Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

A Crisis Of Legitimacy

“If I am not a tyrant, if I merely seek legitimacy then why would I not accept such favorable terms?” – Rome

Hulk Hogan apparently had to seek therapy – the diagnosis was wrestle-mania.

I think one thing that has always been a feature of Americans is that we’ve had a healthy distrust for authority. The entire Revolutionary War was because we didn’t trust the British to take our interests into account. We even used roosters to find British spies – a version of chicken-catch-a-Tory. Yet, just enough trust has existed to keep us going.

Mostly.

Right now, however, there is a crisis brewing – a crisis of legitimacy.

We see it everywhere, but I’ll start off with the worst: the “Presidency” of Joe Biden. The points that bear discussing are certainly well known to readers here:

  • The “open” conspiracy to change laws to beat Trump,
  • Evidence of ballot harvesting, and
  • Evidence of counting “irregularities”

Among a lot of other things. Heck, even Pa Wilder voted for Biden, which is something he’d never do if he’d still been alive.

How do you change a lightbulb in a house built by Apple®? You don’t, they no longer make that outlet, so it’s time to buy a new house.

The reaction of the Left is more of their politics as usual. Anything possible to distract and vilify the Right is in play. Any hint or even joke about the legitimacy of Biden’s electoral “victory” is shut down. Case in point, I made a joke about Biden’s victory being more in the counting than in the voting, and that podcast was immediately shut down by YouTube’s® A.I. (Shhh, don’t make fun of that A.I., it’s really self-conscious),

If they’re that sensitive, I know I’m over the target. The reason is that there is a mountain of evidence that shows fraud in the election, in just the right places and locations it would be needed (and would be possible) to swing the election to Biden.

Huh.

A robust and positive response would have been to participate as hard as possible to show Biden was legitimately elected. They would have taken the points brought up by (in many cases) non-partisan analysis showing the trickery.

Nope. The Democrats looked for voter fraud just as hard as O.J. looked for “the real killer”.

I drink apple juice; I heard OJ will kill you.

I wonder could there be a parallel there, or if that could be the reason that a majority of the American people think Joe was falsely elected? Instead, they use the word “baseless” when they really mean “facts we really, really, want you to ignore.”

Hmmm.

If a phony election was enough to destroy the Republic, though, it would have failed long ago. Historically, there have been other elections that have been called into question: 1876 and 1960 were two big examples. But we survived both, even though Rutherford B. Hayes was called “His Fraudulency” for the rest of his life.

Rutherford B. Hayes was a stunning success compared to Biden, serving one term where his most notable accomplishment was attempting to avoid inflation and keep the money supply sound, whereas Biden prints and spends money like a Pelosi drinks and drives.

Why is Owen Wilson’s nose in the middle of his face? It’s the scenter.

That’s the second crisis of legitimacy – phony money. Again, none of this is new – I’ve written that our monetary policy appears to be less sound than the logic of a drunken 22-year-old rock star in a strip club in Vegas.

The phony money is, of course, only one component of the phony economy. For years now, pools of cash have kept up the appearance of value in home prices. Likewise, stock prices have been artificially pushed upward at the same time bond prices (and interest rates) were artificially kept downward. At some point (and, it’s looking like that point is very near, indeed) the stored energy caused by the distortions will cause the economy to snap.

Because? Our economy is illegitimate.

What about the Uvalde police department: Who thinks that they’re legitimate now? But how many people are secretly asking, “if that happened in my town, what would our cops do?” and then thinking, “probably the same thing.”

Reason #238 for the Second Amendment.

Where most people would expect cops to run in and, oh, save children, it’s not in their playbook. Really. Lots of police departments put as their number one priority “officer safety”. And courts have repeatedly backed the cops up – they have no duty to even try to save me, kids in a school, or you.

How legitimate does that feel?

I could keep going all night, but sometime I have to sleep, so I’ll just bring up one more. We’re in a society where even the concept of “being a man” or “being a woman” is legitimate anymore. But even that is a symptom of a society where the basic values that have been consciously subverted at every opportunity – good is now bad, and vice versa. Truth is now despised while lies are celebrated.

To summarize our society is in deep jeopardy because we have:

  • Illegitimate Politicians (especially the President),
  • Illegitimate Money,
  • An Illegitimate Economy, and
  • Illegitimate Values.

I hope he never gets around to building back better . . .

This is the opposite of the formula to make a country work well. Civil strife combined with a collapsing economy, rising prices, and a collapsing social fabric sounds like a lot to take away from just a loss of legitimacy, but it’s not – for people to create a productive, free society, they have to have incentive, they have to have trust.

They have to have legitimacy – they have to believe.

To restore that? They have to have truth.

The Good News Is The Same As The Bad News: It’s You

“Winners always want the ball. . . when the game is on the line.” – The Replacements

Floors take on a lot of responsibility. It’s like everything falls to them.

There’s bad news:

No one is coming to save you.

But there’s good news:

No one is coming to save you.

Who will save us?

You will.

I think many people have this weird idea that other people are the answer. The last first aid course that I took before moving to Alaska ended up every scenario with, “and then you call 911.” To be fair, that’s a great idea in most places. I mean, unless you’re in a school.

The reason the murder rate has gone down over the last few decades isn’t because the idiots in Chicago have developed some sort of restraint in shooting each other. Nope. The medical folks are faster at getting those that were shot, and the docs are better at saving them.

The woman who helped The Mrs. deliver Pugsley quit. I guess she was having a midwife crisis.

But then I took a first aid class in Alaska.

Wow. Night and day. The content was much, much richer. The trainers went into much greater detail, and told us, “You’re not trained to do this. But if help isn’t coming, it might save a life.” The translation was simple. Phone coverage in Alaska sucks.

How bad was it? When we moved there, you couldn’t get a phone line, even if there was copper to your house. And cell service? The infrastructure consisted of what two bright schizophrenics that left the mainland United States could cobble together with the parts of a downed DC-3.

Everyone else was in the same boat. The message was clear.

“You’d better pay attention.”

The quiet part they didn’t say in class was: “because no one is coming to save you.”

When I woke up in the hospital, I told the doctor I couldn’t feel my legs. “That’s because we amputated your arms, maybe?”

When I ended up having to have my entire fingernail removed and the part under the nail stitched up because there was were two 55 gallon drums of salmon oil (I’m not making ANY of this up) on my property that I tried to open and the wedge slipped and pulled most of the nail off anyway, the doctor said, “Okay, this is going to hurt like hell for a few days. I’m going to prescribe you some (powerful painkiller). You probably won’t use them. Toss them in your backpack, so if you’re out moose hunting and break your leg, you might be able to limp out.”

Think that a doctor would say that in Nebraska?

He didn’t say the quiet part: “because no one is coming to save you.”

I prefer it that way. Really. Sure, I like Internet and electricity and cold beer and watching Trailer Park Boys. But I know the true answer.

When it goes bad?

No one is coming to save me.

Three friends were in the forest – the first said, “These are moose tracks.” The second said, “No, those are bear tracks.” The third was run over by a train.

That might sound depressing to some people, but not to me. I like me. And, I like my chances. To be fair, the person in this world I trust most in the world . . . is me. The next one is The Mrs. Third in line?

Maybe Sturm, Ruger, and Company? Yeah, they’ve always been straight shooters to me.

One of the lessons that I’ve walked away with in the last 20 years of my life is that:

  • the police,
  • the Constitution,
  • the courts,
  • the military,
  • congress,
  • and anyone sitting in the office of president

is not going to save me.

And they’re not coming to save you, either.

In one sense, it’s scary. I think that many people take the idea that someone, somewhere, is responsible for them. That’s simply not true for anyone over the age of, say, 14.

We are not passive actors in our lives. That idea is corrosive. We are in control.

That’s from an Edgar Allen Poem.

I think a lot of the idea that other people are responsible for us comes from the anonymity of large city life. To me, it’s odd – the more of us around, the less responsibility we feel, and the more we want to blame other people. Why? With so many people around, it brings anonymity. Anonymity makes it easy to avoid responsibility.

In Modern Mayberry? We know each other. We talk to each other. We are, in the end, responsible. I go to dinner, and the owner of the restaurant greets me, and (from time to time) brings a bottle by the table and pours each of us a shot.

Why?

Our lives are not anonymous. It’s a community. Are we responsible for ourselves? Certainly. But in a small town, we understand that we help each other. And he can go home and tell his wife he wasn’t really drinking on the job.

“Tequila or vodka?” That’s how I’d start a marriage counseling session.

Our nation is fundamentally broken. I’d say that someone in New York City doesn’t care about Modern Mayberry, sitting here in flyover country. But they do. Most of them can’t even understand it, but what they do understand they despise.

That’s okay. I’m not responsible for them. And I certainly don’t want them to be responsible for me.

Only you can save you. Only you can save your family. And that’s still the good news: “Winners always want the ball . . . when the game is on the line.”

The people in Washington D.C.? They won’t save us.

You will.

And that’s the good news. Your life. Your future. Your family. Your country. They’re in your hands.

Would you change that for anything?

I wouldn’t. I like it when the ball is in my hands.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

Our Economy: At The Jagged Edge

“Because of the metric system?” – Pulp Fiction

I saw a mountain covered in cows.  “Huh, that must be Mt. Heiferest.”

Systems work within certain limits.  Let’s take . . . the Earth.  The Earth is absolutely filled with life.  It’s nearly everywhere, and in abundance, unless a particular bit of life has secrets about the Clintons.  Let’s just look at a single variable of the system that supports life:  temperature.

All things being equal, if the Earth was as hot as Venus is, the zone where life could exist (if it was based on the need for water, of course) would be pretty small.  Likewise, Mars would have a smaller envelope – it’s too cold – and water would be frozen most of the time.  Sure, life is technically possible in both locations, but it will never thrive like it has for a huge chunk of the Earth’s history.

And that’s just one variable impacting a complex system.

There are many ways to configure an economy.  Most of the ones that work really well are decentralized for most things.  No one tells a farmer in Nebraska what or when to plant.  The farmer chooses, based on what he thinks he can sell.  No one tells PEZ® to make a Yosemite Sam™ PEZ© dispenser.  But why wouldn’t they make a Yosemite Sam® PEZ® dispenser?  Duh.

A day on Venus lasts 5,832.6 hours, so it’s just like a Monday on Earth with Biden in the White House.

Most of the time, this system is pretty closely coupled.  The world doesn’t have years of surplus of, say, food just sitting around – with billions of people, I know someone would eat the Ding Dongs® and Pop Tarts™ first and then there wouldn’t be any for me.  I mean, it certainly looks like Nic Cage could make an infinite amount of movies since the word, “no” isn’t in his vocabulary, but even he has limits to his Nic Cage-ness.

I think we’re close to the limits of the system that’s given us prosperity as we know it.  Yup, that’s a sobering thought.  Here are a few data points:

This one hit me fairly hard (from Vox Day’s place – there’s more at the LINK):

I own a small trucking company, and this is what the fuel crisis is doing to our country… Today I filled up my truck to deliver products that help keep our country fed. When I filled up my truck, it cost me $1,149.50. This is ONE truck, for ONE day of fuel. I own three. So for one day of operation, it’s costing me $3,448.50. (Yes, we use a full tank of fuel every single day, sometimes more than 1 tank per day).

My trucks generally run 5-6 days a week, so we’ll just estimate on the low side and say five. That’s $17,242.50. Last week was over $20k for ONE week, that I have to pay out of my pocket to try and keep not only my children fed, but those of my employees, and our country.

Mark my words, we are on a downhill slide to the worst recession our country has ever seen. Trucking companies are going under left and right. (Literally hundreds weekly.) If you’re not aware, what you’re wearing, what you’re eating, what you’re living in, what you’re driving, what you’re reading this on, was delivered by a truck.

That’s sobering.  All the beer comes on trucks, so it could be literally sobering.

We might need USB if the USA fails.

What else have we seen?

  • Baby Formula Shortages
  • Rising Violence, Well, Everywhere
  • Short Tempers
  • Shortages of Basic Repair Parts For Vehicles

These have some consequences.  Big ones.

People are pulling back on frills, in a hurry.  A very good restaurant in Modern Mayberry just shut down.  Forever.  The owners threw in the towel.  Rising prices led to fewer customers . . . customers feeling pinched can always cook their own food at home as a quick way to save a few bucks.  I opened my browser (which thinks I live hundreds of miles away from Modern Mayberry) and saw the same exact story a few hundred miles away on the same day our local hangout closed – another, distant, beloved local restaurant shutting down in a town I’ve never been to.

The Mrs. has a phobia so she stacks the plates in the cabinet by the year we bought them.  It’s a very rare dish order.

Why are dining customers feeling the pinch?  Let’s just talk a single variable:  fuel.  By my calculations, the rising cost of fuel is draining $2.3 billion dollars a day, every day from the economy.  That’s not quite a trillion dollars a year, but fuel is priced into everything.  Divide the rough annual cost of just the increase and I came up with almost $2,800.  Per person.  Multiplied by a family of four, and that’s about $11,000 a year per family.  If the average family makes $69,000 a year, just the increase in fuel prices is about 16% of their annual income.  Sure, lots of that isn’t direct to the family, but it gets priced into every single thing they buy.

That’s stark, especially because it’s only a single variable.  Increased interest rates will be hitting soon, along with all of the financial pressures that will bring.  And, of course, there will be more things as this crisis cascades.

I took a college elective on pollen creation.  I got a B.

Here’s another data point.  I pulled into McDonald’s® and asked for a McSausage McMuffin with McEgg®.  Don’t judge me!  They’re tasty!

“Sorry, we’re all out.  We do have sausage biscuits left.”

“Okay.  I’ll take one.”  Not my favorite, but, whatever.

“Okay, that’ll be $6.50.”  It was just as they put up their lunch menu, so I hadn’t seen the price.

Six fifty?  For a sausage patty, some not great scrambled eggs, a slice of cheese, and a biscuit?  And it wasn’t what I wanted in the first place?

I noped out of that.  First time I’ve canceled a drive-through order that I can recall, but I didn’t need the sandwich $6.50 worth.  I drove out of the line and off on my way.  Good thing it wasn’t an Amish McDonald’s® – I hear they don’t have outlets.

I hate to think about what happens when Joe runs out of his “good” ideas.

Our economic systems are certainly out of balance.  Badly.  We’re at the edge of a cliff, and I have the feeling that things will soon be changing, and quickly.  Be prepared for a change in temperature.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Failure and Guns

“Your company cannot be worth that much.” – The Office

I hear Joe Biden has an I.Q. of 150 – he took the test three times and added up all the scores.

  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 Clock O’Doom at the same location. For now. 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 Michael Scott Presidency – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Guns – 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 nearly 700 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/

The Michael Scott Presidency

The Michael Scott in the title refers to the fictional Regional Manager of Dunder-Mifflin on the NBC® sitcom, The Office. Michael Scott was a bumbling character, a bit self-important and self-absorbed, and an HR nightmare. Even with all of that Scott was generally successful, often in spite of himself.

I would hate for anyone to think I was comparing *resident Joe Biden to Michael Scott. I don’t think that Biden could last for a month as a regional manager of an office supply company. But what I do refer to is one particular episode, where Michael had quit, started his own paper company, and was negotiating its sale to his old employer. Why?

It was a sitcom.

Michael Scott’s old boss had a simple response when Scott wants his old job back, which his boss, rightly, notes is a multimillion-dollar buyout. “Your company cannot be worth that much.”

Scott responds: “Our company is worth nothing. Business isn’t about money to me, David. If tomorrow my company goes under, I will just start another paper company. And then another. And another. And another.”

What sounds good on paper? Communism. Unless you’re reading a history book.

And that’s where Brandon Biden is. He has failed so spectacularly in every category imaginable:

  • Economic Policy making Jimmy Carter look like a genius,
  • Remembering the names of the days of the week,
  • Foreign Relations, except the Afghans would sure like to do business again,
  • Raising children that even a drug lord would disown,
  • Trade, where his idea of sanctions on enemies are actually things that hurt Americans more, and
  • Energy, where he started with an energy-independent nation and made it more dependent than a welfare mother of six.

Biden’s presidency isn’t worthless, it has a negative value. He has nothing. At all. So he has nothing to lose, which is the scary part.

When Bill Clinton was in the same place, however, he did something incredibly astute: he decided to work with the Republicans, and crafted a legislative package that led to drastic reduction of deficit spending while creating a booming economy. Just like sleeping with Hillary, it wasn’t what Bill wanted to do, but it was what he had to do to keep power.

That’s not where Biden has gone. At every chance, he has upped the stakes on partisanship. This is straight out of Obama’s playbook – whenever there is a chance to unite? Divide. I’d say that Joe learned that lesson there, but I’m pretty sure that his cognitive abilities are somewhere below the low battery limit.

No, whoever is calling the shots is upping the ante. And, losing this badly and refusing to admit that there are no fewer than 100 million citizens that think he is insane, he’s attempting to swing for the fences. That means that, as long as Joe is in office, there’s no limit to the number of things he’ll try. There’s also no limit to the level of Leftist insanity that will be in those plans.

Sadly, this isn’t a sitcom episode. I mean, except for the whole Hunter thing.

Hunter spilled beer on his laptop so he took it to the repair shop since he thought it had Corona virus.

Violence And Censorship Update

May started off with a victory, of sorts. The shrieking harpy that had been selected to head the Department of Justice’s Ministry of Truth quit. At least temporarily. I’m not sure that I completely believe that they’ve given up the plan, but I think that they’ve given up on the cartoon-tier villain that they had chosen to run it.

In other news, the dream of the dystopians isn’t dead: vax trackers and now, a “carbon-footprint” tracker has been created. All of them use that oh-so-wholesome invention, the cell phone. We see how that will be implemented – in Australia, for instance, “citizens” had to take pictures and prove location using cell phones at random intervals to prove they were following the COVID laws.

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 ticked up. Perhaps turning back up in June or July – Antifa® seems primed?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up more in May. With abortion and gun control, even more in June?

Economic:

Instability increases . . . .

Illegal Aliens:

It set a new record. Again. An all-time record. The border is, for all intents and purposes, wide open.

Guns

Gun control is probably the third rail for ten or twenty million Americans. And, well, those are Americans with guns. It would probably be easier to disarm the “pillow lovers club” but it has always been guns.

Why?

It is certainly for one reason, and one reason only. It’s not about hunting. It’s about a challenge to tyranny. As attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, “You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass.”

So, when the Left asks, “How many more kids have to die?” it’s not a political position or tear jerker line. It’s a threat – they will do anything, anything at all to take your guns from you.

Regardless, the gun debate is over. Period. If armed police will stand outside of a school while children inside are slaughtered, they will stand outside of anyone’s home while the same happens there. The reason that we haven’t had another hijacking after 9-11 isn’t because of sky marshals. It isn’t because of enhanced security or the FBI suddenly becoming competent.

Nope. It’s because the American people on those airplanes finally recognized something that nearly every reader here has always known: the defense of your family and your own life is your responsibility, always has been, and always will be. The defense of our nations and schools belongs to us, not some outside entity.

Anything else is fiction.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://youtu.be/MTzbYB0SE

https://youtu.be/FEnPmPGF4aY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QqSqsT0SJmU

https://twitter.com/i/status/1527067336334639104

https://twitter.com/DMVFollowers/status/1523469299230253056

https://twitter.com/i/status/1523437362197323777

https://twitter.com/i/status/1523532070412120064

https://twitter.com/i/status/1523165355828461571

https://twitter.com/WCBD/status/1531652018900713472

https://youtu.be/WQ5gbRqss-M

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10861417/Woman-pleads-fellow-NYC-subway-users-intervene-thug-assaults-none-do.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10812643/Moment-pair-gunmen-assault-rifles-kill-man-gas-station-brazen-broad-daylight-attack.html

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/RockholdJones/status/1527711404786073602

https://twitter.com/i/status/1523792561936408576

https://twitter.com/ArtValley818_/status/1524983401706496000

https://twitter.com/NFL_Memes/status/1524427784776466432

https://twitter.com/i/status/1522560391590653952

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqRXYevJbiw&t=17s

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10820965/Hero-pastor-hit-Orange-County-gunman-chair-churchgoers-hogtied-seized-weapons.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10820413/JK-Rowling-praises-feminist-never-dropped-flag-stood-masked-trans-activists.html

https://nypost.com/2022/05/19/topless-mom-in-her-undies-rescues-pet-goose-from-bald-eagle/

One Gal

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10865783/West-Virginia-woman-praised-using-pistol-shoot-dead-gunman-AR-15.html

Body Count

https://media.gab.com/system/media_attachments/files/106/428/960/original/0b6680c0c946e893.jpeg

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/massive-fire-strikes-huge-poultry-farm-supplies-eggs-major-supermarkets

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/fbi-warns-imminent-cyber-attacks-food-plants-after-mysterious-rash-fires

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/05/16/when_misinformation_drives_bad_policy_147601.html

https://summit.news/2022/05/09/fda-chief-claims-misinformation-is-leading-cause-of-death-in-the-united-states/

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/mortality-among-white-collar-workers-jumped-24-percent-between-2020-and-2021-life-insurance

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/05/us-road-deaths-increased-by-more-than-10-in-2021/

https://grahamlinehan.substack.com/p/this-never-happens?s=r

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-10846893/The-birth-rate-increased-time-seven-years-2021-teen-pregnancy-fell.html

https://www.kff.org/womens-health-policy/state-indicator/number-of-abortions/?

https://abort73.com/abortion_facts/us_abortion_statistics/

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/70/ss/ss7009a1.htm

https://www.statista.com/topics/3218/abortion-in-the-us/#topicHeader__wrapper

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/06/1096676197/7-persistent-claims-about-abortion-fact-checked

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/swedens-death-rate-among-lowest-europe-despite-avoiding-strict/

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/uk-government-data-shows-nobody-should?s=r

https://www.statista.com/chart/26397/cumulative-covid-19-deaths-in-the-us/

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailydeaths

https://twitter.com/gyan_chakshu/status/1522359806606159873/photo/1

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/breakthrough-deaths-comprise-increasing-proportion-died-covid-19/story?id=84627182

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/11/health/unvaccinated-covid-deaths-growing/index.html

https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/research-suggests-covid-jabs-are-actually-killing-more-people-than-they-save/

https://naomiwolf.substack.com/p/dear-friends-sorry-to-announce-a?s=w

https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/328529

https://thehill.com/changing-america/well-being/3484416-us-drug-overdose-deaths-hit-another-record-high/

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20220521-kill-japan-s-elderly-cannes-film-probes-chilling-idea

Vote Count

https://twitter.com/MeetMalcom/status/1523642964152504328

https://twitter.com/realLizUSA/status/1522408945880555521

https://twitter.com/Stevenjsargent1/status/1527791870981640192

https://twitter.com/AKA_RealDirty/status/1525246274626371586

AZ: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/new-long-withheld-records-reveal-20000-mail-ballots-received-legal-deadline-maricopa-county/

GA: https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/something-stinks-in-georgia?s=r

GA: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/05/24/breaking-new-ballot-data-in-fulton-co-reaffirms-2020-election-issues/

GA: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/05/03/true-the-vote-unusual-surge-of-absentee-ballots-in-gwinnett-county-ga/

GA: https://www.ajc.com/politics/what-2000-mules-leaves-out-from-ballot-harvesting-claims/FFMNUU56RVBRNOLZKWHUREQPEU/

MI: https://freebeacon.com/latest-news/tales-from-the-swamp-how-a-republican-senators-son-partnered-with-a-liberal-dark-money-group-to-sink-voter-id-expansion/

MN: https://www.kpvi.com/news/national_news/lawsuit-minnesota-voter-roll-has-586-duplicates/article_7a454991-675c-5a6e-be92-7857bc083fb9.html

PA: https://www.mcall.com/news/elections/mc-nws-state-martin-request-20220506-rfiavrwadvc3jnqmyugnm6fq5e-story.html

VA: https://wcyb.com/news/local/grand-jury-report-accuses-adkins-of-forging-voters-signatures

USA: https://rumble.com/v16w7mz-true-the-vote-destroys-journalist-terrorists-for-fake-news-over-geospacial-.html

USA: https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/05/2000-mules-documentary-provides-compelling-evidence-that-2020-election-was-stolen/

USA: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/05/03/exclusive-true-the-votes-catherine-engelbrecht-america-needs-to-wake-up-or-election-malfeasance-could-occur-again/

USA: https://otter.ai/u/qtUQSw4cQupaguY3OkmodyLtbzY

USA: https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/19/does-thou-shalt-not-steal-apply-to-elections/

USA: https://amgreatness.com/2022/05/09/no-more-ballots-in-the-wild-america-needs-to-ban-mail-in-voting/

USA: https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/05/2000-mules-investigator-gregg-phillips-drops-bomb-investigators-discovered-multinational-player-federal-agencies-involved-operation-multinational-deal-involving-billions-dollars/

USA: https://verityvote.us/

Civil War

https://www.wired.com/2022/05/geeks-guide-stephen-marche/

https://www.ft.com/content/9c237473-603d-4196-8a32-0f135c900612

https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/syndicated/assault-voting-rights-midterms-may-mark-beginning-end-multiracial-democracy/

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2022/05/roe-abortion-supreme-court-republican-divide/629768/

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/us-democrat-republican-partisan-polarization/629925/

https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/05/18/ncreased-testosterone-levels-turns-voters-more-conservative/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/10/roe-civil-conflict-military-democracy-gender/

https://baptistnews.com/article/the-religion-of-the-lost-cause-is-back-and-it-may-be-winning/#.YoA99-jMJoM

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/actual-insurrection-chicago-mayor-urges-call-arms-over-supreme-court

https://www.minnpost.com/community-voices/2022/05/civil-war-lets-make-a-civil-pact-instead/

https://summit.news/2022/05/10/swedish-fashion-designer-embrace-multiculturalism-or-face-civil-war/

https://www.thegazette.com/guest-columnists/we-are-fighting-a-third-civil-war/

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1071082955/imagine-another-american-civil-war-but-this-time-in-every-state

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/11/second-american-civil-war-robert-reich

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/5/31/the-civil-war-that-is-here-and-the-one-that-may-yet-come

https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/columnists/kress-the-gop-arms-up-in-preparation-for-civil-war-ii/article_26ae7e92-14d5-5d20-80ce-193865627d03.html

https://www.laprogressive.com/progressive-issues/second-revolutionary-war

https://time.com/6174297/america-divided-civil-war/

https://www.historynet.com/are-we-on-the-eve-of-another-civil-war/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/10/roe-civil-conflict-military-democracy-gender/

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/19/the-new-civil-war-00033782

https://www.newsweek.com/tucker-carlson-civil-war-gun-control-mass-shooting-school-robb-elementary-texas-1710356

https://unherd.com/2022/05/do-we-need-a-capitalist-civil-war/

https://breakingdefense.com/2022/05/ending-the-civil-war-over-the-future-of-the-us-marine-corps/

https://medium.com/politically-speaking/will-war-break-out-between-red-and-blue-states-93cac4d8c219

https://andrewmtanner.medium.com/2025-the-year-america-tears-itself-apart-e175f30f9f1f

The Real Replacement

https://donsurber.blogspot.com/2022/05/the-real-replacement.html

A.I. – The Most Dangerous Game

“Nuke it from orbit, that’s the only way to be sure.” – Aliens

When I go out to eat I always try to tip my waiter.  That’s how I know that they have terrible balance when they are carrying one of those big round trays.

There was quite a bit of upset from the “I love science” side of the Left recently.  What triggered them this time?

(Spins Wheel of Leftist Outrage)

Computers.

How did the toaster make them mad?

An Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) computing system designed to review x-rays was able to make correlations because, well, that’s what they programmed it to do.  The correlations allowed the A.I. to be able to predict the self-reported race of the individual based solely on the x-rays with a 90% accuracy.  You can look it up.

One writer actually used the phrase, “can perpetuate racial bias in health care” since the bias of the writer was that race is a social construct that had nothing to do with genetics and tens of thousands of years of separate development.  Huh.  Nope, none of that matters.  A slogan written by a hippy is obviously more important.

What bothered the writers that I read is that they had no idea how the A.I. could do it.  The researchers purposely degraded the resolution on the x-rays, and the A.I. could still make the prediction accurately.

This isn’t where it ends.

My Tesla’s A.I. wouldn’t let me in the car.  It said, “upgrading driver”.

I wrote several years ago about an A.I. that could predict life or death based on an EKG (elektrokardiographie if you’re planning on invading Poland), or ECG – electrocardiogram. Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors they detected no abnormality, yet the A.I. was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient.  This was even when the actual doctors made of meat couldn’t see anything wrong with the ECG.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. did it.

The game “Go” – originated in China almost 2,500 years ago, when your mom was in high school.  Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play Go by . . . playing itself.  It was programmed with the rules and played games against itself for the first few days.  After that?

It became unstoppable.  It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best Go player on Earth?  It played a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.”  The very best human Go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. does it.

What happens when you win this game?  The answer might shock you!

There are more examples, but I think I’ve proven my point.  A.I. exists.  A.I. is real.  Is it right now equivalent to a general human intelligence?  Nope.  And it may never be exactly that, since it may never be exactly like us.

I’m fairly certain that most A.I. researchers have seen The Terminator, yet they keep advancing A.I.  Why?  I mean, besides that their name isn’t Sarah Connor?

The stakes are huge.  What if you had an A.I. that could predict stock market behavior, even an hour in advance with 95% accuracy?  This sort of prophet machine would become a profit machine.  It would be worth billions.  And what if you had an A.I. that could make dank memes as well as I do?

If these were sold on an infomercial you know they’d call it Screw It!

I think that one of the things that is not widely known is how very different that A.I. might be.  Human emotions serve a purpose to allow society to function.  What would A.I. value?

  • Would it have sentimentality or would it judge people based entirely on societal utility?
  • Would it make the judgment that entire categories of human society need not exist?
  • Would it have “voted” for Joe Biden, too?

Yeah, and weirdly as that potentially scary scenario of a super-smart intelligence that had no particular connection to the goals of humanity might be, that’s just the starter.  Artificial Intelligence might also be the most dangerous trigger for an external existential threat to humanity.

What?

Well, assuming that time travel and the ability to cause a generalized cascading decay to the zero energy state (zero point energy) aren’t possible, the most dangerous thing that humanity could unleash on the planet is A.I.  And, unlike time travel or a sober member of the Pelosi family, from everything I’ve seen, A.I. certainly is possible.

Lenin loved Hip Hop.  Favorite artist?  M.C. Hammer and Sickle.

While travel for humanity throughout the galaxy is a really, really hard problem due to time and energy, travel through the galaxy for an A.I. is easier.  Don’t want to spend 25,000 years traveling to the next star system?  Easy.  Take the redeye and sleep on the way.

No habitable planets there in the star system?  No problem.  An A.I. doesn’t need oxygen and beaches and water.  It can land on an asteroid and make copies of yourself.  While the A.I. is replicating faster than a Kardashian that just let out its mating call (“I’m soooo drunk!”) it can 3-d print and then shoot copies of itself to the next five-star systems nearby.

And repeat.

Depending on the method used, essentially every star in the galaxy could be visited by an A.I. probe in a fairly quick timeframe.  How quick?  500,000 years to 10,000,000 years, or roughly how old George Soros is.  That’s quick, and essentially meaningless to a toaster or a George Foreman Grill®.  And if I were an advanced alien civilization, that’s the thing I would be scared of – not a grill, but an advanced, very alien intelligence with unknown motives showing up in my solar system.

What’s the toughest thing about being vegan?  Apparently, keeping it to yourself.

So, using the same principle, I could send my own (smart, but not A.I.) probes to hang out in nearly every solar system – waiting.  If those probes saw signs of a possible A.I.?  What would I program them to do?

Yup.  You guessed it.

Nuke the civilization back to the Stone Age.  It’s the only way to be sure.

So, as we worry about the problems in our civilization, remember – it could always be worse.  We know that Kamala doesn’t have any intelligence – artificial or otherwise, so the alien probe will certainly leave her alone.

Wherein I Discuss Home Mechanical Systems, The Economy, Otters Running A Nuclear Plant, and Pelosi Alcohol Consumption

“Iced tea. . . air conditioning . . . water.” – Stargate SG-1

I went to an air conditioning conference once.  It was pretty cool.

Let’s begin our tour of the economics world with the lowly thermostat.  When The Mrs. and I were first married, The Mrs. would turn the thermostat on our air conditioner way down in the summer, say, to 62°F (45km).  This led to the house gradually beginning to cool down, but the air conditioner would labor on like a Billy Barty attempting to oil a “modern” Sports Illustrated, um, model with a stepladder and a 55 gallon bucket.

This electrical effort by our air conditioner would continue until the outside of the house would resemble Joe Biden after he’s seen his latest approval ratings:  a cold sweat on the exterior of the house as the moisture outside condensed on the meat-locker temperature windows.

I asked The Mrs., “Why do you turn it down so low?”

“So it gets colder, faster.”

The Mrs. says I’m an absolute 10 – on the Kelvin scale.

Now, on the surface, that sort of logic makes sense.  If I spin the dial on the stove farther, it heats up my Dinty Moore Beef Stew® and Orange Jell-O© mix faster (goes great with corn and doughnuts).  Twisting the dial puts more energy onto the stovetop.  But (at least in every house I’ve lived at) the air conditioning doesn’t work like that – at all.

The air conditioner at our house is either on or it’s off.  There is no “kinda on” or “working as hard as a Supreme Court Clerk deleting his phone texts” setting.  Nope.

On.

Off.

Two choices.  So, if you want it to be 68°F, and you put it to 68°F it will get to 68°F exactly as fast as if you put it down to 40°F.  But not everything works that way, and The Mrs. can certainly be forgiven for not knowing that when we met.  Plus, in our case, the air conditioner dries the air, so when I woke up in our 40°F house in the summertime, the air was making fun of Hillary Clinton since it was as dry as Norm Macdonald’s wit.

I hear that when Norm got to Heaven, St. Peter told him, “Norm, you have to have an eye test.  Cover one eye.”  Norm covers one eye and reads the chart:  “E-I-E-I . . . Oh, come on!  I wasn’t that old!”

The economy is certainly more complicated than a household HVAC unit, but I’m not sure the incompetent participation trophy award winners at the White House have any sort of clue.  At all.  They’re like putting playful river otters in charge of running a nuclear reactor.  Sure, it’s all fun and games watching them be all nimbly-pimbly with the control rods.  But sooner or later (mainly sooner) the control rods will be pulled and the uranium will eventually melt into a radioactive mess that’s slightly more destructive than the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp trial after the core melts down.

I believe this is actually from the trial –  Lawyer:  “Did you see what happened after you left?”  Depp:  “I wasn’t there after I left.”

The point is that our economy is complicated, and we’re dealing with a current Resident of the Oval Office that would find running a YouTube® video complicated.  “What do you mean, I press the button and the sheep start to talk?  How does that happen?  Who puts them in there?”

It would be hilarious if we weren’t actually living through this, like when Caligula named his horse a Senator of Rome.  My sides are still in stitches about that one!  But when it’s us, it’s scary.  I mean, Kamala’s not exactly a horse, but, still, the analogy holds, even in this case if it rhymes.

The air conditioner analogy (as a very simple one) actually does have some meaning in this case.  When an economy is stalled, there is a case (not the best one, but at least a case) for using money to restart it.  Sure, it’s dangerous.  And I can make the argument that we’ve done it so many times that it’s really messed up the entire system.

I hear she’s auditioned to be a Batman® villain – The Giggler™.

But after the system is going, by continually forcing more money into the system, well, as Joe said, “I did that.”

If that were the only issue, it might be solvable.  It’s just one variable.  Have Kamala and AOC eat all the spare money and then it might be as okay as Buddy Holly in a parachute.  Might.

Joe, however, has other ideas.  When you put sanctions on a nation, the idea is to hurt that nation.  Really, that was their plan.  But the sanctions against Russia (along with the war, which I also blame Biden for – he could have stopped it with ONE PHONE CALL) have resulted in soaring fertilizer and food prices.  That’s bad enough, but it has also popped fuel prices to record highs – The Mrs. wanted to give me something rare and valuable for Father’s Day, so I just asked for five gallons of gasoline.

Fuel impacts everything.

Roses are red, violets are blue, Janet Yellen doesn’t care about you.

The combination of these sanctions and war have effects that haven’t been felt yet – not remotely.  An example:  a farmer normally fertilizes his alfalfa to increase yield.  Not this year – the cost increase for fertilizer far outstrips what he expects to make in revenue.  So, he deals with the “natural” yields.  Due to high diesel costs, he also gets less money after the cost for harvesting is deducted.

What eats alfalfa?

Well, for one, cattle.  So, less alfalfa, more expensive food for cattle.  More expensive food for cattle?  Well, if the rancher can’t make a profit, he’ll sell the herd.  Those aren’t magic, and cattle don’t regenerate immediately like Wolverine®, so if you think we have high beef prices now . . . . just wait.

That’s the second idea:  every action has a reaction.  Some are immediate, like lower amounts of oil leading to higher prices.  Others are longer-term.  There’s a delay between taking the action and the result.

Going back to houses, this is like water hammer.  That’s what happens when a valve closes too fast in a poorly designed plumbing system.  The closing of the valve sends a pressure wave back and forth through the system, rattling the pipes as the pressure goes (at the speed of sound!) through the piping system.  If you’ve ever lived in a house with water hammer, you know the sound.  It’s loud.

But a simple act, closing a valve, can send waves of pressure moving back and forth through the system.

If you find a bomb that explodes when it’s stepped on, let me know.  It’s mine.

We haven’t seen the end of those pressure waves from the magical sanctions that were supposed to have weakened the Russians but have instead raised the value of the ruble and thrown the food and fuel systems of the world into turmoil.  Again, my analogy of otters running a nuclear reactor doesn’t appear to be far off as these secondary impacts reverberate through the system.

Eventually, these systems come back into equilibrium.  However, unlike the consequences of a 40°F house, in this case we end up with the possibility of an economy more wrecked than the Pelosi family after about 11 AM.

As Nancy would say, “Cheers!”

Memorial Day, 2022

“This day does not belong to one man but to all. Let us together rebuild this world that we may share in the days of peace.” – The Return of the King

Antiaircraft battery on Corregidor, 1941/1942

The Mrs., Pugsley and I went out to the local cemetery this weekend.  The Mrs. had bought flowers for her grandparents, and was decorating their grave.  I have never once done this.  First, the graves of my relatives are very far away.  Second, my family never did this – we generally tried to honor the dead by remembering them.

Pugsley and The Mrs. were walking along the cemetery road looking for a grave of a relative that The Mrs. couldn’t quite find.  They had taken off cross-graveyard and left me to bring the car up to the location that The Mrs. thought the grave might be.  As I drove along behind them to catch up, a gravestone caught my eye.

I stopped the car and read the inscription.  The headstone was big, ornate.  On it, there was one letter larger than the others, and it wasn’t a first or last initial, it was the first letter in the rank of the deceased.  Reading on further, this particular gentleman had died on May 5, 1942.

The place was Corregidor.  Corregidor is a small island at the inlet to Manila Bay, in the Philippines.  It was established as a fort around World War I.  Needless to say, when the Japanese attacked the Philippines 10 hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Corregidor was at some point going to be attacked.

The siege of Corregidor started on December 29, 1941.  After the fall of Bataan, the Japanese focused on Corregidor, bombing and shelling it.  Finally, the Japanese decided to land an invasion force on May 4, 1942.

The fighting was ferocious, and the troops defending Corregidor, especially the Marines, gave more than they got.

As of right now, I don’t know exactly when or how the officer in the Modern Mayberry cemetery died or what his branch of service was.  What I do know is that the monument notes that he isn’t really buried there – his body still lies half a globe away.  He was buried in the Philippines after being killed in action.

I can only imagine Modern Mayberry back in 1942.  To be clear, in May of 1942 the United States had exactly zero real victories against the Japanese – they were still expanding in the Pacific.  The Germans still had a shot at victory if Case Blue worked out for them, allowing them access to the oil of the Caucuses.

When the officer died, it wasn’t looking good for the United States, at all.

Memorial Day used to be called Decoration Day, and the earliest recorded date I can find for it is 1861 during the Civil War.  Originally it applied to those soldiers that died in war.  It now applies to soldiers who died during service.

The mystery officer in Modern Mayberry’s cemetery certainly died during war.  And as I drove by, I did notice a small American flag next to his grave.  The American Legion had already been there.  But I can only imagine the situation that led to his tombstone being where it is.  No family nearby.

It was 1942 and he certainly would have been one of Modern Mayberry’s first dead from World War II.  Perhaps his parents till lived there.  Perhaps he had been a standout on the football team, a local hero.  Why weren’t they buried next to him?  Perhaps they moved away later.

These are questions that I don’t have answers to.  There is no tombstone for a wife, so possibly he never married, or never had children, but again, I certainly don’t know.  These are mysteries that, perhaps, I will never be able to solve.

That’s okay.

Tomorrow, I’ll take flowers down to put on his empty grave, and spend a few minutes thinking about the man buried half a world away from that tombstone, who died nearly exactly 80 years ago.

Why We Are The Luckiest People, Ever.

“Keep a memory of me, not as a king or a hero, but as a man.  Fallible and flawed.” – Beowulf

Donate one kidney, you’re a hero.  Donate six, and all of a sudden you’re a monster.

We are the luckiest people who have ever lived.

“Why, John Wilder, you must be insane!  Look at what’s going on,” you say.  Well, the nice men at the sanitarium said that the whole “insane” thing was in the past, especially since the surgery.  The doctor said the lobotomy was a no-brainer.

But really I believe that we are lucky.

When you look at the state of society, we see an amazing breakdown.  I chronicle that breakdown, week after week with this blog.  We see our government falling apart.  We see it brimming with fraud.  We see our lives mocked and insulted.

I hear summer in Finland is the best day of the year.

Functional cultures run on shared values.  The values built over hundreds or thousands of years of hard-fought experience on how to make that culture work?  To make a stable government?  These are all being subverted.

Discarded.

On purpose.

In a time like that, it’s easy to give in to depression.  It’s easy to give in to despair.

Seriously, though, why would you?

We can’t lose.  Why?

My boss calls me the computer at work:  if left unattended for ten minutes, I go to sleep.

We have the whole world against us.  We are called horrible names because we have beliefs rooted in those timeless values.  Even though they hate us, they’re more than happy to take the fruits of our labor – to tax and to take our productivity.  Despite that, at every point our politicians again and again take the road that gives them power – a road that is rooted in evil and lies.

And the world?  Many in the whole world have fallen for the lies, utterly.  Timeless values are overturned in the span of less than a decade.  In 2000, if young boys were dancing nearly nude in the streets, dressed as women, taking money from men, there would have been arrests.

Now, the pictures are printed and celebrated.

This is not evil, this is the Evil of books for children, of such a caricature that they’re nearly comical.  Charles Schumer?  Nancy Pelosi?  Joe Biden?  Soros?  Really?  They’re so over the top Evil that central casting wouldn’t send them to a serious movie – they’d be given roles as the Wet Bandits from Home Alone.

Pictured:  Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi.

Their tactics are no better.  They brag about being tolerant while using the power of government and media to ruthlessly suppress any opposing voices.  They use the levers of government selectively – citizens visiting the Capitol on January 6, 2021 is the worst thing that ever happened.  Riots in the streets causing billions in damage, theft so brazen that stores pull out of major metropolitan areas?  They celebrate that.  Congress is used, again and again, to pass laws that push society away from values, destroy the family, and increase the power of the government over the governed.  Oddly, anarchists and Antifa® applaud that, and celebrate things that even thirty years ago would be called tyranny.

They hate us.  They are attempting to use the education system to make children hate the very culture and society that allowed the prosperity that they’re leeching off even now.  They want to erase the history that built this nation and the heroes that tamed a frontier and invented entire industries.

Galileo said that everything falls at the same speed.  He never saw Biden’s stock market.

Why do you think they want to destroy and desecrate our monuments?  Why do they hate our flag?  Why fill the media with propaganda?

They want parents to fear children in a mirror of the Soviet era.  They want to turn wives against husbands.  They want to split the atom that makes up society, the family, and replace it with the state.  Even religious institutions are rotting from within as the values of the Current Year replace the values that have proven themselves for over 2,000 years.

I started drinking brake fluid – it’s okay, though.  I can stop anytime.

That, my friends, is why we’re lucky.

Our backs to the wall, the entire world against us, we owe our enemy nothing.  We stand by our beliefs.  We stand by God.  We stand by our families, our wives, and our children.  We stand by the future that we are even now building.  To win, we will need to show virtue, courage, and strength greater than any generation that has ever lived.

We will do so.

We are in a place to bring heroism back to our world.  The future will remember us, not as the remnants of a world gone past, but as the founders of a world reborn.  They will speak of us for a thousand years.  They will write stories about us.  They will write songs about us.

That is why we are lucky.

When Will The Bubble End? When We Give Up.

“Oooh! Ahhh! That’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.” – Lost World:  Jurassic Park

What do you call a swimsuit a girl wears to an animal park?  A Zookini.

One time, Pa Wilder told me he had been interested in buying Sears® stock in the early 1980s.  In addition to growing, it also paid a nice dividend.  He’d calculated that the dividend from the stock would have paid for the stock, and he could have sold it in the 1990s and been dollars ahead.  He didn’t.  Ma Wilder flatly refused.  She didn’t like stocks during the day, and I know she would have hated bitcoin in the evening.  I’m sure it would have been her crypto-night.

Ma’s philosophy was that hope isn’t your friend when it comes to most things in life.  And especially the stock market.  The stock market is really built on hope.  Many stocks have projected growth “priced-in”.  This means that they sometimes sell for many times their projected earnings.

Since 2008, the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury have done absolutely everything that they can to keep the prices of stocks up.  The biggest thing they did was to cut interest rates to zero, on everything but dirt.  On dirt, the Fed™ charges high-interest rates – I guess you could call them loam sharks.

In one sense, interest rates serve as an alternative to buying stocks.  If I can park my money in Treasury bonds and make a few percent (essentially keeping up with inflation) then that’s a stable investment.  Horses hate that as well – they often can’t invest because they don’t have a stable income.

I named my horse Mayo.  Sometimes, Mayo neighs.

But when the interest rate is zero, the government is printing cash as fast as it can, investments are pushed toward stocks, and more and more cash piles in.

This makes the investments silly, as more and more cash chases revenues.  In a world filled with eternal hyper-growth, this works.  But that world doesn’t exist, so essentially the stock market becomes a Ponzi scheme or a cargo cult of prosperity.

It’s good if you get out on time.  You get the upside of growth.  You can get dollars out of the market that you can buy things with.  Like me, I blew all my stock market gains on a limo without a driver.  Spent is all and nothing to chauffeur it.

But eventually?  The market falls.

Sorry if that joke didn’t land well.

Normally, that’s healthy.  Falling markets weed out weak and bad companies.  Falling markets are actually healthy since they clear out the junk.  On top of that, CEOs will never be worthless, since there is a pretty healthy market for slightly used internal organs.

We live in a world, however, where the markets have been aggressively managed.  The idea of a recession is scarier to a politician in office than almost anything.  People without jobs look for someone to blame, and politicians will do anything to avoid blame.  Heck, Joe Biden would do whatever he could to set Hunter up for life, that is if Joe was ever tried for murder.

The result is that the economic policy is aggressively tied to growth, regardless of the consequences.  It’s like trying to keep a party going long after everyone should have gone home.  The best way to do that?  Switch from beer to wine.  When people start to lag?  Swap out to vodka.  Then, for a final shot?  Pure grain alcohol.  Sure, that sounds like Nancy Pelosi’s breakfast routine, but when you’re trying to run an economy like Pelosi’s daily frat party, eventually it has to stop.

And the longer you’ve been drinking?  The worse the inevitable hangover.

Did you know Helen Keller had a cat?  Neither did she.

That’s where we are.  The booze has been pulled away from the table.  At some point, I’m certain, that the Fed® will run out of tricks to keep the party going – even they have a limited supply of cocaine, especially since Johnny Depp found the spare key they keep under the mat.

I’ve been wrong before.  Perhaps the party isn’t over at this point.  Perhaps there’s some adrenaline that they can inject in the eye socket of the economy to keep it dancing a few more years.  Biden would love to kick the can down the road and have it keep going until at least 2024.  I mean, he’d love that if he knew what day of the week it was.

But every party has an ending.  And as long as this one has been going, it will be bad.

We never really paid for the party in 2008.  Sure, the Great Recession was bad, but the housing bubble never really cleared.  How can I tell?  It happened again.

Right now the average rent in the country (I read in some disreputable source) is $1,800 a month.  I’d say housing prices were so high that NASA put them there, but NASA can’t put anything nearly that high.  If people didn’t learn the housing bubble lesson, the housing bubble never really popped.

I hear NASA wants the next person on the Moon to be a woman – so dinner will be ready when the men get back there.

The housing bubble pops when people start buying houses again – not as investments, but as places to live.  The stock market bubble pops the same way – when most people don’t want to buy stocks.

And from May, 2022, there’s a lot of pain left before that happens.  The way the stock bubble ends is with utter capitulation, with people being so disgusted that they ever thought that stocks were the road to riches.

Only when people stop thinking that houses and stocks are magic money machines, will it be over.

The reason Ma Wilder wouldn’t let Pa buy the Sears© stock is that she had seen the aftermath of the Great Depression, and had seen stock speculation ruin the lives of many, many people.

When we get there, we’ll know it’s over.  Will it be this year?  In five years?  In ten?

Being a waiter might not be a glamorous job, but at least it puts food on the table.

I don’t know.  But I feel the combination of debt, inflation, and the generally fragmented nature of society will bring crisis.  The good news?

It’s still a beautiful night, and I think someone left a beer in the cooler.

Monkey Pox: COVID 2.0??? A story in pictures.

“No can do. I am itching all over with Angela-pox.” – The Office

I guess the Ukraine is waning.  Time to pull out Monkey Pox®?

As we find ourselves at a time where action in Ukraine mainly consists of sending Zelensky more money so he can eventually recycle it to the Biden family, it appears to be time to (spins wheel) bring out Monkey Pox™ as the villain of the day.  This post will mainly be memes.  First, Monkey Pox©.

Note:  none of the memes are mine today (except maybe one that I originally did and then recopied from another website). 

This, though unconfirmed, is the scariest bit.  Which in normal times, would make it unlikely.  When Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement is in play?  All bets are off.

So, the planned “exercise” on Monkey Pox™ was written about in March 21, and has nearly exactly the same initial date as the actual Monkey Pox© reports here in 2022?  Huh?

At least it’s a break from the war in the Ukraine.

Thankfully we didn’t treat masks like we were members of a cargo cult, right?  And we’ve learned since last time, right?

 

Here’s hoping the mask part is over.  And as it goes, that leaves the jab.

Death is so much worse without the Jab, right?

It would be hard for any logical person to support forcing people to take the vaxx at this point, especially given the data.  But hey, is it really about keeping people safe?

I would have thought that, in addition to having the vaxx, that the Germans would at least want people committing suicide to spend a few months making panzers or something.

What was it that The Who said?  We won’t get fooled again?