Communism – Page 30 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Coming End of The United States

“Hello, I’m Dr. Bean. Apparently. And my job is to sit and look at paintings. So, what have I learned that I can say about this painting? Well, firstly, it’s really quite big, which is excellent, because If it were really small, you know, microscopic, then hardly anyone would be able to see it.” – Bean

If you look closely, you can see itsy-bitsy fur bikini women.

The death of the United States as we know it is near. COVID-19 isn’t the cause of it, despite being in the news nearly as much as a Kardashian. Coronavirus is, rather, a symptom. Like any organism, as soon as a nation is born it begins the process of growth and eventual death. This cycle is a common theme in history, and I’ve visited it before in posts here because I find it more fascinating than, say, beekeeping.

One post I wrote about the how empires have a natural cycle and end date is here (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence). That post contains information about Sir John Glubb’s paper called The Fate of Empires. You can also find Glubb’s original paper here (LINK), and you’ll be pleased to find it’s been translated from Glubb’s original fish language.

Which brings us to Thomas Cole. Mr. Cole was an American painter. I say “was” because he’s now dead. This is good, because otherwise he’d have to explain to his wife where the heck he’s been since 1848. Cole did a series of five paintings depicting Glubb’s paper between the years of 1833 and 1836, which was pretty amazing, since Glubb’s paper wasn’t published until 1976. Cole’s five paintings are collectively known as The Course of Empire.

The first of these paintings is called The Savage State. It’s the first picture up above. Cole wasn’t horribly inventive with names, and it’s rumored that he had a dog named “Dog” and a cat named “Cat” and subsisted entirely on a diet of unsalted boiled potatoes. His painting, The Savage State is just that, a savage land dominated by nature, which is also how The Mrs. describes my side of the bedroom. In his painting, you can see that the civilization matched the landscape – rudimentary and rough. It’s chaotic, but that describes a great deal of the prehistory of man. This period of history can last a very, very long time, and would have lasted even longer if humanity would have failed to invent shag carpet.

If you look closely, all these paintings are set in the same place, at different times. Cole even changed the time of day from morning in the first one to night in the final one. I guess this is what you had to settle for as an 1836 version of HD television.

The next painting in the series is The Pastoral State. Each of the paintings presents the same area, just at different stages in the development of the civilization. The land from the original painting has been tamed enough for farming and herding animals. The wild nature of The Savage State has been at least partially replaced by enough control of the land that a greater degree of specialization and start of civilization is possible.

At this stage in the civilizational cycle, there is generally a single dominant culture. If there are two competing cultures, they’ll fight. This explains the Spartans and the Athenians, the North versus the South, or my ex-wife and humans not possessed by Satan. Having a single culture breeds trust, and the uniformity of purpose required for this phase.

The theme of the pastoral state is expansion along the frontier, and is characterized by growth and optimism. It’s how it feels to be on the winning team. Religion is dominant, as are ideals that are higher than self – in Rome, public service was considered honorable. Plutarch wrote about Spartan mothers and their attitudes when their sons went into battle: “Another woman handed her son his shield, and exhorted him: ‘Son, either with this or on this.’”

Legend has it that at one point when Athens was fighting Sparta, that a Spartan, hidden by a hill, taunted the Athenians by yelling, “One Spartan can beat a thousand Athenians!” Enraged, the commander of the Athenians selected his thousand best men and sent them over the hill to kill the insolent Spartan. After fifteen minutes of battle sounds and screaming, a single Athenian, mortally wounded, limped to the top of the hill and yelled down to his general: “Don’t fall for it! It’s a trap! There are actually two of them.”

This state ends when there is no more expansion and frontier. At that point, someone always gets the bright idea that they want to make a buck. The pursuit of profit then replaces the pursuit of honor.

This is the most beautiful and intricate of the paintings. Of course, I had to meme all over it. And looking at the multitudes of people in the painting I had to wonder, “What would a decent three bedroom in the suburbs cost?”

After profits have been pursued for a time, the Empire then reaches the height of power. Cole depicted this phase in his painting The Consummation. Both as a military and economic entity, the Empire will never be better off than at this time, well, at least until it builds that Death Star®. It is here that the greatest works of arts and literature of the society will be created. While the society retains the myth of the expansion, the reality is that is no longer a concern.

Also at this point, intellectuals will start rejecting all of the values that allowed the society to be great, and replacing them with ideals that are often the direct opposite of those that led to success. Virtue is replaced by vanity. Honor and discipline will be mocked as the philosophy of a fool, and be derided as inferior to the values and beliefs of amorality, nihilism, materialism, and collectivism.

Not that I have an opinion, or anything.

Somewhere about this time, with the Empire ceasing to grow, powerful groups figure out that it’s much easier to steal wealth than create it. Politicians devise ways to maximize how much money and power their group can take from the others.

This is the Cole painting, The Destruction of Empire, I see most often out of this set. Perhaps it’s a sign of the time, or perhaps it’s a sign that everyone likes a good Viking raid? Okay. Not everyone. But remember that Roman soldiers are trained, but Vikings are Bjorn.

With the Empire past its peak, the wealth is used to create decadence. Focus is on material goods, and religion declines across the Empire. Since the focus is on wealth, the welfare state forms – Romans had bread and circuses, we have EBT and Netflix®. Historically, foreign peoples from across the Empire stream towards the original culture. Why? Again, the focus is on material goods and not a cohesive society. Why would a Greek want to leave Greece for Rome? I prefer to read books about Rome in Braille – it makes it feel like ancient history.

And as the focus grows on material goods, the originality of the goods disappears. Art becomes a cynical mechanism of control and a means to harvest cash. The remake of the original is remade or rebooted to once again drag the culture for profits. I heard that Hollywood was even going to remake a Muslim version of Footloose, but this time without the Bacon.

An example of that is Spain after the conquest of the New World. Spain found itself with immense wealth in gold. How much wealth? So much that the Spaniards decided that they didn’t want to do the day-to-day things in life, and drew workers in from all across Europe to Do The Jobs Spaniards Wouldn’t Do. So much gold flew into Europe that it changed the exchange rate and wrecked the market for gold. After a century of such luxury, the Spaniards ceased to be the conquistadors that boldly conquered a continent with grit and bravado and became a culture that complained when the Dutch help didn’t peel the grapes correctly.

As an example, in one park I found a cannon seized from a Spanish warship during the Spanish-American War. I looked at the engraving on the cannon – it was beautiful. But this cannon, taken from the Spanish in 1898, was actually forged in 1780 or so. The United States was using cannon that were state of the art and sophisticated, with more than a century of technological advances on the Spanish.

Heck, when a friend got at tattoo in Spain, I was shocked. It was really good. Why was I shocked that it was good? No one expects Spanish ink-precision.

The destruction of Empire can flow not only from battle, but also from a checkbook – a financial collapse can be nearly as devastating as a foreign army, as Spain proves. Regardless, when vigor is gone, pessimism prevails, and sacrifice for the common good to a trustworthy state disappears? Why would you want to be a hero, as all of the national myths and heroes are, one by one, destroyed to make way for the new myths of the intellectual class?

Destruction is just around the corner.

If you look closely at this picture, there are no people, only birds, which must mean that Cole felt that the birds would take over the Earth. This is my favorite, because it makes me feel better about how my yard looks.

Cole’s final painting in the series was the Desolation of Empire. The Empire is over. The drama is over. What remains are a scattered people and the ruins of a great civilization. It sounds bleak, but it doesn’t need to be.

The desolation of Empire isn’t the ending for every person in it, it’s just the ending of the golden age of the way things were. Imagine someone near the end of the Roman Empire, worried about what they saw going on around it. Would the Roman Empire collapse? Certainly. Would all of the people die as a part of this collapse? No. But the globalism of the day did.

And the Roman Empire, in its death, set the stage for a new series of cultures all around Europe – from the reuse of Caesar as “Czar” in Moscow to the United States, which consciously adopted many of the symbols of ancient Rome. What was the first name of the United States Army? Under its first commander, Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, it was known as Legion of the United States from 1792-1796.

This isn’t the end of the world, it’s just the end of what we have now, and the end of the United States as we knew her. It’s the beginning of something new as the old structures cease to serve us. There’s a common phrase that I can’t find the source of but that describes the cycle simply and well: “Hard times breed strong men. Strong men breed good times. Good times breed soft men. Soft men? They bring hard times.”

We are in for hard times. But don’t fear. This will make strong men, and, if they are strong enough, a new United States that deserves those strong men.

A Hiking Trip Through The Coronavirus Economy

“You were last seen hiking up Mount Ego.” – Frasier

You know, because I might be using hiking as a metaphor.

When I was younger, I did a lot of hiking. So much so, that it was second nature to me – I can recall hiking up remote mountain trails when I was kindergarten. If you take the average kindergartner, they are built to walk a trail, and their strength to weight ratio will beat any four wheel drive. I guarantee you that unless you are in prime condition, your motor will run out before theirs will.

Before this weekend, the last time I went hiking was about four years ago, and it was quite a hike. We went up and down and deep into the Rockies, at one point following old mining trails that were originally blazed by miners with mules looking for gold – I know because I found an ore cart still sitting on its rails up around 12,000 feet when I was 20. I could tell it was a mining cart, because I found their deodorant underneath the cart, and everyone knows miners always pick Axe™.

On this trip, I was in good enough shape that one 18 year old rang the bell before I did, which is the kind of thing that makes an older man smile – he knows he still has “it.” And I did still have “it,” unlike my hair. I figure the group did over nine thousand feet up and nine thousand feet down over two days. It was nice, though I will admit that at one point every muscle in my body cramped all at once, even the bottom of my foot, and that’s my arch nemesis.

My commute often doesn’t include pants. Pants are for fancy, non-Corona time.

This weekend, Pugsley, having had enough of the house, convinced me that we should go hiking. Honestly, it was my idea, too, so I was thrilled when he got me up to go hiking. Since the lockdown I hadn’t been to my usual gym, and on several days in the last six weeks the most strenuous part of the day had been rolling out of bed to go downstairs to my “office” on the loveseat where I’ve been working from home. It’s also where I normally write these blog posts, so it’s a place which is already set up physically and mentally for productivity, except for the coffee, which was allllll the way upstairs. And I spent all that energy being debunked.

But after six weeks of not working out, how would I fare hiking?

Pugsley and I hit the trail. It was a warm, but not hot, spring day. In short? It was a day perfect for a hike. The grass was vibrantly green under a cloudless sky as we hit the trail. As trails go, this one isn’t the most challenging that I’ve been on, but it certainly is aggressive. And four years of rust was immediately apparent. And we didn’t bring any snacks, though I’ve heard that zombies bring entrail mix when they hike.

We made it about as far as my legs were willing to go. We weren’t out of the woods yet, but that’s the purpose of hiking, right? It is clear to me that I need to go hiking with Pugsley again – the treadmill at the gym is no replacement for an actual mountain. The next day I could feel the pain, but I knew I was getting stronger, since I was still alive. And Nietzsche always said that, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Except for Ruffles®.”

All I need is a gym with a doughnut shop attached.

Getting stronger rarely feels good. It involves aches and pains. It involves discomfort, and moving your body in ways it may not have moved for a while. In a “good” recession, this is what happens. The economy sheds, often in very painful ways, companies that are no longer competitive and gets stronger. That recession is the spur for changes within companies that allow them to survive. Sentimentality goes by the wayside – the harsh blade of profitability determines what products will be built and what products will be discontinued. Plus the bank helps lots of folks get back up on their feet, mainly by repossessing the car.

This, however, is no ordinary recession. Entire industries are going to be destroyed. I’ll pick just one for this post: air travel. Airlines and airplane manufacturers are facing the biggest, by far, challenge of their existence. People are finally coming to the understanding that the last 45 days of their lives is the most momentous (so far) of nearly anyone alive. With me, it came with the dawning realization of my receding airline.

Body cavity search, Mr. Wilder?

The solution of government to this recession is that of the zombie – prolonging the existence of a company far after its usefulness to the world has ended. A great example is Boeing®. Boeing™ used to be among the better designers and builders of aircraft in the world. Recently, its reputation has suffered after it made a software change that resulted in crashes and the grounding of an entire airplane model, which might be the ultimate Boeing™ constrictor. It has a loan fund earmarked for it and similar companies that sits at about $17 billion dollars. I’m betting you and I couldn’t borrow in the way that Boeing© will.

And what about the airline industry as a whole?

Last year, on average, the TSA screened 2.7 million passengers a day.
Last week? Less than 100,000.
On an average day in 2019, there were 44,000 daily flights.
Last week? 8,000.

The airline industry is backed by $25 billion to pay employees that the Federal government is you and I are giving the airlines to pay employees until September. I guess you and I were feeling generous that day, since my industry didn’t exactly get paid and yours probably didn’t, either.

At least this government solution isn’t bigger than the problem . . .

And though I generally like the idea of inefficient or corrupt companies failing, this economic tidal wave is different – whereas the normal recession is a very vigorous workout that makes the body stronger, this is more like conducting weight loss surgery with a chainsaw. I’m sure the doctor is being gentle, but it’s still a chainsaw. Good companies and bad will fall, large companies and small.

If the economy is normally liquid water in good times, then the government’s tendency to freeze market winners into place is turning the economy to ice. But this economic collapse we’re seeing as a result of COVID-19 is a boiling pot of water. It’s chaos. Who will win? Who knows? Will useful, economically viable portions of the country be ripped away? Certainly. We can argue that bad companies will die, but this is economic Russian roulette.

And who said the Soviets weren’t innovators???

It has already happened, we just don’t have a real-time graph from Johns-Hopkins showing angry red bubbles of economic destruction on a county by county basis with a counter and a logarithmic graph of job losses to date. We also don’t have a doctor talking about all of the regulations that will have to change so businesses can grow again and how business regulations people are used to will be gone forever in the “New Normal” that Coronavirus has brought for us.

Some industries will be gone for good. I don’t miss flying, and had already given it up on all trips where it only saves me a few hours a few years ago. What else is gone? How about small movie theaters? How long can they survive in a world where the movies have turned to crap that’s driven by a corporate model that values sequels and familiarity over originality and cleverness? Will they be saved by movies that are created by a target audience of people around the world and are so culturally inert that they could be about kung fu warriors or Tom Cruise jumping off of a shiny building and all make equal sense?

Human/CGI cats singing. How could that be a flop? Maybe the Coronavirus was the Earth saving itself from the Cats® movie?

Why are comedy movies dead? Chinese people don’t think we’re funny and in our incredibly Politically Correct world, none of the jokes are allowed to be funny, anyway. Besides that, the small town theater has already found it hard to compete with Netflix® and Amazon©. Now the big Hollywood© studios have finally gotten first release on streaming. How happy will Disney® be when they don’t have to share the profit with small town theater owners? They’ll smile from mouse-ear to mouse-ear because Disney™ gets a big Federal bailout, and the theater owner doesn’t.

In this era, the results are unpredictable. If I work really hard on lifting weights? I’ll get stronger. But in the economy of 2020, either my arm might fall off, it might grow to world-class proportions in an afternoon. There’s no way to predict because there’s no rational process determining winners and losers.

Regardless, I need to hit the trails with Pugsley more. Even though I can’t predict the winners and losers in the economy in the next few weeks, months, or years? I can predict that I need to be able to hit that trail a little harder.

You never know when that might come in handy.

ALTERNATE BONUS MEME:

Endgame: At Some Point? This has to stop.

“You know, when I was a kid, food was food. Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil, decimated plant and animal life.” – Soylent Green

I pity the fool that thinks we’re done.

In 471 B.C., a group of soldiers of the Roman Republic broke camp one fine morning. The way the story works out, I’m pretty sure it was a Monday. Their plan was to go attack some smelly hill people under the command of the Roman Consul, Appius. As the horn sounded to leave the camp, the smelly hill people swarmed down on the Roman column from behind. In the defense of the Roman soldiers, this was way before the invention of coffee but after the invention of wine, so they probably weren’t exactly awake.

As an aside, I imagine that the whole of the ancient history can be explained by un-showered illiterate people who were hungover most of the time trying to run things. I guess this description also applies to congress, but at least the Romans dressed well and threw great parties. Can you imagine Bernie Sanders or Adam Schiff or Mitch McConnell being fun at a party?

Perhaps the artist was a talented person who had only ever seen birds with lazy eye and just imagined what a person might look like?

Regardless, the Roman column broke under an attack less expected than the Spanish Inquisition. The Roman historian Titus Livius, more commonly known a Livy, is the reason we remember this battle. Livy wrote that the reason the hill people stopped pursing the Romans were that the Romans were running away faster than the victorious hill people could wade through the dead Romans, but remember, the smelly hill people didn’t have coffee, either, so maybe they just got . . . tired. The Roman Consul, Appius, tried to stop the fleeing soldiers, but wasn’t able to do so, no matter how he tried.

Appius rallying the troops. Colorized.

When the Romans made camp far enough away that the mean hill people weren’t going to attack them, Appius lined all of the soldiers up. Every soldier was asked, “Where are your weapons?” Every standard bearer was asked, “Where is your flag?” Then Centurions that had fled the field of battle were identified.

All of these men were beaten, and then beheaded, because being beheaded wasn’t quite enough. That made a bad morning worse, but it didn’t stop there: of the remaining men, they drew lots. One out of each ten was executed for the overall cowardice of the unit. Why not ten out of ten? There were still lots of smelly hill people around, and Appius might have been faster than some of them but not all of them.

This latter part where one out of ten was killed lives on today in our language as the word “decimate,” from the Latin “deci” meaning “Lucy’s husband,” and the Latin “mate” meaning, “someone an Australian drinks beer with.” But, in a literal fashion it means losing one out of every ten, and has been a military punishment used all the way up into the 20^th century, when the Soviets did it to at least part of the 64^th Rifle Division after a very bad day at Stalingrad in 1943, though rumor has it no one had fun in Stalingrad in ’43. If you don’t believe me, read your “Argentinian” grandfather’s real diary.

I know you’re thinking, “Hey, John Wilder, that’s fun, but why are you talking about dead Roman bird-faced men when the economy is collapsing?”

To be clear, I don’t have any dirt on the Clinton family.

The United States labor force in February 2020 was 164.6 million. In the last three weeks, respectively, 3.0 million, 6.9 million, and 6.6 million people filed for unemployment, bringing that total to 16.5 million newly unemployed. For those of you without a calculator or fingers, that’s just over 10%. And as bad as the rest of the news is, I had to search for it, rather than it being front page.

Think of it, the second worst unemployment numbers in the history of the United States not being above-the-fold page one news. Instead? “Could have been worse. At least the sky isn’t dripping blood and lava.”

Employment in the United States has been literally decimated in the last two weeks. Sure, it’s not as bad as being beaten to death because of those stupid scary hill people who had the bad manners to attack before lunch or being a Russian (or a German) at Stalingrad, but it’s not good.

It is catastrophic. And next week will be more of the same, if not worse.

If we listen to some leaders, it could be “until August,” or if you listen to Bill Gates, “until the entire United States can be vaccinated and Windows 14™ implanted into their spinal column.” Neither of those two are acceptable, especially since some people, like Joe Biden, have no discernable spine.

He sniffs, he sucks, he scores!

But removing those restrictions is important. Even as farmers dump milk that they can’t put into supermarket-sized cartons and break eggs that they can’t put into 18-packs for Wal-Mart, the system is breaking down. At a certain point the economy is important, because a breakdown in the system might be just the key for some of the more fringe elements on the Left to begin to “finally try real communism” in the United States, which will end up with a bigger butcher’s bill than COVID-19 could ever create. Yeah, it’s a worst-case scenario, and I don’t think we’ll go there, but did anyone think the Fed and Congress could imagine $5 trillion dollars in extra debt. In a single month?

The other side of the argument is, “Start everything back up. Now!”

That won’t work, either. You won’t see people crowding into quaint and cramped Italian restaurants, because nobody wants to get Coronavirus from the busboy. People want to see the infection numbers drop before they commit to getting into a stadium with 77,000 other people to cheer on the NFL®. Zero? Nope. But lower than the 30,000-ish daily (hopefully) peak of newly infected we’re seeing right now.

Well, I guess this is the hard part of the Art of the Deal.

And if you really want to see the fireworks over this idea, wander on over to Aesop’s place. Here’s a representative post. The genius (and the real nuclear part) is in the comments (LINK). As you can see, Aesop has a plan. The plan? Probably not. But it’s important, because it’s a plan.

One thing that is owed the people of the United States is the plan, complete with criteria and reasoning. We know, for certain, that after restrictions are removed that more people will die of COVID-19, and that every single death will be placed at the foot of Trump by the Left. Even though we know that collectively the Left couldn’t organize a hunger strike at a fashion show, we do know that they’re aces at blaming everyone for everything, just like The Mrs. blames me for not having the hardwood floor installed six years after having purchased it. Oops. The Mrs. messed up. She trusted me.

We also know that the devastation of job loss and economic collapse will create thousands of ‘silent’ deaths through despair and addiction. Trump will be blamed for that economic loss, as well. There’s no daily graphic for showing economic misery. Well, not yet there isn’t, but as soon as it sells in the news media? Expect it on the front page of Drudge® every single day.

You dirty birds. I have to apologize for this one since Misery the movie came out in 1990, but it’s at least cheap to watch on Amazon®. Which Pugsley and I did, after I wrote this. I guess we’re dirty birds.

When the time finally comes for Americans to emerge out of their basement bunkers fatter than Hillary Clinton after a wine evening with the ladies? And we’re caught up on all of that “must-see TV” (spoiler: fire insurance is a must if you live in King’s Landing®), what kind of a landscape will they see?

Americans are already getting antsy. It won’t last until August. I don’t think it will last past May.

The economy won’t be the same. Small businesses are in really bad shape. Since they don’t have a lobbyist like Boeing®, that steak house on Main Street? Owned by Ma and Pa Steakhouse owners? They don’t have anyone looking out for them. They’ll get loans, sure. But another loan on top of the mortgage on the restaurant? Another loan on top of the bills they have for the steaks sitting in the freezer because no one is coming in? Yeah.

That’ll help. Just like links from the chain of the anchor would help a lifeboat from the Titanic.

I’m an upbeat person, I really am. Work back through my posts, and I defy anyone to find me being downbeat. I’m not. I think that things will generally work out for me, at least until I die. That part will probably suck. Unless Anne Wilkes has a sledgehammer between me and the grave.

But one thing I want to stress is that hope isn’t a plan, and that hope isn’t your friend. Hope keeps you wishing for a future you wish to see, rather than the future you can work to have. If you hope that after Corona-chan is in the rear-view mirror, the United States will be the same, you will be disappointed.

If you hope that the world will snap back into “happy motoring” (thanks, Jim Kunstler) in June, you’ll find that hope will be a straightjacket. Hope is not your friend, to the extent that it allows happy thoughts to replace action.

Don’t hope. Do. And live. Hope is for amateurs and dreamers.

The United States as you knew her in February 2020 is dead. There. You have it. Deal with it and plan your life. You don’t have to be among the decimated.

But know this:

The United States is dead.

Let all of us go and find her. She is there, waiting for us.

Another Way Politics Messes Things Up, Complete With A Bikini Picture

â€œThough in war, you only get killed once; inÂ politicsÂ it can happen over and over.â€ â€“ Battlestar Galactica (2000â€™s)

â€œThe taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.â€ â€“Will Rogers

Politics is not a great tool for a real, actual crisis.

Politics is, like our economy, about motion.Â Itâ€™s about creating fear enough to spur people into an emotional frenzy, or bully bureaucrats.Â One of my favorite stories along this line was when Amy Klobuchar, D(emon)-Minnesota, wrote to the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) about . . . BuckyballsÂ®.Â Buckyballsâ„¢, if you donâ€™t remember them, they were small strong spherical magnets that were fun to play with.Â They were generally marketed as a desk toy for adults.

One toddler died from swallowing seven of them.Â Apparently, during the life of the product, there were 19 other injuries as well, though I donâ€™t have details on those, but I have it on good advice (Ma Wilder) that nearly anything will put your eye out or result in a severed limb.Â Maybe I would have taken her more seriously if we had more adults who looked like Captain Hook.

But there were hundreds of thousands of BuckyballÂ® sets sold, and MILLIONS of little magnetic balls in circulation.Â Cars, for example, are at least 287 times more deadly than BuckyballsÂ©.Â 100 kids a year die on bicycles.Â The biggest cause of death for toddlers?Â Backyard pools.Â Most dangerous food product for toddlers?Â Hot dogs.

But dying because of small magnets?

Clearly, common sense assault toy safety should be important to all of us.

Thatâ€™s somewhere lower than â€œbeing hit by lightning while holding an aluminum replica of Celine Dion above my head on a pole while covered in barbeque sauce and crushed potato chips.â€

Did Amy go after those bicycles or pools or hot dogs?Â No, that would make her look crazier than usual and give her bad press.Â Instead, Amy went after Buckyballsâ„¢.Â Â And Amy got her way.Â The CPSC shut down Buckyballsâ„¢, and went after the owner of the company with particular zeal.Â Why?

Amy asked them to.Â You see, in 2012, despite the looming Mayan Calendar Apocalypseâ„¢, Amy needed something to complain about.Â So she found her reason in the newspaper and built her grandstanding off the back of that unfortunate fatality.Â I can hear her complaint now.Â â€œChildren are dying in a very rare yet odd and public way that puts them in the newspaper!Â The only thing that can save them?Â Senator Amy to the rescue!â€

Iâ€™m just sad that Amy didnâ€™t volunteer to catch the JartsÂ© when her brothers were playing and she was a kid.Â Seriously, Jartsâ„¢ were fun.Â JartsÂ® child death toll over a span of 35 years before the CPSC banned them?Â 3.Â Thankfully, you can still buy them, but to beat the CPSC, the company asks that you assemble them yourself.Â Itâ€™s a kit.

Ha!

JartsÂ®, when played right.

The problem wasnâ€™t with BuckyballsÂ®, the problem was that there wasnâ€™t anything else pressing that Amy could complain about and get away with.Â Her party held the presidency, so most national issues were out of the question because if they failed, the Democrats would own the failure.Â But she could complain about a tiny toy company.Â The only victims would be the owner and the people who liked the toy.Â Confession:Â I bought six sets of Buckballsâ„¢ in their going out of business sale to help contribute to the owner before he lost his business.

What does one stupid senatorâ€™s quest against a (mostly) harmless toy have to do with today and the COVID-19 virus?

Everything.

Chuck saved me some joke writing.

Politics in 2020 is still about doing something.Â But, more importantly, itâ€™s the art of been seen to be doing something.Â One day when I came home from work, The Mrs. was incensed.Â â€œSchumer wants to allocate $4 billion to the Corona virus!Â Heâ€™s insane!â€Â The Mrs. was skeptical at that point, primarily because weâ€™re used to the media crying wolf about every little potential crisis, and secondarily because the Corona death toll was smaller than Jeffery Dahmerâ€™s.

My response was simple:Â â€œ$4 billion?Â Trump should say, â€˜Make it $8 billion, Little Chucky, think big,â€™ but put in an asterisk that weâ€™ll spend the money only if necessary, and in ways deemed by the President to stop a pandemic.Â Heck, he could even get a few miles wall out of that.Â Arenâ€™t you tired of the Canadians, dear, coming in with their beavers and maple syrup asking â€˜abootâ€™ everything?Â Initiate Operation Leafblower*.â€

â€œBut John,â€ she replied, â€œthe country doesnâ€™t have $8 billion to spare.â€

â€œSo what?Â We donâ€™t have $4 billion, either.â€

*I actually love Canadians.Â And Canada, ever since I discovered Bob and Doug as a kid, beauty, eh.Â Itâ€™s a joke, you hosers.

And this should add back in the RDA of bikini as suggested by the FDA . . . .

The Corona Virus, Chinese Virus, MOVID-19 (named after MOre streaming VIDeo in your basement) or whatever you want to call it is still an enigma.Â Those that say it is not any worse than the flu really should look at the real-time consequences weâ€™re seeing in hospitals, especially in New York.Â However, is Corona Chan a wrecking ball like Joe Biden at a hair sniffing contest that, unless it was stopped, destroy civilization?

Nah.Â Weâ€™ve lived through, and thrived through, worse.

But are we the same people who did that?

Right now, people no longer hold the idea of sacrifice highly.Â Instead, the idea is the no one should ever be inconvenienced for the greater good.Â Which is because in the mind of most people, there no longer is a commonly recognized greater good.

You can see this in the stories of the infantile people licking products, spitting on food, and stating that if they came down with Corona, that they were going to go to Trump rallies to infect as many people as possible.Â There are people who think, â€œWell, the rules on staying home donâ€™t apply to me.â€Â There is no us to them, no commonality, only the idea their needs, right now.

Iâ€™m Joe Biden, and I forgot this message.

Why isnâ€™t there a greater good?Â Itâ€™s primarily being driven by the political rift between Right and Left, though there are other factors, as well.Â Decisions are made not on the basis of what is for that greater good, but on the basis of what looks good for the cameras and can get more money for â€œmyâ€ group of constituents, and get more votes for me.

As such, every decision is a political one, meant to obtain or maintain power.Â And every opportunity should be made to attack an opponent, whether or not they deserve it.Â This means that every action taken in the muddled and unclear past is subject to criticism based on the perfect knowledge of the future.Â Political attackers are looking for errors.

Let me explain, using a discussion of Type I and Type II errors.

The best way to explain what these errors are is to use an example that always stuck with me: Â Â prescription drugs. Â The two primary jobs of the FDA are to approve drugs for sale in the United States and surf social media during the day.Â When the FDA approves a drug that it shouldnâ€™t have approved, thatâ€™s a Type I error.Â What happens with a Type I error is that there is a body count.Â Drugs that show up on the market that kill people (even terminally ill people) make the FDA look bad, so they just wonâ€™t do it, and will go to ludicrous lengths to keep drug company profits high.

So, the cat did warn the dog not to eat out of itâ€™s bowl.

What happens when a bad drug gets through and into the market?Â Does anybody at the FDA lose a job?Â No.Â Does anyone get demoted?Â No.Â But they look bad, which I guess is similar to public execution for a bureaucrat.

That leads to the second type of error, the Type II error.Â Thatâ€™s when the FDA doesnâ€™t approve of a drug that it should have approved.Â Â People still die, and maybe a lot of people.Â But since they really died of the condition and not the lack of a drug that legally doesnâ€™t exist, you canâ€™t get to a body count.Â You canâ€™t convict without a body count, or at least thatâ€™s what my lawyer tells me.

Letâ€™s go into an alternate universe where President Trump hears of the Wuhan Flu and shuts down access to China immediately.Â Not only that, he shuts down access to secondary nations that have contact with China, and perfectly protects the United States from Corona.

Does he get any credit if he does this?Â No.Â No one will count the dead bodies that didnâ€™t exist because he took decisive action.Â In fact, heâ€™d be called a racist xenophobe abusing his powers by the media.Â You can read various articles making exactly this point that were written around the end of January and the beginning of February.Â Â Â My favorite of these articles is one written by an avowed communist that includes the line, â€œThe Trump administrationâ€™s â€˜state of emergencyâ€™ should be regarded as a piece of more substantial and systematic hostility in its relations with China.â€Â The author then complains that people should move freely.Â Thereâ€™s a lovely comment at the bottom, â€œWell, this article aged poorly.â€Â I expect articles like these to be scrubbed from the Internet as people get around to it.

Trumpâ€™s critics kept complaining he was doing too much, until there was a body count.Â At that point, the problem became a Type I problem â€“ people dying because of choices that were made in the past.Â So, with that upward ticking clock of bodies available live on the Johns-Hopkins Pandemicvisionâ„¢, we are in a continually unfolding crisis complete with rolling odometer of sick and infected that, from a political standpoint, require visible action.

To get a quick test result, touch Johnny Deppâ€™s face and see how soon his test results come back.Â Bonus?Â Contact high.Â Â

Or at least people pretending to take action.Â Is the current policy of shutting down huge chunks of the economy the best one?Â Iâ€™m not sure.Â The information we have is very poor â€“ we simply donâ€™t have sufficient information to make great decisions.Â Iâ€™m thinking the President has better info, what with deciding to put the Northern Command (the bit of the armed forces thatâ€™s concerned with North America) back into the nuclear bunker under Cheyenne Mountain, which is always the sign that things are going well.

The initial death rate was estimated to be up to 10%.Â I think itâ€™s clear thatâ€™s not the case at this point.Â Some hack said that itâ€™s so mild that, â€œhalf of Britain may have already had it.â€Â Itâ€™s also clear thatâ€™s not the case.Â But every credible report Iâ€™ve heard says itâ€™s big â€“ intensive care units being swamped.Â Time and data will tell.

But politician response has to be played for the crowd:Â Nancy Pelosi is already blaming everything on Trumpâ€™s past decisions.Â Her quote, â€œBut as the President fiddles, people are dying,â€ seems to ignore Nancyâ€™s own banjo lessons during the impeachment.

Iâ€™ve never seen a more non-essential employee . . .

In a sense, we are where we are as a society because there isnâ€™t anything that can ever be simple bad luck.Â Blame must be assigned.Â Every accident must have a cause, and every person at fault must pay, even if the outcome isnâ€™t one that was intended, or even remotely likely.Â The lady spilling coffee in her lap for hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from McDonalds is the norm now, not the outlier.

All political decisions are coming through these filters:Â Type I Errors and Assigning Blame.Â Donâ€™t be surprised by the mindboggling amounts of money and silliness that will come shortly.

But sometimes sanity wins.Â Buckyballsâ„¢ were made legal again when the CPSC got thrashed in the courts back in June of 2018.

How I Learned To Love The End Of The World

“We estimate between two and four megatons. Everything within a 30 kilometer radius will be completely destroyed, including the three remaining reactors at Chernobyl.” – Chernobyl (HBO®)

Thankfully, everyone is equally hungry under communism. Bernie’s job is done.

I think I’ve always thought about what’s known today as “prepping” – even at a young age. When I was young, we lived deep in the mountains. How deep? The next closest kid anywhere near my age was ten miles away and probably 2,000’ lower in elevation and was actually a yeti that had moved there from Tibet to get away from the crowds. The nearest grocery store was twenty miles away. The nearest movie theater? Fifty miles.

When you live nearly so far from civilization that tourists try to pay you in beads and pantyhose, you have to think ahead. Ma Wilder did. Ma had designed the house with remoteness in mind. Her pantry was always full, and it was huge. She built in a pantry that consisted of one entire fifteen foot wall, floor to ceiling, a foot deep.

The pantry was always (and I mean always) stocked from floor to ceiling with canned goods. Freezer? Not one freezer. Two. And they were always packed to the brim with food. Well, with the exception of when Pa would let the inventory go down so there would be room to fit half a cow. Literally. He’d buy a “side of beef” which was half of a cow. Minus the hooves, of course.

Ma Wilder had also designed a root cellar that the contractor built. For those of you not in the know, a root cellar is a small building (8 foot by 8 foot by 8 foot) that is 90% buried to keep vegetables so they will neither sprout nor spoil. In order to do that, the cellar is dark and cool, like Nancy Pelosi’s heart. Ma Wilder kept hundreds of pounds of potatoes there. I should know – I was often the guy taking them down in fall and hauling them up in winter. And to be clear, we kept the potatoes in the cellar, since Nancy Pelosi’s heart isn’t big enough to hold a French fry.

Exercise? No, with COVID-19, it’s extra fries.

The house was designed to be heated in winter with firewood. Since electricity was incredibly expensive up there, Pa Wilder made gathering, cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood his summer hobby. As it was Pa’s summer hobby, it turned out to be my summer hobby, too. It was hard work, and paid poorly until it came time to hit the blocking sled for football when it paid off with massive thighs of steel.

There is no jean size for “massive thighs of steel.”

But it wasn’t just the remoteness that drove Ma Wilder to be prepared. First, I have to explain a little bit about the family. My parents were older than I was. Oh, sure, that’s normally the case, except in some places like Hollywood, but in my case my parents were a LOT older.

Why?

It turns out that I was adopted, despite the original story they told me of finding me as an infant in a crashed space capsule in a wolf den near the summit of Mount Olympus. In reality, Ma Wilder was my biological grandmother and not who hiked around Greece looking for wolf-raised space babies. Apparently, as a child the only super-power I had consisted of making my biological mother and father both disappear.

I blame the heat ray vision.

I made a website for orphans, but it doesn’t have a home page.

So, I was adopted. Since my parents were not only older than me, but also much older than even standard issue parents, they had hands-on experience with the Great Depression and World War II while they were young. Apparently, those were events that may been somewhat memorable.

I do remember sitting down in rocking chair in the kitchen while supper was cooking. After Pa Wilder had finished his chores for the day, he and Ma would sit down to talk about life, most often with a libation, as Pa Wilder called drinking. I believe it was mainly bourbon, but I can’t really say since they were quite poor hosts and never offered me any. Often, Ma and Pa discussed people I didn’t know. This was so boring it made me want to go to and stick forks in outlets to test breakers.

Especially when they talked about people, I was often admonished that “what we discuss stays within the family” though it was implied that that admonishment probably counted for every topic. I can see how it might be considered controversial how irritated that they were that the neighbor dog kept peeing in the snow by the back porch and they didn’t want me to tattle to the neighbors. Or how economic collapse might be a thing. Or how we might be headed towards nuclear war, and had Pa thought about buying dynamite so he could blow up the road leading to our house so we weren’t the victims of marauding, murdering gangs?

Yup. That was an actual conversation that Ma and Pa had. I think they only mentioned that idea once while I was in the room, but when your mother is calmly talking about having your father blow up bridges to save you from hordes of people (the parents of the kids you go to school with) ransacking your home after the Soviets gave America a “just thinking about you” bouquet of 10 megaton fireballs?

You tend to remember that sort of conversation when you’re 12.

I heard that after a nuclear war, there are high radiation levels, then only the politicians will be left.

Ma and Pa were acutely aware that all of their material prosperity could evaporate in an instant. Ma and Pa had both seen rich men laid low by the Great Depression, and Pa Wilder had fought in World War II. He had driven all through northern Europe, having been on Omaha at D-Day +3. I can’t even imagine what he had seen. Of course I asked him the obvious question, “Did any Germans shoot at ya, Pa?”

“No, son, they never shot at me,” he replied with all the coolness of a Steve McQueen, “but I was with a lot of people they were shooting at.”

I’m ashamed at how long it took me to figure out what he was really saying.

That’s not impressive, though. One of my friends had a grandpa that brought down 15 German planes during the war. Worst mechanic the Luftwaffe had.

I’m not sure that they ever mentioned the idea of nuclear Armageddon more than once or twice, but it doesn’t take long to make a kid connect the dots: “Oh, that’s why we have all the food. And all the guns. And the 500 gallons of gasoline. And the 250 gallons of diesel. And Ma’s amusing utter failure to raise vegetables in the backyard, repeated year after year.”

My parents were preppers before it even had a name beyond “being prudent.” It’s probably justifiable, especially on Ma Wilder’s part. She had seen her family make it through the Great Depression okay, but her family had also raised several children whose parents weren’t well off enough to feed them. I know that sounds crazy in the year 2020, but in the year 1930, sometimes parents couldn’t even figure out where to get enough money to feed a child.

I think those experiences were a driving force in Ma Wilder’s life. She saved aluminum TV dinner trays. She saved old clothes. She could sew (fairly well), make soap (that was more like a caustic chemical burn in a bar), knit (very well), or ferment wine (she gave me a sip and to 12 year old me it tasted of pepper, hate and despair). Back when she grew up, prepping wasn’t a hobby. Prepping was what everyone did.

As I mentioned, one factor that made all the preparation seem even more normal was being so far away from anything. Also, being so far away from everything meant I was pretty far away from the middle school. I was the last one on the bus route. That also meant I was the first one on, and the last one off. It gave me a lot of time alone on the bus to read – a lot.

All of this might explain why I developed a love of fiction that featured the end of the world when I was growing up. Lucifer’s Hammer, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Earth Abides, The Stand, On the Beach, The Postman, and I Am Legend were all novels that I read as I rode the green pleather seat on an endless loop back and forth to school. My classmates might have been looking at the trees and houses or talking to each other, but I was living in a world where everything had changed, all at once and strong men did what they could to rebuild. And without communists this time.

I think Baltimore jokes are just a riot!

My middle school’s library was filled with books that were older than me – many from the 1950’s with pages already becoming yellow and brittle with age. There were dozens of science fiction anthologies. Science fiction in the 1950’s was filled with the paranoia of a country that was just coming to grips with the concept of being able to destroy an entire planet and wrestling with the now obvious fragility of the human species. One of the short stories I remember was A Pail of Air, by Fritz Leiber. You can read it for free here (LINK). It’s worth it.

If you’re not a fan of apocalyptic stories, you might think that the attractive part about reading the end of the world was about death – and you’re wrong. Reading that literature was, for me, a celebration of life. In most of those books and stories the human race didn’t die out. To me, apocalyptic books weren’t about gloom, they were about hope. No matter what was thrown at humanity, we would find a way through.

I am unabashedly pro-human, and most fiction in the 1950’s was pro-human. Somewhere after that, we became a bit more self-loathing and reveled in the idea of our destruction. I can’t help but think that self-loathing started with Doogie Howser, M.D., but I might be wrong. Much of today’s literature isn’t fun, and isn’t optimistic. Sure, I see tough times ahead. But I feel quite strongly that we can make it through them.

Trust me. We will.

What, you don’t think I developed psychic powers on Mount Olympus?

Eight Phases of Crisis: COVID-19 Edition

â€œYou had aÂ dishwasher box to sleep in?Â I didn’t even know sleep. Â It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.â€ â€“ Deadpool

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.Â I replied, â€œDunno, depends on if you are trying to kill BatmanÂ®â€

â€œGreat, now itâ€™s the end of the world and we canâ€™t get a new dishwasher,â€ The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost.Â Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.Â I call that a win-win.Â Besides, AmazonÂ® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See?Â You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.Â When it was lunchtime, I wasnâ€™t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch.Â Good times.Â I do have a concern â€“ The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, â€œnice buttâ€ so Iâ€™m thinking of bringing this up with HR.Â I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.Â I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derriÃ¨re, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.Â While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people donâ€™t change all that much, even though circumstances do.Â Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.

Okay, Iâ€™ll stop.Â Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.Â I donâ€™t want you to think Iâ€™m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned?Â Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisisâ„¢, a level at which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the other â€“ this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.Â This is like the KÃ¼bler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind.Â Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind?Â Itâ€™s so nice and cheery.Â The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

Who would he assassinate for a KlondikeÂ® bar?Â Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand.Â

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.Â It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I.Â Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say â€œno.â€Â The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment.Â With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?Â We donâ€™t trust the media very much.Â Why?Â They donâ€™t seem trustworthy.Â Example: Â when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNNÂ® says itâ€™s racist.Â When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNNâ„¢ says itâ€™s a wise and prudent move by Chinaâ€™s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNNâ„¢ and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf:Â in the end, wolves really attacked.

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be.Â Itâ€™s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War.Â The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was.Â Itâ€™s the spark that lights the fire.Â When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards â€“ The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently.Â It is disruptive.Â It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system.Â In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant.Â COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy.Â Was it poised for a fall anyway?Â Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts:Â what if we havenâ€™t seen The Event yet?

Iâ€™m not sure heâ€™s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.Â When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch.Â Why?Â Habit, partially.Â But thereâ€™s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesnâ€™t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isnâ€™t a coping strategy, and itâ€™s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.Â Itâ€™s more inertia.Â Youâ€™re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isnâ€™t, part of your mind isnâ€™t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction â€“ COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.Â But that isnâ€™t explained by the reactions weâ€™ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.Â Italy is locked down.Â In two weeks, we will know more.Â In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it.Â But the rules are new, and unknown.Â What to do?Â One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?Â One could Panic.Â Panic is easier, and doesnâ€™t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality.Â So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile youâ€™ve accumulated over time?Â Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain DewÂ®?Â Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you donâ€™t know what to do or have any independent thought?Â Â Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

Not all heroes are able to walk.Â I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.Â Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.Â Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism â€“ realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.Â Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because itâ€™s the right thing to do.

There was a family story â€“ Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.Â She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.Â Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.Â Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.Â Why ration needles and sugar?Â To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part.Â To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasnâ€™t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we arenâ€™t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch NetflixÂ® unless weâ€™re keeping vital industries going.Â Hereâ€™s a link to Aesopâ€™s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).Â Read it all.

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners.Â My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.Â Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.Â In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didnâ€™t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.Â Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, thereâ€™s The Cliff.Â I wrote about it here: Senecaâ€™s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.Â Is it certain that there is one?Â No.Â But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like itâ€™s there.Â I believe we will see it.Â The new normal will be grow from events moving quickly.Â Already at Wilder Redoubt, weâ€™ve had nothing but home cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that weâ€™ll see The Cliff soon enough.Â How deep will it go?Â As Iâ€™ve mentioned before, no one knows.Â The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.Â Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.Â 80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.Â The average monthly car payment is $800.Â Me?Â Iâ€™d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole.Â But the businesses that employ those people arenâ€™t much better off.Â The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.Â The second best restaurant didnâ€™t survive.Â There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this wonâ€™t just be for small businesses.Â I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.Â Overall loss to the economy?Â 40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?Â Sure.Â We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.Â We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up.Â Thatâ€™s the best case.Â And thatâ€™s just in the United States.

Iâ€™m not kidding, thatâ€™s how deep The Cliff is.Â If weâ€™re lucky.

Something, something, Dark SideÂ®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.Â We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.Â Disillusionment sets in when things donâ€™t snap back to normal.Â Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.Â The more government â€œhelpsâ€ during this phase, the worse recovery will be.Â Roosevelt â€œhelpedâ€ so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they canâ€™t help themselves.Â The length of time Disillusionment lasts?Â Months to years.

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.Â Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.Â Rebuilding the economy will take years.Â If we do it right, weâ€™ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly?Â The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.Â Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.Â Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

So, I guess Iâ€™ll get a jump start on rebuilding.Â Dishwashers on the Internet.Â Amazing.Â My only problem is that thereâ€™s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time.Â Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her!Â They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

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

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

But you were expecting the Spanish Inquisition?

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

Until you see a black one.

Taleb defined his â€œBlack Swanâ€ 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.

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

Phase changes are simple and reversible.Â Itâ€™s only a matter of energy.Â But burn a piece of paper, and like the girl you had a crush on your freshman year in high school?Â Itâ€™s never coming back.Â Burning the paper is a one way trip.Â Itâ€™s a chemical reaction that you canâ€™t reverse.Â Or a restraining order in the case of the girl.Â It turns out they donâ€™t like you standing outside of their house holding a boom box over your head in real life.

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

Changing the guard from Republican to Democrat and back to Republican is a phase change.Â Same stuff, different day.Â But the American Revolution?Â That was a chemical reaction â€“ after the war we could never go back to being British subjects â€“ the ideas of independence, freedom, and self-governance were too firmly rooted.Â 9/11 was another phase change.Â Despite Wâ€™s desire that we â€œgo on as normalâ€ 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 â€“ they are irreversible, even though people expect a return to the â€œway things wereâ€ it never happens â€“ you canâ€™t unburn the paper.Â The change is a one-way event.Â 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.Â No, they werenâ€™t crack dealers, and they werenâ€™t alone.Â 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.Â Itâ€™s not quick and immediate like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or the Great PEZÂ® famine of 1986. Â Â This Black Swan is unfolding in slow motion across the economy and the world.Â 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.Â In a week, weâ€™ve gone from business as usual to shutting down restaurants.Â Itâ€™s the new normal.Â And yes, I said a year.Â Weâ€™ll be lucky if it doesnâ€™t last a decade.

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.Â But history teaches it like it happened during the two minute warning at a football game.

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

In due time, we would have had a recession anyway.Â Probably a big one, since the economic expansion has been going so long.Â But just like Wuhan isnâ€™t really the flu, this economic upset really isnâ€™t a recession â€“ itâ€™s far worse.Â DowÂ® 8,000 or less isnâ€™t out of the question on the downside.Â Really.

Itâ€™s that bad.

The government is going to take unusual actions.Â I mean, more unusual than usual.Â Today, it was floated to just start writing checks to most people.Â â€œMillionairesâ€ were excluded.Â Free health care will come on the table soon enough.Â We havenâ€™t even scratched the surface of whatâ€™s going to happen.Â And we will never go back to the way things were.Â This isnâ€™t a phase change.Â Like a board game that you let a toddler open, things just wonâ€™t go back in the box the same way, ever, and all of the pieces are covered in cookie/saliva mix.

Honestly, I donâ€™t miss toddlers, what with them trying to poison you or cut your brake lines or eating all the Cheeze-ItsÂ®.

Once upon a time, I got paid to think about disasters as a short time gig at a company I was working for.Â It was a lot of fun.Â I researched probabilities of things like civil wars and floods and tornadoes and visits from my ex-wife demonic manifestations.Â My life for those months included a LOT of surfing of doomer porn sites and thinking about how the world could go to hell.Â 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.Â If a tornado hit the headquarters, Then what?Â 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.Â Even for someone as old as Ruth Buzzi Ginsburg, thatâ€™s not very often.Â 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 â€“ a Torcano Hurriquakeâ„¢.Â After researching with every department, it was concluded that we might not be able to collect on a few hundred thousand dollarsâ€™ worth of payments that people owed us.Â As this company was a multi-billion dollar company where the executives had BMWsÂ® that were designed to stop an RPG strike, that was less than the company spent on Featureless Grey WallpaperÂ® in a year.

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

They didnâ€™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.Â When I showed them the math, they couldnâ€™t argue, but they werenâ€™t happy.Â They didnâ€™t like it even more when I pointed out that they could afford to spend about $100 a year in disaster prep â€“ most of their systems already had offsite backups.Â 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.Â Torcanos. Hurriquakes.Â Civil War?Â Iâ€™m not sure I even brought up a pandemic, but they would probably have looked at me like I had six eyes.Â â€œJust not credible.â€

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

Which brings us back to COVID-19.Â How do you discuss it with someone who is stuck thinking normally?Â Itâ€™s difficult.Â Their minds arenâ€™t even playing in the zip code as people who prepare.Â But even to them, it is undeniable that things have changed.Â They just donâ€™t realize itâ€™s like herpes:Â forever.

When I went to school, school lunches were something to be avoided.Â The Lunch Ladies did their best with the USDA Approved sources of, I guess Iâ€™ll call it protein.Â Now, school food is deemed to be a requirement even when school is out of service.Â And they say that there isnâ€™t a hell.

Yes, it was just Spring Break, and the school kitchens were closed.Â And they close during summer, last I checked â€“ every summer.Â But now?Â School food is a must.Â Here in Modern Mayberry, theyâ€™re offering the school lunches for free to anyone who comes to pick them up.Â I think itâ€™s because at least someone in Washington pulled their head away from the bacon-wrapped-shrimp trough long enough to realize that weâ€™re in trouble.Â 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 wouldnâ€™t stop killing people by infecting them with typhus cooking?).

Oops.

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

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

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

As of now, the supermarkets are functioning.

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

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

Thatâ€™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.Â To understand whatâ€™s going on, to be one step ahead, you have to imagine what could happen.Â 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.

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

When an idea makes sense, follow it through. Â If so, Then whatâ€™s the consequence?Â Donâ€™t limit your thinking.Â Itâ€™s a fun game.Â Sure, sometimes it ends up in global thermonuclear war, but so did The Terminatorâ„¢, and look how much fun that was.Â But when you really think about it, youâ€™ll look to see what happened in the past.Â While the future wonâ€™t look exactly like the past, it will rhyme.Â The cause and effect of many things doesnâ€™t change.

If weâ€™re quarantining, Then we wonâ€™t drive as much.Â If we donâ€™t drive as much, Then we wonâ€™t use as much of that sweet, sweet gasoline.Â If we donâ€™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.Â Thatâ€™s exactly what happened last week, and will happen in the next month.

If.

Then.

COVID-19 wasnâ€™t in my projections â€“ I was expecting cake.Â It wasnâ€™t in the mindset of the people of the world.Â Then it was.Â So what happens next?Â What chains will snap, further unraveling our civilization?Â 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 theyâ€™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-MartÂ® tells you that â€œtheyâ€ have been telling her to have a minimum of two weeks of food, Then will you listen?
If you hear from another Wal-MartÂ© 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.Â Neither I, nor anyone else can tell you exactly what the future will bring.Â But as I mentioned in my last post, the universe is a harsh grader.Â The final exam is pass/fail.Â And passing means you live.

Until the next exam.

If.

Then.

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

â€œThe reason I’m going to SantaÂ Corona, Steve, is the worst thing that can happen there is that I run out of suntan lotion.â€ â€“ Wonder Woman (1978)

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

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

The clock didnâ€™t move this month for the second month in a row.Â Will Leftist state governments support Antifa violence this spring and summer?

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

Welcome to Issue 10 of the Civil War II Weather Report.Â 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.Â 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:Â itâ€™s one of the other.Â This month, itâ€™s both.Â Weâ€™ll start with Violence.Â Arthur (LINK) sent a link to a story that got some coverage â€“ the attempted murder of people just because they supported the other side of the political spectrum.Â To be clear â€“ this man (LINK)was attempting to kill old people who were expressing support of President Trump.Â Thankfully he was incompetent â€“ driving wasnâ€™t something they studied in Marxist theory class.

Iâ€™m amused when the Left talks about â€œRight Wing Extremist ViolenceÂ®â€ because itâ€™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 â€œdoing somethingâ€ to stop the HateÂ®.Â At every level in the last four years, Leftist violence has greatly exceeded violence coming from the Right, and if you donâ€™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.

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.Â 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.Â Leftists hate the Right, but they hate mainstream Democrats even more (see links below).Â 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.Â Because there isnâ€™t a comprehensive list of bans for YouTubeÂ®, I can only report what Iâ€™ve seen in the news or that were mentioned in passing by other sources.Â 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 BitchuteÂ® site and watched the video he felt was responsible for his banning.Â It was tame, mainly just him arguing that the Left-Right violence statistics as reported by another YouTuberâ„¢ in a debate were wrong.Â He also spent a great deal of time criticizing his own debate performance and preparation.Â It wasnâ€™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.

YouTubeÂ© has also started demonetizing channels that feature content thatâ€™s favorable to the Right, like Sargonâ€™s channel.Â Sargonâ€™s biggest offense?Â Dunno, having a keen beard?Â I canâ€™t seem to find anything offensive.Â But demonetization is generally just the first step before deplatforming.

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

Virginia:Â Imposing Costs

Last Weather Report, I wrote about the concept of imposing costs, as in the Right wasnâ€™t imposing costs on the Left.Â Hereâ€™s what I said:

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

First â€“ make sure that they arenâ€™t re-elected. That requires organization and planning.Â Oh, and voters.
Second â€“ go through their histories thoroughly. Donâ€™t blackmail them â€“ find (legally) all of their dirty laundry and air it â€“ imagine what Ralphâ€™s browser history looks like.Â Isnâ€™t that a public record?Â
Third â€“ make sure that that people are rude to their wives and shun them at social functions. How will Governor Northamâ€™s wife, Pam, feel if people tell her what they think of Ralph when she stops in to get a StarbucksÂ®?Â Â What if her public meetings were peacefully protested?
Fourth â€“ remove their privacy in every public space. Park vans outside of their houses with billboards that advertise what a horrible person lives within â€“ theyâ€™ve done this with Susan Collins in Maine, so itâ€™s a tactic thatâ€™s fair game.Â But the Geneva Convention does categorize playing Twisted SisterÂ® 24/7 at their house a crime against humanity.

Iâ€™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.Â

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

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

Delegate Levineâ€™s panties got very much in a twist.Â He immediately called the police, but was quite upset to find out that Mr. Howard had done nothing to violate the law.Â 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. Â 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.Â I want to make sure that person can be prosecuted.”

Mr. Levineâ€™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 doesnâ€™t approve of.Â The research I saw indicates that Mr. Levine has a copy of the Constitution that he keeps in his pocket.Â 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.Â 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.Â Iâ€™ll just leave it here, since it seems to fit:

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

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

Political Instability:

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

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions.Â The economic indicators began to turn in February.Â 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 $30â€™s.Â Expect March numbers to collapse, which is in keeping with the chaotic nature of the way her hair is displayed.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory.Â This is (thanks for the terminology correction, 1chota) a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.Â One would assume weâ€™re catching fewer because there are fewer to catch.Â And those arenâ€™t legs that last forever, since they obviously end in October.

Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona

Itâ€™s rare that a society devolves into civil war when everything is going along fine.Â Part of the recipe for trouble is economic instability.Â The second part is hating each other â€“ and we already have that in place.Â What keeps us from killing each other is the day job, and the fact that most of us have all of the TwinkiesÂ® and Ho-Hosâ„¢ and Strawberry Starburst PiÃ±a ColadasÂ© 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

The Boy did a fine job photoshopping this.Â 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.Â Oil prices are collapsing.Â The Everything Bubble is imploding.

Whatâ€™s next?Â If this economy follows every other collapse in recent economic history, job losses start soon. Â Businesses collapse.Â Banks?Â Theyâ€™re in the business of generating profits in good times, while having the government and taxpayers pay for the bad times.Â 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.Â Sometimes they end just because it was time.Â Other times, an event occurs that causes the growth to stop.Â 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.Â On the Democrat side, Iâ€™m not sure that Bernie can get the nomination â€“ thatâ€™s the conventional wisdom â€“ and I dearly hope thatâ€™s right.Â 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 donâ€™t work â€“ itâ€™s like a medieval doctor performing more bloodletting when the first bloodletting didnâ€™t work.Â Itâ€™s that we never did true bloodletting.

Joe Biden isnâ€™t really certain what planet heâ€™s on most days, and Donald Trump will go through him like a velociraptor in a room full of kittens.Â President Trumpâ€™s recent tweet that â€œBiden will be tough to beatâ€ was the 2020 version of â€œdonâ€™t throw me in that briar patch.â€

And thatâ€™s no malarkey, you frog faced bony soldier.

Thatâ€™s my take â€“ but the range of outcomes is so very wide with Corona, itâ€™s nearly impossible to make a good prediction right now.Â Give it two months.Â Then we wonâ€™t have to predict, weâ€™ll know.

Buckle your seatbelt â€“ this definitely increases the odds of conflict happening sooner.

Links

Most are from Ricky this month . . .Â enjoy!

NBC Misunderstands Boogaloo.Â Probably intentionally.Â But they canâ€™t do math, so maybe not intentionally.

Clickbait on Boogaloo.Â 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.Â Or something.

Globalists want Trump out.

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

Doug Casey talks Fourth Turning.Â Good read.

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

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

Must read:Â Roots of the Divide.

The Left . . . looking for segregation.

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

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

Socialists hate the Democrats.Â See, I told you.

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

Michael Lind wants bigger government, more control.

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

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?

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.

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 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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Okay, I’m 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

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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 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 . . . .

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.