Category: Big Thoughts

Essential Decisions: Coming to a Town Near You

“They call it a panic room.  I know that’s a difficult concept for you, because for you, every room is a panic room.” – Monk

TP

I hear that the Australians have really started hoarding toilet paper – they are superstitious about problems down under.

What’s essential?  Right now, there are hundreds of Federal bureaucrats asking exactly that question.

That scares me.

Why?  The Federal government could cause an ice shortage in Antarctica if they were given a mandate to make more ice, so I’m not hopeful that they’ll make the right decisions.  It should probably scare you, too.  When Hurricane Ike hit Houston, we were there.  Here are some examples of the great competence that was on display from our Federal, state, and local governments:

  • Radio telling us to go the FEMA website for crucial information. During a power outage.  Where cell phones weren’t working.  So, I assumed we were to access the FEMA website psychically.
  • Radio telling us to go and bail out “first second responders” because they didn’t have food or water, because no one can plan for a Hurricane in Texas, right?
  • FEMA water showing up over a week later after power was nearly completely restored. Oh, and you could get one case.  In contrast, a local radio station had a semi-load of bottled water delivered for distribution in only two days.

america

Okay, I may have yelled at a hurricane like this during Hurricane Ike after a wee bit of wine.  No flag.  But there was a bathrobe and it was after midnight.  Does that count?

Federal response is good for, oh, responding late and poorly to any real event.  And why did I call government people “second responders” up above?  Because they are generally the second (or later) person to respond to any crisis.  In most cases, you’re the first responder.  Fire at your house?  It’s you and your trusty extinguisher or cell phone.

Bad guy in your hallway?  First responder is you, because the average police response time in the United States is ten minutes.  Then?  They’ll generally not run into the house like Rambo on steroids, they’ll come in slowly so they can go home that night.  It’s not unlikely that you’d be alone with that robber for fifteen minutes after you made the call to 911.

Do you think you’ll have time to take selfies with the burglar?  Maybe share photos of your kids and amusing anecdotes?  The old saying is right:  when seconds count, the second responders are minutes away.

burglar

One burglar stole all my lamps.  I was upset, but I was also delighted.

It’s not that I dislike the government, I think their inefficiency is cute and endearing in the same way that dealing with a young child is.  If government were actually efficient at anything that would scare me.  The government (at every level) is horrible at coordination and planning, as illustrated by my examples above, with the exception of taxation, where money is on the line – they won’t even give fishermen a break on their net income.    Individuals that are motivated by profits, however, are exceptional at planning and fixing bad situations.  Plus, do you really want to be 100% reliant on government for anything important (besides national defense)?

Let’s take an example:  food lines are a constant theme of Socialism.  I know Bernie Sanders says, people lining up in lines for scarce food, “is a good thing.”  But in capitalist systems, the food waits for you, in abundant variety.  Why?  So people can make a buck.  That’s why we have more than one kind of beer, and one kind of ketchup.  Heck, in the local Wal-Mart® there are like 8 different kinds of Heinz™ ketchup in five different sizes.  The market works to satisfy you, in ways great and small.  Especially if covering yourself in ketchup is what satisfies you.  Mmmm, jalapeño-ranch ketchup.

smooth

I got some Heinz™ ketchup in my eye, and now I don’t need glasses anymore.  My optician said that Heinz®-sight is 20/20.

The profit motive is at work even during this COVID-19 panic.  I heard this week an amazingly Good Thing.  At work, I heard we were waiting for some widgets and some polishing compound for a racknpinion molecule, and heard that there was no shipping on some of the stuff we wanted.  None.  Every single truck that normally shipped gizmos and lefthanded-transaxle wax was being put into hauling food.

That’s a lot of trucks.  As confirmation of this, The Boy went to go retrieve his things from his dorm, college having been cancelled for the End of the World®, and noted that there were huge numbers of trucks moving on the interstate.  The Boy estimated there were probably 150% of the number of trucks he normally sees, and this was on a Saturday.  State Troopers were entirely absent.  Even the cops want the food to move.

hillary

So, next time you get pulled over, just roll down your window and start a nasty dry cough.  I’m betting the lights go off and the trooper heads out . . .

This was accomplished not by bans.  Not by government edicts .  Just, “the people are scared and want more food?  Give it to them.”  This is easy because there’s plenty of food in the system.  The corn that’s being turned into Tostitos® was grown with sunlight from 2019.  Next year’s Tostitos have yet to be planted.  Rice?  We have tons.  Fuel?  As I told you several weeks ago – it’ll be the cheapest in the past 20 years.  Taking inflation into account, it may be the cheapest in history, so cheap you’ll be able to start bathing with gasoline instead of tap water, like Jeff Bezos does to clean grease from his moving parts.

You can shut down some parts of the free market because they’re non-essential – we did that in World War II.  My folks tell stories of rationing of sugar and sewing needles and tires.  And at some point those semi-trucks hauling the radishes and rutabaga and rhubarb and redfish will need new tires.  They’ll need oil changes, and wiper fluid, and the drivers will need coffee and meth.

And farmers must farm, and ranchers must ranch, and people must be ready to pick the pizza rolls from the pizza tree when they are ripe.  Someone has to milk the mice.  But farmers live for that, so as long as they have gallon milk jugs, they’ll keep filling them.  Economic incentives are still working.

The longer we go on with “nonessential” businesses being closed, the more businesses will become essential.  In Modern Mayberry, we regularly close down non-essential businesses.  It’s a day we refer to in our local dialect as “Sunday”.  On Sunday, if Wal-Mart® or a fast food restaurant doesn’t have it, you’re not getting it.  That was one of the bigger changes in moving here from bigger cities – businesses close down on Sunday, and the hours aren’t all that long on Saturday.  Most businesses close at 5pm.

So, we live with non-essential shutdowns all the time.  It’s hard to argue that the steak restaurant is essential to the public, though it’s certainly the opinion of the waitress and the owner that it’s essential, but even they agree to close it down on Sunday and Monday.

SUNDAY

It’s the first five days after Sunday that are the always the hardest.

In a true governmental paradox where bureaucrats live on a different planet than the rest of us, schools are closed but daycares remain open.  Having the grimiest, most germ-laden creatures on Earth (first graders) congregate for seven hours at school is wrong, but having those same infested viral fermentation pots play together for eleven hours at a daycare is okay.

I guess daycare workers need better unions.

But reasonable people could work together and come up with a definition of what’s essential.  My job isn’t.  Not today.  In a few months?  Maybe, but probably not.  In a few years?  Yeah, somebody needs to do it, for sure.  And most jobs, even within essential industries aren’t essential.  HR?  Let them work from home, or better yet, work from Nome or the bottom of the ocean for the next year.

Heck, I’d be surprised if productivity of home workers wasn’t greater than working in a traditional office setting.  I had read a statistic when I was starting off at work after college, and it said that up to 2/3 of the average office worker’s day was wasted.  But how do office workers waste time?  I had one boss who would just pull up a chair and talk.  For sometimes two hours or more.  About, well, whatever.

Before you snicker, around the same time I read a statistic that said something like 40% of industrial repairs fixed the wrong thing.  But it’s hard to take a steel smelter home to fix it, unless you sneak it out in your big lunchbox.

Anyway, we’ll soon be seeing what government bureaucrats feel is essential.

I’m just hoping it involves beer . . . .

If . . . Then . . . The Two Words That Allow You To See The Future

“And so, Arthur, we learned that gambling is bad and yet in a certain sense, isn’t life itself a gamble?  You can never be sure of anything.  Like who would have thought that dolphins could go bad and that fish were magnetic?  Not me, no sir, not me.” – The Tick (Animated)

coyote

But you were expecting the Spanish Inquisition?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is most famous for his 2007 book The Black Swan:  The Impact of the Highly Improbable.  It’s a great book – I wish as many people read the book as bought it.  Then they might have at least understood why home prices plummeted faster than California’s self-respect in 2008-09.  Heck, if people would just retain a little bit of this book after they read it, they’d be better off than most MBAs.  The title of the book comes from Taleb describing Europeans touching down in Australia, and seeing something that they never thought possible:  a black swan.  All European swans are white.  Therefore?  All swans are white.

Until you see a black one.

Taleb defined his “Black Swan” events as having some important characteristics:

  • Black Swans are extremely rare. Standard techniques (like normal probability distributions) will never predict them.
  • Black Swans have huge consequences.
  • Everybody looks at the Black Swan event (after having gone through it) and concluded it was obviously going to happen.

I’ll throw out one other idea to mix with Taleb’s Black Swan concept – this one was from James P. Hogan’s wonderful 1982 book (that Hogan says helped topple the Soviet Union, and he might be right – LINK) Voyage from Yesteryear.  In this book, Hogan has a character talk about the difference between a phase change and a chemical reaction.  When you freeze water or melt ice, it’s just undergoing a phase change.  Warm the ice up, and you get water.  Make the water cold enough, and it’ll change back.

Phase changes are simple and reversible.  It’s only a matter of energy.  But burn a piece of paper, and like the girl you had a crush on your freshman year in high school?  It’s never coming back.  Burning the paper is a one way trip.  It’s a chemical reaction that you can’t reverse.  Or a restraining order in the case of the girl.  It turns out they don’t like you standing outside of their house holding a boom box over your head in real life.

CUSACK

In real life, John Cusack blocked me on Twitter®.  I probably deserved it.  I just wanted my two dollars.

Changing the guard from Republican to Democrat and back to Republican is a phase change.  Same stuff, different day.  But the American Revolution?  That was a chemical reaction – after the war we could never go back to being British subjects – the ideas of independence, freedom, and self-governance were too firmly rooted.  9/11 was another phase change.  Despite W’s desire that we “go on as normal” we never have been normal again and conventional ideas of privacy, freedom, independence, and self-governance are dead.

Oops.

All Black Swans are chemical reactions – they are irreversible, even though people expect a return to the “way things were” it never happens – you can’t unburn the paper.  The change is a one-way event.  In one (for me) particularly striking story in The Black Swan, Taleb wrote that his relatives from Lebanon were still waiting for things to return to normal, even though it had been thirty years since the war had ripped Lebanon apart.  No, they weren’t crack dealers, and they weren’t alone.  Even as late as 2012, 76,000 people were displaced within Lebanon, waiting for things to get back to normal.

Wuhan Flu, COVID-19, is a Black Swan.  It’s not quick and immediate like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or the Great PEZ® famine of 1986.   This Black Swan is unfolding in slow motion across the economy and the world.  When this is studied in classes in fifty years, the students will think it happened all at once, rather than unfolding, day-by-day over the course of a year.  In a week, we’ve gone from business as usual to shutting down restaurants.  It’s the new normal.  And yes, I said a year.  We’ll be lucky if it doesn’t last a decade.

waterloo

A woman born at the beginning of the French Revolution would have already had kids by the time Napoleon was booted off stage permanently after Waterloo.  But history teaches it like it happened during the two minute warning at a football game.

As I’ve written about before, the economy is facing a crisis that’s at least twice as big as the 2008 Great Recession.  The stage was set beforehand for a phase change – from functioning economy to recession and then back again.  Trump had really juiced the economy in an unusual way:  clearing out regulations.  Sure, he pumped money back via tax cuts, but those tax cuts were targeted toward non-millionaire types and businesses.  This was, perhaps, the most wholesome way to grow the economy – by people making money rather than by government choosing who got to win.  Bernie, I’m talking about you.

In due time, we would have had a recession anyway.  Probably a big one, since the economic expansion has been going so long.  But just like Wuhan isn’t really the flu, this economic upset really isn’t a recession – it’s far worse.  Dow® 8,000 or less isn’t out of the question on the downside.  Really.

It’s that bad.

The government is going to take unusual actions.  I mean, more unusual than usual.  Today, it was floated to just start writing checks to most people.  “Millionaires” were excluded.  Free health care will come on the table soon enough.  We haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s going to happen.  And we will never go back to the way things were.  This isn’t a phase change.  Like a board game that you let a toddler open, things just won’t go back in the box the same way, ever, and all of the pieces are covered in cookie/saliva mix.

TODDLER

Honestly, I don’t miss toddlers, what with them trying to poison you or cut your brake lines or eating all the Cheeze-Its®.

Once upon a time, I got paid to think about disasters as a short time gig at a company I was working for.  It was a lot of fun.  I researched probabilities of things like civil wars and floods and tornadoes and visits from my ex-wife demonic manifestations.  My life for those months included a LOT of surfing of doomer porn sites and thinking about how the world could go to hell.  So, I guess that makes me sort-of a retired professional doomer.

And my thinking pattern developed a rhythm . . . If (generic disaster) happened, Then (outcome).

It was thinking about the outcome that was the most fun.  If a tornado hit the headquarters, Then what?  Well, based upon the statistics that I could find, it was an average wait of 500 years for a tornado to hit any given spot in the geographic region of the HQ.  Even for someone as old as Ruth Buzzi Ginsburg, that’s not very often.  I tracked down and tried to figure out how much money the company would lose if it got hit by a tornado, volcano, hurricane and earthquake all on the same day – a Torcano Hurriquake™.  After researching with every department, it was concluded that we might not be able to collect on a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of payments that people owed us.  As this company was a multi-billion dollar company where the executives had BMWs® that were designed to stop an RPG strike, that was less than the company spent on Featureless Grey Wallpaper® in a year.

BONUS

Hey, everybody who thinks exactly alike gets a bonus, right?

They didn’t think it was funny when I told them that a Civil War was 10 times as likely as a natural disaster shutting down operations.  When I showed them the math, they couldn’t argue, but they weren’t happy.  They didn’t like it even more when I pointed out that they could afford to spend about $100 a year in disaster prep – most of their systems already had offsite backups.  And no one was even slightly interested in shooting RPGs at the executives.

What the executives were interested in was things that they were used to, floods.  Torcanos. Hurriquakes.  Civil War?  I’m not sure I even brought up a pandemic, but they would probably have looked at me like I had six eyes.  “Just not credible.”

No Black Swan event is credible when you try to describe it to someone who is stuck in thinking normally.  Just like Taleb’s relatives looking for stability in Lebanon or me wondering when TSA will stop fondling my man parts, it’s not going to happen.  But describe trying to get on a flight in 2020 to an American in 1995?  They’d think it was a silly science fiction story.  If only we could convince the TSA to fondle Lebonese?

Which brings us back to COVID-19.  How do you discuss it with someone who is stuck thinking normally?  It’s difficult.  Their minds aren’t even playing in the zip code as people who prepare.  But even to them, it is undeniable that things have changed.  They just don’t realize it’s like herpes:  forever.

When I went to school, school lunches were something to be avoided.  The Lunch Ladies did their best with the USDA Approved sources of, I guess I’ll call it protein.  Now, school food is deemed to be a requirement even when school is out of service.  And they say that there isn’t a hell.

Yes, it was just Spring Break, and the school kitchens were closed.  And they close during summer, last I checked – every summer.  But now?  School food is a must.  Here in Modern Mayberry, they’re offering the school lunches for free to anyone who comes to pick them up.  I think it’s because at least someone in Washington pulled their head away from the bacon-wrapped-shrimp trough long enough to realize that we’re in trouble.  One of the brighter ones probably had the following thought:

If (Lunches are Free) Then (How Long Until They Become Free Community Lunches)?

If (Free Community Lunches Exist) Then (How Many People Remember Typhoid Mary Was A Lunch Lady Cook who spent 30 years in prison isolation because she wouldn’t stop killing people by infecting them with typhus cooking?).

Oops.

typhoid

If you cook them too long, they get all crunchy.

Schools are being closed.  This, in my opinion is good.  But If (Schools Close) Then (Are Daycares Any Safer?)  Your takeaway should be this question:  how long until daycares are closed?  If they can close the NBA, Then they can close daycares.  But I repeat myself.

What can you do?  The best time to prepare was last month.  The next best time to prepare is now.  I can’t tell you if you have enough cans of corn in your pantry.  And, no, that’s not a creepy metaphor referring to some orifice you may or may not have.  I mean actual corn.  Or tuna.  Still not a metaphor.  Or mayonnaise.  Whatever you normally eat, you have some extra, right?

As of now, the supermarkets are functioning.

If (Supermarkets Close) Then (what)?  The average supermarket used to have inventory for three days.  The average house, food enough for three days.   Add that up, and American is pretty close to being hungry.  What happens Then?  Martial law?  Food distributions?

If (Your Job Ceases to Exist) Then (what)?

That’s the key to preparing yourself, not only physically like those people building blanket forts with a semi-load of toilet paper in their basement as structural wall material, but also mentally.  To understand what’s going on, to be one step ahead, you have to imagine what could happen.  You have to let your mind make it real and run it to a logical conclusion.

Then you have to see if it makes sense.

TOM

Okay, not everything bad can happen.  I mean, cats with thumbs?  Silly.

When an idea makes sense, follow it through.  If so, Then what’s the consequence?  Don’t limit your thinking.  It’s a fun game.  Sure, sometimes it ends up in global thermonuclear war, but so did The Terminator™, and look how much fun that was.  But when you really think about it, you’ll look to see what happened in the past.  While the future won’t look exactly like the past, it will rhyme.  The cause and effect of many things doesn’t change.

If we’re quarantining, Then we won’t drive as much.  If we don’t drive as much, Then we won’t use as much of that sweet, sweet gasoline.  If we don’t use as much of that sweet, sweet, gasoline, Then the price of oil, refineries, and oil producing companies will drop and some will go out of business and lots of people will lose their jobs.  That’s exactly what happened last week, and will happen in the next month.

If.

Then.

COVID-19 wasn’t in my projections – I was expecting cake.  It wasn’t in the mindset of the people of the world.  Then it was.  So what happens next?  What chains will snap, further unraveling our civilization?  What changes will be permanent?

  • If you want to keep your doctors alive, Then how will you protect them from COVID-19?
  • If you want to save the people with the most future, Then how many over 40 will get one of the 60,000 ventilators? Besides me, I mean.
  • If your customers are being impacted, Then will they fail?
  • If your customers fail, Then who will pay you?
  • If government wants to control people and how they move, Then they’ll start using the tracking information from cell phones.
  • If the government tracks cell phones, Then why would they ever stop? About the time they stop touching your no-no areas so you can go to Cleveland?
  • If the clerk at Wal-Mart® tells you that “they” have been telling her to have a minimum of two weeks of food, Then will you listen?
  • If you hear from another Wal-Mart© employee that they are setting up special hours for employees to shop after the store is closed, Then will you pay attention?
  • If the government starts paying people just to breath, Then will they ever stop?
  • If I tell you that hope is not a plan, Then will you . . . plan?

We are in a Black Swan event, probably the biggest of your life, and 9/11 was no slouch.  Neither I, nor anyone else can tell you exactly what the future will bring.  But as I mentioned in my last post, the universe is a harsh grader.  The final exam is pass/fail.  And passing means you live.

Until the next exam.

If.

Then.

COVID-19: A Brave New World

“Because if just one of those things gets down here then that will be all!  Then all this – this bulls**t that you think is so important?  You can just kiss all that goodbye!” – Aliens

NEWT

I can’t stand people who are xenophobic.

Corona.  COVID-19.  There’s a catastrophe always lurking, but it’s never what you think.  But it’s always something.  Beer Flu.  Kung Flu.

Do you understand the magnitude?  Most people don’t.  I’m not even sure I do.

The last few nights here at Stately Wilder Mansion Redoubt have been especially enjoyable.  I took off some time last week, and plan on taking some time off this week, as well.  It’s a great time, especially if you’ve never read Poe’s Masque of the Red Death (LINK).

Rarely do things change so quickly:  we Wilders were preparing to go to a state-level event where Pugsley was going to compete.  Competing was an honor – it means that he was one of the very best in the state at competitive freestyle dramatic baking rhythmic knife combat.

The championship was cancelled – 6,000 people in the same place probably doesn’t make sense.  Why?  Mathematically I’m betting that at least one of the competitors or spectators would have been COVID-communicable.  6,000 would have been a wonderful place for one person to donate billions of virus fragments to thousands of others, just like one South Korean was responsible for over 1,000 cases.

batstew

Ahhh, panda.  So very tasty.  I like it with a side of bald eagle.

One of my friends and I were talking before the event was canceled and said to me, “John, it’s cancelled.  There is no way that’s going to happen.”  There was no uncertainty in his voice – it was clear he was 100% certain.  In my mind, I thought that somehow this event would sneak under the radar.  It did not.  And in retrospect, I found myself guilty of one of the chief sins of the universe:  thinking that normal can win in abnormal circumstances.  Thankfully, the penalty here wasn’t the usual penalty for such a sin:  death.  Okay, that was dramatic.  Mainly it’s feeling stupid.

Pugsley was disappointed since he had his katana sharp, his Hamlet memorized, and his recipe book tattooed on his left thigh, but cancelling the event was the right call.

The Boy was back in town for spring break, so the four of us Wilders are hunkered down in the basement as I write this.  The other three idiots have been taking turns invading my writing space playing a video game.  Thankfully, we like each other and have a reasonable supply of deodorant and soap.  If the soap runs low, I volunteer to try to make some out our fire pit ashes and the cat.

SOAP

But is it made from cat?

The Boy and Pugsley have been out into the world since COVID-19™ hit more than The Mrs. and I.  The Boy went back to his college on Saturday.  They say that the college will open at some unspecified time in the future, but sent a note out that maybe you should think about coming to get your stuff.  The Boy and Pugsley took a road trip for just that purpose.  While The Mrs. hasn’t had her job officially cancelled for the foreseeable future, I expect that will be the case.  I don’t expect either of the three of them to be required to be outside of the house in the month of March except for runs to Wal-Mart®.

TRIPS

Okay, it wasn’t that bad.  They didn’t even ask me for gas money.  Hey, have you guys seen my credit card?

My job?  It’s probably not directly required for the United States to keep going on a daily basis, so I could see myself being restricted to working from home unless I absolutely had to be somewhere to defuse a bomb or perform a circumcision an alien.  As it is, if I have symptoms of Corona, I can’t come back to work unless I’ve been cleared via a doctor’s note.  Assuming I can find one of the six doctors in the county, but, hey, I can sign a signature that might look like a doctor?  It looks just like an Ebola© virus, right?

I’ve really enjoyed the time at home.  It’s surreal, since as I listen to the Internet radio, I can hear everything crumbling as the news gets weirder by the day.  I dumped my 401k (the part that was in stocks) into the money market fund this morning on Sunday.  That means they’re supposed to dispose of it tomorrow.  But as the market is lock-limit down already, what does that even mean?  Can my money even find an exit point?

I’m betting the Fed dumps a trillion dollars, or maybe even two trillion into the market.

Tomorrow.

It’s that bad.  I hope I’m wrong, but I think it’s going to be October in 1929 bad.

COLLAPSE

Maybe this will work.  Seems stable, right?

It’s obvious that the world around us has already changed.  As we drove to Wal-Mart© on Friday for a scouting expedition, I looked at a parade of businesses that would soon be closed as I drove by them one by one on the street.

  • Move theater? Who’s going to go, especially since the movies are crap?
  • Diner frequented mainly by old people?   Old couples are going to be self-quarantined watching the Price is Right® until they welcome COVID-19 to escape each other.
  • Car dealerships?   I’d like to buy that new Jeep® Coronaâ„¢ Wagon.
  • Scented candle places? Okay, I’m not sure how they stay in business anyway in 2020, unless they launder meth money.
  • Insurance companies?
  • Laundromats?
  • Thrift shops?
  • The VFW?
  • Churches?
  • Bars?
  • Liquor stores?   Let’s not get crazy here.

People don’t really need those things.  Except for liquor stores.  From start to finish, what do people need in a modern society?  I left off Law Enforcement because they keep people I don’t like away from me.  Yeah, some of them are tools, but for the most part we really do want them around for a modern society.  Or, if we don’t have Law Enforcement, a lot more ammo.

HILLARY

But the FBI seems reluctant to stop them.  Even for speeding. 

And need is not for the basics of life, it is for the basics of life for a modern society.

  • Water
  • Transport
  • Grocery Stores
  • Electricity
  • Their Bank
  • Pharmacies
  • Internet
  • Gasoline/Fuels
  • Natural Gas

But each of these requires people going to work to make things happen.  The people who run the water system have to purify the water.  The farmers have to farm, ranchers have to ranch, and dairy owners have to, um, dairy?  The systems that provide water, milk, eggs, meat and corn are fundamental.  They keep us in Doritos® and salsa and Monterrey Jack™ cheese.

What will keep the system going?  The city water department needs chemicals, so we need a chemical plant to make chlorine.  But will we open the potato chip factory, or expect people can figure out how to cook potatoes?  Will we open the frozen food factory, or assume people can make their own pizza?  We move from a market economy to one where “shortages” are created based upon allocations – what’s the best way to minimize the number of people that congregate while minimizing the spread of CoronaChan?

I don’t know.   But I do know that some foods will be considered so frivolous or interpersonal contact intensive that good sense won’t let them be made.  Eating at a restaurant?  That involves additional people, from cooks to servers that are potential additional viral vectors.

BEAN

And as far as the tip, wash your hands.

What else don’t we need?  That’s a tough question.  Do we need the latest spring fashions shipped in from China?  Do we need the latest iPhone®?  Do we need Stephen Colbert?  Definitely not.  Heck, I’m not sure we need most of those things on any given day at all, let alone during a catastrophe.

And that’s just consumer products and a lame late night host.  How much gasoline do we need if we’re not travelling to and from work?  Not very much.  Lots of diesel is needed to move products in semi-trucks and on trains.  In the United States, about 9 million barrels (42 gallons per barrel) are used each day as motor fuel.  After Corona?

Three quarters of that?  Half?

This weekend I would have probably used 30 gallons.  Instead?  None.  Multiply that by millions of people, and gasoline demand is sunk.  Get ready for the lowest gasoline prices you’ll ever see in your life.  And, since we’ll not be transporting a lot of “stuff”?  The lowest diesel prices, too, and unlike the hoarded toilet paper, they’ll hit bottom.

ESSENT

Maybe there will be new markets???

I look at this from a standpoint that I’ve got some food in my house that I’ve bought for times just such as this.  I don’t owe much to anyone.  As I’ve indicated before, if you have money (and if money is still good, which may not be a given) you’re in for the buying opportunity of a lifetime.  Want an oil well?  You’ll never have a better chance at getting a good one, if you have money.  Especially the baby oil wells.  Contrary to popular opinion baby oil isn’t made from babies, but from toddlers.

But it’s the people who don’t have money that I’m concerned about.  The theater owner can’t keep the theater going if there are no butts in seats.  The diner waitress can’t make the payments on their car if they can’t bring plates filled with eggs and bacon with a side of biscuits and gravy to Grandpa Verne.  She depends on the tips that pay the bank for that car, since Virgil can’t hold a job now that he’s in the county lockup for fighting Clem again.

Most people depend on this week’s income to pay this month’s bills.  I’ve been there.  I lived several years of my life one month and one lost job away from bankruptcy.  Thankfully, now I can live without a month of income.  Most people can’t.

How does that end up?  It’s simple enough to say, “Well, let the banks take a hit on a month of payments.  They’re greedy and don’t need that money.”

But . . . it’s my money you’re talking about.  My money is in the bank.  How does Hells Wargo® pay me back if my money isn’t collected from the waitress and the theater owner?  For every transaction, there’s another party.  And if you have more money than zero, you’re impacted.  That money of yours that your bank has?  You loaned it to them.  And if the loans that they made don’t pay back?  What happens then?

Another system failure.  I’m expecting that the Federal government will just pony up several trillion to make it all go away.  They have a printing press, ink, and paper.  Why not?

INFLATE

It worked out okay for Zimbabwe and Venezuela, right?

From the best available information I’ve seen slowing down the WuFlu® isn’t enough.  It has to be stopped.  COVID-19® isn’t the flu.  All available data indicates that it is far more deadly, and far more contagious.

At the high end of mortality, it would kill up to 7,500,000 Americans, assuming half of the people in the US get it.  What else is a factor?  How quickly we get it.  If you want to live, having a ventilator will be an issue for some percentage, say, 5% of people who get it.  No ventilator for that 5%?  They die.  Mortality rate skyrockets without care – it’s the difference between as low as 0.5% (as observed in South Korea) to as high as 5% in overwhelmed countries.

My trigger for “not the flu” is 30,000.  That seems like a big number, but when you divide it by the number of people in America, it’s really not.  The flu (as near as we can see today) is a LOT less fatal.  And, unless I missed a day in kindergarten, 30,000 is a lot less than 7,500,000.

heaven

Okay, not me.  I have to write.  And I have HBO®.

But until we see how it pans out, I guess I get the big prize:  spending time with Wilders.  And I’ll enjoy spending time with each of them.

Except the cat.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, #10: Economy on the Brink?

“The reason I’m going to Santa Corona, Steve, is the worst thing that can happen there is that I run out of suntan lotion.” – Wonder Woman (1978)

clock10

This year, International Woman’s Day was on Sunday, March 8, which is when we moved the clock to daylight savings time.  So now they’ll complain that they only get 23 hours for every day, while a man gets 24.

  1. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  2. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  3. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.

The clock didn’t move this month for the second month in a row.  Will Leftist state governments support Antifa violence this spring and summer?

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Virginia:  Imposing Costs – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona – Links

Welcome to Issue 10 of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK), Issue Seven is here (LINK), Issue Eight is here (LINK), and Issue Nine is here (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

Generally, this section reports on either violence or censorship:  it’s one of the other.  This month, it’s both.  We’ll start with Violence.  Arthur (LINK) sent a link to a story that got some coverage – the attempted murder of people just because they supported the other side of the political spectrum.  To be clear – this man (LINK)was attempting to kill old people who were expressing support of President Trump.  Thankfully he was incompetent – driving wasn’t something they studied in Marxist theory class.

I’m amused when the Left talks about “Right Wing Extremist Violence®” because it’s generally either propaganda or a funding ploy by Lefty organizations to frack the pockets of liberal donors on the Coasts who want to be “doing something” to stop the Hate®.  At every level in the last four years, Leftist violence has greatly exceeded violence coming from the Right, and if you don’t believe me, I can point to a few congressman who were shot at (and shot) by a deranged Sanders supporter who might beg to differ.

antifa

The difference between a Leftist and a puppy is a puppy stops whining when it grows up.

As the country continues to unravel, I expect a significant uptick in violence from the Left.  If Bernie loses his shot at the presidency, I fully expect that the very first target will be the Democratic Party, with riots in Milwaukee at the Democratic National Convention.  Leftists hate the Right, but they hate mainstream Democrats even more (see links below).  And with enough practice, sadly, Leftists might become proficient at hurting people other than their parents.

Moving on to censorship, Leftists should be pleased that censorship is still in fashion.  Because there isn’t a comprehensive list of bans for YouTube®, I can only report what I’ve seen in the news or that were mentioned in passing by other sources.  Several Right-ish content producers were banned recently, and probably the most prominent one I know of is I, Hypocrite.

When I heard about the banning, I went to his Bitchute® site and watched the video he felt was responsible for his banning.  It was tame, mainly just him arguing that the Left-Right violence statistics as reported by another YouTuber™ in a debate were wrong.  He also spent a great deal of time criticizing his own debate performance and preparation.  It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in a typical political debate except he admitted when he was wrong and his opponent had a strong point.

Now his voice is silenced.

YouTube© has also started demonetizing channels that feature content that’s favorable to the Right, like Sargon’s channel.  Sargon’s biggest offense?  Dunno, having a keen beard?  I can’t seem to find anything offensive.  But demonetization is generally just the first step before deplatforming.

On the Twitter™ front, they recently permanently banned the news website ZeroHedge© for a tweet popularizing a story that the Coronavirus may have been a result of genetic engineering.  The most recent mainstream stories I’ve heard seem to confirm that’s an opinion that’s not out of the question.  So, a news story that’s (admittedly) fringe?  Instaban.  That may be one reason a “conservative” buyer is looking to shake up leadership at Twitter®.  I’m not certain that would change a thing, since most “conservatives” seem to care more about the opinions of the Left than either the truth or honest dissenting opinions to the prevailing Leftist opinions.  Crazier parties, right?

Virginia:  Imposing Costs

Last Weather Report, I wrote about the concept of imposing costs, as in the Right wasn’t imposing costs on the Left.  Here’s what I said:

. . . no politician had to pay any price for their support of the votes, nor do they feel that they’ll have to pay a price.  And, no, to be very clear, I’m not suggesting violence on them or any illegal action.  But what I am suggesting is that if they pay no personal price, they’ll never change.  What are legal ways to influence them? 

  • First – make sure that they aren’t re-elected. That requires organization and planning.  Oh, and voters.
  • Second – go through their histories thoroughly. Don’t blackmail them – find (legally) all of their dirty laundry and air it – imagine what Ralph’s browser history looks like.  Isn’t that a public record? 
  • Third – make sure that that people are rude to their wives and shun them at social functions. How will Governor Northam’s wife, Pam, feel if people tell her what they think of Ralph when she stops in to get a Starbucks®?   What if her public meetings were peacefully protested?
  • Fourth – remove their privacy in every public space. Park vans outside of their houses with billboards that advertise what a horrible person lives within – they’ve done this with Susan Collins in Maine, so it’s a tactic that’s fair game.  But the Geneva Convention does categorize playing Twisted Sister® 24/7 at their house a crime against humanity.

I’m sure that there are people who are far better at this than I am who can come up with dozens of legal ways to make a vote against Constitutional rights pretty uncomfortable. 

Well, someone did come up with a legal and peaceful way to make Virginia State Delegate Mark Levine, Leftist, uncomfortable.  Levine is the author of the bill to confiscate semi-automatic guns from law-abiding citizens of Virginia.  Brandon Howard, American, showed up in front of Mark’s house.  With a protest sign.  And a rifle.  Here’s a link to the story (LINK).

In no way did he use his rifle in a threatening fashion, but Howard did protest.

Delegate Levine’s panties got very much in a twist.  He immediately called the police, but was quite upset to find out that Mr. Howard had done nothing to violate the law.  Levine was quoted by the article by saying that “. . . if they cannot prosecute him (Howard) because of the way our Virginia laws are, well then that’s the advantage of being a lawmaker.  I intend to come back to Richmond and introduce legislation to make sure that anyone who threatens a lawmaker at the point of a gun and says I’m coming to your home with a gun unless you change your mind on legislation.  I want to make sure that person can be prosecuted.”

Mr. Levine’s sense of irony must be broken to not see how his sense of having his rights violated would result in him writing a law to enable cops with guns to stop citizens from peacefully protesting in a way that he doesn’t approve of.  The research I saw indicates that Mr. Levine has a copy of the Constitution that he keeps in his pocket.  The only conclusion I can come up with is that Mr. Levine is illiterate?

This will not be the last time that costs are imposed on the Left as they try to restrict rights.  Assume as the Right gets as sophisticated and as active as the Left in this type of work, it will increase rapidly.

Hank Curmudgeon left a link (LINK) to this guide last month and suggested I print out this figure and include it.  I’ll just leave it here, since it seems to fit:

Insurg

Updated Civil War II Index

More graphs.  February was a kind month, but the seeds were set for turbulent months to follow.  In keeping with the journalistic standards of Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise, I’ll note that I did make sure that all pictures used resulted in no harm or mistreatment of any bikini, anywhere.

Violence:

violf

Up is more violent.  Violence remains steady.  My prediction?  Peaks in June-July-August as political violence coming from the Left peaks.  That may make a strange graph, but I’ll do my best to find a fitting match in a bikini if and when it happens.

Political Instability:

politf

Up is more unstable.  Instability skyrocketed with impeachment, and then got better before bouncing slightly this month.  Expect increased instability as we move to November, with August being secondary peak during and after the conventions, and bikini’s flash red.

Economic:

econf

Down indicates worse economic conditions.  The economic indicators began to turn in February.  Based on the way this index is calculated, it does not yet show the impact of the free-falling stock market, which (as of this writing) is limit-locked down on the early futures, with oil collapsing to the $30’s.  Expect March numbers to collapse, which is in keeping with the chaotic nature of the way her hair is displayed.

Illegal Aliens:

borderf

Down is good, in theory.  This is (thanks for the terminology correction, 1chota) a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.  One would assume we’re catching fewer because there are fewer to catch.  And those aren’t legs that last forever, since they obviously end in October.

Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona

It’s rare that a society devolves into civil war when everything is going along fine.  Part of the recipe for trouble is economic instability.  The second part is hating each other – and we already have that in place.  What keeps us from killing each other is the day job, and the fact that most of us have all of the Twinkies® and Ho-Hos™ and Strawberry Starburst Piña Coladas© that our sticky fingers and sugar addled brains can pay for with our nearly maxed out credit cards.

But then enters Coronavirus:

Ooh, my little viral crop, my viral crop
When you gonna give me quarantine, Corona
Ooh, you make my economy stop, my economy stop
Got stop the production line, Corona

Never gonna wash, cough it up, such a dirty hand
I always buy the TP, hoard the food that is canned
My, my, my, aye-aye, whoa!
M-m-m-my Corona

corona

The Boy did a fine job photoshopping this.  I guess he has the knack.

As I write this on Sunday evening, March 8, 2020, the stock market has already tripped a stop-loss trigger before opening.  Oil prices are collapsing.  The Everything Bubble is imploding.

What’s next?  If this economy follows every other collapse in recent economic history, job losses start soon.  Businesses collapse.  Banks?  They’re in the business of generating profits in good times, while having the government and taxpayers pay for the bad times.  This is, for some reason, referred to as the free market.

Economic recessions can happen when the economy has been growing too quickly, too long, or both.  Sometimes they end just because it was time.  Other times, an event occurs that causes the growth to stop.  Corona has the ability to be that event, and even if the economy was in peak condition, Corona could have started a recession.

Given a recession, the political landscape will be in turmoil.  On the Democrat side, I’m not sure that Bernie can get the nomination – that’s the conventional wisdom – and I dearly hope that’s right.  A hard Leftist leading a country in times of economic trouble always provides the worst solutions, and always prescribes more of the same solutions when they don’t work – it’s like a medieval doctor performing more bloodletting when the first bloodletting didn’t work.  It’s that we never did true bloodletting.

Joe Biden isn’t really certain what planet he’s on most days, and Donald Trump will go through him like a velociraptor in a room full of kittens.  President Trump’s recent tweet that “Biden will be tough to beat” was the 2020 version of “don’t throw me in that briar patch.”

joe

And that’s no malarkey, you frog faced bony soldier.

That’s my take – but the range of outcomes is so very wide with Corona, it’s nearly impossible to make a good prediction right now.  Give it two months.  Then we won’t have to predict, we’ll know.

Buckle your seatbelt – this definitely increases the odds of conflict happening sooner.

Links

link

Most are from Ricky this month . . .  enjoy!

NBC Misunderstands Boogaloo.  Probably intentionally.  But they can’t do math, so maybe not intentionally.

Clickbait on Boogaloo.  Strangely, no Antifa reports?

Salon admits that they feel their side is Leftist.

More Leftists Boogaloo afraid.

Progressive Magazine is worried that Ed Asner is worried about people on the Right having guns.  Or something.

Globalists want Trump out.

Daily Dot revisits Electric Boogaloo, adds even more stupid than NBC.

Doug Casey talks Fourth Turning.  Good read.

Vox Magazine thinks Identity Politicsis awesome.  But only for the Left, not for the Right.

Salon is ecstatic that Bernie is a symbol of people turning hard Left.

Must read:  Roots of the Divide.

The Left . . . looking for segregation.

What is an American?  Hint:  no one can agree.

The Week talks about Ross Douthat having a stupid opinion about the divide in America in a new book review.

Socialists hate the Democrats.  See, I told you.

Auntie Beeb writes about Sanctuary Counties in Virginia, still butthurt about 1776.

Michael Lind wants bigger government, more control.

 

Complacency, An English King, Elon Musk, and Bikinis

“Well, perhaps what we most needed was a kick in our complacency to prepare us for what lies ahead.” – Star Trek, TNG

dinos

Q:  Why can’t dinosaurs clap?  A:  They’re all dead.

Once upon a time The Mrs. and I bought a piece of bare land to build a house on, and not a Lego® one like they make in California.  The land was in a county that had (eye roll) rules about that sort of thing.  In order to get a permit to build the house, we had to have our land approved as a subdivision.  We did it the old fashioned way – we did it ourselves.  We prepared the relevant paperwork, hired the surveyor, and worked with the county zoning staff to present it to the Zoning Commission.  After discussing it at the meeting, and observing the property, the chairman of the commission stated:

“Mr. Wilder, the commission would like to reserve a 40’ foot strip of land along the north boundary to put in a road at some future point.  In your zoning packet, we’re going to add that you will deed us this land at no cost if we ever decide to build said road.”

That was over an acre.

The Commission Chairman must have seen the expression on my face.  I’ll admit it, I wasn’t pleased.  I felt, based on my law degree of “reading the Constitution” that this was a clear violation.  It was, I felt, a “taking” of my land with no compensation.  Even though I didn’t say a word, and wasn’t wearing a Gadsden Flag t-shirt, I think he knew right where my head was.

GADSDEN

Snek no lyke step.

“Now, Mr. Wilder, you understand that we as a Commission have a duty, a duty not only to those living here for today, but for those not living yet.  Why, this subdivision will be recorded and be in force for the next thousand years.”  I don’t recall the next sentence, because I really couldn’t believe what I had just heard.

The next thousand years?  Was he taking the same kind of drugs that Bernie does?

The Mrs. and I finished our turn at the podium for the meeting.  We left and went outside.  The Mrs. beat me to the punch.

“The next thousand years?  Was he serious???  What an idiot.”  We actually still joke about it to this day.  You would have been proud of her scoff when I read it to her tonight.  It was perfect.

We had both focused on the same sentence.  It was pompous.  It was self-important.  It was delusional.  It was . . . complacent.

The idea that the governance, the structure, or even a culture that respected property rights would follow a continuous path for a thousand years was deluded.  1,000 years ago, the Danes ruled Norway and England as well as Denmark under King Cnut (yes, that’s spelled right) the Great.  Ever hear of him?  Well let me tell you if you misspell his name just one time in an e-mail to Karen, you’ll have to spend an hour explaining old English history to HR so you can prove you really meant that Karen was displaying the wisdom that old King Cnut was cnown for.

knaren

Yeah, just like Karen, the Commission Chairman was a Cnut.

That more or less proves my point.  I doubt that the records of that subdivision named the “Free Autonomous Reserve Tract” will even exist in a thousand years.  It could be that whatever emerges from the nearly certain Musk Cat Girls on Mars© Uprising of 2257 or the Amazon™ slave rebellion of 2856 against Bezosclone4651 don’t destroy the records, but don’t bet on it.

Elon

Elon apparently has a different version of Cat Scratch Fever.

Expecting a county commission’s decisions to be relevant 1,000 years into the future was an outrageous example, but it proves the point I’m trying to make.  Often, we get so complacent in our day-to-day lives that we’re willing to believe incredible things that we normally would scoff at, like, oh, Joe Biden doesn’t have dementia.  I mean, it’s normal to answer the question, “What is your vision for health care?” with “I remember when it was polite for a man to call a woman a ham-handed yellow-teethed hammer soaker before you made sweet love to them in the back of your tree fort, I mean if you had a dozen or more.  Pinecones, right?  Those were the days when you could rub my legs and watch the hair spring back up and the wood elves would play music for hours on their nose harp.  Ever have a nose harp?  We did, but you could call women broads then, because they liked to get you coffee, what with the skirts and pantyhose and all.  Canada.  And if you don’t like it, you can damn well vote for that Reagan fellow.”

One way I choose topics to write about is I want to look at a subject I know something about, and then dig deeper.  My idea is that often one of the biggest dangers was well defined by Mark Twain:  “What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

It’s a shame Twain never learned to write properly and not use “ain’t” – maybe if he had his career would have gone somewhere like mine has.  Anyway, when I find a disconnect like Twain described, or new information that’s something that I like to write about.

But when I can find that same situation and tie it directly to a problem or situation in society today?

That’s perfect.

Okay, nearly perfect.  It has to be interesting, too.  The relative changes in the combustibility of dryer lint throughout the twentieth century might be not what you expected, but it’s probably not particularly interesting, unless you like to burn dryer lint as a hobby, which I hear is what Jeb Bush is into now, at least when it’s group craft time.

TWAIN

Okay, that’s actually “lightning and lightning bug.”  

I really like learning new things, and I learned something new today:  One thing I like writing about, and keep returning to as a nearly constant theme here is:  complacency.  It’s evident when I write about the economic system (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse), or prepping (Be Prep-ared) or really nearly any topic I write about.  And I try to live by my advice.

In my life, I try not to be complacent about:

  • Relationships: Love is a voluntary choice.  Being complacent about those around you is a good way to lose a relationship, and that can be expensive.  But, for certain people, it’s worth it.  (That’s an ex-wife joke.)
  • Jobs: Jobs come and go, even within companies.  I have seen entire departments disappear as technology made people irrelevant.  Always be learning new skills, or at least be learning more about the “niece” of your boss.
  • Value of Money: When I was a boy, Bernie Sanders would shine a shinbone for a nickel.  Now?  I think he wants to expand Medicare to do that.
  • Economic Future: The stock market will always go up, right?  Well, no.  Sometimes
  • Limits of Human Knowledge: Much of what is science is a fad, to be replaced by new science in a few years.  Not so much with math.  Mostly not with physics.  Medicine?  75% of it is washing your hands and eating right.  20% is antibiotics.  5% is not step on snek.  And Aesop will change all of these percentages if he gets this far.

Wilder, Wealthy and Wise is absolutely against complacency.  I don’t like complacency.  I like finding places where it has snuck into my life or I see it sneaking into the lives of others.  I especially like sharing things that help people see complacency in their own lives, because then I don’t have to change anything about me.

That moment when I’ve written something, and I imagine that someone’s entire world view changed?

That moment is why I write, though some of you might say that for a writer, I’m a fairly competent typist.  Regardless, that’s the enjoyment I get from this, besides the jokes and the bikinis.  I want to create discomfort in me.  And in you.  And also be able to explain to The Mrs. why I spend so much time looking at bikini pictures.

“Research, dear.  It’s for my readers.”  Oh, the things I put myself through for you.

dogkini

At least it’s not another Kardashian.  But I think the dog has less hair.

Back to complacency.  When it comes to life and health, how often do you step back and question your basic, underlying assumptions?  If never, you should.  How often are they wrong?  If never, then you’re not testing them hard enough.

Assumptions change because circumstances change.  A forty year old metabolism isn’t the same as a twenty year old metabolism.  If you eat like you’re twenty when you’re forty and fifty, you’ll end up weighing 657 pounds and being buried in a piano box.  I guess the good part about that is “all the Oreos®,” and being able to dress convincingly as Jabba the Hut® at Halloween, but the downside is attractive slave girls cost more than you think.

Assumptions change because knowledge changes – we were wrong.  All of us.  Sugar used to be great for you, it was a carbohydrate, and those were good.  But fat?  Fat was bad, as bad as John Travolta acting in a movie that requires his character to be able to use words of more than one syllable bad.  Everyone knew that, and they were right.  But only about Travolta.  Companies even made fat-free cookies in special green packages so you could know that you were safe eating them.  But in 2020, we know that’s insanity.

Lkini

But I hear Darth Braider did her hair.

What circumstances have changed in your life that you need to account for?  What will be changing?

As for knowledge, what does “everyone know” that’s wrong today?  That’s tougher.  I think that the news about sugar (for instance) started to show up in more than “fad” levels about the year 2000, a good 20 years after the war on fat in food began.  Pay attention.  And if something seems too good to be true, it probably isn’t.

Complacency.  Heck, I’ve made mistakes.

Probably enough for 1,000 years.  Just ask Karen.  She’s quite a Cnut.

Dangit.  It’s HR again.  FCUK©.

(FCUK™, of course is the British clothing brand “French Connection, UK®.”)

Silly.

The Siege of Waco and the Deep State

“There’s a reason you separate military and the police.  One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people.  When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.” – Battlestar Galactica (New One)

ATFRAID

Don’t worry, Leftists, all those people at Waco were here legally.

The Waco Siege started 27 years ago.  It started as a raid by the ATF – Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.  The ATF was formed after the Gun Control act of 1968.  In researching the ATF, I was amazed that its history consists of nothing more than an unending series of scandals and heartache visited upon (mainly) people with no criminal intent who had no idea that they were violating some extremely technical law.  And that’s on a good day.

How bad is the ATF?  Here’s what a Senate subcommittee said:  “Based upon these hearings it is apparent that ATF enforcement tactics made possible by current federal firearms laws are constitutionally, legally, and practically reprehensible.”  From that, it actually got worse.

The ATF was involved (besides Waco) in the Ruby Ridge disaster (which netted a body count that included a 14 year old boy and a mother holding a baby) as well as operation Fast and Furious where guns were intentionally illegally sold to Mexican drug criminals.  It’s okay selling guns to drug cartels because Fast and Furious was named after a Vin Diesel movie, and who doesn’t like him?

It appears that most of the actually useful things that the ATF does revolve around databases that attempt to match weapons to crimes.  Keeping close to computer screens and away from actual A, T, and F might be a good idea, since they’ve lost (in just one audit) over 76 firearms, plus hundreds of laptops.  Oops.  Too much A?  And this is the group that revers Elliot Ness and the famous Untouchables as their forefathers.

donut

Looks like the Deputy Director really wanted to win the pie eating contest with the FBI, so they hired Karen.

In an existence consisting of repugnant, objectionable, and odious events the Waco Siege is probably their crowning achievement.  Waco is certainly the worst single thing the ATF has ever done.  The fact that it’s not the only bad thing people talk about when they bring up the ATF tells you just how incompetent they are.

What did the ATF do that was so bad at Waco?

They launched a military-style raid against a church, the Branch Davidians, for no real discernible crime other than being a great target for a raid that could get publicity right before Congressional budgets were set.  Oh, and ATF agents knowingly lied in order to get military support, indicating that there were illegal drugs at the church when there was no evidence at all.  And this is just for starters.

On the morning of the attack, the agents shot the dogs, then engaged in a firefight with the members of the church.  The ATF says they didn’t shoot first.  The surviving Branch Davidians say the ATF did shoot first.  Since the ATF was recording the raid for use in public relations, it seems odd that they don’t have footage of that.  Almost as if the tapes were . . . conveniently lost?  Nah.

The ATF may be evil, but they make up for it partly by being incompetent.  After 45 minutes of exchanging gunfire with the Branch Davidians, the ATF asked for a do-over, since they had shot all of their ammunition.  The church allowed and honored a ceasefire when they could have easily killed every single ATF agent as they tried to withdraw.  But the folks in the church didn’t.  Once the threat of attack had passed, they let the agents leave in piece.  Did I mention that the Branch Davidians called 911 when they were first attacked?

knocking

ATF agents are notoriously bad at knock-knock jokes.

The Waco Siege then spiraled into a circus.  The press, FBI, and the Texas National Guard all showed up.  When a group of moms and kids surrendered, the moms were immediately arrested and the kids placed in state custody, which made the remaining kids not want to leave.  Funny, that.  The FBI hostage negotiators sent in a camcorder so the Davidians could show they weren’t being coerced into staying.  The FBI refused to allow the tape to be given to the media.  Why?

It might make people sympathetic to the Branch Davidians, which wouldn’t do because the FBI needed them to be the villain.

During the standoff, the FBI continually ramped up the stress through lights at night, and horrible sounds during the day – which is probably a questionable strategy when dealing with an end-of-the-world cult.  The FBI then decided that broadcasting “This is not an assault” over a loudspeaker while using a tank to demolish the structure and pump in flammable tear gas.  If that’s not an assault, I’m not sure what is, especially since there are infrared recordings that may show muzzle flashes on the morning of the attack – muzzle flashes of people outside shooting into the compound.   Apparently, this sort of behavior isn’t an assault – it’s just the non-threatening way that FBI agents normally great each other.

attack

I will warn you, the FBI can leave a mess.

Malcolm Gladwell tallied the forces in his article for the New Yorker:  “Outside the Mount Carmel complex, the FBI assembled what has been called probably the largest military force ever gathered against a civilian suspect in American history:  10 Bradley tanks, two Abrams tanks, four combat-engineering vehicles, 668 agents in addition to six U.S. Customs officers, 15 U.S. Army personnel, 13 members of the Texas National Guard, 31 Texas Rangers, 131 officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, 17 from the McLennan County sheriff’s office, and 18 Waco police, for a total of 899 people.”  Those were just the ground forces – there were helicopters and other flying surveillance, too.

The Siege ended in tragedy after the tanks went in – a total of 76 dead in that final “not an assault.”  The church members perished horribly in a fire that may or may not have been started by the government.

I don’t want to give the impression that the leader of the Branch Davidians, David Koresh, was a hero.  He clearly wasn’t.  Outside of his taking wives that were very young (though still within Texas marriage age at the time, per the Sheriff), Koresh had the opportunity to end the standoff without tragedy.  That still doesn’t absolve the government, because if Koresh felt he wouldn’t get a fair deal, it looks like he was right.

Almost immediately after the first catastrophic attack by the ATF, the involved agents started writing reports on what happened.  And were stopped even though writing reports doesn’t allow them to use what is apparently their only skill – bungling operations and getting people killed.  Someone from Washington, D.C. noticed that the agents were writing things that could be used by the Davidians to prove themselves innocent, which must violate some sort of ATF policy.

Thankfully, the evidence remaining from the fire was at least carefully cataloged so Americans could have faith that the justice system would produce a fair result?  No.  The entire site was bulldozed within two weeks after the fire, destroying valuable evidence.

Evidence?  Why would you need that?

peewee

His courthouse is in the basement of the Alamo.

I mentioned that I was going to write about Waco to The Mrs.  We discussed it for a while, but she opened with, “Well, I guess that’s another list you’ll be on.”

We continued to talk about it.  Her position was that Waco started the Right/Left split in the country.  From one standpoint, she was correct.  If you look at the Pew® data from back in 1994 (LINK), we weren’t that split as a country, but by 2017 the split was in force.  Waco happened right at the front of the polarization of American politics.

voice

I blame the vegans, ruining Thanksgiving with their stupid tofu turkey.

The Mrs. and I continued discussing the Waco Siege.  We both agreed that Waco was also the most blatant display of the Deep State back before the year 2000, and she felt it was the blow that really split the country.  How so?

  • The search warrant for the raid was based on multiple lies.
  • The Branch Davidians had phone lines cut with the outside world so they couldn’t plead their case except through the FBI.
  • Evidence was “lost” including physical evidence as well as video evidence.
  • Agents writing routine reports after the failed first raid were stopped from creating reports because their stories didn’t match and the government didn’t want to provide evidence that the Branch Davidians could use to be found innocent. Innocence is for government agents, silly.
  • Stories of agents never actually matched with each other, being inconsistent as late as 6 years after the raid.
  • Physical evidence (as was available) contradicted agent testimony or suggested agents may have lied.
  • In the end, every charge that could be brought against the survivors was brought, but there were no charges brought against a single Federal agent. Perhaps 9 (from the data I could find) ATF personnel either retired early (presumably with full benefits and honors) or were “under scrutiny” which probably means that they wouldn’t get promoted again for a year or two.
  • There were lasting career consequences, though: one FBI leader was demoted from a very high position, and the rest of his life was horrible.  Just kidding.  He moved from one high paying executive job in the private sector to another.
  • Leftist Senators (most prominently Charles Schumer) bent over backwards to justify what the ATF did during the Senate hearings on the Siege. I can say this with confidence:  Chuck Schumer is the ATF of the Senate.

The parallels to the Deep State today are similar:

  • Hillary Clinton can intentionally violate the law related to storage of classified information. No charge.
  • The FISA affidavit that started the Mueller investigation could be based on . . . lies. No charge.
  • Andrew McCabe could lie to Congress. No charge.
  • John Brennan could lie to Congress. No investigation.
  • Roger Stone could lie to Congress. No investigation.  Just kidding.  Hammered as if by the fist of an angry god, and convicted of a crime.
  • General Flynn made non-consequential misstatements of fact when he was in a “friendly chat” with FBI agents. No charge.  Just kidding.  Hounded like he had stolen Satan’s bra and convicted of a crime.

Certainly I could come up with more examples.  But the point is clear – the Deep State protects itself first.  Members can commit murder, and there will be no charges.  Members can lie to cover each other and be immune.  Members can destroy evidence without consequence.  Members can get in the 10 item only line with 12 items.  No consequences.

stapler

When I think about why the Deep State would go so far to protect its own, my first question is, why?  You see this as a regular fixture with almost any member.  Some of those being protected aren’t important.  The on-scene director at Waco – why protect him?

The answer is fairly simple:  these people know things.  They know of the activities that the Deep State wants to hide.  They’re the ones who know the real secrets, both on you and me but more importantly on each other.

Why could Waco not be ended peacefully?  Because it would give Koresh a victory.  And a victory, no matter how small would, they felt, make them less powerful, less respected.  There is a reason that the ATF and FBI posed in pictures on the still-smoldering remains of the Branch Davidian compound.  There is a reason that after the fire took down the Branch Davidian flag, the ATF raised an ATF flag at Waco.

ATF

Nothing says reasonable like a selfie on top of ashes!

That reason is the Deep State’s deepest desire.  What does the Deep State want?

Power, both personal power, and power to the organizations they serve.  Make no mistake, the Deep State is partisan, and loves all of those who like state control.  Why else would they militarize a Federal Bureau that was less effective than Soviet situation comedy writers?  You could look into the sneering, mocking weasel face of Peter Strzok while he was giving testimony to Congress and see it in his eyes.  Contempt.  Contempt for those that weren’t of his Deep State pedigree, and a smugness borne of the thought that there was nothing that could ever be done to him.

derp

Would you trust this man with your secrets?

He had become like the hero of the ATF, Elliot Ness.

He was Untouchable.

Being Overwhelmed, a Survival Guide

“I guess this whole experience has left me feeling a little overwhelmed.  Flying at warp 10, evolving into a new life-form, mating, having alien offspring . . .” – Star Trek:  Voyager

HANDPUMP

Whenever I get too overwhelmed and I need motivation, I think back to what Grandpa Wilder said to the doctor on his deathbed:  “Be positive.”  I just wish he would have answered the doctor about what his blood type was instead – they might have saved him.

Overwhelmed.

It’s that moment when everything is happening at once.  When the dishwasher is flowing a mass of foam that looks like a 1960’s science fiction monster onto the kitchen linoleum.  When the new baby has a fever of 102°F and is expelling fluids at high velocity from every orifice.  When the wife is crying because it’s Sunday night and someone left a Sharpie® in a pocket and it’s now all over her white skirt that she was going to wear for her presentation that was going to make or break her career.  And then out in the driveway the car has a flat.  And when these are all happening . . .

All at once.

It’s overwhelming.

I’ve been there.  And so have you.  It’s part of life.

Being overwhelmed brings with it that moment of time when you feel hopeless.  There’s literally too much input for you to make rational decisions – deal with the suds on the linoleum or put the baby in the freezer?  In some cases, if you’re overwhelmed enough, there’s a tendency to not make any decisions and freeze like an artificial intelligence told to compute ways that Mayor Pete could really be elected president outside of his home planet.

But somewhere between the intersection of life, family, work, and self you’ve created that moment and now you’re overwhelmed.  There is but one salvation:

Scotch.  Action.

justpark

I think one of those might have a slight door ding.

The first thing I do when I find myself in a situation like this is, well, something.  Not just anything, however:  I try to prioritize loss of human life or loss of property first.  Which one life or property?  Depends on who it is and what’s going to be lost, I mean if the choice was to save the life of the ex-wife by donating my used shoes or to let her die and collect aluminum cans by the side of the road in Arizona in summer instead?

What’s aluminum going for nowadays?  I kid.  I hope she does well – Star Wars® well.  In a galaxy far, far, away from me.

onering

I kid.  She wanted to leave as much as I wanted her to leave and I really don’t bear her any ill will, and I think that she would agree with me that divorces are expensive because they’re worth it.

After taking whatever emergency action is required, I like to list the rest of the things that are overwhelming me.  While it’s not actually solving the underlying problem(s), it at least puts a boundary on the situation.  It’s translating me from thinking that “there’s too much to do” to a list that, while it might be really long, is finite.

And then?  I like to prioritize.  First on the list are the things that have to happen now – the urgent and important issues.  Then I take action to get them off the list.  I know it sounds crazy – making yourself feel better by taking the issues that are bothering you and dealing with them?  What sort of sorcery is this?

I know, it sounds as foreign as a “job” to a Bernie Sanders supporter.  But unlike a Bernie Sanders supporter, my method works.  Crossing something off the list that’s urgent and important – it makes me feel less whelmed.  Bonus – now you and I know that whelm is really a word.  (I didn’t until the little red squiggly didn’t show up underneath it and then looked it up to make sure.)

quadrants

I did this a while ago.  It’s based on comments from Eisenhower but has the stink of MBA all over it now.

Items that are urgent and important are the ones to do first.  But even though you get a burst of dopamine from solving those important and urgent items, it’s a tyranny in your life – a tyranny of crisis.  Unless you’re a drama queen or a Kardashian (but I repeat myself), being in a constant state of adrenaline from always having to react to the latest emergency is tiring and probably wears out your deodorant.

The first step away from this continual crisis management state is an understanding of a simple truth:  not everything matters.  The second step might be to understand that a deodorant that’s “Strong enough for a man, but made for a woman™” may not be enough if you have the scent glands that produce Kardashian mating musk.

kardash

I hear they’re filming a remake of Gorillas in the Mist, but to save money it will just be ninety minutes of Kardashians showering.

When you are stuck in that emergency, dig out, not deeper down.  I’ve seen people respond to emergencies by taking more and larger risks.  They hope that a home run will save them.  Eventually, the risks get higher than a hippie in a hot air balloon so that even if they won, it still wouldn’t save them.

Dig out.  Solve one problem.  And then the next.  I have always found that one solution leads to the next, and before too long I feel in control.  Success breeds success.

And for heaven’s sake, don’t be like Hillary Clinton running for president for the 35th time:  learn from the situation so you never have to repeat it.  Some advice:

  • Learn to say “no” and mean it – there are large numbers of charities, clubs, boards and even hobbies that will consume all of your time if you let them. Guard your time jealously – it’s all you have.  Time is the biggest resource – nine pregnant women can’t make a baby in a month.
  • Understand that other resources matter, too. Money is a pretty big one.  I know that some folks preach that you have to have an “attitude of abundance.”  That’s fine, if it teaches you to be happy with what you have.  It’s not fine if you end up buying three new cars and a European vacation on $12,000 a year.
  • Understand that some results matter more than others – in some races there really isn’t a second place. If a loss will be devastating, either plan to win, or don’t play.
  • Learn that effort is better than genius. Combine the two and you have a nearly unstoppable combination, but if I have to pick just one, I’ll pick effort.  There’s rarely any traffic on the second mile, except for that Jesus guy.
  • Schedule.  Anticipate.  You can’t plan your future entirely, but you can plan to have skills and competence in things that may help you in the future.  You can never tell when carving a flute out of your enemy’s shinbones might come in handy, so practicing early is recommended.

spanish

Beware of the comfy chair.

But sometimes, even though you’ve planned, even though you’ve attempted to do the right thing, you’ll lose.  Sometimes, tsunamis hit.

And sometimes the dishwasher shoots suds all across the kitchen floor, even if you tell her to stop it.

So get to work.

The Coming Recession, Explained Using Six and a Half Bikinis.

“Well, just find yourself a man with a spotless genetic makeup and a really high tolerance for being second guessed and start pumping out the little uber Scullys.” – The X-Files

FIRST

After the next recession, most people will be on their feet in no time, after the bank repossesses the cars.

This wasn’t my originally planned topic. My originally planned topic was a discussion of PEZ® seed pricing mechanisms in 1850’s Great Britain, complete with discussion on how many orphans could be traded per bushel of finished PEZ™. Alas, I’ll have to return to that exciting topic some other time, since the world financial system seems to be imploding.

Okay, imploding isn’t the right word. And it really may not be as bad as it looks.

But today? It looks bad. Maybe not implosion bad, but I heard that some bankers had been discouraged. I guess they lost interest.

How bad could it be?

If it just stays at a financial level, the worst I would expect would be a W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 4 (Great Depression) in the United States, though it might hit a W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 5 (National Collapse) in China. You can read all about the W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Levels here (The Lighter Side of the Apocalypse) in an article praised by critics as “one of the best things ever written by a man with such questionable levels of personal hygiene, fashion sense, and grooming.”

In order to understand and guess at the future, let’s take a look at the past. The most recent past economic downturn was the Great Recession. What happened then?

sp500

As you can see from this chart, the S&P 500 experienced a big downturn right around the calf and knee area. Feel free to enlarge – just explain that the study of economics is really interesting.

Several things: first, lowered interest rates and the idea that anyone could and should get a mortgage led to a massive mis-investment in housing. Part of the cause were things called stealing and looting mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. I won’t go into technical details, but it was a way that Harvard® educated MBAs convinced themselves that a strawberry picker making $14,000 a year could afford a $720,000 mortgage (LINK). And, yes, this really happened.

Second, the world was awash in money after the Fed flooded the fields with money after the Dotcom Bubble. Where did that money go? Everywhere. Houses. And . . . oil. Oil prices skyrocketed during that time. Companies rented oil tankers and kept them full, sitting at sea, continually selling futures on the oil in the tanker. They made fortunes by pretending to sell oil. I know that sounds like I’m making an obscure joke, but no, that really happened.

The price of housing hit the financial system like a mousetrap on a cat’s tail. Or a cat with a mousetrap on its tail? Or . . . nevermind. People kept borrowing more on their houses as their houses appreciated. They spent that money on pickups and boats and child care and food and vacations. The people weren’t evil, but they thought that the value of their house could never go down, so the risk was small. Rational people, like bankers, were telling them this. Heck, some even invested in more houses so they could double or triple their magic ATM.

30year

This view of 30 year mortgage rates explains that there have been mortgage rates. Look closely, and you can see them.

Finally, one day the music stopped on the housing prices. Was there a cause in particular? Not really. But the market lost the one thing required to keep it afloat – belief. Every market rises as the beliefs of the participants overcomes the worry of loss. Wow, that sounded poetic and cool. But it’s also true.

In many ways, the stock market is a barometer not only of the actual underlying economic performance, but how people feel about the future. It keeps going up as long as people keep being optimistic and has proven to be a much better barometer of economic activity than the amount of leg hair I grow before each winter and then form into a nice, soft nest to sleep in when it gets cold.

crude

Crude oil prices had Exxon® jumping for joy in 2008!

One thing that brought the mood of people down in 2008 was the price of oil. In the midst of the recession that came from the housing bubble, the secondary oil bubble inflated. Prices increased more than double in a single year – from $70 per barrel to over $140 per barrel at the peak. Oil acts as a tax on everything to do with physical goods. To move a Tom Brady’s booty dinghy from where it’s made in by incontinent baboons in Romania to his rump mechanic in Massachusetts requires energy – energy from oil.

So that’s the “why” for 2008. How does that relate to today?

The Great Recession was brought about by an actual recession – things slowed down in the country because there were only so many houses that could be made. That’s different than today’s trouble. The stock market is tanking not because of a recession, but because the worry about Corona-Chan locking up the flow of physical goods from China. I wrote about that last week (Corona Virus, with a Slice of Recession?).

What have we seen so far?

stand

This was a pretty good miniseries documentary.

The stock market has decreased in value. In general, a stock price has two components – the first is the value of the factories and land and machinery that the company owns. This is boring, it’s like saying a Stradivarius violin worth less than a piece of firewood because the firewood weighs more – in the hands of a genius, the violin can make masterful music, though in the hands of my kids it just made me contemplate the positives of being deaf.

The second and often biggest component of value to a stock is the assumed growth of that stock. This is why older, boring stocks like Ford® are priced closer to the value of the assets they own – no one thinks that Ford™ will end up tripling in size in the next three years. There’s an ex-wife “tripling size in three years” joke, but I’m bigger than that.

But people do think that Tesla© can triple in size in three years. Therefore, people value Tesla™ more than Ford® even though it sells about six million cars a year and Tesla© sold only 370,000 cars in the last year. You’d think that Ford™ would be worth about 10 times what Tesla® is. But in reality, Ford© is valued at $28 billion, while Tesla™ is valued at $147 billion. Is Tesla™ really worth that much? That’s up to Tesla®. But give me $147 billion and I bet I could sell 380,000 cars a year, too. And they would be pretty neat ones and they wouldn’t look like they were designed by a third grader with limited imagination.

cyber

Elon took a lot of heat for the Cyber Truck design, primarily because it looks like something that no human would buy. Thankfully, Elon’s next advance will be robotic customers.

Tesla© has convinced people it is almost six times more valuable than Ford©. That’s what I call optimism. Or a con, but at least a con for a good cause (Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars).

Since the stock market is based on optimism, this latest decline in February of 2020 shows that investors are shaken. The world hasn’t (yet) changed but the implications are now becoming concerning enough to cause the market to drop. Is this going to be a big drop, like in 2008, or another head fake?

I can’t be sure. But I do know that this seems like a good time to trot out what I learned the last time the economy went south.

Lesson One:

Market bubbles aren’t rational. Companies rise faster and farther in a bubble without regard to, well, anything. Uber®, which is basically “Taxi App” is worth $61 billion dollars, which is more than Elon Musk spends in a typical year on hair plugs. Uber© lost $8.5 billion dollars last year while generating tons of bad publicity because its founder is a douche and it treats drivers worse than Mongolian bull milkers. There are tons of companies just like Uber™, and all with an idea that they’ll “disrupt” segments of society. Essentially, disrupting involves an app, a smart phone, and booting someone out of a job. Some are, I assume, legitimate ideas that will be profitable in the future. Others are like GoPro™, which is (in Karl Denninger’s words) just “camera on a stick.”

I heard someone call this the Disruption Bubble, and it’s as good a name as any to describe the distortions and irrational money flows as everyone tries to find the next Amazon™, Facebook© or Google®. In a real panic, stupidly valued things like Uber® deflate, and deflate quickly. But companies that are really worth something will fall in value, too.

The best time to buy a company is when it is cheap. It will never be cheaper than when people are panicking like Godzilla® is hungry for Japanese take-out and orders Tokyo. Finding quality companies that are selling at a 90% discount is possible during a real panic.

Lesson Two:

When the market falls, investors have less money. But they still have bills. So what will they do? If this is like 2008, they’ll sell other things. What kinds of things? Cool cars will be cheap, but not everyone is in the market for a Lambo. But gold dropped, too. During 2008, gold went from $1000 per ounce to as low as $720.

gold

You can see the price of gold really drop around the shoulder area, and take off afterwards.

I can’t guarantee that gold will drop, but I’d be watching if you want to buy some – there might be a great opportunity to buy gold at a lower price than the current $1655 per ounce.

Lesson Three:

In past recessions, the interest rate that is charged for the 10 Year T-Bill generally dropped. Why? People wanted to get to a safer asset. That asset has generally been the dollar. The most likely candidates to replace the dollar were the Chinese whatever-they-call-it and the Euro. As China is now in the grip of Corona, it’s not a flight to safety. Every European country with a beach is thinking about dumping the Euro and exiting the EU so they can print wrapping paper and call it money, the Euro isn’t a great one, either. The Swiss Franc is kinda awesome, but they only make so many of those.

10year

Look closely and you can see that the Fed doesn’t have a lot of room to lower rates.

Nope. It’s the dollar. In times of economic uncertainty, the dollar will increase in value relative to other currencies. Does it make sense? Maybe? It seems that the world notices the Navy, Army, Marines, and all of those nuclear weapons and those make the banks in New York seem a bit more secure.

Expect that if this goes like 2008 for a while you can buy foreign stuff like a king. For grins I track the New Zealand dollar – it’s right now at its lowest value in five years. I bet it goes even lower soon, so sheep should be quite a bargain. Remember New Zealand’s national motto: “We’re not Australia.”

Don’t expect to find a great place to get a good yield anytime soon if Uncle Sam is paying less than a 1%, you’re not going to get even that good of a deal. Negative interest rates have already hit Europe, and there’s no reason they won’t hit the rest of the world. Investing in cash in mason jars buried in the backyard might be a good idea. Send me your map, and I’ll keep it safe.

Lesson Four:

No financial collapse looks the same. Each one of them is unique, and this one has been a long time in coming so, if it’s hitting right now, it could be really bad. Each of the above lessons might be wrong, so look for opportunities where you see them, not where an Internet humorist thinks they might be, no matter how charming and freshly showered he might be. Oh, if you have cash, it does no good if it’s in a bank that collapses. Just sayin’.

A friend of mine made the joke in 2008 that “when the tide goes out, you see who isn’t wearing a swimsuit.” There are vulnerabilities that very few people know about right now that will (in hindsight) become obvious in the days or years ahead. Just nod sagely and pretend like you expected it would happen all along. That’s what I’ll be doing.

Wildcards:

Desperate people sometimes do desperate things. As the Soviet Union collapsed, there was some small risk that an official decided he was better dead than not red, and pushed the button. That didn’t happen – in large part because by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, nobody believed in it anymore: it was as tired as Joe Biden’s campaign.

mankini

Okay, I’m sorry.

sorry

If China were to teeter near collapse, would they decide to launch a regional war to keep the people together so the nation didn’t collapse or fall into civil war? Hopefully not, but the chances of it happening are greater than zero. As you prepare for a world where there is a financial dislocation, don’t forget to prepare for a cultural dislocation as well. Buying food now when it’s cheap and easy to get doesn’t make you a hoarder – it makes you one less person who is drawing on system resources if things go bad. Preparing for bad times when times are good is a profoundly moral thing to do. But don’t forget to complain like everyone else.

Nobody likes a smug prepper.

Disclaimer:

Keep in mind, this is NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. I make fun of Johnny Depp and PEZ® and post pictures of girls in bikinis over economic graphs and am even writing this sober. Consult someone who has those credentials and maybe drinks martinis at lunch since that seems pretty swanky. Also, I don’t own any direct positions in any of the stocks discussed, and don’t plan on taking any positions in them (maybe ever), though I do own a Ford™ truck. I’m betting that maybe some of my 401k money is investing in, well, something and might include these stocks, but I don’t know. Maybe it’s just invested in magic beans?

Don’t wish your life away, complete with Catch-22 and bikini picture

“Mr. Frond.  He’s a tall glass of . . . annoying.” – Bob’s Burgers

commie

I guess you could say that Bernie engages in wishful thinking.

A few years ago I was in a meeting with my boss, who has since retired.  It was a particularly hectic time at work – we were looking down at a calendar of 13 hour days, 7 days a week, for the next few weeks.  We had already been on that hellish schedule for at least 20 days.  We couldn’t have been more exhausted if we were a car muffler or the guy charged with keeping Joe Biden away from functional microphones.

At this point, the most dangerous place in the office was getting between me and the coffee pot.  HR had cautioned me about my threatening language when I found someone in the way of the coffee, but I responded that growling wasn’t really a language.  They said I was being intimidating, but I stared at them silently and then they went away.

So, we were busy.  As I said, I had a meeting with my boss.  My boss leaned back in his chair.  In a very tired voice he said, “Well, I don’t want to wish my life away, but I’m looking forward to finishing this.”

The part of that sentence that really stuck with me was, “I don’t want to wish my life away.”

When faced with something unpleasant, I want it to be over, and the sooner the better.  I think that’s just human nature.  I’d actually never given that desire a second thought.  “Let’s finish the bad times so we can get to the good times, right?”

biden

It serves you right, you knock-kneed slobbering tuna monger.

I also recalled another, slightly different example of this kind of thinking.  When I was a child waiting for Christmas, I wanted the days before Christmas Eve to dissolve into the past like all of those bodies in Bill Clinton’s basement so I could begin unwrapping presents like a Tasmanian Devil® with chainsaw arms.  A similar example is how people can’t wait for the work week to finish so that they can get to the weekend and live their “real” life.

But life isn’t just the good times – it’s also the crappy ones, too.  It’s also the dull ones.  It’s the hours spent at work.  And it’s the hours spent in a dentist chair.  And that really is the sum of life – it’s not the great moments, it’s all the moments.  It’s what we live in every day:  that’s life.  Life isn’t just hopping from peak to peak, victory to victory, Christmas present to Christmas present.  Nope.  Most of life is spent in the valleys and hillsides and Bill Clinton’s basement.

holyspirit

I will say the one time I had Tequila I did end up on my knees.

I did an experiment once on a warm spring day.  I was in the parking lot of a liquor Bible store to get some beer to buy extra Bibles for the Bible room in my house.  For whatever reason I stopped and just looked around.  I observed as closely as I could.  I looked everywhere.  Up into the blue sky and the wisps of clouds moving lazily to the east.  I looked at the grain of wood in the gray sun-bleached privacy fence by the parking lot.  The staggered brick pattern of the store wall contrasting with the evenness of the mortar joints holding them in place caught my eye.  From the natural to the manmade, I looked deeply.

As I spent time that afternoon really looking at and observing my surroundings I was struck by how much beauty that I was surrounded by, day after day.  This was a beauty that I never noticed – it was just visual noise in my daily life.  But that beauty really was there, hidden in the small things that are everywhere.  Also it was in bikinis, but those really weren’t hidden.

BIKINI

It has been mentioned that I needed more bikini.  I assume you mean on hot chicks, because it’s considered an international war crime if I posted one of me in a bikini.

There was a weird majesty in the moment.  Most days I don’t take the time to look for it.  But I know that it’s there if I want to take the time to look.  After that, things weren’t really the same.  I began to look closer at all aspects of life.

Not too much later I read an article that said that even when it gets fairly cold, say -5°F with a wind of 10 miles per hour, it would take up to half an hour to get frostbite.  I’m not making fun of those temperatures – they can be deadly.  But if I was walking around outside and the temperature was 40°F with a wind speed of 10 miles per hour I might be a bit uncomfortable, but a healthy person with exquisite DNA that was the result of a secret government breeding program named Project Lunchbox (like your humble host) could easily stand those conditions for hours in just a light jacket with no lasting negative impact.  Shiver?  Sure.  But I’d be fine.  And so would anyone else without a weird medical problem even if they weren’t part of Project Lunchbox.

LUNCHBOX]

When we had to do a group project in school we were in trouble – we were all “that guy”.

The same is true about high temperatures.  Yes, I might sweat – it’s not like I’m a member of the English royal family.  But for the most part, most ranges of heat you’d encounter in the United States isn’t life threatening to a healthy person.  Uncomfortable?  Yes.  Sweaty?  Certainly – we already established that.  But only uncomfortable, not in danger.  One summer the air conditioning went out on my car.  My response?  I rolled the windows down when I headed home from work.  After a week or two, the heat ceased to bother me at all.

As I kept at it, I realized that there were a lot of other conditions I could simply ignore if I chose to:

  • Hunger – Most people reading this have never been really hungry in their lives.
  • Thirst – Water is important, but it how many times are we actually thirsty versus just drinking because of habit?
  • Airline Seats – Okay, these really are from the fifth circle of Hell. But I can scrunch up in one for an hour or so.
  • Ear Hair – If I let it grow long enough, I can braid it like the bride at a Leftist wedding.
  • Bad Smells – How many of them are just annoying? I mean, besides the French?
  • Disorder – Not everything in my life needs to be perfectly arranged, but it would be nice if Pugsley put the Vise Grips® back after he was done braiding my ear hair.

After all of this, the minor irritants of life ceased to irritate me on most days.  As I became less irritated, the thing that oddly became more irritating was people complaining about minor irritations.  I then had yet another realization:  some people just like to complain.  So I added another thing to my list of things I could ignore if I chose to:

  • Annoying People

I’ll admit that not everything in my life is always exactly the way I’d create it if it were entirely up to my choice.  And that’s good.  It’s that difference (along with carbohydrates) that forces me to grow.  Bad times give me an excuse to call my friends and discuss my problems with them.

JESUS

Jesus told me I could turn water into whine.  I guess he had enough the third time I brought up airline food. 

Also, I am human.  Annoying people, especially the professional-level annoyers, still annoy me.  And the list of things I can choose to not be angry about is just that, a choice.  From Catch-22:

Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly.

…

“Do you know how long a year takes when it’s going away?”  Dunbar asked Clevinger.  “This long.”  He snapped his fingers.  “A second ago you were stepping into college with your lungs full of fresh air.  Today you’re an old man.”

“Old?”  asked Clevinger with surprise.  “What are you talking about?”

“Old.”

“I’m not old.”

“You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission.  How much older can you be at your age?  A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unhooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise.  Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon.  Zip!  They go rocketing by so fast.  How the hell else are you ever going to slow time down?”  Dunbar was almost angry when he finished.

“Well, maybe it is true,” Clevinger conceded unwillingly in a subdued tone.  “Maybe a long life does have to be filled with many unpleasant conditions if it’s to seem long.  But in that event, who wants one?”

“I do,” Dunbar told him.

“Why?” Clevinger asked.

“What else is there?”

Joseph Heller was probably a bit more pessimistic than I am.  I don’t think that living a life filled with unpleasant conditions is required for a long life.  If so, people would be lining up at chiropractors to have them misalign their spines.  But, on the other hand, someone did marry my ex-wife . . . .

ex

And you pay half of all your stuff.

No, the wisdom that my boss shared with me is clear.  Spending your life torturing yourself isn’t productive, except in California.  But even during a bad time or when you’re anticipating a good time in the future, don’t wish your life away.  Each minute is a precious one.

Use them all.

I suggest skeet.

The Revolutionary: A Wilder Review

“We, the soldiers of The National Liberation Front of America, in the name of the workers and all the oppressed of this imperialist country, have struck a fatal blow to the fascist police state.  What better revolutionary example than to let their president perish in the inhuman dungeon of his own imperialist prison.” – Escape from New York

MAORIT

Rittenberg and Mao.  One of them was working for his country at the time.

Two weeks ago, Concerned American over at Western Rifle Shooters Association (LINK) posted about a documentary, The Revolutionary.  His request was pretty simple – “Find it.  Watch it.  Tell us about it.  Any takers?”

I raised my hand.  Here we are.  As you read this, I suggest one little thought:  would a Leftist takeover be any different in the United States?

The film opens with a shot of a library, filled with books with Chinese ideograms written on the spines.  Finally, the hand of an elderly man pulls Mao’s “Little Red Book” – Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung from the stack.  That elderly man, Sidney Rittenberg, then announces with gravity that Mao was a “great hero and great criminal.”

The Revolutionary is a documentary about Sidney Rittenberg and his time in China.

Sidney who?

Sidney Rittenberg was born in Charleston, South Carolina to a wealthy and politically powerful family.  Rittenberg went to college at the University of North Carolina.  The documentary doesn’t mention graduation (he didn’t), nor does it mention that he became a committed communist while at college (he did).  His first work was as a union organizer.  What union?  Apparently all of them.  Rittenberg recounts that one paper described him as:  “an alien element who is here spreading class hatred.”

I’m surprised he didn’t get shirts made.

rittenarm

“I don’t always fight for my country, but when I do it’s not really for my country.”

Sadly for the Chinese people, Rittenberg was drafted and sent to Stanford to learn Chinese for the U.S. Army.  After being sent to China with the Army, Rittenberg did the usual thing soldiers do and stayed and joined the Chinese Communist Party in 1946.  The film hints that Rittenberg made contact with communists as soon as he could after reaching China, so he might have been playing for both sides at once.

After joining the Chinese Communist Party, RIttenberg acted as a liaison and translator with the U.S. Army in the area – even translating the Laurel and Hardy movies that the Army brought (I’m not making this up) for Mao to watch.  Per Rittenberg, Mao told him that he wanted to show the world that “China could be civilized and democratic,” which I’m betting Mao thought was the central message of most Laurel and Hardy films.

In his first real taste of actual communism (versus the imaginary unicorn communism Rittenberg made up in his head) as Mao was about to take over Beijing and consolidate final victory on the Chinese mainland in 1949, Rittenberg was arrested because Stalin cabled Mao that Rittenberg was a spy.  This may be the only thing (besides dying) that I ever was happy that Stalin did.

attack

The Chinese version of Swan Lake has a slightly different ending and involves a steel mill.

For the next five years Rittenberg was in prison, and his account of this time in the documentary is filled with self-congratulation that he was a fine, faithful communist even in his jail cell.  Offered the chance to go home to the U.S., Rittenberg declined and studied for five years in his jail cell until Stalin died and he was released.  During the time he was in prison, the communists actively purged countless people on the losing side of the Chinese Civil War, and lost hundreds of thousands fighting Americans in Korea.  These were down from the 11,000,000 or so killed during the Chinese Civil War, so it almost seems like Mao was getting tired of killing Chinese.

Spoiler alert:  Not at all.

In theory, Rittenberg could be absolved of culpability in those deaths and the treason of supporting a government at war with the United States.  But after Stalin died, Rittenberg was released.  And after showing such loyalty by staying in prison, he was admitted to the “real” Communist Central Party.  He was on the inside.

How far inside?  In a country where hot running water was nearly unknown, he had it.  He had a driver and car at any time of the day or night.  If he wanted entertainment?  He had tickets to any shows.  Vacation travel.  And, he noted he was, “paid better than Mao.”

Rittenberg’s first crime, at least as shown in the documentary, was in 1957.  It was at that point where Mao’s “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend” scheme unfolded.  Mao, in theory, told people to argue about what would be best for China and let the best ideas win.  Rittenberg admiringly notes that Mao, “with great artistry,” coaxed anyone who had a different opinion than Mao to speak it.  Then like a vengeful junior high cheerleader, after Mao knew who his enemies were, he crushed and ruined them.

lmao

Who says Mao doesn’t have a sense of humor?

One person who worked with Rittenberg in the Radio Beijing propaganda section during the “Hundred Flowers” was the daughter of the founder of Goldman Sachs®.  This unnamed daughter fought for the civil rights of those being crushed by Mao, and challenged Rittenberg.  Hadn’t Rittenberg fought for civil rights in the United States?

He had.

But she just didn’t get it, said Rittenberg.  Apparently civil rights were to be fought for before power was achieved.  After gaining power, civil rights weren’t something to fight for – they were a negative.  But Rittenberg got it.  Rittenberg described taking part in “struggle sessions” where people – his friends – were denounced, beaten, and berated.  Often, Chinese would commit suicide rather than be the subject of a struggle session.

Rittenberg’s second crime was in the Great Leap Forward.  I wrote (a bit) about the Great Leap Forward here:  In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!.  This was Mao’s attempt to modernize the Chinese economy to match the industrial output of China to that of Great Britain within fifteen years.  The idea was that food production would exponentially increase, and that, from small steel forges in the backyards of peasant huts, steel would be made to match the output of a first world producer of steel.

But the Chinese had a problem.  How on Earth could they get that much iron and steel so quickly?

Easy!

Melt your pots.  Melt your pans.  Melt your plows and tools.  And while you have all the men working at melting down useful items, leave the fields to the very young and the very old.  Call the death toll due to famine as 40,000,000.  This brings Mao’s total up to 51,000,000.

Oops.  But he’s not done yet.

grtlp1

Spoiler:  there wasn’t a Chinese spaceship during the Great Leap Forward.  Also?  No Lucky Charms®.

This led to the largest famine in world history.  When this was pointed out to Mao by one of his trusted lieutenants, Peng Dehaui, Mao had Peng placed under arrest – later (during the Cultural Revolution) Peng was beaten so badly his back was splintered.  Taking constructive criticism might not have been at the top of Mao’s skill set.

But that’s not how Rittenberg sees it.  “Everybody lied.”  Rittenberg said that the lies started at the bottom, and the leadership farther up was “deceived.”  Certainly lower level officials gave the numbers Mao wanted to see.  They knew the alternative.

pretend

They also pretended to make steel.

For Rittenberg to blame the peasants and low level officials for lying is pretty much the “she had a short skirt on and I couldn’t help myself” level of defense – the defense of a man who knows that he was corrupted by luxury and ideology.

I’ll note here that for the last 2,000 years, China has led the world in killing Chinese.  The cumulative total for the various civil wars and fights dwarfs any other conflicts in the world.  And Mao killed more than Chinese than any person in history.

But a catastrophe as bad as the Great Leap Forward hurt even a near-deity like Mao.  He lost tremendous amounts of power as sane people tried to get the economy working again so that the Chinese would be a little less accomplished at killing Chinese.

Mao would have none of it – by far he was already the best killer of Chinese in history, and there was no way he was going to let up as long as he was alive.  He created Sidney Rittenberg’s next, and probably worst crime:  the Cultural Revolution.  I wrote (a little) about that, too:  Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be.

To put the Cultural Revolution in perspective, it was really just a way for Mao to regain power.  Essentially, he told the youth that it was, “right to rebel” and to oust those that ran the communist government because they presumably weren’t good enough communists.  What was a bad communist?  Someone who was against Mao.

cultbomb

The nuclear spinach helped the most.

This is where Mao’s Little Red Book made its appearance.  Everyone had one.  Everyone HAD to have one.  What did it mean?  Whatever you thought, unless Mao said different.  Teenagers and college students were told to take control of their institutions, and they did, forming what they called the Red Guard.  But there were lots of different Red Guard organizations, and they often fought each other for no other reason than they had different opinions on the best way to support Mao.  Think of it as Lord of the Flies, but running Congress and every public institution.

Oops.  Too late.

At the least, hundreds of thousands died, with every kind of atrocity listed from cannibalism to baby-killing, all in the name of Mao.  The high range of the death toll was 20,000,000, which would take Mao’s total to over 70,000,000.  And Sidney Rittenberg was right in the middle of it.  He gave speeches to these Red Guards supporting them since that was, according to him, “my role to play.”

SIDNEY

Sidney gave speeches to every size crowd, from 100,000 at a stadium, to 12 people at a Denny’s™ grand opening.

Rittenberg was a prime figure in the start of the Cultural Revolution, he knew of the violence.  He knew of the murders, the suicides, the atrocities, and the ruined lives.  In his words, he “made feeble protests . . . against it.”  But he gave up, rationalizing that, “ . . . revolution is not like having guests to dinner . . . not gracious, not gentle.”

Rittenberg knew what was going on.  He related a story where one group of Red Guards captured and tortured rival Red Guard members.  They tortured them, and recorded the screams of the tortures.  Why?  So they could play them to their members to “harden” them.  Rittenberg knew that about shopkeepers killed.  Teachers stabbed.  All of this occurred while the army and police were told to keep their hands off and let the Red Guards do as they pleased.

Rittenberg knew that millions were being murdered.  One military leader told him that, “more soldiers were killed in the Cultural Revolution than in any campaign in China’s history.”

DINNER

Yes, Rittenberg knew this was going on.  And he willingly went along with it.

Eventually, if you play with dictators, you’ll eventually end up on the wrong side of them.  Rittenberg did.  At this point in the documentary, The Mrs. noted that, “it was too bad they didn’t put a bullet in his head.”  She’s cuddly that way.  But she’s not wrong.  Instead they stuck him in solitary, and let him out after Deng Xiaoping took control after Mao died.

Since it looked like there wasn’t much country left to loot and they stopped killing Chinese by the bucketful, and finding his luxurious lifestyle gone, Rittenberg felt his job in China was done and took his wife and family and moved to the United States.  He was only there for 60,000,000 of the 71,000,000 deaths that occurred during Mao’s time.

Several of the scenes of the documentary were shot in Rittenberg’s house, I assume.  The house was beautiful – lake or oceanfront beautiful, and contained a dining room set that probably cost thousands of dollars.  How did a poor communist afford it?

After coming back to the United States, he sold his Chinese connections to the highest corporate bidder, and charged millions.  After taking part in activities that destroyed millions of lives, he lived the last forty years of his life in luxury, apparently unburdened by self-reflection of an odious, treasonous, treacherous, and pathetic life that brought tragedy to so many.  Not that I’m judgmental.  To me, the most chilling part is how the one person he didn’t blame for the horror that was Chinese communism was, well, him.

At the end of the documentary, he has a rare moment where he reflects that maybe he would have been better just going over and helping the Chinese and teaching English, and not being a leader in the Chinese Communist Party.

“But I didn’t want that.”

And neither do the would-be Rittenbergs that are present here in the United States today.  They want the power.  They don’t mind the body count.

The Revolutionary, 2013, 1 hour and 32 minutes, is streaming now on Amazon® Prime™.