Month: March 2023

Silicon Valley Bank? You’re Soaking In It.

“Why don’t we pretend he didn’t die?  Just for a bit . . .” – Weekend at Bernie’s

Why can’t Ray Charles drive?  He’s dead. (Outside of this one, memes are “as found”)

On March 15, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was walking to work, since Rome was declared by Gretanius Thunbergium to be a “walkable city” because she was concerned about the sweat of galley slaves and horses making the oceans too salty, thus enraging Neptune, the god of the sea.

This particular day was a good one in Rome, and the bright warm Sun shone down on Caesar as he made it to the Senate.  Caesar loved the Senate, since all of the Senators were really cool and he loved hanging out with them to watch the gladiator games every Sunday.

Then, on arriving at the Senate?  Caesar was stabbed in the back by raising interest rates, and, with his last, dying words, he said, “Please, take this salad dressing, and remember me by it.  Oh, and name a way that babies are born after me.  And Kaiser and Czar might be cool titles for kings in the future.”

Okay, that might not be exactly what happened.  But you can’t prove it wasn’t, because it’s not on YouTube®.

But interest rates have been a thing since long before even Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, took the throne, and then became a human pincushion.  And they’ve been gumming up society both before then, and also since then.

Last Friday, on March 10, a curious thing happened – the 19th largest bank, Silicon Valley Bank, went tango uniform.  To paraphrase Python, Monty:

“It’s a stiff.  Bereft of life.  It rests in peace.  If you hadn’t backfilled the coffers with Federal Reserve® notes, it would be pushing up daisies.  Its metabolic processes are now history.  It’s off the twig.  It’s kicked the bucket.  It’s shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible.  THIS IS AN EX-BANK.”

How, exactly, does a Norwegian blue parrot bank die so quickly?

The truth is, it has been dead for a bit.  I’ll explain.  You can get explanations of this elsewhere, but none of them will be as funny, since that’s what my job is.

When banks take in money, they have several options of what they can do with it.  They can bury it in Mason® jars in the back 40, they can loan it to other people, or they can park it in an investment.  Back in 2008, the big financial crisis was that the loans were to people that could never have paid the money back.  I was offered a guaranteed approval home loan on a house (with zero down!) that was ten times my income.

“Why would you offer me that?  I could never pay that back?” was my response.

The loan lady sighed audibly over the phone.  “I know, but I’m required to tell you that.”

It’s like they never learned anything.

So, part of the problem in 2008 was that the loans were junk because some folks said, “I could use a pool surrounded by marble columns with a champagne fountain built out of PEZ™.  I’m in!” even though they only made $32 dollars a month.  They even had a name for these loans – NINJA – “No Income, No Job”.

These banks also gambled with the cash of the average depositor, investing in champagne PEZ© fountain manufacturers.  Hey, how could they lose?

Oh, yeah.  Things don’t go up forever.  So when they end?  It gets ugly.

The response to that by the Fed® was to use a cash cannon and barrage the banks.  The idea was this, the banks would soak up the cash to paper over the bad debts, and if they had extra cash, they’d park it at the Fed™.  Essentially, the Fed™, working with the banks, made sure that the bankers could keep getting big bonuses, not face criminal charges like the average small-town banker might if he stole the cash from the deposits to pay for his 4.5 out of 10 mistress and trips to Vegas.

It’s like there are different rules for you and I.

Nope.  They got to keep their penthouses, private jets, and bimbos.  In order to keep this nonsense so it wouldn’t implode, the one thing the Fed™ had to do was keep interest rates low.  If the Fed© had tried this in 1975, or 1985, or 1995, the world would have punished it by driving the value of the dollar down (faster), cratering purchasing power and the economy.

But after 2008, there was no other big power.  Japan was a basketcase, Europe was still the Jekyll an Hyde level continent, with Western Europe mainly concerned about how many “Syrians” they could import, and Eastern Europe mainly working out how to make more potatoes so they could make more vodka.  Roads?  Why?

That left the United States as, amazingly, still the only kid with a currency anyone trusted, even though we were spending like a sixteen-year-old with dad’s credit card.

Huh, wonder when YouTube® will ban people for this?

Oh, the Left is already trying to censor people.  Nevermind.

I like the cut of his jib.

Not now.  The COVID world created the Trump/Biden policy of “How can we spend more money today?”  Contrast that with China’s “No body count is too high” policy, and, oddly, the world began to trust the United States less.  Add in Biden’s incoherent policy of a.) letting wars start and b.) pushing away allies like the Saudis, and now we live in a world driven by chaos.

And we’ve lost the trust of the world.

So, the banks still do the same three things with the cash deposited in their banks:  Mason™ jars in the backyard, loan it, or invest it.  Last time, the banks invested in whatever crap floated in the window.  That was silly.

The banks thought they had cracked the code:  this time, they invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds.

Yay!  That’s what a sober person would do, right?

Well, maybe.  But when a bank buys a 10-year bond that has an attached interest rate of 0.08%, and the stated inflation rate is 6%, the value of that 10-year bond craters.  Interest rates go up?  Bond values go down.  It turns out Silicon Valley Bank™ had some of these bonds.  How many?  Enough to wipe out all of the shareholder and bondholder (yeah, they bought and sold bonds) value.  And it’s not limited to them.  Here’s the take on the unrealized losses of the biggest banks in America:

Losers in 1901, Losers in 1921, Losers in 1929, Losers in 1937, Losers in 1945, Losers in 1948, Losers in 1953, Losers in 1957, Losers in 1950, Losers in 1960, Losers in 1969, Losers in 1973, Losers in 1980, Losers in 1981, Losers in 1990, Losers in 2001, Losers in 2007 . . . Oh, wait, the banks didn’t lose anything, it was just regular people.

The FDIC insures deposits to $250,000.  Except when (reportedly) Oprah had half a billion in that particular bank.  Turns out that the United States blinked:  “You get all your money, and you get all your money, and you get all your money,” because Oprah is more important than you and I.

Two other banks have failed already.  You can see that some of their CEOs were serious people only worried about the welfare of their depositors.

Yup, the “adults” are in charge.

This will not result in an immediate run.  The Fed® and the Treasury will continue to backstop the banks because to do otherwise would collapse the system.  They even say so.  Valuing assets “at par” means at what the banks paid for them.  I own a car from 2003.  In Fedspeak® that asset would be valued at the initial purchase price, despite the fact that it has one light-second worth of miles (kilopascals) on it.  Here’s proof:

See?  I’m a respected journalist.  Besides, I believe I am the VERY FIRST person to note that the reserve ratio had gone to zero.  You can check it out.  This will help my lawyer if I’m ever sued.  (Serious about the very first part.)

The Fed™ is screwed.  They want to keep Biden in office, which requires low interest rates and a booming economy and no inflation.  But to lower inflation, they have to jack up the interest rates far above the rate of inflation.  Biden cannot be re-elected.  Period, unless there’s a global war.

Nah, people would never buy a war started due to economic issues.

Ooops.  I’d say sorry, but this is already in the playbook.

Me?  My bet is this can keeps rattling around causing damage for several months.  Six or seven?  Maybe.  Eventually, the Fed® is going to figure out that they can’t paper over this mess.

In the meantime, the cash for businesses will dry up, and the only people that can borrow money will be those that don’t need it.  New projects?  They’ll be cancelled unless the company has the cash or it will ruin them if they don’t stop.  New housing?  Forget it.  The housing market will collapse, (it already is) and the costs of new stuff to make new are so high that no one can afford it, forget the interest rate.

People will stop eating dinner in a restaurant.  We already have.

No, the Ides of March won’t be the end.  But you can see it from here.  While you can, enjoy the nice walk on a sunny day.

And Neptune?  He’s always been a whiney bitch.  Ignore Neptune.

Things You Can’t Say . . . 2023

“Remember, all I’m offering is the truth.  Nothing more.” – The Matrix

In reverse, The Matrix is about a guy who quits drugs and gets a job.

What opinions do you have that you can’t tell all of the other people you know?  I’m willing to bet that since you read here, you have quite a few.  I have plenty of them.  When someone doesn’t have views they can’t share, well, I think that’s probably the best definition of an NPC: always believing the current thing.  I swear, if an NPC takes over, it will be a dictator-sheep.

One of the more difficult things is keeping track of what to believe.  Scott Adams (more about him in a future post) famously noted that the anti-vaxxers were right, but there was no way that they could have known that they were right based on the evidence at the time.  I respectfully disagree.  The application of a new technology to stop a disease in a panic?  What about that says, “wise decision”?  Especially when Pfizer™ and the other “vaxx” manufacturers demanded secret language in their contracts to absolve themselves of liability.

Literally nothing about the vaxx looked legitimate.  There were more warning signs than a cocktail with Bill Cosby.

What about January 6?  The most visible icon of the January 6 “insurrection” was the face painted dude with the bison headdress.  Turns out he was led around by various security folks until they found an unlocked door for him to go through.  It’s like they picked the silliest looking person for the photo opportunity of a decade.  Yet, folks didn’t see through that, either.

Not pictured:  someone who actually broke into the Capitol.

If the January 6 protest was a real insurrection rather than people who (mainly!) were there peacefully, even observing the velvet ropes.  How did I know it was fake?  If it were a real insurrection, they’d still be there.

January 6 was political theater, and was misrepresented by nearly every news media outlet, and was also lied about by the Left every chance they got.

Am I correct in everything I believe?  Certainly not.  But I try, every time that I can, to look to the things that are True, Beautiful, and Good to be my guideposts.  Some of my calls are wrong, but with those guideposts, it’s difficult to be too far off the mark.

It is clear that if we don’t think different thoughts than those the media would put in our heads, there is something wrong with us.

When the Kardashians die, they won’t be buried or cremated – they’ll be recycled.

It’s odd, because the pushback comes the closer we come to the Truth, because that’s dangerous.  If I were to walk around proclaiming that Hillary Clinton is 40 feet tall (6 milliliters), blue, and made of cheese, people would think I was a nut and ignore me.  But when I wrote about the “vaxx” – the website came under the biggest attacks ever.

The attacks don’t come when people are silly – the attacks come when the ideas presented might make people think.  And the attacks come with a fury that is only reserved for those who have committed actual heresy.

Leftism is a religion.  Sure, some of them say they have other religions, but Leftism is generally their guiding star.  Recently Jane Fonda suggested murdering anyone who was against abortion.  And abortion is one of the greatest sacraments of their church.  No one on The View told her she was wrong, just that she shouldn’t say that in public.  And a Leftist, as long as they are a True Believer, will always be excused for amazingly horrible comments like Hanoi Jane spouted out of her wrinkly piehole.

At her age, I’m sure she casts a lot of smells.

But someone on the Right?  The guy who ran the Firefox™ project was essentially fired because he donated to a group that was against legalizing gay marriage years earlier.  Years earlier when Obama was likewise “against” gay marriage.

Now it’s microaggressions and any perceived slight that someone can make up.

There are only a couple of reasons to do this.  The biggest is the one that I think that is operative here:  they’re scared because they think they might be wrong, or that they know that they’re lying.  Again, if I go outside and tell someone who is a Leftist that they’re an idiot because their house is floating, well, they can be confident that life is okay for them because their house isn’t floating.  They know it to be true, and don’t need me to validate that for them.

Their economic ideas?  They’re upset at me (mostly) because they’re not sure they have the Truth, and they simply cannot have anyone thinking about alternatives to their ideas.  I mean, I’m totally sure that communism would totally have worked if only the average 20-year-old at Harvard® had been in charge.

I remember the time I came up with a cure for dementia.  That brings back memories!

And that, partially, is why I write the way that I do.  If you can make a great point, you can win the debate.  If you can make a great point and poke fun at the idea?  The idea itself becomes the joke.

As near as I can tell, that’s always one of the biggest crimes of totalitarian regimes:  a joke about a Communist Party official could send an unlucky Soviet citizen to the GULAG for 25 years.  That isn’t a sign of strength, it’s a sign of fear.

That is why they want to shut down the conversation – they’re afraid.  They know as well as anyone that putting a 300 pound model in lingerie isn’t Beautiful, True, or Good.  It’s hilarious.  But until we’re not afraid to point out that the emperor has no clothes (and that the lingerie model needs more) you can tell that the struggle hasn’t been ridiculed enough, though that time is coming.

And then maybe we’ll all find out our secret opinions were shared by millions.  Except that one I have about motor oil, shower curtains, escalators, and garden tools.  There are places I’m not gonna go.

Why Adversity And Bullies Are Your Friends

“He’s 28 years old and he can eat a chicken sandwich. Very Impressive. Mike Fitzgibbon’s son is a nuclear physicist, and my son can eat a chicken.” – Freddy Got Fingered

I did hear what Beethoven was up to recently:  decomposing.

Adversity is important.

I’ll give you an example:  if a kid’s life has been one simple task, with no conflict and eating Cheezy-Poofs™ on the couch while Mom brings him chicken tendies and sauce and his only responsibility is making sure he can walk from his room to the bathroom, well, he’s going to be worthless.

Why?  If any little thing goes wrong, the program in the brain that says, “crap goes wrong all the time, figure it out” isn’t there.  It’s never been created.  This is why things like “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” exist – a life with an utter lack of adversity.  Again, embrace the power of positive bullying.

In my case, school sucked between fourth grade and sixth grade.  Why?  I was the odd man out.  I had moved from one small school district to another when my family moved from Wilder Ranch to our compound Wilder Mountain.  I was alone, for several reasons.  Me?

I retreated into schoolwork.  The teachers were fine.  The kids were bullies, though.  Little kids are okay.  High school kids are okay.  But there is a time in the middle where kids are cruel – kids entering adolescence have developed the ability to be mean, but they haven’t developed the capacity for empathy.  It’s like they’re communists, or Stephen Colbert.  But I repeat myself.

Communists are awful at telling jokes – they don’t stop until everyone gets it.

I also retreated into athletics.  The one place where men of different backgrounds can come together is through additional diversity – athletics.  If you tackle someone so hard that their Mom felt it, you get respect.  And that respect breeds camaraderie.  The new guy?  He hit me so hard I had to check to see if I was standing on the train tracks.

And then?  I was one of them.  I also will admit this – when the kids were bullies, often they had a point.  It was awful to be confronted with my inadequacies and shortcomings in that way, but the only thing worse would be to live in a bubble of pretty little lies, and never be confronted with the raw truth.

I think about kids who go through life and never meet a single challenge.  I’ve interacted with a few recently.  Things go bad for them?  They crumple.  Badly.  They don’t have the ability to fight back.

That’s the problem.

A bully told me I had a face only a mother could love.  Turns out I’m adopted.

I think I’ve related this story before, about a child in a Japanese schoolroom.  In the story, the child (call him Phil, which I assume is a common Japanese name, like Chuck or Dave) looked at a cocoon in the back of the classroom because I assume Japanese people keep those things there along with samurai swords and they all dress like Pokémon characters.

Phil watched the butterfly struggle to get out of the cocoon.  Phil felt sorry for the butterfly, so he helped it open the cocoon.

I guess butterflies just aren’t what they used to be.

The butterfly then plopped straight to the floor, since gravity works the same way in Japan (I hear) as in other countries.  Phil cried.  Because he was a sissy.

The teacher came to the back of the classroom and saw Phil crying.  “Phil, did you help the butterfly get out of the cocoon?”

Phil, crying in the way that only Japanese children do (I have no idea what that means, but I wrote it so I’m going to go with it.  Maybe their tears shoot out in coherent streams, like a squirt gun?) nodded.

The wise teacher put his hand on Phil’s shoulder.  “Phil, the only way that a butterfly can get enough strength to fly, is to struggle against the cocoon.  If it gets out some other way, like a can opener, it can never fly, and will die.”

Phil nodded through the tears.  Then the teacher wrapped Phil up in Ace™ bandages so he could struggle to get out.  I think.  I get fuzzy on the end part, since the idea occurred to me as I got to the end of the story that maybe Kim Jong Un keeps shooting missiles over Japan is so he can keep Godzilla® at bay, and if he stops, well, goodbye Tokyo.

I hear Kim doesn’t date, because he’s focused on his Korea.

The point is still clear – struggle is important.  My friend sent me an embroidered patch:  “The strongest steel is forged in the fire of a dumpster.”  And that’s true.  Struggle is what makes people resilient.  It is what keeps us putting one foot in front of the other when our comrades have stepped aside and given up.

I moved again when I was in junior high.  I joined track, because, why not?  I was a shot putter and a discus thrower, and one day the coach told us, “Go for a run,” because the most lame sport in junior high is track, and the most lame thing in track is shot and disc and I think the coach wanted to avoid association with us.  I had been running up in the mountains because there was nothing else to do because the Internet hadn’t been invented yet, and had been putting in about six miles a day on the mountain roads.  Running was fun.

Is your refrigerator running?  If so, I might vote for it.

So, when we went running, we went for . . . about six miles.  The other shot put dudes couldn’t believe that they’d gone so far.  From that day forward, we were brothers.  We had struggled with the six miles (well, they had, but I encouraged them onward).  Struggling together, and winning, creates a bond.

On this second move, I was in with the guys in about two weeks.  “Wilder?  The new kid?  He’s okay.”

We will have challenges.  All of us.  Some of them are awful.  One of them will, in the end, kill me.  That’s okay.  I look at these challenges and resolve that I will not be afraid.  I already know that I’m going to win against all of them but one, so I might as well go into that future as a happy warrior, knowing that my winning streak will eventually end.

Whatever challenge you’re going through will end.  And you’ll win.  Unless you die, in which case I think you should blame Phil.  After all, adversity is our real strength.

But I’m not going to lose today.  And not tomorrow, either.  Though chicken tendies do sound nice.

Bulgarian Mall Lawyers, Proteins, And . . . Life?

“I remember thinking ‘Jesus, what a terrible thing to lay on someone with a head full of acid’.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

If you were looking for good jokes, it’s nacho day.

Wednesday is a day that I normally cover economics, but I’m going in a different direction today.  As Wilder, Wealthy and Wise has had over 300 Wednesday posts since I cranked it up in this format back in 2017, that’s 300 comments on wealth and related economic topics, something like 1,500 memes, and so tonight, I’ll only briefly talk about economics:  we’re screwed.  Pic related.

Okay, that looks like a mountain that Yosemite Sam® has to climb to catch a varmint.

Okay, with that over with, let’s shift gears entirely.  Why?  Because, why not?

Let’s talk about Life.

I’m going to start with a number.  1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

I wrote it out with all the zeros because that’s a lot of zeros, and bloggers get paid by the character.  I could have written it out as 1×10300, and it would have been the same, but not had the same emotional impact.  What, exactly does 1×10300 represent?

Yeah, if I divide most anything by 1×10300 I get zero.

Let’s take a step back.  RuBisCO (short for ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase, not Russian Biscuit Company) is probably the most common protein on Earth, making up about 30% of the protein in a plant leaf.  When you eat lettuce, you’re chowing down on lots of RuBisCO.  It looks like the picture below, sorta, but is much more tasty with some ranch dressing or a nice raspberry vinegarette:

When I was weightlifting I bought expired protein powder.  There was no other whey.

By Ericlin1337 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67176768

This pile of spaghetti is a mass of amino acids, but it has a really important task – it rips apart sweet, sweet CO2 so grass can eat CO2 and can grow to be eaten by a cow and turned into a ribeye.  Or so tobacco can grow and turn into a nice Macanudo™.  Or so grain can grow and turn into scotch.  A day without RuBisCO is a day without a decent dinner.

Planet Earth without RuBisCO is probably a barren rock.

If you stretched it out, it’s nothing more than a chain of amino acids that are the building blocks of the RuBisCO protein.  RuBisCO doesn’t turn CO2 into steak without being mashed together, just right.  The protein (which is just a bunch of amino acids connected up) has to be folded up.  If it doesn’t fold up perfectly, it doesn’t work.

The Japanese gang member responsible for keeping the crime boss’s beer cold is called the Yakoozie.

That’s where all the zeros come in.  The proteins that turn into RuBisCO can fold up in to make that spaghetti-looking thing in quite a few ways.  1×10300 of them, approximately.  There are more ways that single protein can fold up than there are planets in the entire observable universe.  There are only 100,000,000,000 total planets (our best guess) in the Milky Way.  Again, our best guess is that the ones that aren’t too hot (Mercury) or too cold (Pluto, still a planet in my book, screw you Neil DeGrasse Tyson) are about 300,000,000.

Now compare with the number of different ways just one protein required for life can fold and be useful.  Keep in mind, that when proteins fold wrong, bad things happen, like they don’t work.  There are even worse consequences, like having brains rot – mad cow disease is a misfolded protein that replicates in the brain and causes people (and cow) brains to turn into brain sponge.  And not the good kind of brain sponge.

Now, as much as I love Bulgarian Mall Lawyers and their ability to be tenacious in personal injury suits and ability to do rudimentary divorce work, if they’re allowed to use shotguns.  No, having Bulgarian Mall Lawyers attempt to fix a Bulgarian Mall Lawyer copy machine in their law office that used to be a Spencer’s™ gifts (right between the place that used to sell cheese and sticks of meat and Waldenbooks®) by poking at it with pencils is far more likely than having a protein folded correctly.  But let’s see a protein convince my ex-wife to sign the papers.

How do you get two Canadian brothers off a couch in a hurry?  Say, “please get off the couch.”

So, we have 1×10300 ways to fold a protein wrong, and 300,000,000 planets.  I’ll even spot you that there have been several billion years.  And billion years is a long time, almost as long as my first marriage.  But  1×10300 is so large that it’s more likely that I put in several pallets of 2x4s, drywall, nails, paint, shingles, carpet, doors, wiring, outlets, and plumbing components into a box and shake the hell out of it and get a house I could live in than have RuBisCO form.

And RuBisCO is important because it is so basic – it’s the building block for extracting energy from sunlight.  No RuBisCO?  No Nabisco™.  To top it off, it forms and folds in milliseconds inside the leaves of every tree on Earth when the temperature and chemistry is right.  We have no idea how it does this, and couldn’t computationally predict this.

This is just one protein that needs to be folded up properly for everything to work out so I can have a decent steak, scotch, and cigar.  When looking further at things like the storage of information on DNA, it starts to look like the ultimate information storage device ever created – the DNA in one cell of a typical human is over six feet (seventeen milliliters) long.  The DNA in all of the cells of your body is twice the diameter of the Solar System, but if you were to stretch all of it out, it’s unlikely you’d be able to go to work on Monday.  Each cell contains three billion base pairs of DNA, or almost the number of words in the average Stephen King novel.

RuBisCO is improbable.  DNA?  Wow.  The squish bits that make us up are at the smallest level more complicated than anything man has ever created, with the exception of the way that a VCR needed to be adjusted so it didn’t flash 12:00.

David Bowie’s VCR always flashed 12:00, too.  Time may change him, but he can’t change time.

One of the ideas of those who would contemplate that life on Earth in general, and humanity in particular, came from random chance must confront are the mathematical impossibilities of things like RuBisCO appearing at random out of only 300,000,000 planets times 8,000,000,000 years.  Further, they have to accept that the number and types of elements available for this are all, randomly, in the proper proportions and properties to support life.

This doesn’t even deal with the observed rates of genetic drift, or the creation of amazingly improbable structures like the human eye or the brain.  The brain exhibits non-trivial quantum effects, so from the smallest possible structures of humanity to the largest imaginable structures of the Universe their appears to be an intent.  Random chance cannot remotely explain what we are, and how we have been created, or this marvel we call consciousness, or what Bulgarian Mall Lawyers call, “a new client”.

It is readily apparent, based on logic and mathematics alone that there are only a few possibilities:

  • That the Universe has been created with intent and a pattern (the big G God),
  • this is all a simulation (the little g god),
  • that life (and thus humanity) was designed and seeded among the stars (which begs, by who or what?)
  • that the purpose of the Universe may be solely for the creation of the Ultimate PEZ® dispenser which may take the form of Yosemite Sam®, or
  • that there are forces that exist in realms in which we cannot yet discern through any physical means.

Random choice is out, mathematically.  Every single time I see it resorted to, it’s a kludge and requires more faith than that which would be required for God.

How else would you explain Yosemite Sam™ or Bulgarian Mall Lawyers?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: National Divorce? Getting Closer.

“Dolores, I am making a citizen’s divorce.” – The Man with Two Brains

Big Alarm Clock is a conspiracy!  Wake up people! (all non-regular memes are as-found)

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same.  Again.  This is moving sideways, but things can unravel quickly.  The advice remains.  Avoid crowds.  Get out of cities.  Now.  A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue:  Front Matter – The National Divorce – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Silly Season – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, subscribe because you’ll join over 740 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

The National Divorce

I remember reading about research a while back that (my fuzzy memory says) indicated that when a married couple didn’t want to have a divorce, one of the easiest things they could do was not talk about a divorce.  I guess that would mean that the first rule of staying married club is don’t talk about divorce club.

Marjorie Taylor Greene brought up the issue in a big way:

It’s a stark question:  do we want to stay married, or not.  Folks on the Internet followed suit, with this poll:

The Internet is what it is, and a poll like that isn’t at all scientific.  But 19,000 people (75% of respondents) were done.  They were ready to get lawyers, and decide how we get to split up California and Virginia and who got alternating weekends with Michigan.

A much more scientific poll was done by Rasmussen® (more on them later in this Issue) and it emerged that a majority of Republicans wanted out.  47%, plus an 11% who might be in favor, but they wanted to know if they could still get Netflix™ off of Uncle Tim’s account it he were stuck in a Blue State before they made up their mind.

Leftists are never in favor of making anything smaller, since it lowers their power.  Remember, it is Leftists who are on the side of international and world governments.  I’m pretty sure they’d love to include Mars, too, since it’s Red.  This is shown in the poll below:

Fully a third of all people (based on Rasmussen’s™ report) are ready to check out.  That’s a lot.  Although Gallup® wasn’t around to do a poll, most literature I can find seems to indicate that only 1/3 of the folks living in the Colonies wanted the Revolution, so 1/3 is a big, big number.

I’ll add in this other (entirely unscientific) poll:

Again, unscientific, but it shows that there are a sizeable number of folks out there who believe that soldiers would, if ordered, shoot on American civilians.  That’s another scary thought, and perhaps feeds back into the idea that people would much rather have a peaceful exit rather than a violent one.

I read that this year’s CPAC (Republican fanboy convention) was poorly attended, and lacking in energy.  And why not?  The most fervent people in the Republican party are done, and don’t trust the vote, and don’t think that their votes may ever matter again.

Spiderman®, though, seems to have an opinion:

Violence and Censorship Update

Cancelling really isn’t government censorship, but it’s censorship nevertheless.  Scott Adams, noted cartoonist and author, really rustled the collective jimmies of the Left.  Rasmussen™ had a poll about whether it was “okay to be white” and 47% of black people indicated that it was either not okay, or they weren’t sure.

Scott has a YouTube® channel (still!) where he talks about whatever he wants to talk about.  In this, he opined that if that was the way that black people felt, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be around them.  The following cartoon describes it in such a way that Scott retweeted it:

The outrage was both predictable, even though Scott noted that many black people he knew called him up and said that his stance was completely reasonable.  Mr. Adams’ publisher dropped him.  Mr. Adams’ cartoon syndicator dropped him.  Mr. Adams’ agent . . . dropped him.  His new book, due out in the fall?  Cancelled.

I don’t feel bad for Scott, he knew what he was doing, and he has tens of millions of dollars.  But what is it about that simple narrative that makes the Left explode?  I’ll cover that in a future post.

The Silence of the Adams

It’s not violence now, but Illinois has now decided that most crimes short of murdering someone and taking selfies with the victim are now non-detainable.  Burn someone’s house?  Out without bail.  Kill someone while high?  Out without bail.

Florida.  Sigh.  Why?  They want to make bloggers who write about elected officials register if they make money for their efforts.  Is this the single stupidest thing to come out of Florida since they elected ¡Jeb!?

The publisher of Roald Dahl is going through his books an removing whatever they don’t like based on political correctness.  No more “ugly” or “fat” or . . . black.  Paging Scott Adams . . . These “corrections” are showing up in people’s previously purchased e-books, too.  This is why physical media is good.  And why I have lots of books.

It’s not censorship, exactly, when programmers prevent A.I. from coming to conclusions based on fact, but it’s close.  There are certain facts that are inconvenient, like boys have xy chromosomes and girls have xx chromosomes, so programmers prevent A.I. from talking about that.  Elon Musk says he’s going to do his own, non-woke A.I.

When the trains carrying ethyl-methyl-death crashed in East Palestine, it was a story that was minimized until it couldn’t be.  I follow stories like this that are under the news, and was aware of it within a few hours of it happening.  But the news?  No reporting on it, since it didn’t impact Baltimore and had the potential to make the Biden administration look even worse than it normally looks.

Biden’s Misery Index

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again, and, like Kamala’s womb, this graph doesn’t eggs.  Here’s a recap:

 

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence is still minimal right now.  I’m betting it stays down until June at the earliest.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was down a bit more.  I think this is a conscious attempt to keep things together, Biden just came out in favor of “law and order”, because I think he saw it the show on cable.

Economic:

Economic numbers took a big dive this month, which surprised me.  The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which still isn’t good.

Illegal Aliens:

The number took a big drop!  Yay!  Oh, it’s still higher than ever for that month.  I’d say border is wide open, but we have no border.

So, when can we ask the Mexicans to leave?

The Silly Season

One way to deflect a story is to not tell it.  The other way to deflect a story is to flood the media with, well, nonsense.  My favorite this month?  The Chinese Spy Balloon™.  During World War II, the Japanese decided they would make Americans afraid.  They launched 9,000 balloons filled with explosives at the United States.  As near as I could find with an in-depth three-minute look, one exploded.  Out of 9,000.

Ohhh, I’m so afraid.

I’m not sure what we’ve found out about the Chinese Spy Balloon©.  I think that we’ll find out they were trying to check up on why Americans weren’t buying more extended warrantees based on those cell-phone calls.  Since we haven’t heard anything, I’m think that it may actually have been a weather balloon.  Regardless, they can solve their problem with just a little bit of camouflage that the United States would never shoot down:

Was this the story that they were attempting to distract us from?

It’s a scary one.  Why do we need so may people?  Why aren’t all the traditional people who would go into the military signing up?  Oh, yeah.  They’ve been told they’re racist.  They’ve been told they have unearned privilege?  They’ve seen the military force people to take the vaxx.  And now they want them to sign up to fight?

What could be next?

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11761485/NYPD-release-images-four-brazen-thieves-staged-50-000-raid-Manhattan-Givenchy.html

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1628194739987046400

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1626367620151738375

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1626397252334809090

https://twitter.com/nofones2/status/1626369625314279426

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1626447147225718786

 

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1621965430930669569

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1628225095893131264

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1627464538609139714

https://twitter.com/762sfuxk/status/1626379421065134080

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11735803/Armed-intruder-left-critical-condition-shot-neck-homeowner.html

 

One Guy

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11632047/Vigilante-killed-robber-Houston-restaurant-breaks-silence.html

 

Body Count

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11732497/More-48-000-Americans-committed-suicide-year-report-finds.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11711353/Seven-states-eye-legalizing-assisted-suicide-America.html

https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/new-paper-an-estimated-13-million

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/is-coincidence-now-the-leading-cause

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11738179/Still-think-secure-Joe-Moment-500-Venezuelan-migrants-walk-southern-border.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11730363/Biden-preparing-mass-deportations-non-Mexican-migrants-Mexico.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11733577/Map-shows-14-million-Americans-live-5-miles-cancer-gas-emitting-plants.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11776999/The-blanketed-fentanyl-NINEFOLD-rise-deadly-opioid-use-western-US.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11701187/Zombie-Nation-Shocking-images-lay-bare-Americas-drug-crisis.html

 

Vote Count

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11761979/Kari-Lake-vows-Arizona-gubernatorial-defeat-state-supreme-court.html

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/02/08/maricopa-heat-maps-the-story-keeps-getting-worse/

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/15/everything-you-need-to-know-about-democrat-gov-tony-evers-bid-to-overhaul-wisconsin-elections/

https://alaskapublic.org/2023/02/17/launch-of-campaign-to-repeal-ranked-choice-voting-draws-a-crowd-in-anchorage/

https://raheemkassam.substack.com/p/fox-vs-dominion-discovery-docs-show

 

Civil War
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/keith-olbermann-calls-economic-civil-war-institute-gun-control

https://www.foxnews.com/media/olbermann-urges-blue-states-wage-economic-civil-war-red-states-starve-red-states-submission

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/internal-atf-docs-show-zero-tolerance-guidelines-shutting-down-gun-stores

https://www.carolinacoastonline.com/tideland_news/opinions/article_bec42134-ad30-11ed-979b-4365a8a67e62.html

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/17/idaho-house-approves-talks-to-annex-oregon-counties/

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/lost-cause-2-0-desantis-and-republicans-inspired-by-racist-confederate-history-re-writes/

https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/newswire/gops-civil-war-republicans-confront-bitter-divide-no-clear-path-forward/

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/06/megadonor-gop-richard-elizabeth-uihlein-00081267

https://www.reformer.com/opinion/columnists/nicholas-boke-what-would-a-civil-war-look-like-anyway/article_c6beefac-aca1-11ed-9fa4-d74d7a722a44.html

https://sundayguardianlive.com/world/will-2022-witness-american-civil-war-2-0-will-happen-2024

https://news.uchicago.edu/us-headed-toward-another-civil-war-william-howell

https://www.businessinsider.com/mtg-defends-call-split-up-us-says-civil-war-looming-2023-2

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greenes-national-divorce-was-the-civil-war.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greene-secession-civil-war/673142/

https://www.theringer.com/2023/2/24/23613267/emasculation-proclamation-civil-war-ii

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/project-veritas-has-forced-out-james-okeefe.html

https://hard-drive.net/hd/technology/ken-burns-releases-4000-part-tiktok-series-on-the-civil-war/

Your Limits: Are They Real? Or Can You Do More?

“A man’s got to know his limitations.” – Magnum Force

I’ve heard coffee is bad, but O.J. will kill you.

Knowing yourself is important.  There are two aspects of that that aren’t considered enough – knowing what you can do, and knowing what you can’t.  In practice, since abilities define a large part of who I am, knowing these limitations and abilities is crucial.

To start off, I have a list of things that I know I’ll never, ever, be good at.  When I was in junior high, my music teacher tried to convince me that everyone could sing.  Then he heard me and began noting that the Geneva Convention probably outlawed me singing, and also that he was wrong – some people can’t sing.  So, I’ve known since I was very young that however much I might like to sing, I will never, ever be able to.

Strike that – I can sing, I’ll just never be able to sing in a manner that other people find pleasant.

Other things are also off limits.  Basketball, for one.  I have been graced by genetics with a very powerful frame that gains muscle very easily.  My body is suited for trudging through snow, chasing priests, rowing longboats, forming a shield wall, and general pillaging.  Basketball?  If I can tackle people that might work out.  Basketball with an axe or a sword?  Even better.

Knowing what I absolutely can’t do is important.  It prevents frustration.

Are Viking Christians Bjorn again?

The next category is things I can do that are easy.  Now, many of the things that are easy for me are hard for other people.  And as I grow older, I find that things that used to be easy are becoming not so easy.  This pattern will continue, up and until a thing that used to be easy (breathing) will cease to be easy.  It will be difficult, and loud.  And hopefully someone will make the joke, “oh, Wilder’s just venting.”

But easy is still important.

Then there are the things that I can learn to do.  Taking great pictures is one, and I was working on that, trying to get the right light at the right time.  I still have a lot to learn, because the teacher kicked me out of class for indecent exposure.  All kidding aside, I’m okay at photography, but haven’t spent the time to be great at it, but I can picture getting good at it.

One time I thought I had a “long distance relationship”, but she called it a “restraining order”.

Learning is crucial.  It is the thing that can multiply capabilities, and when they’re used for something important, it can work wonders.  When those capabilities are used for nothing important, it’s the same as multiplication in the real world – it amounts to nothing.

That’s important.  Learning can make us better.  The last category is, in my opinion, where the magic happens:  things I can do, but I think I can’t do.

Like I said, this is the magic.  I had one boss who believed in me even more than I believed in me.  On more than one occasion, he said to me when he gave me a task that I thought was impossible, “Wilder, you can make this happen.”

My boss at the suicide hotline asked me to be a bit less positive.

Nine times out of ten, he was right.  So, nine times out of ten he knew and mentored me to do more than I thought I could do.  That is either the definition of a great boss or a psycho.  In this case, he was a great boss.  The downside?  He set ten impossible goals for himself before breakfasts, too.  In one of those cases, he was wrong.  As I recall, it only cost a few billion (really, not making this up) to the company.  It wasn’t fraud, mind you, he just wasn’t able to do what he thought he could do.

Obviously, he was fired.  And then he managed to make another billion dollar company and make himself several tens of millions in the process.  Even the thing he screwed up still is worth billions.

All because he didn’t allow those that he worked with to limit themselves.

Looking back, the biggest mistakes I made were in overly limiting myself.  When I look at some other friends, I see the same, not swinging for the fence when they had it all.  When I get those phone calls or texts, from the outside it’s generally a trivial call to give advice because I can see the capabilities of my friends and I believe in them.

Sometimes more than they believe in themselves.

The Mrs. has a simple test to see if a cat is a psycho.  “Is it a cat?  It’s a psycho.”

Am I done?

No.  I still have a goal – I want to kick a dent in the Universe.  I think I can.  If my old boss was right, it’ll be a bigger dent than I think it will be.  I’m really hoping that it isn’t the Russian’s weaponizing my singing to use in the Ukraine.

Some things are more horrible than war.

Discipline, Romans, And Spending All The Money

“That’s newspapers for you.  You could fill volumes with what you don’t read in ‘em.” – The Green Berets

I decided never to jog with Marcus Aurelius.  It’s always dangerous to run with Caesars.

Self-discipline is hard, but it starts with the smallest step.  Even (the dead) Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in his book Meditations talked about how hard it was to get out of bed in the morning.  Marcus talked about how warm and comfy he was under the covers, and how he’d like to stay there, curled up.  In then end, though, he got up because he had responsibility to govern the Empire that was a bit more important than his desire to be comfy.

Me?  There are some mornings I would have given up Gaul for another fifteen minutes.  Okay, maybe not Gaul because of the food, but definitely Judea.

Marcus did the tough (maybe he had a hangover?) thing because he had a responsibility to millions of citizens to do his very best for them, and as nearly as I can determine, he took that seriously.  Plus?  It’s good to be the Emperor.  I hear they didn’t have to wait in the drive through for Chicken McNuggets® and always got enough Hot Mustard™ sauce.

My advice?  Never eat a Kid’s Meal at McDonald’s®.  Their mothers tend to get upset.

The difficult part of discipline is that it requires, well, discipline.  Getting good things in life is difficult – that’s why we work for them.  And that’s why it’s called work.  It’s tough.  But when the seeds are planted, cared for, and weeded, then at harvest it’s time to reap the rewards.  Discipline is like that.  Heck, some sort of east Asian place that I can’t be bothered to look up has a proverb that says that, “A woman who marries a man who works hard every day will never starve.”

I don’t think that was China, because if it was China, they have been starving every century by the tens of millions, especially when they embarked on the Chinese Diet Plan called Communism.  Maybe it was Puerto Rico?  Or Applebee’s™?

Probably not.  But I think it might have ended in a vowel, but not Y, because that’s sometimes only a vowel, and I don’t think that Asians use the same fonts.

So, if even a dead Roman can figure it out, why can’t we?

Some people want to ban Roman numerals.  Not on my watch.

The latest bouts of fiscal insanity in the United States have made me think that none of them have read Marcus Aurelius, or maybe even can read.  What triggered this post is the recent Supreme Court Case about ghosts.  Oh, wait, that’s later.  No, student loans.

Student loans in the United States are a particularly horrible thing that gives money to Leftist professors so that they can indoctrinate youth but the youth has to pay for it until they lose all their teeth or pay it off.  I think that was in the terms and conditions of my student loans, but I can’t be exactly sure, since after I signed my name, they gave me $7,500.  Duh.

The most pernicious thing about student loans is that they live forever.  I paid mine off in January, 2013.  I paid ahead, but didn’t want to pay them off completely if the world ended in December, 2012 (which was a thing).  Oddly, this is a true story, and illustrates how far I’m willing to take a joke.

But student loan forgiveness is just the tip of the iceberg.  For the last five or so years of my life, the government (both Right and Left) has been like a fat girl who decides on a Tuesday night that the diet is over.  That cookie dough?  Sure.  I can eat a tube or two.  Covered in frosting.  Oh, and I’ll just tidy up the frosting container so it doesn’t go bad.  If you’ve given up, why not go all in?

The cannibal decided to go on a vegan diet.  He found a family of them at Whole Foods®.

The government (again, both Right and Left) has decided that there is no limit.  Every Tuesday for them is time to give Ukraine more money for . . . (spins wheel) dental x-ray infrastructure.  Will $23 billion cover that?  Sure, if it were just Ukraine, that would be one thing.  But it’s not just that.  Biden’s Build Back Better means that we’ll just burn cash to make us warm if we run out of oil.

If I seem a bit cynical, it’s because that at every single turn in my life, that I’ve seen fiscal discipline further erode, and money fly a bit freer each day.  At no point have I ever seen (outside of Ron and Rand Paul) and politician say, “stop”.  Apparently, when elected to Congress, the “spend money on everything light” blinks on the dashboard of their cars.

My dashboard keeps telling me “trunk is ajar”.  Silly car.  A trunk isn’t a jar.

There is no discipline.  There is no pretending to have discipline.  It’s all just comfy warm covers and Chicken McNuggies™ while every sense of fiscal discipline is overridden by another trip of the spoon int the Pillsbury™ chocolate frosting.

But that’s okay.  I’m sure it will end fine.  Where’s the frosting?  I think I want to sleep late today.  Oh, but have we spent enough money on Ukraine?