Category: Big Thoughts

Groundhog Day, But It’s The Economy

“You like Japanese sake, Mr. Bond, or would you prefer a vodka martini?” – You Only Live Twice

The economy also depresses me.  That’s why I drink a gallon of water before bed each night – so I have a reason to get up.

First, I want to pop a signal flare on behalf of Big Country Expat.  He was bananated off of blogspot®, and now has a new home here (LINK).  So, if you were looking for BCE, he’s surfaced.  Expect more of these flares in the future, because more folks will be kicked off of platforms as time goes on.

Okay, back to the blogging.

Back in 2018, 2019, there were few reasons to post contemporary economic posts.  I could do what I like to do best, sit back, research, think, and give a few strategic thoughts on what I thought the future would bring.  There weren’t a lot of stories of an immediate nature.  That had been true (more or less) going back to 2010.  The motions in the markets were longer, and we could take the time to post the waves, print bikini-girl graphs, and talk about the problems that were coming.

Why is our economy like a strapless bikini?  It looks like there’s nothing holding it up.

Now?

It’s that damn movie Groundhog Day.  I have folders of graphs on economic doom that, in a normal year, where each would be the biggest story in months.  In 2022, those stories are coming out every week.  Germany collapsing and all of their people are going to be cold in the 2022-2023 winter?  Check.  Britain collapsing and the latest prime minister wants to (spins wheel) import 50 million illiterate immigrants that marry their first cousins because that’s what will fix Britain’s problem?  People literally saying, “Global thermonuclear war?  Bah, that’s not as bad as COVID®.

I’m not even making the above three stories up or exaggerating it in any way.  The Babylon Bee in 2022 has become non-fiction.  I’m expecting Joe Biden to pull a rubbery mask off his face and reveal himself as the old man who ran the carnival.  He would have gotten away with it, if not for those pesky kids.

So, this week I’m just going to rant.  On (spins wheel) vodka.  “Vodka, it’s not just for breakfast anymore®.”

Our economic system before the Federal Reserve™ was a mess.  Why, people had to have actual gold to back money.  And if a bank got sideways?  It failed.  Talk about incentives.

Gold wasn’t the biggest of the pre-Fed© sins, though.  Regional banking centers outside of New York were taking a larger and larger percentage of the banking market. That, my friends was a sin.  If there’s money to be made off of charging people interest, and a New Yorker isn’t involved, that’s treason.

The Federal Reserve™ Act essentially stopped the growth of banking outside of New York like Kanye West would be stopped from attending a Soros-family bar mitzvah.  But that pesky gold remained.  So, FDR confiscated it.  All of it.

What did Obama use for birth control?  His personality.

Why?  So he could immediately make the dollar worth less.  It was a con.  But one he sold because (smoke and mirrors) I have no idea.  Seriously.  Maybe it was the equivalent of the COVID® panic back then.  If the American public had stormed the White House when FDR stole their money, lynched him, and then placed statues of Eleanor Roosevelt’s face on each coast to ward off evil spirits I think we’d be a better country.

But we didn’t.

I’ll skip ahead to 1971.  There are plenty of things I could complain about in the decades between the 1930s and 1971, but I don’t think there’s enough vodka in the house (only a few gallons) and my liver has indicated that it can only take these utter financial rants about once a year unless I switch to wine or beer.

But, I tell my liver, we already drank the wine and we’re saving the beer for . . . hmmm.  Why are we saving the beer?  Shut up, liver.

Regardless of my weak organs, in 1971 Nixon booted the dollar off of any convertibility to gold.  That was because the French had figured out the game:  they saw how many dollars that we were printing and wanted us to give them gold instead of dollars.  Nixon saw right through that (thank you, vodka!) and just said, “We’ll print all the damn money we want to, or I’ll send G. Gordon Liddy to eat France.”

If you ever feel useless, remember this:  France has an army.

Of course, inflation followed.  Jimmy Carter was an awful president, mainly because he wasn’t aware of what happened, why it was happening, what he could do about it, or  . . . wait, this is sounding like Biden, but Carter was actually smart and relatively virtuous.

Then we sailed.  Interest rates were raised, stopped inflation, and after two decades of high interest rates the currency stabilized to the point gold prices dropped and the biggest problems the country had were Hillary killing people and Bill Clinton having sex with anyone else besides Hillary.

Ahhh, brings back memories of a sillier time.

Pressure though, was there to inflate the currency.  That was built in.  Social Security and Medicare

Hang on.  Need more vodka for this.  Be right back.

Social Security and Medicare require a growing economy.  They require more people working than those that are receiving benefits.  But tax policy and birth control and Hillary Clinton’s Abortion Clinic® (Motto:  No human is too old to abort©!) made it important to import people to pay for this stuff, especially if they’d vote (D) in elections.

That made the economy less stable, rather than more.  But the Federal Reserve© retained two controls:  printing money, and interest rates.  Heck, the Fed© should call it, “This One Weird Trick Allows Us To Print Money Without Printing Money.”

That one weird trick is low interest rates.  When people borrow money, it actually is inflationary.  I could go into detail, but each $100 you have in a bank can be loaned out.  So, if you put $100 in a bank, you think it’s there.  In reality, it has been loaned out, so you think you have your $100 at the same time someone else is spending it.  There’s more to it than that, but I’m running low on vodka and, last time I checked, you have the whole Internet.  I mean, none of it is as funny as this place, but, you know, I have to leave room for other folks.

If you ever try to do yoga drunk, that can put you in an awkward position.

But that brings us to the Great Recession.  The Fed™ and Congress wanted everyone to own a home, so they created massive amounts of money through the magic of low interest rates.  Poof.  Then everyone wanted to buy six or a dozen houses because they never go down in value.

Then it collapsed.

The problem with a debt deflation as the loans collapse is that the cash supply collapses even faster than the Fed© can print it.  That’s the Great Recession.  So, the Fed™ tried to smooth things out by “dropping money from a helicopter” – which is a direct quote from the Fed© chairman.

It worked.  Sort of.  When you do things like that, it distorts the economy in a big way.  You bail out banks, but cause other people to fail.  But those people aren’t congressmen, so, who cares, right?

Again, it worked.  Sort of.  The problems with Social Security and Medicare remain, and are getting bigger.  We’re pretending that those things aren’t happening, just like I’m pretending that having Kamala within a heartbeat of the presidency is something that Jefferson, Adams, or Washington would be cool with.

Then, COVID.  Solution?  Print money.  Now, we’re back to inflation.  The solution is simple:  raise interest rates to the point where they’re larger than Barron Trump.  But we can’t!  Back in the 1970s when we played this game the first time, we had functional manufacturing and the undisputed strongest economy in the world.  It still almost wrecked the place.

At least Barron will never have microaggressions.

We’ve run out of places to hide.  Admittedly, this nonsense has gone on far longer than I expected it could already.  We are living in a time and place where we’ll see more changes in a year than we normally see in a decade.  Heck, we might see weeks in the near future where we see more economic changes in a week than in a decade.

I’ll admit, I do miss boring at this point.  But, I still have you, vodka.

Feminism: The God That Failed

“Now, I know you’re a feminist, and I think that’s adorable, but this is grown-up time and I’m the man.” – Family Guy

My friend was a manager and hired a woman.  He told her that her first job was to make him a sandwich.  She quit.  Subway® is so sexist! (FYI, most memes today are, “as-found”)

Feminism.  It sounds so, well, reasonable from the start.  “Women just want equal rights.”  Sure, it sounds reasonable until you recall that the rise of feminism was the rise of the temperance movement, which made having a beer after work, umm, complicated.  But it was women who were at the lead of that absolute failure, too.

The result was two atrocities:  women got the vote, and you couldn’t get a beer.  All they missed was a Constitutional Amendment mandating Fran Drescher’s voice doing every public announcement and commercial and sports play-by-play and the world would have been an absolute hell.  Yes, it would have been worse than actual 2020.  But not by a lot.

How much beer does it take to get an astronomer drunk?  At least 4.5 light beers.

Again, it sounds reasonable.  Don’t drink.  Oh, wait, your humble purveyor of dank memes and attempted witticisms is maybe two glasses of wine in and I’m enjoying that.  I’m not arguing that not drinking is better for you than drinking.  Mormons and other people that don’t drink live until they’re essentially dust connected to other bits of dust by regret, but, hey, I’m not judging.

Mark Twain, though, had a few choice words:  “Never refuse to do a kindness unless the act would work great injury to yourself, and never refuse to take a drink – under any circumstances.”  But we’re not talking about booze here, we’re talking about feminism.

Again, I’ll reference Twain:  “A woman springs a sudden reproach upon you which provokes a hot retort, and then she will presently ask you to apologize.”  I honestly think that’s the history of feminism.

What’s the difference between a Sumo wrestler and a radical feminist?  The Sumo wrestlers shave their legs.

I’ve attacked feminism several times in this post so far without any sort of backing.  What sort of backing do I need?  I mean, should we start all the way back at the 19th Amendment, which granted women “universal sufferage” – which I would have thought would have been a bad idea.  I mean, The Mrs. suffers a lot, but that’s just because I’m me.

The difficult part of feminism is that it attempts to first create a division between women and men.  And, the fair part of that is that women and men are fundamentally different.  They’re different biologically down to the genetic level.  When studies were done of the brains of women and men, it was found that those brains were fundamentally different.  The Mrs. can see about 175,083 colors.  I see seven or so.  The Mrs. likes to be warm and comfy on a campout.  I realize that discomfort is a transient condition and if the tent leaks, it might be irritating.

If you love someone, let her go.  Hopefully, she won’t call the FBI.

But “science” assumed for decades that the brain of a dude was the same as the brain of a broad.  It’s simply not so.  It’s actually 100% provable that dudes and broads have different brains.  When studying babies, baby boys like men toys – wheels, cars, machines.  Baby girls like plush toys and fuzzy warm girl things.

Science had (and still has) a weird egalitarian streak that assumes that any baby created from any combination of parents on Earth might be shorter or taller, fatter or skinnier, browner or paler, and yet still has exactly the same brain.

Let’s pretend that utter fiction was true (it’s not).  If so, what happens when those kids get flooded with the white-hot hormones of puberty, estrogen and testosterone?

Yeah.

This is your brain on feminism.

Men and women are different, and they’re born different, and develop differently.  Dress a man up like a woman?  That’s the same as turning a classic Pizza Hut™ into a bank.  We all know that whatever color you paint it, or what sign you put on it, it’s still a Pizza Hut®.

Even worse?  Men and women have utterly different motivations when it comes to mating.  Why?  Men are involved, but women are committed.  A man can have nearly unlimited offspring in a lifetime (as Genghis Khan can attest, 35% – not a typo, 35% of Mongolian people today are his descendants) but women can only have a few kids so they are choosy and choose the best dude they can find.  The result?

35% of Mongolian people are the descendants of Genghis Khan.

When women aren’t constrained by society, they’ll have the kids of the most macho dude they can find.  Women practice hypergamy – they try to marry up in either social caste or intelligence or whatever floats their boat.  Men practice, well, “Dude, did you see her?  She’s hot.”

Hint:  having a majority of young males that have no interest in the future of society isn’t a good thing.

I am a result of such hypergamy.  As many of you know, I’m adopted.  Unlike many adopted kids, I have a lot of data about my biological parents.  My biological mother was at college and decided, “Whoa, that dude is really smart.  I want to have his baby.”

Yes.  This happened.  The dude was a freshman.  My biological mother was a senior.  The poor guy never had a chance, and, thus, I exist, entirely due to hypergamy.

I say “the poor guy” because it was true.  He was a mark in her game.  She wanted his genetics in her child.  That was it.  There wasn’t a plan, there wasn’t love.  Hypergamy isn’t about those things, it’s a transaction.  For him, it was her saying, “Hey, baby, I like the way you fill out those genes.”  The long-term result for her from this strategy is pictured below:

And  . . .

But, when it came time to take care of me, my biological mom was not up to it.  I assure you, that given the combinatory genetics of her willful and cunning plotting and his intelligence, I was probably the most capably evil baby born that year.  Seriously.  I was the most awful child in stunning ways.  I could list them, but you’d be shocked.  I mean, how many other seven-year-olds have convinced their grandmothers to buy them magazines with actual boobage in them?

Yeah.  And that doesn’t include . . . . oh, so many things.

Hypergamy is a less-than-zero-sum game, though.  Whereas conventional morals would indicate that a married couple should really try to stick it out unless it was a morally untenable relationship (see:  my first marriage, which would have been dissolvable in any Christian year since ever) now the woman is encouraged to blow it all up for games and prizes.  And demonize men in the process.  Why?  Because they’re there.

Also?  Feminism.  The laws used to be if you were the reason that the marriage didn’t work, you suffered.  Later?  Not so much.  Now, women have the upper hand in nearly all facets, and in fact, start most of the divorces (70-80%) in the country.  Why?

The laws are stacked in their favor, even more so if there are children.

This is a result of feminism.  But beyond that has been the impact on society as a whole.  What would the result of the 2020 election have been (even after the shenanigans) if only men voted?

Left for you:  show how the federal deficit, abortion rate, divorce rate, rate of church attendance, number of single mothers, increase in welfare, and a dozen other things increased after women got to vote.

I want to make something clear:  I really, really love women.  I think they’re awesome and respect The Mrs. highly, and I think she’d trust me to cast a ballot she’d believe in, because we think alike.  I also think that woman’s suffrage has only resulted in suffering and believe it can be shown mathematically (shhhhh, most of them aren’t so good at math).  So, let’s put out a petition to end woman’s suffrage!  I think we can get 70% of women to sign it . . . .

It Takes A Village To Raise Darrell Brooks

“You are not on trial for being a dwarf.” – Game of Thrones

I bet if I did a video about that, it would never get more than 665 likes.  Oh, and all memes today are “as-found”.

As I noted in the last post, The Mrs. and I have been listening to the trial of Darrell Brooks, the alleged murderer of six and injurer of 60 when he drove an SUV through a Christmas parade in Waukesha, Wisconsin.  It is, in one sense, informative.

Brooks is defending himself.  So, the judge in the case is going slowly, and making every accommodation possible.  For non-lawyers like The Mrs. and me, it’s a quick tutorial on the “how and why” the justice system works.  To watch Brooks defending himself, is, well, cringe-inducing.  But the judge very calmly and very patiently explains the procedures to the petulant child who never grew up and seems offended that the system would even consider locking up such a wonderful person such as him.

During the trial, one thing that The Mrs. and I have noted is that every single point is an argument with him.  Every.  Single.  Point.  He objects to every question the prosecution asks – I think his objection count is over 1,000 now.

This is the meme I found that best describes Mr. Brooks’ relationship with the legal system.

When the prosecution team asked to skip a portion of a video, he objected.  “Show the whole thing,” was his response.  Showing the whole thing, in this case, would allow the jury to hear his long litany of felony offenses, which included sexual contact with minors (felony), trying to run someone over (he was out on $1,000 bail when he drove the SUV through the parade), (shooting at people, out on $7,500 bail) and many others.  His arrest and conviction record is so long and convoluted, I’m sure I’ve got some inaccuracies and omissions above, but it doesn’t matter.

Darrell Brooks is a dirtbag.

And he’s been committing felony after felony for twenty years.  Lose your right to own a gun after getting a felony?  I don’t see how that’s relevant if Darrell can get arrested for SHOOTING AT PEOPLE AS A FELON IN POSSESSION OF A GUN and be out and about on bail.

Twenty years.

Now six people are dead, and dozens of people have been injured, some with multiple surgeries.

And only now do we take it seriously.

This trial gives me vision problems.  I don’t see Brooks not being guilty.

When I was in high school, I was the editor of the school paper.  It was a glamorous job, and our April Fools edition was amazeballs, you can bet, and my goofy horoscope page was (seriously) the most read part of the paper.  But I actually got some state-level awards for editorials, too.  One of them was about rules.

This was the phase of scholastic America where rule after rule was being added, and the phrase, “zero-tolerance” was being added to everything, because memes hadn’t been invented yet.  To summarize my editorial, “Keep it simple, have a few rules that are actually necessary, and enforce the hell out of those.”

I stand by that.  Darrell Brooks could have benefited from it.  This week I wrote about pathological altruism – the idea that being kind was actually cruel.  Darrell Brooks is the poster child for that.  In his actions as his own retard-level defense attorney, Brooks shows that he actually thinks that some of his arguments (the first witness he called for his defense was “The State of Wisconsin” – seriously) are going to keep him from being locked up until the Sun is a cold, dead cinder in the sky.

Maybe his motto was “it takes a village idiot to raise children”?

They won’t.  The system let him do crime after crime after crime with little to no punishment or consequences to his actions.  He thinks this is the same.  The only actual time I saw any emotion out of him was during the point in the trial where he gave his opening statement for his defense.  “You have to understand, there are two sides to every story.”  This is true.  One side is that there are the Waukesha Dancing Grannies being run over by Darrell Brooks, and the other is . . . Darrell Brooks didn’t get his way.

At no point has he shown even the slightest sign of remorse.  He is, I am sure, in his mind the victim of an unfair and “biast” (his word, not mine) conspiracy between the prosecutor and the judge.  What world created the mindset in a person that they could drive an SUV through a parade and be a victim?

Ours did.

The solution for parents is obvious – the system as it exists is so corrupt that you really cannot count at all on any external help in creating children that turn into virtuous adults.  When Hillary Clinton “wrote” her book It Takes a Village (to raise a child), Darrell Brooks was that child.  This is the result of parental dereliction of duty.  Sure, there are some kids that are just bad.  Heck, even when I was growing up, I recall one set of parents who legally disowned their sixteen-year-old because they couldn’t manage him.  But most of the issues can be contained with a unified parental front.

January 6th gets a Congressional investigation.  Jeffrey Epstein dying gets a collective sigh of relief from Congress.

It doesn’t take a village.  It takes parents.  It takes them intervening early and often and many times with terrible wrath because there is no help from the schools.  Kid failing?  They’ll pass the kid anyway – holding a kid back is not allowed, even in Modern Mayberry.  The judicial system is (at this point) so unrelated to actual justice that it deters essentially only people who are unlikely ever to become criminals from committing crimes.

I think that in any possible universe, Darrell Brooks was going to be a dirtbag who is absolutely unaware of anything existing but him and his feelings.  But, maybe, just maybe, his parents working to raise a decent human being could have stopped it.

Or maybe a judicial system that actually functioned.

I used to be such a sweet, sweet thing ‘til they got ahold of me . . .

This status cannot and will not stand, since society is actively breaking down at a rapid pace.  Is this intentional?  The results are clear, and people like Soros keep funding (to the tune of tens of millions of dollars) the election of Woke district attorneys that refuse to prosecute favored groups, encouraging crime, and encouraging the inevitable backlash.

So, yeah, it’s intentional.

And my horoscope for Darrell Brooks?  Don’t make any plans for the next six or so lifetimes.

How Did We Get Here?

“Dividing and mutating at the same time?” – The Andromeda Strain

Two guys stole a calendar and divided it equally. They each got six months.

I think it’s fair to look around and ask a very simple question:

How did we get here?

Certainly, the United States is in a heck of a mess in almost any way one can look at it. When it comes to cohesion, half of the country is like dad sitting on his easy chair after a hard day working at the PEZ® mines. The other half just wants to pester him because he doesn’t care enough about The Current Thing. They have been careful to not make dad put the paper down. Yet. Because that’s when the spanking hand comes out.

The ability of our economy to manufacture critical goods has been outsourced around the world, because, let’s face it, no one is better at sewing up a soccer ball than an 8-year-old Pakistani kid. And if we took the time to teach them and spent the money to build the factories, no one is better at making iPhones™ than Chinese women who are locked in those factories who have to put up nets to keep people from actually killing themselves when they try to jump off that same factory roof. I think the Chinese even charge the women an “amusement park ride fee” when they jump.

So, how did we get here?

The United States has always had an ornery streak. I think Andrew Jackson would have happily had every single central banker in the United States executed – of course, the central bankers retaliated by putting his face on the $20 bill, but I assure you they waited until they were certain he was dead.

And, despite what Biden thinks, Andrew was not a member of the Jackson 5.

How, then, do you take a country that has divided in a massive War Between The States, been brought back (mostly) together, and divide the nation again? In many ways the three items I’ll bring up are intertwined and feed off of each other, but I’ll take each one in turn.

Propaganda. The first part is to skew the definition of America. America was a nation even up into the 1960s, where most (85%-90%) of people had a common ancestry in northwestern Europe, with Great Britain having the largest contribution. Scots may have had problems with the Irish, and the Irish with the English, they might have been neutral about the Swiss, and all of them might have been irritated by the French and Germans, but the common bounds of country and culture were there.

What changed? The idea that if you came to America, it would be expected that you would assimilate to America. Sure, your name might have been Giuseppe, but your grandkid’s name might be Colin, or Brandon, or Brayden. You left that old world behind and consciously gave it up for the new culture. The American culture.

“9 or 10? Let ‘em in! 3 or 4? Here’s the door.” will be my presidential campaign slogan.

The first lie is the lie that there is no American culture. I can understand that from the point of view of most of the world. How would a fish know about water when he’s swimming in it? American culture (with due credit to Great Britain for kickstarting it) became the most pervasive in the world, spinning off ideas and music and clothes and food at an amazing rate.

Now, of course, propaganda would tell us that we have no culture, and it is evil for us to expect people who come to our country to learn our language, and respect our culture first. No, that’s inverted. It does no good to a person who would divide a country for that to happen. Instead? It’s evil to ask people to learn English. If they kill chickens to sacrifice to Gorbo and marry off their eight-year-old kids to 32-year-old first cousins? We are expected to celebrate that.

No. That’s an inversion. They came here. If they can’t assimilate into American culture and American norms? Out. And take the chickens.

A friend told me he made a voodoo doll of me. I said, “You’re pulling my leg!”

Other ways that propaganda has hurt America are numerous, probably enough for a book. One that’s still hurting us is the idea that nuclear power is evil. It isn’t. It’s funny that all the Green® power seems to be either more polluting or require those 8-year-old kids in Pakistan to learn how to mine lithium rather than sew up soccer balls to make batteries for cars fueled on pure Hopium. No, if you don’t like oil and gas, the only real solution is either condemning the country to an unending abject poverty or to build nuclear power plants.

The warfare culture post 9/11 has also been difficult. What, exactly, were we doing in Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden assumed ocean temperature? Don’t know. Why did we go into Iraq? Don’t know. Why did we overthrow governments in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?

Don’t know. But the propaganda that accompanied all of those divided the country, though it’s not nearly as bad as the race grievance industry that’s been in full tilt in the last two decades – but I’ll save that for a future post.

Pathological Altruism. If I have a puppy, and it piddles on the floor and everyone laughs and it’s cute, well, when it’s a big dog no one laughs. Then the dog wonders why I’m beating it for something I was laughing about. No one wants to be the bad guy and say, “No, you have to be punished for your actions so you won’t do it again.” Everyone wants to give people another chance.

My friend’s house was also hit by the dessert thief. He takes the cake.

A friend of mine had his house broken into. They were able to catch the criminals, and he attended the trial. Result of them stealing thousands and thousands of dollars of his property? A suspended sentence for one guy (who had multiple prior felony convictions) and two years for the other. What message, exactly, is that sending?

The Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act of 1965 (plus the amnesties that have followed and will follow) are horrifying in their pathological altruism and use of propaganda. The composition of the country has changed – it’s no longer a nation. Where once there was a central culture, now every viewpoint is expected to be equally valid, and (I’m not making this up) the incoming medical school class pledged to honor “all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by western medicine.”

Let’s go kill some chickens, because that will get rid of the gunshot wound. Oh, right, don’t forget the Ouija® board.

Corruption. The United States has always been corrupt, let’s get that out first. But the beauty of the corruption early on is that, mostly, it was limited because the scope of the Federal government was limited. Sure, Sheriff Smith over in Mount Pilot would take bribes, but he’d eventually be caught. And did several members of the state legislature take bribes to get the “right” senator into office?

Sure. That happened, too. Three events ushered in eras of nearly unfettered power for the Federal government: the Civil War, the 16th and 17th Amendments, and the New Deal. The Civil War ended the idea that the Several States were sovereign – they became mere political subdivisions of the United States. The 16th and 17th Amendments made it possible to tax and ended the appointment of Senators. Now, Senators became Representatives with six-year terms, rather than appointed representatives of the Several States – a huge difference.

Fetterman also had a prostate exam the other day – thumbs up!

This level of corruption concentrated power at the Federal level and made the farces we see today where people who are on the Right receive massive sentences at the Federal level for minor crimes, but people on the Left are not even indicted, and almost anyone who has power has a free pass for anything but killing someone on-screen at halftime during the Superbowl™, and that only counts as a delay of game penalty.

I originally had more items here, but had to delete them because otherwise this could become a book. I’m certain, though, that the top three cover it well enough for now. I do think that America is getting ready to get out of the easy chair. And the spanking hand is getting ready.

The One Where I Prove Electric Cars Are A Lie

“For more enjoyment and greater efficiency, consumption is being standardized.” – THX1138

Patton never colored his hair, because my heroes never dye.

Electric cars are a scam.  A really, really big one, and in ways that most people aren’t talking about.  My original sentence that I typed said, “in ways that moist people aren’t talking about” but I feel moist today, so that didn’t fit.  Let me explain.  About the cars.  Not why I’m moist – this is supposed to be a family-friendly blog.

Electric cars are, in most ways, absolutely inferior to cars powered by Oil, Our Slippery Friend™.  Why?  The technology is relatively new, the first electric car (really a locomotive, but who’s counting) having been invented only in 1842 in Edinburgh by engineer Robert Davidson.  It traveled at the breakneck speed of 4 miles per hour, which is roughly 4 miles per hour faster than Davidson could move after a fifth of something that John Walker® (yes that one) might have been selling back then.

So, it’s not fair to judge electric cars, since they have been only developing for 180 or so years.  It’s still an infant technology.  Oh, wait.

How can you say it’s not an infant technology?  It sucks.

But California has decided to ban the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035.  Hurray, California!  You’re geniuses beyond imagination!  You’ll single-handedly solve global warming.

Or . . . will that pesky math get in the way?

Let’s see – in order to get California girls to the beach, it takes 13.8-15 billion gallons of gasoline.  We’re skipping diesel for now, and just dealing with gasoline.  I’ll use 15 billion gallons because in the immortal words of the captain of the Hindenburg, “Close enough.”

Let’s do the math.

15 billion gallons of sweet, sweet gasoline is 500 TW-h (that’s terawatt hours, which is the metric equivalent 5,000 bushels per fortnight).  California produces in electricity, in total . . . drumroll please, 277 TW-h.  So, California produces slightly more than half the electricity needed by its stunning new fleet of cars.

All I can say is that’s shocking!

To keep just the same level of energy production available for homes (because, presumably, all new citizens between now and then will live in tents) that California will need to triple the amount of power it produces.  If you count in increased uses for the iAndroid™ Eleventy-X® and GameBoxStation 2000©, the grid will have to multiply by four or five times.  And, remember, we skipped diesel engines, so it’s nearly certain that my estimate is low.

And if they tried to make those cars run on PEZ® (normal PEZ©, not PEZ™ made of anti-matter) it would require 278 quadrillion PEZ™, if you assumed that you could burn PEZ™ at the same efficiency that you could burn gasoline.  And that would be 278 quadrillion PEZ© a year.  Every year.

Hey, if this PEZ™ idea works out I could mint money.

To quote Monty Python on a related matter, “Where’s the fetus going to gestate?  In a box?”, we’ve reached a point where politics cease in any reasonable fashion to correlate to reality.  As I’ve seen in recent years, California’s electrical grid is in a shambles, so much so that, rather than be blamed for creating the periodic apocalypse-level fires, the various utilities have been hiring homeless people to burn forests so they don’t get blamed for all of the fires.

In reality, it’s not their fault.  Californians keep using electricity, but the process for building reliable infrastructure is so Sovietized that to upgrade their transmission lines requires more paperwork than conductor wire, by weight, and takes longer than Biden does to remember that John McCain died half a decade ago.  And this is a state that’s going to quintuple energy production?

Using what?

Seriously, where do they think energy comes from?  Oh, I forgot.  Outlets.  “Why do we need more power plants?” I can hear President Kamala asking, “There’s always power when I plug something into an outlet.  Besides, if we lost electricity we could watch television by candlelight.”  The answer is that the energy has to come from someplace, like the dams they’ve been destroying, the nuclear power plants they’ve been shutting down, or the coal plants that they won’t allow to be built.

Perhaps they could use the power of the Void?

If it were just that level of stupid, it’s survivable.  But it’s more than stupid, it’s greedy stupid, and here’s the rub:  they’re doing this to soak the folks buying cars.

Let’s take, me.  My newest car is (I think) a 2016.  It was paid for in . . . 2016.  My daily driver is a 2010.  It’s got a 130,000 miles on it, and I replaced the engine in it at 115,000 miles, and it cost $5,400.  At 5,000-10,000 miles a year?  It might last another decade, easily.  It’s not complicated, the air conditioner works, and it’s comfortable.

Try that with an electric car, I dare you.  My 2010 had the engine blow up.  $5,400, plus tax, and I was back to happy motoring.  A Chevy® Volt™ had a bad battery.  $29,842.  Snopes™ even confirmed it was the real deal.  But they tried to put a good spin on it.  “It was an antique car” that was two years younger than mine, “and the battery technology was old.”

I hope the car bought her a drink first.

I have one car that is now 20 years old.  How many batteries would it have had to go through?  And you can be certain that the latest bill to replace it would have made the entire car worthless.  Period.

This is an odd game.  Cars had become very, very reliable, some lasting 300,000 or more miles with only routine maintenance.  There’s a reason that, aside from the AK-47, the Toyota® HiLux© is the brand of choice of insurgent armies everywhere.  They last forever, and you can mount multiple heavy weapons on them.

That just won’t do.  As a consumer, you have to be made to consuuuuume.  Me?  With my old car, I’ve more than offset the “carbon debt” caused by making it, so replacing it will actually be damaging to the climate (if you believe in that sort of thing).  And electricity will have to involve tossing more carbon into the atmosphere and will cost a lot more, so it’s not that, either.

Joe Biden is making helping stop energy usage – every time he’s on TV people turn it off.

No, the root cause is that cars are too reliable and people are using them far too long.  If you have a paid-off car, you’re not paying interest.  You’re not paying for new car plants.  You become an economic black hole and the powers that be will do anything (and I mean anything) to force you to consuuuuume.  Remember digital TV?  I saw several articles where economists were calculating the economic uplift from forcing everyone to junk their old televisions for new ones.

Let’s consuuuuume!  And with electric cars, use ‘em or not, they rot away so you’ll have to pay $29,000 for a new battery or consuuuuume a new car.  Emissions?  Who cares?  We’ve got to keep people slaving away, paying interest, and buying the new thing.  Insane?  Certainly.

What did Californians use to light their homes before they had candles?  Electricity.

Thankfully we have television and commercials.  I’m sure that they will be used for good and not to convince everyone that the point of their life is consumption.

Well, I guess now you know why I’m moist.  Too much time consuuuuuming.

Don’t Fear The Reaper

“No. Not like this. I haven’t faced death. I’ve cheated death. I’ve tricked my way out of death and patted myself on the back for my ingenuity. I know nothing.”  Star Trek II:  The Wrath of Khan

Why did New Jersey get all the toxic waste and California get all the lawyers?  New Jersey picked first.

When The Soon To Be Mrs. and I were just dating, I was cooking something or other.  I think it was eggs.  I like eggs sunny side up, and don’t particularly care if they’re cooked all the way.

The Soon To Be Mrs.:  “Aren’t you worried about salmonella?”

John Wilder:  (Laughs in full Chad manifestation.)

The Soon To Be Mrs.:  (Swoons.)

Seriously, she swooned.  I’ve never seen it before in my life, but in that moment I think that was what sealed the deal, the moment in time that The Soon To Be Mrs. realized that this one is different.  He’s not like the others.  Here is a man who has zero fear of The Current Thing, and knows that salmonella won’t be the thing that punches his ticket out of having a functioning circulatory system.

Weird.  You can get salmonella from chickens, but not chickenella from salmon.

No.  I’m not afraid of salmonella.  I would spit in its tiny little eyes or flagellum or tentacles and say, “Not today, my bacterium friend!  My Danish-Scots-Germanic blood is far too strong for the likes of you!”  And then I would attack Poland.  Oh, wait, that’s been done.

I know I’m not going to die like Hemingway, and I’m not going to die like the comedy greats Belushi, Twain, or Nietzsche did.  Nope.  I think I’m gonna go out like Elvis.  On a toilet after having eaten a fried peanut butter, jelly and bacon sandwich covered in cheddar cheese and mayo.  Nope, I’m gonna die on a toilet.

I mean, after all, a king should spend his last moments on the throne, right?

A lot of people worry about dying.  I suppose I did, in my 20s, when I was worried about carrying out my responsibilities as a dad.  Those are serious responsibilities – because those kids are going to be the legacy that I leave on Earth.  That and my writing, collection of PEZ® dispensers and velvet Elvis paintings.

I tell you, when the King died, that left me all shook up.

Again, a lot of people worry about dying.  I’m not sure why.  Of things that are more-or-less predetermined, that’s the big one. We’re all going to die.  All of us.

And I’m not sure I care.

Oh, sure, I want to live.  I have no particular desire to die.  If given the preference, I suppose I’m in favor of my continued heartbeat.  But I don’t fear death.  I don’t go to sleep at night wondering if this pain or that pain or that thing might be the symptom I look up on WebMD® that seals the deal that Wilder is going up to irritate Jesus in Heaven with bad puns.

I don’t worry about some future point when I’m going to enjoy life.  I’ve achieved nearly every goal I’ve ever set for my life.  End.  Full stop.  It’s like when a baseball game goes into extra innings, “Hey, free baseball.”  And me?  Free life.  I’ve done nearly everything I’ve ever wanted to do.

If you don’t like Hillary, you should move to Benghazi.  At least you know that there, she’ll leave you alone.

What do you give a man who has everything?  I mean, besides another bottle of wine.  You give that man:  Today.

I’ve got Today.  The only moment I live in is right now.  And right now isn’t all that bad.  I’m sitting in the sitting room (question:  is any room I sit in, by definition, a sitting room?  Discuss.) with the cool night air blowing in the window, some songs I love playing on the laptop, a cold beer by the keyboard, and the knowledge that at this moment, everything is fine.

Literally, in my life, Every Single Thing Is Fine.  I could go into details, but you already know how awesome I am.  So, I live for today?

Hell no.

That’s YOLO.  The idea that “You Only Live Once” is a free pass to act in any fashion has corroded society.  It’s really at the root of many of the problems we have today.  It is, in many ways, the absolute inverse of the philosophy I’m trying to describe.  YOLO seeks to elevate hedonism and the passions of the moment as the highest good.  YOLO is Tinder® times Planned Parenthood© times SnapFaceGramInstaChat® times Rwanda®.

I wonder if Hindus consider YOLO offensive?  (not my meme, as found)

It’s the inversion of beauty:  it consists of being positive about, well, any old thing that feels good.  I could list these “pleasures”, but you know the list as well as I do.  We see it every day, with vice being paraded as virtue, and the continual demand going out for people to celebrate it, because, “Can’t you see?  This horrid abomination that no healthy society or people in the entire history of the world has tolerated, iS BeAuTIfUL!”  No, I think living a life built on YOLO is one doomed to fail – inevitably it will fail based on two reasons:  it is materialism or a faith based on the nihilism of the material world writ large, and it is based on needs, like youth, wealth, sensation, or, yes, even life.

So, not YOLO.

One thing I’ve tried to preach is outcome independence.  Indeed, since the final outcome of life on Earth is fixed, all the intermediate steps lead there.  Instead, I try to focus on virtue and faith.  I write not because of YOLO, and not because it’s easy.  Some nights it’s hard as hell to get the post to “close” and feel right.  There are dozens of posts where, even after 1600 words, I still didn’t say exactly what I meant to say.  That’s okay, it’s on me.  I’m learning, and if I were perfect at this, I wouldn’t have more work to do.

For me, it’s the work.  It’s getting better.  It’s finding ways to add value to those people around me.  There are those who pull their weight in the world, and those that don’t.  I want to be one that pulls his weight, who has contributed as much as I can to helping my family and the wider world.

Why was Karl Marx buried at Highgate Cemetery?  He was dead.

I don’t always do it.  And I’m not always right, either.  I’ve produced some stuff in my life that was really, really good, but not perfect.  Thankfully, that’s not my mark, either, since just like immortality here on Earth, searching for perfection is a lonely and silly pastime.  I want to make the world a better place with my family (first) and my work (now second) guided by God.  And I want people to laugh hard while learning and thinking about the things I write.

The beauty of this is to win, all I have to do is the best that I can do every day.  To win?  All I have to do is be the best person I can be every day.  See?  Each night, I go to bed and sleep soundly if I know, in that day, that I gave it my all.  Do I take time for me?  Sure.  But that’s not the goal – I serve a higher purpose.

So, what do I fear?  Not death.  It’s coming whether I like it or not, and, honestly, I’d rather not return my body in factory-fresh condition – I’d like all the parts to fail at once.  On the toilet.  I think Elvis would have wanted it that way.

Oh, wait . . . .

I wonder if Elvis ate eggs sunny-side-up?  Hang on, I’m sure he did.  Elvis ate everything.

The Economic End Of Europe

“I don’t get history. If I wanted to know what happened in Europe a long time ago, I’d watch Game of Thrones.” – Community

Why do communist governments always fail?  They cease the means of production.

(Memes today are mostly as-found.)

The handling of the war in Ukraine will go down as a historic blunder, rivaled by only a few events in history:

  • Archduke Franz Ferdinand deciding to go cruising down the road in his ragtop,
  • Socrates, who in his last words said, “I drank what??” (thanks, Real Genius), and
  • The forming of the band U2®.

The Western World had already been rocked by the response to COVID-19.  The economic shenanigans required to keep the economy on life support had been bad enough.  The entire debt-based currency system had been lurching back and forth more than Hillary Clinton after quality time with a bottle of gin and her “Madame President” scrapbook.

And bad things are going around in Switzerland, as we’ll see below.  And big trouble may lie ahead for Great Britain:

In truth, the recovery from the Great Recession hadn’t created any real structural changes.  The primary mechanism for preventing utter economic collapse was printing bucketloads of cash and shoving it into the faces of the banks so that they didn’t fail in a catastrophic and sequential fashion.  It isn’t the only time that irresponsible decision-making was rewarded with buckets of greenbacks, but let’s not dwell on Hunter Biden.

Where are we now?

Europe is facing an energy drought – one that (unless Russian gas shipments are resumed fairly quickly) will result in lowered economic output.  How bad?  Some have said, “Great Depression bad.”  The precursors of this can be seen in the cracks we see developing economically:

If the Pope commanded the cash be transferred electronically, would that have been a PayPal® order?

Now, one thing I do know:  religions are really, really good about keeping their eye on their cash.  I wonder if there was some reason that the Pope was wanting this financial move?  Was it because he like making Papal airplanes?  Or, was it because someone had tipped him off?

Why can’t the Pope be cremated?  He’s still alive.

People are betting that Credit Suisse® to fail.  They’re also betting that Deutsche Bank™ will fail.  Why?  When banks lend money to people that can’t pay it back, well, unless the Federal Reserve© comes around to stuff the banks full of cash, they fail.

So, COVID-19 hits, governments around the world print cash, but nothing is physically broken.  We can (sort of) pretend that the world is fine, and whistle through the graveyard and hope that we can squeak out another year of wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

Then, Ukraine.  As I’ve said before, with a sane president capable of making good decisions, this would have been solved with a few phone calls, some Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and maybe a few coupons for 50%-off shrimp at Red Lobster™.  Nope.  Biden escalated all of it.

And, again, maybe (probably not, but maybe) in a world with an economy that had underlying actual strength, Biden could have pushed it just like he did and not cratered the entire economy of the West.

But he did.  And now the consequences cannot be avoided.  Interest rates are shooting up.

How high?

Oh, surely we aren’t in a real estate bubble.

Oops.  But at least the international community isn’t panicking.

Oh, they are?  Well, at least Biden hasn’t sold off our energy reserves in a naked bid to influence the 2022 election. 

Oh, he did?  Well, at least Biden has a good understanding of how energy markets work, and how supply and demand sets prices.

Oh.  Well, I guess that’s really scary.  Thankfully, no one is messing around with the fundamentals of reality.

Huh.  I guess my dog just quit.

Well, at least The Mrs. and I had a serious talk about the bedroom.

All foolishness aside, if Europe has an energy drought that lasts three years or more (one of the latest estimates I’ve seen) the results will be as devastating as a war.  Economies need jobs to produce wealth so people can have wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

And, despite the magical thinking of some people on the Left, free anything (not just healthcare) isn’t free.  Someone, somewhere, has to work for it to pay for it, otherwise it’s slavery.  Which, I think, is fine for Leftists, because they never imagine themselves the slaves.

But I have faith, faith that the Swiss will save us.

The Swiss have a long and proud history.  This history goes back to at least 1307, or so the legend goes, to William Tell (the guy who shot the apple resting on his kid’s head).  In fact, William Tell and his son were in a bowling league, but the records of what team they were on are now lost to us.  We will never know for whom the Tells bowled.

Deception: The Media Is Soaking In It

“Theatricality and deception are powerful weapons, Alfred. It’s a good start.” – Batman Begins

Thankfully he wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition.

I’m certain that few had any idea of how the Internet would change the world.  Oh, sure, some did.  In one of the zillion versions of Ender’s Game (or the never ending stream of sequels) Orson Scott Card wrote about the Internet, in the 1980s, I think.  In his version, people could make carefully reasoned arguments and other people would listen to them and be swayed.

Ha!  Instead we have Twitter® with its 280 character limit, and meme warfare.

I actually don’t mind meme warfare being the place where ideas are injected into society, primarily because the Right memes pretty well, and the Left can’t meme at all.

That is, of course, what the Left is worried about.  When the Internet began to gain popularity in the mid-1990s, it was a Wild West.  It was first created, page by page, by people who were passionate about something.  The programming was easy, and the hardest thing was to get noticed, since the search engines and directories were rudimentary.  I used at least three, depending on what I was searching for, because one was good for technical stuff, one was good for “normie” stuff, and the last one, as I recall, wasn’t good for much at all.

On the Internet, you can be whatever you want to be, so why do so many people pick “stupid”?

Then came the Media®.  At first, they didn’t really know how to use it, so they’d just put their written stuff out there, since video would swamp most dial-up connections.  But everyone knew it was going to be big, which is why AOL© merged with Time-Warner™ even though all AOL® presented was just a single way to get to the Internet.

But the problem for the Media™ and .GOV was that the Internet had shattered their ability to carefully script a single narrative.  It had also destroyed their ability to memory hole or gloss over big stories.  Now those passionate people could chronicle entire events that the .GOV would rather you forget, or, better yet, never even know about.  The carefully crafted defamation of everyone who believed in something outside of the Approved Narrative as a Conspiracy Theorist began to crumble.

People say it’s a small world, but I know I certainly wouldn’t want to paint it.  And in that small world where communication had drastically lowered the time for information to come out, and also made it harder for the information to be erased.  The Genie of information, once out of the bottle, couldn’t be put back in.

Does anyone know what an ink blot test is?  I Googled® it, but only found pictures of my parents yelling at me.

The Wild West continued.  Google® had a corporate slogan of Don’t be Evil® and Amazon™ would sell most any book that was it was legal to sell.  And the established Media© and .GOV still had no real understanding of how to control what people see and hear and remember.  The Internet was built to be decentralized, and hard to control.

I think, from what I see so far that the strategy has been to do at least five things:

Throw Lots of Content Out

Oddly, even though the major news sources keep firing journalists, they keep making more stuff.  What kind of stuff?  Clickbait, really.  Stories with little informational content, stories about celebrities, top 10 lists of best/worst/etc. (fill in the blank).  These aren’t news – they’re entertainment.  Heck, one browser I have on my phone has (it looks like) computer-generated compilations of posts from Reddit®.  The idea is to distract.  And if the algorithm is good enough, heck, maybe that person will forget what they were looking for in the first place.

Marginalize and Trivialize

This is one that’s carried on from the past.  If I had written a post about MK-Ultra (where the CIA essentially acted like the worst possible mixture of Jeffrey Dahmer and the DMV) in the 1960s, it would have been dismissed as a “conspiracy theory” at best.  The idea isn’t to contradict, it’s to hit the person making the accusation with personal attacks, and make it sound like they’re a nutcase.  And when the facts come out?  Minimize them – make them sound unimportant, “Oh, that tear gas we used at Waco?  Well it may be flammable, but only in super-high concentrations.  We won the war.  Go back to sleep.”

So, Alex Jones was right again, eh?

Control Discussion

How many people that you interact with are . . . real?

I’ve recently gotten robocalls that are very sophisticated, so much so that they nearly get through the uncanny valley of sounding right.  But what if the sound wasn’t an issue?  In a Twitter® comment it isn’t.  It is known that a significant percentage of Twitter® users are bots – programmed to interact.  Why would anyone go to that level of trouble?  Because they want to sell you something – an ideology, a candidate, or PEZ™.  They’re also useful to make it seem like there’s a consensus.

People are wired as pack animals, and generally want to be a part of the group, to not be left out.  Plus, a group of bots can drown out viewpoints and ideas and bury them in a sea of text.  On a related note, how many conversations are taking place on the Internet that are nothing more than one bot talking to another?

Control Access

Most people come to this website either directly or from other blogs.  The web search traffic I get is amazingly low – most days less than 3% of my traffic.  That’s new.  I used to get more traffic from search engines (20%+) but after July or so of 2020, Google™ shut the valve, and traffic dropped.  Likewise, I know that this site is banned by corporations.  Why?  Maybe my ideas are considered to be . . . dangerous.

A related question is this:  just how many website hits does Google® really have?  I searched for Civil War Weather Report and noted I wasn’t on the first page.  I jumped ahead to page 18.  If you’ll note, on an earlier page, Google© claims that there are 34,800,000 results.  But when you get to page 18, well, there are only 174 results.  I know I’ve written nearly 40 Civil War Weather Reports.  Funny that I didn’t see ‘em all in this list . . .

Note that Amazon®, which for a long time would not ban any legal book, now bans hundreds if not thousands of books merely because Amazon™ disagrees with their ideas.

Just Keep Lying

It seems to work for the FBI, Bill Clinton, and the CIA, so why not expand it to the Media®?  That’s just what they do.  These pictures will help illustrate the problem:

 

So, in the end, it has been established that the Media© wants to control you.  The only remaining question so that we can put the pressure where it needs to be is this:  who controls the Media™?

Unplug Yourself From Things That Drain You. And Kardashians.

Then you’ll see, that it is not the spoon that bends, it is only yourself. – The Matrix

Okay, it’s not great.  The other one was, “What do you get when Keanu Reeves does ‘shrooms?  Neo-sporin.”  See, I saved you from that.

Unplug yourself.

I mean, don’t stop coming here.  That would be silly, because you definitely want to associate yourself with someone who has the amazingly good hygiene and stellar good looks that I do.  I mean, unplug yourself from places that make you mad.

Consciously, most of my posts, while letting you know the unvarnished Truth with a capital T* (*really, as best as I know it), are meant to poke fun at it.  It might make you think about things that you really don’t want to think about.  I understand.  I’m still sorry about that Kardashian meme.

Honestly, dating a Kardashian would be like dating a wookie®.

Well, obviously not that sorry.

Back to the Truth.

Most people that I talk to have an Agent Smith (from The Matrix, not that pesky ATF guy who keeps asking if the stuffed dog I have is filled with Tannerite, because, let’s face it, the only thing that ATF agents love shooting more than kids is dogs) moment.

No, the Agent Smith moment I have with friends goes like this:  I talk about facts.  They nod.  I talk about actual events.  They nod.  Then I bring up a premise that is inescapable:  “So, we agree gravity exists.”  Nod.  “And I’m holding a coffee mug over a 1,000 foot (4.3 Celsius) cliff.”  Nod.  “And if I drop it, it will fall down, and shatter into a million pieces, and it will never be able to be put together again.”

Then Agent Smith takes over the conversation.  “Well, I don’t want to think about that.”  The conversation is over.  There is a step that they cannot take.  It’s like me trying to convince them that a constant diet of candy corn, Twinkies®, fried Snickers® bars, and drinking the fluid from a chocolate fountain that 359 kindergarteners have been putting their booger-soaked fingers into isn’t a good diet.

This is what happens when you follow the USDA food pyramid.

I recall having a conversation several years ago with a guy on the Left.  “Yes, John Wilder, I agree.  Massive immigration is destroying every one of the values in our country.  But strawberries might be more expensive if we didn’t allow them in.”

My response was rather simple, “So, you, a guy on the Left, wants to pay people less so you can have cheaper strawberries?  Wouldn’t it be simpler to pay people more, pay less than 1% of what you make in a month to pay Americans enough to give you strawberries?”

Agent Smith took over his mind.  “Umm, well, I don’t understand those things very well.”

I took him to the ledge, but he refused to look over.

But, hey, he saved $0.35 this week.

That’s the Truth.  And, I assure you, the Truth is your friend.

What is Truth?  Step on a scale.  Look down.  The number is the Truth.  Try to pick up a weight.  If you can, you can.  That is Truth.  The Iron never lies.  The scale never lies.

I was working with a person who noted I had lost some weight.  He asked me, “How can I lose weight?”

My response was simple:  “Weigh yourself.  Every day.  The scale doesn’t lie.”

The look on his face was amazing.  I think he wanted me to tell him, “Believe in aliens, bigfoot (bigfeet?) and the Loch Ness Monster, drink seven shots of Hershey’s® chocolate syrup ever night, and you’ll lose 27 pounds a week.”  When I told him to weigh himself, his face fell.

He didn’t want the Truth.  And I didn’t follow up with, “By the way, I also rarely eat between Saturday night and Friday,” because that would bake the gourd of most people.  They don’t want to know that losing weight sucks, that it requires amazing work and walking into the house at night after work and telling The Mrs., “No dinner for me, I’m fasting.”

I’ve been doing this whole Intermittent Fasting thing.  Bums me out.  I did it at least nine times today.

People want pretty lies.  Yet, the healthiest thing for them is the Truth.  Just before I started writing this, Frequent Commenter Ricky emailed me a story that said that, per FDA guidelines, water could not be labeled as, “healthy”.  So, enjoy all the Gatorade®, Pepsi™, and Coca-Slop© that you want.  It doesn’t have fat in it, so, according to bad science dating back to before I was born, it’s better for you than water.

Nope, the Truth sucks.  People are awful.  Bad guys win – a lot.  People get old.  And then they die.  All of us die.  And, the FDA lies.  But, most of you come here regularly.  Can you handle the Truth?  Yup, you can.  And you seek it.  I think most of you understand that.

But there is a group of people who are trying to demoralize you.  The easiest way to win a battle, per George S. Patton, Jr., is to make the enemy afraid of you.  Yet, they wouldn’t have to do any of this if they had won.

They haven’t won.  They are desperate to win, yet you and I remain, stubborn, like islands in the middle of a hurricane.  We live.  We persist.  And we will win.  That’s what scares them the most.

Why am I so stubborn?  I’m not telling you.

So, when you see something that makes you feel like all is lost, remember, that’s them whispering in your ear.  The want you to think that you can’t win, even though everything that is right, beautiful, and True is on your side.  When you see this sort of demoralization?

Turn it off.

Don’t go back.  Not because you’re afraid of opposing viewpoints, but because you refuse to have your emotions manipulated.  Never, ever, let Agent Smith inside.  Seek the Truth.  It’s there.  Unless it’s a Kardashian that isn’t hairy.

That’s a lie.

Flirtin’ With Disaster, And By Disaster, I Mean Nuclear War

“A four-alarm fire in Downtown Moscow clears way for a glorious new tractor factory, And, on the lighter side of the news, Hundreds of Capitalists are Soon to Perish in Shuttle Disaster.” – Airplane II:  The Sequel

Hillary tried to sell her soul to the devil to be elected president, but the devil declined, “Can’t do it, you don’t have any collateral.”

The big story in the news is the hurricane about to hit Florida.  If it were about to hit Detroit or Baltimore, it might add a few billion in value to those cities, but alas, it looks like it might create damage beyond anything ever seen by man – it might muss Tom Brady’s hair.  It also reminded me that I’m hungry, since I accidentally typed “burricane” twice before I got it right – my mind must be on burritos.  Or maybe it’s prophecy – that a hurricane-sized burrito will hit Tampa?

That’s (the hurricane, not the burrito) the story in the news, however, I think the much bigger story is buried.  Or it was buried.

Russia makes most of its money by shipping natural gas, oil, fertilizer, and wheat out to the world.  It imports tracksuits, cell phones, and gold chains.  As I’ve covered before, what Russia imports is silly, but what it exports is crucial.  The cheapest way, by far, to export oil is in the hair of a Russian or Italian.  But they don’t do so well at moving natural gas, so people build big holes called pipelines.

Really, that’s all a pipeline is.  It’s a hole.  As tempting as it is, I’m not going to make a Kamala Harris joke.  And you can bury it like they do most places, you can put it on stilts like they did in Alaska, or you can even have it under the sea.

I hear that part of the ocean is haunted, so Germany might be getting super-natural gas.

As the Europeans have come under more political pressure to stop adding CO2 to the atmosphere, they’ve moved away from coal.  They’d like to move to entirely renewable energy sources, but last I heard those only exist in sufficient supply to power a technological civilization in the dreams that Greta Thunberg had in the womb as her mother engaged in one too many vodkas while riding rollercoasters on sleeping pills.

No, in 2022 Europe is powered by fossil fuels.  Sure, there are some renewables, and the French built a lot of nuclear power plants.  But the desire for power has increased exponentially to keep up with civilizational growth.  Concentrated energy is also a multiplier, it allows a person or a company or a nation to do far more.  With natural gas, a German factory can build all the Volkswagens® and bratwurst and lederhosen that the world needs.  Without it?  The production is (if they’re lucky) one percent of the powered production.

Time zones are confusing.  It’s September 28 in Europe, September 29 in Australia, and 1953 in Moscow.

Russia was the biggest single supplier of natural gas to Europe, providing 45% of the needs.  Nord Stream© was one such pipeline, and it took the route of going on the seabed from Russia to Germany.  Why?  One reason was that it avoided having to pay Poland, Ukraine, and other Eastern European countries that never visit this blog for “transit rights” through those countries.  For example, if Russia wanted to send gas through Ukraine (natural gas, not sarin) then Russia would have to pay Ukraine for the right to do so.

They say they saw Bubbles in the water after the explosion . . .

As such, the Poles and the Ukrainians hated Nord Stream®.  But, it was successful.  And the Germans loved it.  Besides Austrians in the 1930s, what can all Germans agree on?  That they like the Nord Stream© and Nord Stream II ™ projects.  It lowers the price of energy for them, and makes it less likely that they’ll be held hostage by the Poles (hint, the Poles are still a bit miffed at the Germans and the Russians).  The Ukrainians hated it most of all, since it looked like those projects alone would end up costing them over $4 billion dollars a year in transit fees, and it also lowers their political power to hold Russia hostage at the expense of European countries.

And some people have paid dearly for that . . . .

That brings us close to today.  The United States has always opposed any of the Nord Stream projects.  Why?  First, if Europe is divided, the United States has one less group to be concerned with on the world stage.  Almost as bad as a united Europe is Germany and Russia on good terms.  Combine Germany’s economic powerhouse with Russia’s raw materials?  That’s a threat that gives the State Department bad dreams.

Wasn’t she in One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest?

This probably explains 90% of what went on in Ukraine, and the other 10% involves Hunter.  Could Biden have de-escalated the conflict?  With one phone call, yes.  But it’s going now, and there reaches a point where even I’m concerned – and that’s the crippling (it can be fixed, but how bad is the damage?) of Nord Stream™ I and Nord Stream® II.

My dad can fix it.  He’s got the ultimate set of repair tools.

Why would the United States do that?  Well, the biggest reason (that I can think of) is that it makes it so that Germany can’t back out of the sanctions when winter gets cold and prices start to be amazingly high and there just happens to be this nice, big straw filled with natural gas that they could suck on all day to be warm.

Note:  this is supposed to be a satire account.

How do we know that people knew this was going to happen?  Well, there are reports the CIA told Germany an attack was imminent.  And there’s this little matter of the British pound collapsing right before the incident.  And, there’s the little matter that an explosive was found next to the original Nord Stream© not too long after Russia took Crimea back in 2014.  The detonation wire was cut, so whoever was getting ready to blow up the pipe had changed their mind (cough) Obama (cough).  The fact that this happened even before we know the results of the Russian referendum?

Do you think the Ukrainians would meet this result with Jeb!ulation?

Do I think that Germans will freeze to death?  Probably not many.  They may clear-cut forests, they may shut down industry for February and March, and they might make it against the law to heat your house in any way other than having a chubby girl in corduroy pants rub her thighs together as a space heater.  On an economic scale, Frequent Commenter Ricky noted, it might devastate Germany’s economy even more than 9/11 did ours.

But now they can’t pick up the phone and call Putin and say, “We miss heat.  Er, you.  Please turn it back on.  Here are rubles.”  That option is gone, and that’s why I’m certain that it wasn’t the Russians who did this:  why destroy your best bargaining chip?  And, no, it’s not shoddy Russian construction – the companies that made the pipe and built the line are the best in the world, not Yuri’s Pipeline By Mail Company.

Even the Polish know the score . . .

And I thought it was Joe Biden, not For Bidden.

So the United States did it.  Biden even told us that he was going to do it.  I’m not sure he remembers he did it, but he did.  It’s even on video, and he looks rather lucid (for Biden) during the speech.

The thing that scares me is this:  if I were Russia, I’d take this as a rules expansion pack:  undersea pipelines are now fair game.  And the ones that feed Europe from Norway are mighty vulnerable.  This, more than anything, just ups the level of tension and ensures that what started as a property dispute keeps escalating.  And escalating.  And escalating.

In Minecraft, of course.

And one thing I learned from Tom Clancy movies?

Hmm.  Good advice.  I’ll even add this bit:

Frequent Commenter Ricky also noted that I get to be the first person to make fun of the next stage in escalation toward a nuclear war.  So, I’ve got that going for me.