers from times when actual Samurai roamed the Earth are, well, fascinating.

They illustrate nicely how farming is different today than it was in 1600 when Elizabeth Warren (Indian Name:  Princess Who Tells Many Lies And Gets Not Many Votes) was teaching the Pilgrims how to farm by burying 1,000 calories of fish to get 500 calories of corn (her people call it maize).  There have been an amazing number of technological improvements during that time, all of which have allowed the maximization of yield on farms:

  • Use of standard, high yield hybrid seed instead of hundreds of varieties of grain,
  • Use of finely tuned amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur fertilizer instead of Elizabeth Warren’s stinky dead Pocahontas fish,
  • Use of computer-controlled moisture sensors driving optimum water delivery, instead of rain or whatever water that might be in the ditch,
  • Use of pesticides instead of extremely active cats,
  • Use of herbicides instead of extremely active children, and
  • Use of computerized mechanical planting and harvesting technology instead of human and animal power.

I still try to avoid hoes, though.

Each of these is an amazingly powerful technology.  Together, they allow amazing amounts of calories to be grown.  Current mechanical farming sensors match the grain yield in particular locations in a field to the amount of fertilizer and seed used in those locations the next year.  Some of these “tractors” nearly drive themselves using GPS while the “driver” Facebooks® in a comfortable air-conditioned cab.

Cool, right?

Absolutely.  We couldn’t support the billions of people here on Earth without this tech.  But each part of this tech leads to a vulnerability.  Hundreds of varieties of seeds?  Not a disease on Earth takes ‘em all out.  One variety of seed?  We’re one disease away from an “eat your neighbor” level famine.

The rest of the vulnerabilities brought about by the technologies bullet-pointed above is left to the reader.  N.B.:  there are more vulnerabilities than bullet points.  Many more.

There are more fat people (on-board calorie preppers) than hungry people in 2021.  40% of people in the world are overweight, so, we’ve effectively solved world hunger.  Most years in the last decade have been devoted to solving “world hungry” which can be solved with nachos at midnight.

For now.

Feeding the hungry is a silly charity.  I mean, if they’re full, are you going to force them?

The Western World (along with Japan, and I think even China gets roped in here) is stuck with a crack habit:  efficiency.  They don’t just want those high-yield farms, they need them like Nancy Pelosi needs her vodka nightcap and breakfast Bloody Mary*.

The result of all of this efficiency is that the carrying capacity of the world is increased.

What’s carrying capacity?

It’s how many critters a place can hold.  The funny thing about carrying capacity is that it can be exceeded, at least for a time.  A classic example is here (LINK) about the introduction of reindeer to St. Matthew Island up near Alaska in the Bering Sea in 1944.  What could go wrong?  The island had no problems, so the 29 reindeer made more reindeer.

And then those reindeer made more reindeer.  And so on.

Finally, there were 6,000 reindeer living on the 128 square mile island in 1964.  In 1966, after a particularly hard winter?  There were 42 reindeer left.

All females.

The problem wasn’t the food available in the summer – although that resource was being stressed as well.  But when winter hit?  The reindeer starved to death by the thousands.

What really makes the Soylent Green Corporation run?  It’s the people!

It’s obvious that the island could support more deer than 42.  If the population was managed (by turning some of them into tasty, tasty reindeer sausage, for instance) it’s probable that the island could have had a year-round population that flourished.  It would probably number several thousand.

But when that hard winter hit after a tough summer with too many deer grazing?  It wasn’t fat and sassy reindeer going into winter, but hungry reindeer who had to make do with even less food when a hard winter hit.  The result was mathematically predictable.

Collapse.

Sheepdogs love jokes about flocks.  They won’t stop until they’ve herd them all.

Think of the slow collapse of technology as the beginning of a very, very hard winter.

The Soviets faced their own hard winter back in the day.  I recall reading Dmitri Orlov’s theory that because the Soviets were always horribly inefficient, they didn’t have very far to fall.  They had already built up systems to get around the systems so that they could survive in the cumbersome Soviet empire.  It’s similar in many places around the world.  Orlov has noted that it won’t be so nice in the West.

Not so nice?  It took from 1986 to 2010 for the life expectancy peak during the Soviet years to be matched again.  24 years.

And that was for what Orlov called a “mild” collapse.

Give a commie a plane ticket and he’ll fly for a day.  Push a commie out of a plane and he’ll fly for the rest of his life.

If New York City lost electricity for a week, it would look like a place where Mel Gibson in a leather jacket would flourish.  The damage that would be done by violent rioters would take decades to fix, and would make our exit from Kabul look like a graceful military triumph.

But what if, say, Haiti lost power for a month?  They’d call it “August” or any other name you would call a month.  Haiti wouldn’t fall far, because Haiti in 2021 is already the next best thing to not having civilization at all.  And with places that are a bit shy on efficiency, you’d think Africa, which has 60% of the land in the world that can be farmed would be a great place.

Nope.  They’re so inefficient that they’re a net food importer.  Africa, like Haiti, and like Afghanistan, and like Pakistan, would feel a collapse not because they’re super-efficient, but because they rely on imported food and other “stuff” from efficient economies to run theirs.  They don’t have as far to fall, but there is still a cliff.  Afghanistan went from 19 million in 2000 to 36 million today.  It’s not double, but it’s close.  To get down to “real” post-technology carrying capacity numbers in Afghanistan probably only requires 80% of their population to die off.

Technology has created a far greater carrying capacity on Earth for people than has ever existed.  It’s estimated that around 1 Anno Domini that the world could only support between 170,000,000 and 400,000,000 people.  Oh, sure, it would suck to make that many pairs of underwear.  But there are roughly 170,000,000 people in Bangladesh alone, which reliable sources inform me all live on acreage roughly the size of a ping pong table.

A collapse in carrying capacity, even a small one, would have an impact greater than the disappointment that was the last season of Game of Thrones.

Understand this:  being prepared for the absence of the things that make your life convenient and easy now is something I’d recommend.  If even a small number of the things that I’m hearing are true, we may be on the brink of a hard winter, indeed.

I feel bad for all of those parents that named their kid Daenerys before they got to the end of Game of Thrones.  I’m going to sit down with my son Judas this afternoon and finish the Bible.

Let’s hope that this one ends better than Game of Thrones.

And try to be one of the 42, and not the rest of the 6,000.

General Milley, The Vanguard Of The American Caesar

“What else is a TARDIS for? I can take you to the Battle of Trafalgar, the First Antigravity Olympics, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, or Ian Dury at the Top Rank, Sheffield, England, Earth, 21st November, 1979. What do you think?” – Dr. Who

What do modern people call socks worn with sandals?  Birth control.

History doesn’t always repeat, but it rhymes.

On January 10, 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River at the head of his troops.  He had been ordered to leave the troops beyond the Rubicon.  After crossing the river, it is said he uttered, alea iacta est, or Latin for “I know you are, but what am I,” (Caesar was a big Peewee Herman fan).

Caesar didn’t pay any attention to the order to leave his troops behind, and Legion XIII, Gemina, followed him to Rome.  What followed was a four-year civil war that ended up with Julius Caesar taking over the Roman Republic and founding what soon became the Roman Empire.  That lasted until the Empire was split in two by a pair of Caesars.

One of the most scrupulous traditions in the United States has been that there are three independent branches of the Fed.Gov:  the legislative, the judicial, and the executive.  What’s missing?  The military.  That’s just as intentional as Biden wearing Depends® the day after he eats prunes.

What determines the length of a Biden press conference?  Depends.

That’s because the military is unique:  the legislature controls funding it and declaring the war it should fight, and the executive is their commander-in-chief.  It should be pretty straightforward.

Except:  the military went from a citizen-militia type military fairly early on.  Even then, it was still pretty lame by today’s standards:  it had a core of officers and smallish numbers of troops.  The armed forces were expanded during times of war, of course, through citizen volunteers.  This lasted until the Civil War became such an unpopular party that you had to force Northerners to come and play because the Southerners were being such meanies.

Sure, the military wasn’t always used just for wars – Congress has authorized use of force 23 times since the end of World War II, and at least once of those times wasn’t related to “scaring up some hot chicks with daddy issues” for Clinton.  Declaration of “War” has become out of vogue since war has such nasty connotations.  Thankfully people can’t die unless war is declared.  I’m surprised the Department of Defense isn’t called the Department of Peace.

I guess both of these guys rubbed women the wrong way.

But, sorta, the idea has still worked out.  Congress authorizes the use of force, and the President wages war peace with tanks.  What’s missing there is the military deciding what it should be doing.  The military is a verb:  kill and break stuff.  The civilian government provides the noun, which is as simple as the name of a person or nation.

The system has some drawbacks:  in my view, it’s much easier to use the military than it should be.  I can understand in a world that has grown much smaller due to things like missiles and the Internet why we can’t wait a year to get ready to make war peace with bullets, but that should be our last resort.

This brings us to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

General Mark A. Milley is the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).  That particular job is not really as cool as it sounds.  The JCS isn’t technically even in the chain of command for war peace with artillery.  They have no command authority over combat forces – that goes from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the commanders of the various Unified Combat Commands.

What does the JCS do?  The short version is that they’re the Human Resources group for the armed forces where they make diversity policies and pick who gets what job.  They also help make sure that “stuff” like food and bullets and goes to the right places.  It’s important – but the JCS aren’t fighting wars providing peace with torpedoes.

I’m not saying he’s woke, but his favorite animal is a pander.

This makes me wonder what General Milley was up to when he decided to tell the Chinese that he would let them know if we were going to attack them.  Of all the things that a General in the United States Armed Forces should be, promising to our (potential) enemies that he would give them a heads up if the elected Commander In Chief decides that even more vigorous peace with a particular country is required, is . . . not his job.  He’s Human Resources, and his job isn’t to set the priorities of the country or conduct diplomacy.  His job is to decide what happens if Jeff steals Julia’s salad in the break room fridge.

Yet, here General Milley was, conducting a policy discussion and taking orders from a sworn enemy of the United States:  Nancy Pelosi.  I kid:  Pelosi isn’t completely evil.  She only wants the complete destruction of the United States after she retires.

I put Jesus as my lock-screen picture.  Now he’s my screen savior.

But here is the danger:  Leftists will talk about how wonderful General Milley Cyrus is.  He won’t be charged with any crime.  He’ll retire from the JCS in 2023, and write a book about how great all of his decisions were.  He’ll get hired by a company that makes components that the Chinese will buy to make weapons for their military.  He’ll get to fly corporate jets and eat bacon-wrapped shrimp at parties with very fancy people.

That’s (mostly) not dangerous.  Unless you have to read the stupid book he’ll write.

What’s dangerous is that it sets the military up as being able to define the noun.  They get to do all the killing of people and breaking of stuff, but now they get to pick who they kill and what stuff they break.  That’s the dangerous point – the Rubicon.

I’ve warned in the past that I see two possible futures for the United States – a balkanized America.  For two decades beyond World War II, the nation was coming together and becoming less regional and more homogeneous.  The influence of television gave us another set of shared experiences.

But splits have been engineered, and now even though New York has a McDonalds® and so does Des Moines, the two places aren’t remotely alike in values or even, in many cases, language.  A balkanized America is one very real possibility as the polarity of the nation increases.

That’s one possibility.

I never judge a book by its cover.  I use that little paragraph on the back.

An American Caesar with a follow-on American Empire is another.  Besides being treasonous, Milley’s call with China is scarier:  it was an independent act of the military at the highest level to circumvent civilian leadership.

There is no doubt – this is close to crossing the Rubicon.  If the allegations are true, Milley should be tried, and if guilty, convicted.  As I said above – I think Milley’s insubordination will likely be rewarded and then he’ll be praised like a pet poodle, and he won’t be punished.

Somewhere there is a colonel taking notes, and waiting for an opportunity to strike in the coming unrest, getting ready to cross the Rubicon.

We’ll see if he has the chance.

When Times Are Tough, First, Sharpen The Saw

“You have personal habits that would make a monkey blush.” – Red Dwarf

I know a lot of broken pencil jokes, but they’re all pointless.

Stephen Covey made roughly a bazillion dollars with his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which at least makes his marketing pretty effective. I read it back in the early 2000s when I found a copy sitting on a shelf in an office when I started a new job. This was lucky for me, since I could never find the self-help section at the library. The librarian just would say, “Well, if I told you where the self-help section was, that would defeat the purpose.”

I couldn’t name most of the 7 Habits unless I cheated with Duckduckgo®, but I do remember the last one of the seven: Sharpen the Saw.

You might think that this would be a reference to Jason or Michael Meyers, but no. In the book he relates a story about Abraham Lincoln, who, when asked if he were to race to cut a tree down, how he would do it. “Well first, I would sharpen the saw, and then I would hire the neighborhood kid to do it and then I would invade the South,” Lincoln replied.

Talk about a one-trick pony.

How many Amish people does it take to change a light bulb? None.

But Covey picked up on this idea: if you’re not sharp, you’re not at your best. You can look at that through several dimensions, and include things like fitness, but you know how to get in shape. That answer is simple – even if you don’t want to do it.

The dimension of sharpness that I want to write about is mental. I know how to exercise to get fit, but if I’m so burned out that I don’t have the motivation to do it, I simply won’t.

The first level of control I do is to control the intake of my mind.

Around 2016 I went full-stop on listening to NPR® radio. NPR™ had always had a lefty slant, but in 2016 they went Full Throttle Leftist. The conclusion that I came to is that if I felt like shouting at the car radio that the host was wrong, I should probably just stop listening to them.

And I did. The reason I did wasn’t that I was afraid of the facts – no. I embrace finding out when I’m wrong. The reason was that the opinion that had always been in the backseat of the car became the driver. And I don’t like the opinions of Leftist NPR© hosts unless they’re midgets: the midgets always know what’s up.

Cats kill more birds than windmills. Heck, I can’t recall the last time I heard of a cat killing a windmill.

The Mrs. relayed to me that some journalism schools were now teaching that journalists should be, rather than impartial reporters on a story, a good journalist should actively intervene in favor to further Social Justice narratives.

My site isn’t a news site. My site is generally an opinion site – your opinion and my opinion. We can all have them, and as long as we agree to that, it’s fine. But NPR® began peddling opinion as fact, and editorializing during straight news stories, “discredited” and “false” were used as modifiers in news, as in “Fauchi debunks the false and discredited idea that people should wear masks,” a week before Fauchi says you need to wear six masks.

NPR® was harshing my mellow without giving me anything that I couldn’t get elsewhere.

The next level of control is to rest.

If I’m going all out, working and blogging, I might average five hours of sleep Sunday through Friday morning. That’s probably not enough. I play catch-up on weekends, but that’s not quite enough. A few weeks ago I decided I wouldn’t go in to work until after lunch on Friday.

It was glorious. I started the weekend with a full tank and that Friday was amazingly productive.

There are only so many hours in a day, and I have a list of things I have to get done. I do often live with a sleep deficit, but I do try to at least monitor it. I did find a scientific test on sleep deprivation online. It told me how much sleep I needed: just five minutes more.

And Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch. He decides what time it is.

The third thing I like to control is chaos.

Okay, I can’t control chaos. But I can control what I care about. I can prioritize. I can plan. I can make lists.

Make lists? How does that help?

I find that when I’m feeling whelmed, that just making a list turns a chaotic list of things to do into something I can attack. And sometimes, I just pick something I can do, something I can complete from the list, and just do it even if it’s not the most important thing.

A shopping center burned down – nothing left but Kohl’s®.

The best catalyst for action is . . . action. When I start getting things done, more things get done. Then things begin to disappear from the list as I cross them off.

At the end of the day, I feel good. Things are done. Sure, some aren’t, but finishing tasks and crossing them off the list makes me happy.

The fourth thing I do is step away. Turn off the chaos by connecting with other people. By reading. By writing.

There is always the danger in distraction. If done too often, it is simply running away.

But a moment to pull back, reflect, and work with the important connections in my life? That’s keeping the reason I face the chaos in perspective. I do those things for the people I love, for principle, or because it’s virtuous and has meaning.

Reading? That’s how I get ideas. That’s how I hit the reset button by focusing on other ideas.

Writing? That’s how I work through ideas. When I put it in writing, I begin to understand where the holes are in my thinking. Then I research. Then I get closer to the Truth.

Again, done too often, it’s an escape, not a refresh.

When the aquatic mammals escaped from the zoo, it was otter chaos.

Finally? I pray.

YMMV, but prayer does wonders for me. Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” except when he said it, it came out more like, “Livet kan kun forstås baglæns, men det skal leves fremad,” and it probably sounded like Søren was gargling a mouthful of small wet frogs.

But Søren was right. Life is tossed by uncertainty and fortune, good and bad, and no one is getting out alive. As I get older, I begin to understand, and see the structure, though I have enough wisdom to know how little I really know.

Prayer brings me peace.

Thanks for sharing in my saw-sharpening. I hope it wasn’t too dull.

Shortages: Welcome To The Post-COVID Reality

“Enjoy it while it lasts, I have a feeling there’s going to be a shortage of cold beer this summer.” – The Stand

Well, well, well.

“Pop, what was your first car?” Pugsley asked.

“Do you mean the first one I owned?  Or . . .”

“No, the first one that was, you know, yours.  Like how mine is the pickup.”  I knew that was the question he was asking, but sometimes dads like to tease.

I replied, “My first car was a 1975 green GMC® truck.  Stick shift, just like yours.  It had a rubber floor, no A/C, and all the radio you could want, if you liked AM.  And it had a vinyl bench seat.  Vinyl bench seats were nice.  When your date got in, she could slide right over next to you.”

And in college, this one girl said we didn’t have chemistry together.

I smiled, remembering the first time I took a girl on a date.  I tried to capture that first date magic with The Mrs. for our last anniversary, but she got mad when I tried to drop her off with her Mom and Dad.

Even though it was only “my” pickup for two years, it was a wonderful little truck with the worst engine that you could imagine.  I think it put out at least a dozen horsepower.  But it was my first taste of freedom.

“Yeah, weird that there’s a shortage of trucks now,” I said.

“What?”  Pugsley laughed.  “What’s the joke?”

As most people know, that’s not a joke.  Because of a semiconductor shortage, new trucks are in short supply.  They can make the rest of the truck, but they can’t make it work without computer chips.

Since people keep their old trucks longer, spare parts for older trucks are in short supply, too.

Shortages tend to build up and have ripple effects.

And my brain is now randomly deleting memory, too.

I started thinking and realized that, with the exception and weirdness of the Great Toilet Paper Famine of 2020, Pugsley has lived in a world of abundance.  In his world, people don’t have to line up for products, the products line up for the people and wait for them.  Probably the only shortage he’s used to is a shortage of spending money.

That was intentional.

In my life as well I can’t recall any real shortages of anything.  I recall (vaguely) my parents talking about a gas shortage.  I guess that impacted the people in Flint, Michigan a lot:  I heard they had a shortage of unleaded.

The only other shortage I recall was the normal shortage of fruits and vegetables when they weren’t being grown.  Strawberries?  “Get some frozen ones,” Ma Wilder would say if I wanted strawberries in winter.  “Strawberries are out of season.”

I got a strawberry stuck in my ear once.  My doctor had cream for that.

Back then, the technology didn’t really exist for the behemoth national chains to manage global logistics to get strawberries in winter.  Now?  Fresh fruit and vegetables are flown across the globe.  I read that one particular species of fish (don’t remember which one) was caught in Chile, flown across the ocean to China for processing, and then flown to the United States for consumption.  Teach a man to fish and he has fish for life.  Give a man a fish and he’ll create a multinational logistics chain to optimize profitability.

This is efficient.  It makes use of low labor prices in China for processing.  But, as we’ve discussed, again and again, efficiency is bad.  Efficiency is why we have a shortage of electronic chips for trucks to move that fish today.  I don’t think the British have this issue – I keep hearing about their fish and chips.

One consequence of efficiency is concentration.  The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company™ (TSMC) was named with all of the characteristic creativity of a colorblind engineer whose parents were introverted accountants.

“What are we making?”

“Semiconductors.”

“Where are we going to make them?”

“Taiwan.”

“I have an idea.  Now you might think it’s crazy . . .”

One thing about excellence is that it brings smart people with similar skills together to work on tough problems.  The more they learn, the more smart people show up because as they solve one problem, another one comes up, and, pretty soon (if the solutions are profitable enough) there are lots of smart people around.  Give the nerds enough time, and they will solve enough problems that they will know more about the subject than anyone else on the planet.  Unless it involves deodorant.

And the movie came out in the early 1980s . . .

That makes for very efficient, centralized production.  Detroit sprang up around the auto, New York around money, and Paris around wide, broad avenues that were perfect for a panzer parade.

But these centers of excellence are centers of vulnerability.  TSMC™ has recently illustrated the vulnerability of companies all over the world to a single manufacturer.  Even going back into the deeper past, during the period of the Roman Empire, most porcelain plates and cups were made in the south of France.  When the Empire fell, everyone was stuck eating out of Tupperware™ from that box in the garage with all their college stuff in it for five hundred years.

Another danger from plastic storage tubs?  Developing Tupperculosis.

Covid-19 triggered shortages have exposed how precarious an efficient world is.  We are often dependent upon single sources of materials and innovation from areas all across the globe to bring us something as simple as the Large Hadron Collider, even though most people think they could construct it from spare parts to a 1993 Buick™ and that old refrigerator that they have in their garage.

Efficiency has made us vulnerable.  I have no real reason that while we’re in the midst of the ‘Rona Retreat around the world to think that this will change for the better soon.  As freedom collapses, and as efficient markets based on low inflation implode, we aren’t headed for a time of plenty.

Soon we may miss the time when stuff waited for us in the grocery store, and the thought of that might bring a happy memory like the thought of a long-gone 1975 GMC® truck.

With bench seats . . . .

How Single Suburban Soccer Moms Are Killing The Country

“Train yourself to let go . . . of everything you fear to lose.” – Star Wars, Episode III

Childhood is like being drunk.  Everyone remembers what you did but you.

I’ve written a lot about fear, and how negative it is.  But fear is a very potent persuasion technique.  Fear motivates people to action.  Heck, I had a fear of elevators, but I took some steps to avoid it.

That’s why it’s used.  David Frum (press “S” to spit) recently wrote an article in The Atlantic titled, How to Persuade Americans to Give Up Their Guns.  I’m not going to link to it because I don’t want to drive traffic to this screed.  That just encourages them to pay Frum to write other crap when he’s not sleeping in the warm chest cavity of the “conservative” money laundering schemes think tanks.

In the end, David takes his Canadian* sensibilities to tell the benighted Americans that they should be horribly afraid of guns.  Guns are scary!  I believe, in technical terms, they are so scary that they make Frum wee a bit in his pants.

I guess we know Frum’s favorite drink:  pop.

Policy Exchange, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, Weasel Hair Added By Wilder

In the end, who, exactly was Frum writing this article to?

Well, let’s eliminate who he wasn’t writing to, first:

  • He wasn’t writing to you. He wasn’t writing to me.  If you’re a regular here, it’s nearly a lock that you’re at least sympathetic to the idea that the Second Amendment provides, in clear language, an individual right to own and carry weapons of war.  And we don’t wee our pants about it.
  • He wasn’t writing to the Left. They don’t need to be convinced.  The Second Amendment is probably the biggest single impediment to their plans (see:  Australia).
  • He wasn’t writing to rural folks. We have so many guns that our guns have guns.
  • He wasn’t writing to urbanites. Most people deep in the hive are already Leftists.
  • He wasn’t (for the most part) writing to guys. Guys (generally) like guns, and are generally less in favor of restricting them.  Women, for instance, are 30% more likely to support restrictions on standard size magazines.

Single Suburban Soccer Moms have such high double standards.

What does that leave?  Suburban women, specifically Single Suburban Soccer Moms.  Frum even admits as much in the article – he references both Mothers Against Drunk Driving® (MADD©) and Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense In America™ (MDAFGSIA®).  No, I didn’t make that last one up.  It’s what happens when the wine aunt tries to come up with a catchy name and everyone is so blitzed on the white zin that they don’t tell her, “Oh, Mabel, that is an awful name.”

But, yeah, the weasel-faced Frum was trying to manipulate the SSSM, because they’re often the swing voter in elections.  And, they make decisions based on fear, unlike me.  I like my emotions like I like my beer.  Bottled.

MADD© and MDAFGSIA™ are an excellent example of fear being used to manipulate Moms.  Did MADD™ do some good?  Certainly.  But even the founder thought they went too far and quit in 1985 because MADD©, founded to stop drunk driving, became (in her words) “neo-prohibitionist”.

That has been the problem:  fear drives decisions which then result in laws that take away freedom.

The SSSM has been the most reliable target of the “if it only saves one life!” and the “what about the children?” level of logic.  And that’s what has led us to the path we’re on today.

As Yoda taught us:  fear leads to hate.  Who does the Left hate now?

People who won’t take “the jab”.  Not everyone, of course.  BIPOC seem to be exempt from this hate, so it’s pretty much people who like freedom and people on the Right.  I’m surprised there isn’t a group called Mothers Against Icky Infected People Not Doing What I Say (MAIIPNDWIS).

It’s healthy to eat dried fruit.  I’m just raisin awareness.

Really, where we’re at is hysteria.  Remember how the ‘Rona crisis started – grainy videos of people walking down the street in Wuhan and collapsing, apartments being welded shut to keep the residents in, and Chinese denials that there was any issue.  It was just like the first four minutes of the average Hollywood® “plague destroys mankind” movie that has been made dozens of times since 1950.

Is the ‘Rona real?  Certainly.  It does have a body count, though I think the one being reported has been artificially inflated.

So it is real.  I’ve had it.  And it seems to kill people somewhat randomly, though in very, very small numbers as a percentage of those who catch it and are captured in the statistics (I’m not).

And the perfect way to beat the fear drum so that Single Suburban Soccer Moms forget the clown show exit engineered by Biden.  The specifics of the “vaccine” mandate don’t matter as much as the process, which never changes:

  • Suck at leading.
  • Have bad poll numbers.
  • Make use of either an existing or contrived “scary” situation.
  • Come down hard on the “scary” situation: propose something that takes away rights, if possible.  The Leftist base will be fine with it, and it will engage the SSSM crowd.

Oh, and I forgot:  always pass the buck.

This is what passes for Leftist leadership.  Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, said the quiet part that you’re not supposed to say out loud:  “Never let a crisis go to waste.”  If there wasn’t a crisis, the Left would invent one.  Drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was one.  The Keystone pipeline from Canada is another.  These are manufactured to enrage and engage people on the Left.

But the crisis had to be a specific one:  a crisis that could engage the SSSM brigade.  As the de facto swing voters, political policies are determined by how the fears of this group can be exploited.  COVID-19 is just one example.  Why do you think images of little kids in cages were trotted out to show how actually enforcing immigration law was mean?  Me, I only get upset when I see a hamburger bun in a cage – that means it was bread in captivity.

I bought a knife that can almost slice five baguettes of bread at once – but it’s only a four loaf cleaver.

Since there is nothing a SSSM loves more than safety, they’ll vote for it every time.  And it doesn’t matter if liberty is on the line – the SSSM essentially views government as her spouse and protector.

Perhaps, though, there is an alternative?

Maybe we could convince the SSSMs that, historically, governments have committed murder on the wholesale level.  Maybe we could get them up in arms about that?  Heck, I even have a name for it if they want to use it:

Mothers Engaged Against Tyrant Politicians Exploiting Everyone (MEATPEE)

Which is weird, because that’s exactly what I think David Frum probably smells like.

*Technically Frum got American citizenship in 2007 or so, but I think it should be revoked because he’s a tool

The Mrs. went to a lot of trouble to create an advertisement for the livestream on Wednesday at 9 Eastern.  Here it is:

Biden’s Big Bluff

“You’ve got to know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em . . . .” – The Gambler

I bought dice, but they didn’t have the 2, 4, or 6 one either one. They are very odd.

This was originally going to be a post on another topic, but events have overtaken it. Again. Instead of getting a sidesplitting romp about a lighthearted subject, you’ll get sidesplitting romp about Biden’s (latest) Big Blunder.

I’ve never been that dedicated of a poker player, though my friends and I played quite a bit when I was in high school. I do recall one game way back then where I won a bayonet (an M8A1 with matching scabbard for you knife nerds) but lost a hand where I wagered a girlfriend.

Oh, and I also won $6.48, mainly in pennies.

I still have the bayonet.

One thing I did notice was that when I was winning, it became easier to bluff. I could bet on junk, but only if I’d won most of my hands up to the point I started bluffing with strong cards.

None of us were experienced poker players, so it was trial and error. I found that the bigger, more confident bet that I had made (after I was winning) the faster my friends would fold their hands, and the fewer bayonets and girlfriends I could win (or lose). But if I wanted to end a hand quickly, a big bet was what I would try to bluff my opponents into folding so I could win the pot.

Never trust a cheetah. They always try to pull a fast one.

Even with that small amount of experience, I can tell you that former vice-president Joseph Robinette (I guess his parents couldn’t afford a real Robin) Biden is bluffing.

And Biden is scared.

The withdrawal from Afghanistan was so poorly managed that it would be enough to charge Captain America® with treason. And that’s probably the best thing that happened to Biden in the last month, even though his recollection of the evacuation of Kabul might be dim and confused until they bring the flashcards out.

As bad as it was, Biden managed to make that national shame even worse. How much respect does he get from the American people when he checks his watch every time the coffin of a soldier goes by? Maybe he thinks there’s something on it, since he obviously doesn’t know what “not on my watch” means.

No, things have not been going well for the kid-toucher in chief.

This string of decisions so bad it makes Johnny Depp on a three-day drunk look as lucky as a chipmunk at a peanut convention. It’s bad enough that I imagine most of the senior White House staff are looking for jobs, or in some cases, countries that don’t extradite back to the United States.

I guess El Chapo would be used to high officials.

Through the art of remote viewing and making things up, I have an exact transcript from discussions among some of the members of Biden’s political strategy team last week:

Soulless Political Drone 1 (SPD1): “Okay, we’re down in the polls. What do we do?”

Soulless Political Drone 2 (SPD2): “It’s not so bad.”

SPD1: “No, it really is. Biden is now less popular than,” checks list, “having leprosy . . . on your genitals.”

SPD2: “Well, people kind of like leprosy nowadays. It grows on you. Besides, we know that there’s a floor to the number of people that will support him, though. The voters . . . .”

SPD1: “Voters? You do realize that most of those voters are copier machines we rented at Kinkos®, right? No. He’s lost the suburban soccer moms.”

SPD2: (shocked) “You mean he’s lost the support of the SSM? That’s a disaster! Our focus groups say they used to think of him,” checks focus data, “as category 74-b: ‘befuddled elderly relative that mostly means well but you wouldn’t leave alone with girls between the ages of six and twelve.’ What do the focus groups of Suburban Soccer Moms say now?”

SPD1: “Now they have him as a 93-w: ‘Creepy old man with degenerative brain disease who probably smells like week-old urine.’ Also, that he doesn’t care about Americans stuck in foreign countries and is . . . weak.”

SPD2: “Ouch. SSMs don’t like weak. Remember when all of them were having romantic dreams about Trump and Trump supporters?”

SPD1: “So, what do we do?”

SPD2: “Let’s do what we always do: trot out the kids. Let’s make a big fuss about COVID-19 not being safe for children, blame the unvaccinated.”

SPD1: “We’ve done that already. It’s getting a big yawn. We have to spice it up.”

SPD2: “We could have him do push-ups, maybe beat someone up? Think we could dig up Corn Pop?”

SPD1: “Do you even hear what you’re saying? You sound like Kamala when she’s off the sauce for a day. This is serious.”

SPD2: “Ok, serious face on. Ohhh, we could have a vaccine mandate. We could threaten the jobs of 100,000,000 or so people if they didn’t comply.”

SPD1: “What? How is that remotely Constitutional?”

(Both laugh. And laugh. And laugh.)

SPD1: “Whew. Constitutional. Still funny. But 100,000,000 people? How many of them are Biden voters?”

SPD2: (checks website) “2,113,210.”

SPD1: “Only 2,113,210? Out of 100,000,000?”

SPD2: “Well, after we were done with the counting.”

(Both laugh.)

Okay, that might not have been exactly the conversation, but it was close. Biden’s political advisors see that he’s as weak as vegan housecat. They have to think of something to distract the voting public and bring his poll numbers up.

  • His economic policies appear to consist of burning money to keep his supporters warm while importing future voters as fast as he can. Can’t use those.
  • It’s pretty certain that there are approximately seven people left that want to go bomb foreign countries for a distraction. Sending cruise missiles to blow up people in (spins board) Denmark is out.
  • Can’t get tough on trade with China – they have too much information on where Joe’s bank balance came from.

That leaves . . . the ‘Rona.

Thanks to Biden, a lot of people are going to be back on their feet again, since they can’t afford cars anymore.

I think the idea was to craft policies that appeal to the Suburban Soccer Mom while not impacting the SJW base. So, go after people with jobs and force them to take “the jab.” Suburban Soccer Moms will love it because it will leave little Cody or Colby or Colbee or Codi “safer” because the TV and Facebook® said so. SJWs are all about injectibles, and this has the added bonus of forcing people to do their will, which makes it just that easier to order them onto the trains.

A hospital in Houston fired 150 for not taking “the jab” – and every private business with over 100 employees will be forced to do the same. Yet Biden is exempting 600,000 Post Office employees. Why?

To lose the mail system would hurt his poll numbers.

Looks like everyone knew this was going to be a popular speech.

This is his big bluff. He’s nearly out of chips. All he has is one chance to try to redeem himself.

I guess it makes sense. I mean, nobody is going to accept Jill as collateral.

What to do?

Huh. I’ll see your bluff, and raise you “the loss of consent of the governed.”

Is that sweat?

Bikini Economics And The Money Supply

“What do you know about gold, Moneypenny?” – Goldfinger

One of the few things that Pa Wilder left me in his will was his bed. I guess you could call it an heir mattress.

On April 5, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order that made the owning of more than trivial amounts of gold by individuals illegal. Owning gold wouldn’t be legal again until Gerald Ford signed a bill into law that reversed that abomination of a policy.

That law went into effect on December 31, 1974, and people could once again buy gold.

In 1933, the price of gold was fixed: $20.67 per ounce. It didn’t vary, because the value of the dollar was pegged to the price of gold. The Fed© couldn’t print dollars unless they had at least 40% of that value in gold to back it up.

Pro tip: If you have a balloon elephant that won’t fit in your backseat, you can always pop the trunk.

What did the government then do?

It defaulted on the dollar. A dollar had been worth (around) 1/20th of an ounce of gold. After the government stole it all, they decided that a dollar was now only worth 1/35th of an ounce of gold. Poof. Immediately, and with the stroke of a pen, the government stole 43% of the value of every dollar in existence.

The penalty for “hoarding” gold was a big one: a $10,000 fine and up to 10 years in the slammer. I guess the government didn’t (and doesn’t) like competition when it comes to stealing.

It was the biggest heist in history – until Nixon severed the link between the gold and the dollar completely. After that, people could own gold again. There was no real reason for the government to not allow them to own it: they had now stolen the rest of the value of the dollar.

If you rob a vape store, is that a Juul® heist?

And it only took 41 years from 1933 to 1974 to convince people that was acceptable.

Since Nixon removed all gold connection, a dollar is worth (today) about 1/1800th of an ounce of gold.

But that isn’t enough to feed the beast.

The (metaphorical) printing presses have been shoveling money into the economy under the mistaken assumption that all we need is additional debt to keep the engine going. It’s like a demented congressman who doesn’t understand engines deciding to open up the hood of an F-150® to just pour gasoline on it using the dim understanding of a toddler that, “gasoline makes engines go, so if I pour enough gasoline on the engine, it will be as fast as a spaceship.”

That’s really what passes as logic in Washington, D.C. now. I keep writing about the economy in the slim hope that whatever passes for an intellect in the halls of congress will get distracted enough to spend at least a minute or two learning before returning to the concept of, “Ugh, free stuff good. Grug pay for stuff easy because all money free. Wonder why Grug’s armpit’s stink?”

I swear, AOC couldn’t spell “cat” if you spotted her the “C” and the “T”.

See, economics can be interesting!

The Fed® has gone all-in on this economic shadow puppet theater, shoving pools of money toward banks to shore up their balance sheets. Some of the people who are on the winning side of this great wave of money being sloshed around have even spent some.

Blackrock® buying up all the houses for sale? Yup. They see what’s coming. All the rich and powerful buying farmland that will never produce enough via crops or cattle to justify the price? They see what’s coming. They’re moving as quickly as possible to use this money to buy everything they can.

And people are happy. “Hey, I sold Ma’s old house after she passed away for twice what she paid for it in 2000! I made out like a bandit.”

It’s not all bad. Thankfully, the velocity of money is down.

What’s the velocity of money?

That’s how fast a dollar gets spent. Poor people move money the fastest – a dollar comes in and, poof, out it goes again. They have to spend it because they don’t have any spare money. They get paid on Friday and on Saturday it’s turned into rent payments and insurance payments and Cheetos® from Target™.

Roses are red, roses are blue, depending upon their velocity relative to you.

But the velocity of money is now slower than Joe Biden when he’s asked difficult questions, like, “What is the year, Joe? Hey, we’re talking to you. Dammit, he’s gone catatonic again. Someone get those squeaky toys he likes. And keep Kamala out of the vodka.”

Things would be far worse if the velocity of money hadn’t dropped so far that it was moving as slow as Oprah trying to get off of a couch. Since poor people slosh it around so much, that means it’s exactly where the Fed® put it: with the rich people.

So, if the money supply has gone vertical, then why hasn’t the price of everything doubled?

And most of it is sitting in pools right now. Except for the early adopters who are looking for something, anything to buy so that when the dust clears out of the coming inflation that they are richer than ever and Oprah has even more Twinkies®.

I’m not against capitalism – but this isn’t capitalism. It’s a rigged card game where your money evaporates – first slowly, and then all at once.

The engine of debt isn’t driving economic growth anymore. What the debt is doing is papering over the holes in the system so that it keeps going another week, another month, and hopefully another year.

But the downside to this is the longer a failing system is kept going by speeding it up, the more energy it stores, the bigger the crash, the bigger the collapse.

Why did Princess Diana cross the road? Inertia.

The economy has inertia, though. Even though it’s working on the most significant collapse in the history of the United States, people still believe. They take dollars because they believe. They believe the rules aren’t going to change.

They will.

Since we’ve seen this game before – we can take at least some steps to protect ourselves. I suppose it’s time to buy PEZ® before the rush . . . .