Bad Smells – Page 14 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Victimhood And Guilt: Tools Of The Left

“Guilt was created for what reason? For man to enslave himself?” – Borgia

You can stop saying Amber Heard wasn’t a victim – her acting school clearly failed her.

What’s the easiest way to defeat a people?

You make them do it themselves.

That’s been the motif for quite a while from the Left. In reality, this is a playbook that has been used for decades by Leftist groups like the Frankfurt School (I’d look it up for you but I’m lazy), and it’s difficult to explain some of the things that we’re seeing in the world right now without thinking through the tactics that they’ve employed.

The first thing Leftist groups tried was to exploit a class difference in America. That didn’t work very well, since unlike Europe, we’d rather firmly out the King generations ago without letting it turn into a Leftist bloodbath, like in France (memo to self – the French can win a war, but they have to be fighting other French people). We were self-governed, and there was sufficient freedom so that (if Homer Q. Citizen worked for someone rather than just doing his own thing) Homer could tell them to take this job and shove it.

I hear in France on Halloween the kids go out Trick or Retreating.

So, class was out. What was the next lever to pry?

The Leftists thought about it quite a bit, since they were doing nothing but being paid for hating America while working at universities like Columbia® and Harvard™ and attending fancy faculty parties while they plotted to destroy the country. Their big breakthrough was in understanding the American psyche in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s.

What was the vulnerability of the nation at that time?

Build a world of Guilt® and Victimhood©.

We’ll take Victimhood© first. The Victimhood© was crucial, because if there isn’t a victim then the scam won’t work. Don’t have a ready victim? Manufacture one. All of the social movements in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s were based on attempting to drive a culture into turmoil, and for that, one needed a steady stream of victims.

In the year 2022, what’s more relevant? Women’s Lib, or Mad Libs®?

I’m not saying that some of the movements didn’t have actual problems and valid concerns at their root. Regardless of that, there’s no way that I’d ever try to base building the character of one of my kids by telling them, “Oh, Pugsley, you got a bad grade in math (he didn’t) because that teacher had it out for you!”

If I do that, I ruin a kid. Similarly, when Victimhood™ is assigned to an entire group of people, that group is morally crippled. Instead of the group taking the issue and working ways to actually solve the issue, those afflicted with Victimhood® simply must perpetuate that Victimhood©.

Microagressions™? Really? Cultural Appropriation®? The length that people have to reach in 2022 to whip up a frenzy is amazing because of the lack of real problems that don’t also involve the behavior of the group. The war against statues? Critical Race Theory© is a playbook straight out of the Frankfurt School.

No matter who wins a race in Bangkok, it’s still a Thai.

Similar things happened with the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s. The result of turning a little over 50% of the population in the country into a group of victims was astonishing and horribly negative. The divorce rate in the United States spiked along with the Women’s Liberation movement, removing social cohesion, and creating yet another victim class, and now it’s waaaay harder for some guys just to get a sandwich.

But creating the victim is only half the equation, and perhaps less powerful than the other weapon: Guilt®.

Let’s return to the American psyche in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. The American psyche was long built on openness and fair play. Why don’t we cut in line? It’s been shown in study after study that Americans from that time period would go out of their way to not allow free riders – people who don’t contribute to the system. Line cutters are just one example.

Studies have shown that this level of dislike for free riders and those who treat others unfairly is so ingrained that individual Americans will work to stop that unfairness. Individuals will work to stop free riders even if it requires them to do something uncomfortable, or if it causes them financial loss.

“What if,” thought the Frankfurt School, “we could convince the American people that they were immoral? That their system is awful?”

“Well,” I imagine they responded, “now you’ve got something.”

What happened when John Galt took too many sleeping pills? Atlas Drugged.

The Frankfurt School was collectivist, and believed in collective, not individual punishment. They hated the individual ideas and nature of Western Civilization, and the United States in particular. To put this in perspective, it is exactly the burning hatred for these ideas that spurred the Frankfurt School on. These ideas live on in exactly the hatred that every Leftist (and many “conservatives”) hold for the “flyover” states and the “red states”.

And those Leftists that have bought into the Guilt™ portion of the Victimhood© and Guilt®?

They are the Americans who say things like, “I’ll never have a child,” and “I hate America,” and “I can’t stand the sight of the American flag,” and pick any and every opportunity that they can to tear down the country. Sadly, people who say that are at the heads of infotainment companies, the executive and legislative portions of government, the military, and are all over in the academic world.

They hate those that they are supposed to lead and govern.

To put it simply, this Guilt® has turned a large portion of the people who are at the levers of power into people that hate America. And these people suffering from Guilt, are people that also hate you because you are getting in the way of their planned suicide of our country.

So, if one way to defeat a people is to have them defeat themselves, then that must mean that the Left is very, very afraid. They’re afraid of you and the power that Americans inherently possess. That’s why they hate you, and that’s why they want to tear down everything that you love and leave a smoking crater.

I feel like we should talk about the aliens.

The great news is that in the midst of the economic and social crisis that has been engineered to create more control, people are waking up. The Guilt® is lessening as people push back against the vilification of people like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington while granting sainthood to the designated felon high on lethal amounts of fentanyl victim of George Floyd. The Guilt© will, I think, begin to fall apart as the crisis continues.

Will we be the same America as in the past? No. But I do believe we will win, because independence and truth usually triumph over Victimhood® and Guilt™.

Plus, you know, it’s not like they’re fighting the French.

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!”

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?

The Funniest Post About Jevons’ Paradox You’ll Ever Read.

“But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless: it squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely, that’s about it. Tell me, though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” – Planet of the Apes

I heard she prefers to be called “aoc” because she doesn’t like capitalism.

In 1865, when Joe Biden was barely sniffing at his first hair, English economist William Jevons noticed something: that Biden’s behavior was really inappropriate. Besides that, Jevons also noticed that innovations that made coal more efficient to use led not to lower uses of coal, but to the use of more coal. This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.

When you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense. If electricity cost 10 times as much as it does today, we’d use less of it, and The Mrs. would probably (reluctantly) turn the air conditioning up from 62°F to 64°F (23 to 52 megaparsecs/joule-furlong) in summer. To make it clear: The Mrs. likes it colder in the house than a college faculty lounge when someone mentions personal responsibility.

The more expensive or more inefficient something is, the less it is used, which probably explains why they keep Kamala Harris in a Tupperware® container when they’re not trotting her out to somehow make even less sense than Hunter Biden after a three-week coke, hooker, and greasy cheeseburger binge.

That’s weird, because I was always under the impression Kamala was the cheap resource. Who knew?

Hunter Biden on drugs: “Cocaine use? I have to draw a line somewhere.”

I was conversing back and forth about various and sundry things with Eaton Rapids Joe (you can find him HERE) on email since he decided to experiment on the tensile strength of his bones (they rarely break in compression) in a kinetic environment and is as mobile as a Ford Pinto™. That made him bored enough to drop yours truly a line. As the conversation progressed, I thought of good old Jevons.

The truth is that we swim in a pool of Jevons. You might want to soap up when you get out. Seriously, though, we normally adapt our work to use cheap (the non-Kamala kind of cheap) resources.

Here’s an example: back when I went to college, computing processor and memory time was expensive. The CPU was the pivot point. In my programming class, students were actually given an account that charged them per Pelosi-second of processing time.

Last night Pelosi was so drunk she took the train home, which was weird, because it was the first time she ever drove a train.

A Pelosi-second is the amount of time required for Nancy’s liver to absorb a bottle of vodka given to her by a Ukrainian lobbyist, so it’s pretty fast. Just like in Joe Biden’s brain, memory was rare and expensive, too. But when the cost of memory went down, we ended up using more of it.

Nowadays, because of Jevons’ Paradox, we find that computing processor power and memory are cheap. There are two pictures, three Polaroids® and six daguerreotypes of me growing up. I have more pictures of Pugsley’s first birthday cake.

One result of this is that computer code is no longer (really) optimized. Because CPU and memory is cheap, industry has decided that they can be sloppy programmers. If we have overflow in the 32GB of RAM, well, we can reboot once a month. Unless you’re in a Boeing®. Oops.

Sorry if those jokes were boeing.

That’s computer stuff. What other things have Jevons’ Paradox impacted?

Energy.

Food.

Money.

“Holy cow, John Wilder,” you’re saying, “that’s nearly as important as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial!” Let’s start with . . .

Energy.

Yup. And in energy, especially, the Paradox has been our friend. What energy does is, essentially, provide us with amazing amounts of prosperity. It moves important stuff like fidget spinners from China to Stately Wilder Mansion for pennies. It moves less important stuff like life-saving medicine and PEZ® for unimaginably small amounts of cash.

Ubiquitous energy has made the world small. It has made huge efforts, like moving Bill Gates’ ego from place to place, inexpensive. But as we see Russian energy cut off, and Biden doing his best to make the United States energy inefficient, perhaps so the only source of energy would be AOC’s thighs rubbing together.

Is the Hooters® home delivery service called Knockers™?

Regardless, we face a future where all the inefficiency that we’ve allowed into the system due to cheap energy will have to unwind.

Next on the tour is . . .

Food.

In my early life, food has always been worth a commercial or two showing starving kids covered in flies from some hellhole where they use sharp sticks for money as well as kitchen appliances. I think it was Baltimore. Regardless, in the last decade, world hunger was solved. We had enough food so we could pave roads with Pizza Rolls® and stripe them with Hidden Valley Ranch™ dressing.

Yup. Totally solved. More than enough calories for everyone on the planet to use Oreos™ for deodorant and bathe in Coca-Cola©. Sure, sometimes people starved, but not very many, and mainly in communist hellholes where the local warlord still hasn’t gotten over his devotion to U2® and Bono comes by to make public appearances to show how much he cares. Or Baltimore.

Were people hungry?

Certainly, but they were generally fat while they were hungry. But the problem was solved.

Broccoli is a great thing to eat when you’re hungry and want to stay hungry.

In a world where Ukraine and Russia aren’t exporting grain and fertilizer, however, this changes. Sure, in the United States we can probably count on food for everyone, just expensive food. But that world hunger thing? Yeah, it’s back in play.

What’s left?

Money.

Huh? I thought we were awash in money, so much so that gasoline was more expensive than supporting the Ukraine for an afternoon? Well, no. Money is the one thing that is getting more expensive.

The reason is simple – we’ve had nearly zero percent interest since 2008. The Fed® has been shoving it down the throat of banks. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have been printing it as fast as they can, since it didn’t seem to matter.

They also make cameras, the Go-Provolone®.

Until it did. And now interest rates are higher. But who needs money? The same people paying record-high prices to try to extract Energy. The same people who need to borrow cash to fertilize fields and plant seeds and harvest them.

Yup. Expensive money means less energy and less food.

Oops.

Well, there must be a bright side?

Yes, thankfully there is.

Faculty lounges all over the continent will heat on up. And maybe personal responsibility will make a reappearance. Or maybe AOC will see her shadow, but that’s scary.

That means six more weeks of communism.

Joe Biden: Tasting Your Frustration Edition

“I can taste all the flavors from the past sixty years. I can taste the Korean War.” – Bob’s Burgers

I have the memory of an elephant. I recall seeing one at a zoo once.

Yesterday, thankfully, Resident Joe Biden indicated he was really in tune with modern Americans. During a press conference, Joe stated, “I understand the frustration. I can taste it.”

Taste it. Yes. Normally, I goof on Joe about being a bit addled, but here he’s nosing in on my gig. “I can taste it.”

I wonder, what exactly frustration tastes like? Is it like the dinner I made last month when Pugsley asked, “Was it supposed to taste like this?”

I wonder if, to Joe, our frustration tastes like something exceptionally expensive. A fine Bordeaux or, say, gasoline?

Thankfully, Joe is willing to devote all of his senses to solving our problems. I wonder if Biden smells our bank accounts? Probably not, though I heard that Joe took an interest that the supply chain issues have made stores run out of Pantene® – Joe said he’d personally sniff out the situation.

What’s the difference between The Mrs. and I? When she says “sniff this” it’s usually pleasant.

Thankfully, in the very same press conference, Biden also said, “. . . inflation is our strength . . .” Yes. He said that. Pretty quickly, Nina Jankowicz (the Jerry Springer of government officials, except Jerry would kill for her jawline) got up and echoed that thought: “Inflation is our strength, and war in Ukraine is peace.”

Okay, I’m making fun of these people, but in truth, they aren’t serious people. They’re an administration that might actually think that Robert Downey, Jr., is really Iron Man® and really might come and save them after he stops the Russians in Kiev. And that’s me being charitable in my assessment.

When it comes to government, one of the Leftist talking points was that, with Biden in the White House, we’d have the “adults back in charge”. In this case that’s an apt description, but only if the adults in question are a collection of diversity hires unable to get a job where an IQ greater than room temperature (Fahrenheit, not the meter thing). Oh, and they are in favor of The Current Thing, whatever it is.

Pictured: White House security badge.

Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine dresses and calls xirself a woman. Xir also dresses like and calls xirself an Admiral.

As the assistant secretary for health, Levine told NPR that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera, about the value and importance of gender-affirming care.” It’s no wonder that Biden appointed a Supreme Court Justice that said she couldn’t define what a woman is. How ever did she decide what to put on her driver’s license?

So, that leads me to several options when it comes to the economy. The first idea is that we have left the equivalent of a group of dim-witted glue-eating children in a room filled with razorblades, poison ivy, cyanide, and whatever hellish creature that Australia might produce that I haven’t had a nightmare about yet. Carnivorous, poisonous koala bears that fly and have scorpion tails, perhaps?

Why did the koala drop out of the tree? It was dead.

Regardless, these idiots were saved from being Marxist perma-baristas by vote harvesting and have somehow gotten the keys to the economy. Of course, never having heard of debt, inflation, or Zimbabwe, the best idea that they had is “make everyone rich by printing more money”. Really. That’s it.

That’s the first option, actual idiocracy.

But what if this is the desired result?

Thus, the second option. The Cloward-Piven Strategy dates from the 1960s and was based around breaking the system through welfare. Cloward and Piven were two married professors that decided that since they were making money from the public for doing essentially nothing, that everyone else should be able to get a piece of that action, too. Economies aren’t based on people being productive, right?

The end idea of their strategy was bankrupting the country through increased pushing of social programs. Why do that, to help people? No, the aim was revolution in the United States. And this wouldn’t be a revolution like the French one (which was a head of its time) which proved that the French can win a war, if it’s against the French.

What’s a good way to start a revolution?

King George was only 11 inches tall – he was unfit to be a ruler.

Doing exactly what the current idiots are doing. It used to be just the commies like Cloward and Piven and their cousins Pol Pot and Stalin who wanted to change man, to make him perfectible. Now, the World Economic Forum (LINK) is on with the same old idea that’s caused so much grief over the past century and change. They have an agenda to make man a global economic cog in a machine where only one culture, one set of ideas is acceptable – in the world.

Strangely, the outcome of the “toddlers in charge” plan looks a lot like the outcome of the “Global Commie Power Grab” plan.

So, was Joe being stupid when he said “inflation is our strength” or was he just slipping and sharing the quiet part of the plan that he wasn’t supposed to say?

Inflation, Velocity, and Bikini Economics

“Well, you already know my name. I come here to, uh, unwind, because my job can be intense. I often dream I’m Clint Eastwood.” – Psyche

A picture from the last Federal Reserve® meeting.

There are several things that are wrecking the economy. One of them that isn’t Joe Biden (or his sidekick, the Amazing Giggle Girl) is the sheer amount of cash in the system. M2 is one of the broader definitions of currency – it includes ready cash, savings accounts, quarters under seat cushions, winning lottery tickets, tears from Leftists over Elon buying Twitter™ and, really, anything that can be spent fairly rapidly.

I want to send a shout-out to the guy who plays the triangle in the orchestra. Thanks for every ting!

I’ve brought up before that this measure, M2, has shot up. It sort of has to – the national debt doubles every eight years so they have to get more and more into the system to build that sort of debt. Half of M2 has been created since September 2013. In the United States, we have so much debt you could rename the country “Owen”.

Although (in theory) cash is supposed to grow in tandem with the economy, inflation has been the inevitable result, especially since the dollar is no longer backed by anything other than kind wishes and Nancy Pelosi’s belly button lint.

So why aren’t things worse?

Velocity.

What’s velocity? A simple definition is how fast cash moves in the economy. I’ve had a collection of pennies in a piggy bank since I was in junior high. Why pennies? I spent all of the dimes, nickels, and quarters on beer when I was underage stuff, so over time, it became a penny fest. But those 1,000 or so pennies are definitely part of M2, but have had zero velocity since I could drive.

So, inflation happens when you line up bikini girls in order of height?

The $20 in cash I spent at Walmart® moved to the bank, where it was deposited. Walmart™ then got a deposit and spent it on wages to a clerk. The clerk then spent it on PEZ®, and then it was recycled again. That currency had a pretty high velocity, just like that one girlfriend that told me she needed time and distance. That’s velocity, right?

Some cash moves around. Some doesn’t.

Here’s the dirty secret of the economy since 2008: the velocity of M2 has dropped from a “healthy” economy velocity of 1.7 or so to a “piles of cash under the mattress” level of 1.1.

People hang on to both cash and ratty underwear (this is true – one sign of a depression is lowered sales of men’s underwear) during times of uncertainty, and a quick view of the chart shows that despite all of the “quantitative easing” that the Federal Reserve™ has done since 2008, things are still broken. Cash is sitting in piggy banks, in accounts, and at least some is sitting in dark pools in accounts to prop up the reserves of the banks.

Things get tough right around the elbow.

We’re seeing the stock market dip now, in a system awash in cash. Why is the stock market dipping when prices of everything are skyrocketing? What is the dipping sauce, is it ranch? Why aren’t stock prices going up, too?

Certainly, some companies are having record profits – oil companies, timber companies, fertilizer companies. But how many people are going to buy luxuries when the price of eggs is $5.00 a dozen and a hamburger costs a kidney “donation” at McTransplants®?

So, is this a kidney Bean?

Inflation causes failure. At first, it looks good. It increases some profits, like that fertilizer company’s profits. Housing prices take off. Most people enjoy this, at first.

But after it gives, then inflation takes away. Prices have to go up at the restaurants because beef and broccoli and potatoes go up in price. Then, people look and decide that they can cook at home for cheaper. And those higher house prices? The result is higher taxes on the property.

Now prices at the restaurant have to stay up, because the restaurant can’t make up for higher prices by charging less than it costs to keep the lights on. But there are fewer customers.

So businesses, especially businesses built on disposable income, fail harder than Joe Biden on a crossword puzzle. But that’s just the start, at least as long as we keep Joe away from actual decisions.

The scary part (besides Joe hanging with his invisible friend, JoJo) is that no one really knows what happens when all of it unwinds.

Well, it’s sort of like a bikini picture.

What will make the velocity of currency go up? When people are afraid to hold on to their money because they’re worried that it’s losing value.

But that is (my guess) not quite yet.

I do expect, especially when the stock market unwinds to see a deflation first, across multiple asset classes. It will be “catch a falling knife” time because in many cases it won’t be clear what is a good bargain, and what’s junk. In 2008, gold dropped from nearly $1,000 to $710 as the market melted down.

Gold was obviously safer at that time than the stock market, but even it was driven downward – because cash was vanishing from existence as home loans defaulted. How does that happen? Remember, if I have $100 in the bank, it’s not really there. The bank loaned it out.

So, I think I have $100, but so does the person who borrowed it from the bank, so M2 shows that there is $200. When the loan defaults, there’s only $100. And it’s $100 the bank is on the hook to pay back to me, so they have to borrow it from someone else.

Yup. Defaulting loans and business failures cause the economy to contract, even during inflation. And if that causes the Fed® to print more money?

We’ll be in even bigger trouble.

Update: our appeal at Google® was approved. The podcast was restored (LINK). Our livestream is on tonight (Wednesday at 9 Eastern), at our channel.

Now What?

“Well, that’s the end of the film. Now, here’s the meaning of life.” – Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life

When my boss died, I spent a moment at his coffin. “Who’s think outside the box now, Terry?”

I have (sometimes) in my life found myself in a weird and uncomfortable place. No, it’s not the backseat of a VW® Beetle®. No, it is something that normally people are happy about. I had accomplished most of what I wanted to do, and then I asked myself, “Now what?”

That is a difficult question. I have long made it a practice to observe people, or at least I did until the restraining order. Okay. Restraining orders. My observation is that feeling like I felt came normally comes from:

a lack of ambition,
waking up with amnesia
too much success, or
having goals set too low.

In my case, it was probably the last one. I can (happily!) say that I’ve accomplished almost everything that I’ve wanted to do in my career, and I’ve done a lot. Do you know the team that got Osama Bin Laden? Not to brag, but I’ll have you know I read a news story about them once.

It must be nice being a Democrat, knowing who voted before the election.

Could I have accomplished more than I have? Probably.

I suppose that could be viewed as a lack of ambition. In my defense, I’ve seen a lot of jobs that I don’t want. And a lot of those jobs come with compromises I simply won’t make anymore. At one point, when I was much younger, I had a job where I was on the road an average of three days per week. I can recall one time my boss wanted me to travel to Chicago and I didn’t want to go, so we compromised – I traveled to Chicago.

I’ll admit, travel was fun at first. One week I started Monday in Portland, Maine and ate lobster, flew to San Antonio and had Tex-Mex, and ended up in Fresno, which is known as the “Akron of the Pacific”. When I was young, that was a pretty nifty gig, plus the work was fun and varied.

At first.

I ordered a “Chicago style” pizza. It started shooting right out of the box.

It actually got to the point where I was on the road for eight straight months in the southern part of Chicago. I did manage to come home alternate weekends – I will say that Midway airport is the only place I’ve ever been that rents cars with a slot for a tail gunner. The charm of traveling went away. The fortunate thing is that it cost me a marriage.

But I’m done traveling like that. There are compromises that I’m not willing to make. And, as I said, I’ve done most of the things I want to do with my career.

So, it’s not that.

What, then?

If anyone has no family and will be alone this Thanksgiving, let me know. I need to borrow chairs.

What about family? Family is always a challenge because being a parent requires almost as much responsibility from me as that one night when they asked me to be a designated driver. But when kids are grown, it’s up to them to determine what course their lives will take. Oh, sure, they sometimes want to chat with the old man, but for the most part, they’re independent. That’s the way I raised them – drop a Bowie knife and some paracord into the crib and if they make it the first month, they’re keepers. The result of this type of parenting (I think the technical term for it is “neglect”), though, is that the kids are able to make decisions and take action between therapy sessions. No family is ever perfect, but mine is pretty good.

Okay. Work was fine. Family was fine. What now?

That’s what I was struggling with. What now?

Then I remembered Joe.

Joe is a friend that I’ve known for years. Talked to him last week. I’ve mentioned Joe before. Pure genius. Joe, however, wasn’t challenged at his job. So, he’d let projects go until there were almost due, and then start work on them at the point where he thought that it was just nearly possible that he might not be able to make the deadline and then work at a furious pace. If Joe had been a chef, the danger would have been that he might have run out of thyme.

Instead, it was a way to keep himself challenged and in the game.

Being a blanket weaver must be the worst. They always have a looming deadline.

That’s not for me, either. The challenge was a real challenge, but it was artificial. It didn’t make Joe better. It just kept Joe’s job interesting enough so he wasn’t bored enough at work to dial random numbers and say, “I’ve hidden the body. Now what?”

So, I thought about it. And thought about it.

What was a challenge big enough? What could be my vision?

It turned out it was this place. That’s the reason I keep hitting my deadlines on my posts. Not every post ends up the way I imagined it would when the idea came into my head – sometimes the posts take on a life of their own in the writing. And sometimes I have to take two or three runs at an idea until I get exactly the post I was looking for.

I was looking for a challenge, for meaning.

What’s the difference between death and taxes? Death doesn’t get worse every time Congress meets.

So, I decided to give my life more meaning than that poor man who installs turn signals on BMWs®. Now, on a given day when I come home from work, I’m a bit tired, but when I reach for the keyboard, it feels good. I have a goal, a challenge, and meaning.

These things don’t come from without, they come from within. Even if the circumstances are already there, they have to be recognized and acted upon.

Now what?

If you don’t have a vision of what you want to achieve, make one.

If your life doesn’t have meaning, give it meaning.

These things are in your hands.

That’s what.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek

“Comrade Stalin, a fortune-teller came to see you!” “Execute him. If he was any good, he would have known not to come.”

Most people like to be told what to do. They want to be led. That makes sense, given the history of humanity. We work best when we work together, and the worst group is a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader. Because of this, hierarchy is a built-in feature to our operating system. Get a group of lumberjacks together, and one of them will want to be named the branch manager.

The downside of this “working together” is that the vast mass of people are willing to behave like lemmings and all jump off the cliff, as long as that’s what everyone else in the group is doing. Heck, lemmings would even jump off a dock, if they felt pier pressure. For me, the last few years has been the biggest revelation in human behavior and how easily people (especially NPCs) can be reprogrammed.

The three biggest reprogramming efforts in the last few years have been Trump, COVID, and Ukraine. I’ll skip Trump for the moment, and jump into COVID. Was the ‘Rona a real disease? Certainly. The reaction to it was overblown at every level. The average age of people who died from Corona-chan was (through my rough calculations) 73 in the United States.

In two years, a total of 921 deaths below the age of 17 were recorded. By my calcs, this was less than 1% of the deaths from all causes for kids of that age. In other words, it was uncommon. For that, though, we shut down schools, shut down the economy, and tossed trillions in cash out everywhere. That led to pent-up demand – when the local Lego® store reopened, people lined up for blocks.

You’re aware of all of that, of course. This isn’t ancient history. But the number of Americans who became Corona believers overnight was in the tens of millions. The reactions of panic were amazing. It became the reason for the existence of the news media and Big Tech® to actively put a blanket of censorship on all views that didn’t agree with whatever the blessed St. Anthony Fauci, PBUH, didn’t believe that afternoon.

The ‘Rona continued to be a means of control, as well as amazing profitability for the vaxx makers. Biden even tried to up the ante with controls that would have made Brezhnev blush that were (in some cases) later defeated, which made him stop before he went full Trudeau. Never go full Trudeau.

Eventually, the vaxx requirements and silly Corona restrictions got so politically muddled and unpopular that the subject had to be changed. A desperate politician with low approval ratings decided that the best thing that could have happened to him is . . . Russia.

Cowboys don’t have to worry either, they have herd immunity.

Leftists have been head over heels hating Russia for quite a long time, even more than they hate having to switch cars after the Amber Alert comes over the radio. I started to write a paragraph as to why – but why doesn’t matter.

It would have been elementary statecraft for Biden to get Ukraine and Russia to have a peaceful settlement, or at least one short of war. Instead, every public statement was a variant of “let’s you and him fight.”

Biden actively egged on the conflict that no one believed would actually happen.

Why? This why is important.

It was to swap out the chips. COVID-19 Fear Enabler™ was replaced with 2022 Russia Hate®. Joe saw his shot to again become nearly as popular as “that dance the kids are doing, the twist” and someone decided to make the chip swap.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to be on the side of Ukraine – there are. Me? I’m not on either side – I don’t need to choose between various them. But the real loser of this war won’t only be Ukraine and Russia. In the long run, I think the biggest loser will be the economy of the United States, especially with unemployment after Ukraine has to lay off the Biden, Pelosi, and Romney families.

Pictured: Will Smith not hitting someone for making a joke.

I see that there is a very, very significant portion of the populace that is highly susceptible to this reprogramming – again – no every Russia hater is an NPC, but many are. The technology for this reprogramming has been honed very well over time. People who couldn’t spell Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map want to intervene with a no-fly zone and troops. One wonders if they know that “no-fly” has nothing to do with zipperless pants.

Whether planned or not, this will very likely result in the final crisis that the United States will face in its current form. The difficulty is that we are a population that is already divided. I feel that the recent sanctions against Russia are an own goal that will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the reserve currency and wrote about that here: (https://wilderwealthywise.com/russia-and-the-end-of-the-dollar/).

Ultimately, this leads to that final crisis that we’ll face as a nation.

How will we deal with an economic crisis? Certainly there is the possibility of Civil War 2.0, which is what I had previously had as my number one risk. It’s still there, but a new risk is becoming more and more probable as we head towards Biden’s Depression. What kind of crisis? That one is simple. Economic disruption in the United States of Weimar proportions, as I’ll outline below.

A move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency (which is happening right now) will create poverty. Yes, we make food in the United States. But we don’t make the microchips required to run the John Deere® harvesters. We also make most of the energy that we consume. But we don’t make the steel to produce the pipe to drill it or move it. We’ve simply lost much of the technological and experience base required to make the things we need, except for Doritos®.

As noted above, I can see other probabilities, but Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the unipolar world we had since 1992. This creates the conditions necessary to crush a United States built on a FIRE economy.

What’s a FIRE economy? Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Yup, that’s the United States. Regardless of how it has been used, it is an economy that’s built around sloshing money around. No matter what the condo sells for in New York, it won’t put a single more hamburger into a McDonald’s® in Manhattan.

Russia can make and harvest the food, because they can make tractors or import them from China. Russia can make excess energy, as well as the pipe to move it. They don’t even need China for that. The United States used to be indispensable. Now?

The United States imports $90 billion a month more than it exports. $90 billion. Why do people sent us $90 billion in stuff every month more than we send out? Because we pay with dollars.

If only he could have gotten another 150,000 votes at 3am, I’m sure he could have won Saudi Arabia.

These dollars exist because we just print them, or, more likely, create electronic bits that we call dollars. It was a good gig, but Biden’s sanctions against Russia have shown the Russians that they don’t need the Western financial system. They can sell oil and fertilizer and grain for . . . rubles. Or gold. Or microchips. They don’t need the dollar.

This sort of crisis facing the United States has happened before. Most of the time, it rhymes.

A decadent people
Weakened through a fixation only on pleasure and power
Because they live in abundance
Are confronted with a crisis – typically ending the pleasure

What, then, do the people want?

Well, of course, they want the pleasure back. They want the abundance back. What are they willing to do? Anything. As I said, people like to be led. So, when the Strong Man shows up with the Plan, they’re ready to accept it.

What does the Strong Man require to return the pleasure and abundance back? Simple, said the spider to the no-fly zone: Control.

Who is ready to give control? People who can swap programming nearly immediately, to swap out COVID Fear Pack™ to Save Ukraine 2022 Upgrade© without skipping a beat.

And that’s how you get a Dictator

Wednesday: The Road to Dictatorship, Past, Present, and Future.

Financial Vulnerability – Who Owns Your Money?

“Also, I’ve been told that the company’s expense accounts have been frozen. . . “ – Arrested Development

It’s hard to explain theft to a government, because they take things, literally.

The power to regulate is the power to destroy. If you know who has that power over your life, that’s one aspect of preparedness – financial or otherwise.

Here’s an example I saw play out in real life: In Modern Mayberry there was a retailer who had a small specialty shop. Now, in Modern Mayberry there are limited shopping opportunities. There’s the Walmart®. There are seventeen antique stores selling stuff from nearby barns. There’s a used kids clothes store – they’re very specific about just taking the clothes. I tried to sell Pugsley during his difficult phase, and they simply wouldn’t take him.

But this shop was different. It was a very specialized store – bicycles and parts – and nice bikes, the ones that cost more than the $75 that Walmart™ wants for a Huffy© with “some assembly required.” It just so happened I was going through a biking phase, so I was gearing up. One day, I got a package that I’d ordered from Amazon™ – I noticed that this small package (bicycle stuff) had come from the local retailer.

I thought to myself, “That’s weird. Not as weird as a badger wearing underwear and lip gloss, but it’s not Saturday night yet, either.”

I did find two badgers in a U-Haul® once and called the ranger. “Are they moving?” he asked. “Maybe. I guess that would explain the U-Haul®,” I replied.

I walked in there since I’d bought my bike from him and asked the owner what was up. About the bikes, not the badgers. I don’t think anyone can explain the badgers except people over at the military base, and they’re not talking.

The owner explained his business model to me. It turned out that he did very little business locally. What he had done was to build a small niche business selling specialty bike stuff on Amazon©. Even though his merchandise was branded by non-Chinese makers, he bought it in bulk from China and sold it via Amazon®.

“I even sell some of it back to customers in China,” he laughed.

Then one day, Amazon© changed (in some fashion, I’m not aware of the details) the terms of the deal. Within six months the shop was closed. Within a year, he was divorced and had sold his house and had left to wander and find rights to wrong, or wrongs to write. Or something. I kinda got bored after he kept wanting me to snatch a pebble from his hand and stopped listening.

The six or so employees? Also gone. Not dead. Just had to find new jobs, like looking for stuff in barns. Side question – where did barn owls sleep before we invented barns?

The entire business gone – all with one, simple rule change.

Is there freedom of speech in Canada? Sure, but if the government doesn’t agree with you, there won’t be freedom after speech.

Canada made a simple rule change, too. They suspended the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They decided that if you disagreed with them politically, you could have your money frozen. I’d use the word “stolen” but it’s not clear that’s the case yet. Of course, like any breaking news in the land of the Internet, take every story you see below with a grain of salt.

I knew Trudeau had a fixation on single moms, but this is ridiculous:

And they can shut down your life nearly immediately:

The idea is clear, though. Just like that small businessman in Modern Mayberry, one tiny rule change can make everything go away. In this case, of course, the rule change wasn’t tiny. It allows banks to shut down the accounts of those people who try to get all their money.

And for what crime? Giving (in some cases) token amounts to the Truckers Who Honked. A $50 donation, made before the emergency act, before it was “illegal” resulted in all of her cash being (at least for now) forfeit.

To be clear, if the government can do that with a stroke of a pen, is it really your money? Thankfully, though the Canadian government is taking a stand against tyranny. In Ukraine:

Roses are red, sorry for the hypocrisy, we’ve just updated our foreign policy.

There was a push a while back for what’s called “Universal Basic Income.” The idea that everyone would get a check each month for breathing. Think the government would manipulate that to manipulate you?

Nah, no danger in with this, right?

It gets worse. It turns out that this is, by far, the biggest dream that Leftists have had since, well, forever. Let’s hear it straight from one of them on Plebbit® (Reddit©). . . .

This is what they admit that they want to do to those who don’t follow their dictates. They admit this in public. The poet and well-known philosophizer Samuel Hyde perhaps said it best:

And there’s certainly no danger and nothing you’d have to prepare for with this new government change, is there?