Category: Communism

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

“Though in war, you only get killed once; in politics it can happen over and over.” – Battlestar Galactica (2000’s)

confuse

“The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.” –Will Rogers

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

Politics is, like our economy, about motion.  It’s about creating fear enough to spur people into an emotional frenzy, or bully bureaucrats.  One of my favorite stories along this line was when Amy Klobuchar, D(emon)-Minnesota, wrote to the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) about . . . Buckyballs®.  Buckyballs™, if you don’t remember them, they were small strong spherical magnets that were fun to play with.  They were generally marketed as a desk toy for adults.

One toddler died from swallowing seven of them.  Apparently, during the life of the product, there were 19 other injuries as well, though I don’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.  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 Buckyball® sets sold, and MILLIONS of little magnetic balls in circulation.  Cars, for example, are at least 287 times more deadly than Buckyballs©.  100 kids a year die on bicycles.  The biggest cause of death for toddlers?  Backyard pools.  Most dangerous food product for toddlers?  Hot dogs.

But dying because of small magnets?

buckyb

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

That’s somewhere lower than “being 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.”

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

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

I’m just sad that Amy didn’t volunteer to catch the Jarts© when her brothers were playing and she was a kid.  Seriously, Jarts™ were fun.  Jarts® child death toll over a span of 35 years before the CPSC banned them?  3.  Thankfully, you can still buy them, but to beat the CPSC, the company asks that you assemble them yourself.  It’s a kit.

Ha!

Jarts®, when played right.

The problem wasn’t with Buckyballs®, the problem was that there wasn’t anything else pressing that Amy could complain about and get away with.  Her party held the presidency, so most national issues were out of the question because if they failed, the Democrats would own the failure.  But she could complain about a tiny toy company.  The only victims would be the owner and the people who liked the toy.  Confession:  I bought six sets of Buckballs™ in their going out of business sale to help contribute to the owner before he lost his business.

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

Everything.

schumer

Chuck saved me some joke writing.

Politics in 2020 is still about doing something.  But, more importantly, it’s the art of been seen to be doing something.  One day when I came home from work, The Mrs. was incensed.  “Schumer wants to allocate $4 billion to the Corona virus!  He’s insane!”  The Mrs. was skeptical at that point, primarily because we’re used to the media crying wolf about every little potential crisis, and secondarily because the Corona death toll was smaller than Jeffery Dahmer’s.

My response was simple:  “$4 billion?  Trump should say, ‘Make it $8 billion, Little Chucky, think big,’ but put in an asterisk that we’ll spend the money only if necessary, and in ways deemed by the President to stop a pandemic.  Heck, he could even get a few miles wall out of that.  Aren’t you tired of the Canadians, dear, coming in with their beavers and maple syrup asking ‘aboot’ everything?  Initiate Operation Leafblower*.”

“But John,” she replied, “the country doesn’t have $8 billion to spare.”

“So what?  We don’t have $4 billion, either.”

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

bikini

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.  Those that say it is not any worse than the flu really should look at the real-time consequences we’re seeing in hospitals, especially in New York.  However, is Corona Chan a wrecking ball like Joe Biden at a hair sniffing contest that, unless it was stopped, destroy civilization?

Nah.  We’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.  Instead, the idea is the no one should ever be inconvenienced for the greater good.  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.  There are people who think, “Well, the rules on staying home don’t apply to me.”  There is no us to them, no commonality, only the idea their needs, right now.

biden

I’m Joe Biden, and I forgot this message.

Why isn’t there a greater good?  It’s primarily being driven by the political rift between Right and Left, though there are other factors, as well.  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 “my” group of constituents, and get more votes for me.

As such, every decision is a political one, meant to obtain or maintain power.  And every opportunity should be made to attack an opponent, whether or not they deserve it.  This means that every action taken in the muddled and unclear past is subject to criticism based on the perfect knowledge of the future.  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:   prescription drugs.  The two primary jobs of the FDA are to approve drugs for sale in the United States and surf social media during the day.  When the FDA approves a drug that it shouldn’t have approved, that’s a Type I error.  What happens with a Type I error is that there is a body count.  Drugs that show up on the market that kill people (even terminally ill people) make the FDA look bad, so they just won’t do it, and will go to ludicrous lengths to keep drug company profits high.

HOT DOG

So, the cat did warn the dog not to eat out of it’s bowl.

What happens when a bad drug gets through and into the market?  Does anybody at the FDA lose a job?  No.  Does anyone get demoted?  No.  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.  That’s when the FDA doesn’t approve of a drug that it should have approved.   People still die, and maybe a lot of people.  But since they really died of the condition and not the lack of a drug that legally doesn’t exist, you can’t get to a body count.  You can’t convict without a body count, or at least that’s what my lawyer tells me.

Let’s go into an alternate universe where President Trump hears of the Wuhan Flu and shuts down access to China immediately.  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?  No.  No one will count the dead bodies that didn’t exist because he took decisive action.  In fact, he’d be called a racist xenophobe abusing his powers by the media.  You can read various articles making exactly this point that were written around the end of January and the beginning of February.    My favorite of these articles is one written by an avowed communist that includes the line, “The Trump administration’s ‘state of emergency’ should be regarded as a piece of more substantial and systematic hostility in its relations with China.”  The author then complains that people should move freely.  There’s a lovely comment at the bottom, “Well, this article aged poorly.”  I expect articles like these to be scrubbed from the Internet as people get around to it.

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

ISOLATE

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

Or at least people pretending to take action.  Is the current policy of shutting down huge chunks of the economy the best one?  I’m not sure.  The information we have is very poor – we simply don’t have sufficient information to make great decisions.  I’m thinking the President has better info, what with deciding to put the Northern Command (the bit of the armed forces that’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%.  I think it’s clear that’s not the case at this point.  Some hack said that it’s so mild that, “half of Britain may have already had it.”  It’s also clear that’s not the case.  But every credible report I’ve heard says it’s big – intensive care units being swamped.  Time and data will tell.

But politician response has to be played for the crowd:  Nancy Pelosi is already blaming everything on Trump’s past decisions.  Her quote, “But as the President fiddles, people are dying,” seems to ignore Nancy’s own banjo lessons during the impeachment.

knuckle

I’ve never seen a more non-essential employee . . .

In a sense, we are where we are as a society because there isn’t anything that can ever be simple bad luck.  Blame must be assigned.  Every accident must have a cause, and every person at fault must pay, even if the outcome isn’t one that was intended, or even remotely likely.  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:  Type I Errors and Assigning Blame.  Don’t be surprised by the mindboggling amounts of money and silliness that will come shortly.

But sometimes sanity wins.  Buckyballs™ 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®)

Shelves

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.

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.

ORPHANS

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.

MADMAX

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.

PA

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.

BALTIMORE

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

“You had a dishwasher box to sleep in?  I didn’t even know sleep.  It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.” – Deadpool

BATSLAP

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.  I replied, “Dunno, depends on if you are trying to kill Batman®”

“Great, now it’s the end of the world and we can’t get a new dishwasher,” 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.  Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.  I call that a win-win.  Besides, Amazon® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

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

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.  When it was lunchtime, I wasn’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.  Good times.  I do have a concern – The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, “nice butt” so I’m thinking of bringing this up with HR.  I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.  I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derrière, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.  While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people don’t change all that much, even though circumstances do.  Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.

Okay, I’ll stop.  Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.  I don’t want you to think I’m a bum.

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

FRANZ

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

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.  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.  Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say “no.”  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.  With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?  We don’t trust the media very much.  Why?  They don’t seem trustworthy.  Example:  when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNN® says it’s racist.  When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNN™ says it’s a wise and prudent move by China’s benevolent leadership.

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

DINOS

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

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

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

DISB

I’m not sure he’s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.  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.  Why?  Habit, partially.  But there’s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesn’t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isn’t a coping strategy, and it’s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.  It’s more inertia.  You’re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isn’t, part of your mind isn’t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction – COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.  But that isn’t explained by the reactions we’ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.  Italy is locked down.  In two weeks, we will know more.  In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

PANIC

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.  But the rules are new, and unknown.  What to do?  One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?  One could Panic.  Panic is easier, and doesn’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.  So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile you’ve accumulated over time?  Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain Dew®?  Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you don’t know what to do or have any independent thought?   Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

HERO

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

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.  Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.  Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism – realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.  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 it’s the right thing to do.

There was a family story – Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.  She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.  Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Why ration needles and sugar?  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.  To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasn’t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we aren’t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch Netflix® unless we’re keeping vital industries going.  Here’s a link to Aesop’s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).  Read it all.

CLIFF

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

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.  Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.  In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didn’t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.  Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, there’s The Cliff.  I wrote about it here: Seneca’s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.  Is it certain that there is one?  No.  But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like it’s there.  I believe we will see it.  The new normal will be grow from events moving quickly.  Already at Wilder Redoubt, we’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 we’ll see The Cliff soon enough.  How deep will it go?  As I’ve mentioned before, no one knows.  The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.  Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.  80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.  The average monthly car payment is $800.  Me?  I’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.  But the businesses that employ those people aren’t much better off.  The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.  The second best restaurant didn’t survive.  There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this won’t just be for small businesses.  I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.  Overall loss to the economy?  40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?  Sure.  We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.  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.  That’s the best case.  And that’s just in the United States.

I’m not kidding, that’s how deep The Cliff is.  If we’re lucky.

EMPEROR

Something, something, Dark Side®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.  We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.  Disillusionment sets in when things don’t snap back to normal.  Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.  The more government “helps” during this phase, the worse recovery will be.  Roosevelt “helped” so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they can’t help themselves.  The length of time Disillusionment lasts?  Months to years.

FIX

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.  Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.  Rebuilding the economy will take years.  If we do it right, we’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?  The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.  Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.  Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

DISHWASH

So, I guess I’ll get a jump start on rebuilding.  Dishwashers on the Internet.  Amazing.  My only problem is that there’s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time.  Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her!  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

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

coyote

But you were expecting the Spanish Inquisition?

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

Until you see a black one.

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

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

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

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

CUSACK

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

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

Oops.

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

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

waterloo

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

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

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

It’s that bad.

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

TODDLER

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

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

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

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

BONUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oops.

typhoid

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

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

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

As of now, the supermarkets are functioning.

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

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

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

Then you have to see if it makes sense.

TOM

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

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

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

If.

Then.

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

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

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

Until the next exam.

If.

Then.

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

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

clock10

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

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

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

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

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

Violence and Censorship Update

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

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

antifa

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

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

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

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

Now his voice is silenced.

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

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

Virginia:  Imposing Costs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Insurg

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

violf

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

Political Instability:

politf

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

Economic:

econf

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

Illegal Aliens:

borderf

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

Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona

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

But then enters Coronavirus:

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

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

corona

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

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

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

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

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

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

joe

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

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

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

Links

link

Most are from Ricky this month . . .  enjoy!

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

Clickbait on Boogaloo.  Strangely, no Antifa reports?

Salon admits that they feel their side is Leftist.

More Leftists Boogaloo afraid.

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

Globalists want Trump out.

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

Doug Casey talks Fourth Turning.  Good read.

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

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

Must read:  Roots of the Divide.

The Left . . . looking for segregation.

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

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

Socialists hate the Democrats.  See, I told you.

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

Michael Lind wants bigger government, more control.

 

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

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

FIRST

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

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

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

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

How bad could it be?

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

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

sp500

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

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

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

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

30year

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

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

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

crude

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

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

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

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

What have we seen so far?

stand

This was a pretty good miniseries documentary.

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

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

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

cyber

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

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

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

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

Lesson One:

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

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

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

Lesson Two:

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

gold

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

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

Lesson Three:

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

10year

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

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

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

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

Lesson Four:

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

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

Wildcards:

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

mankini

Okay, I’m sorry.

sorry

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

Nobody likes a smug prepper.

Disclaimer:

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

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

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

commie

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

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

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

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

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

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

biden

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

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

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

holyspirit

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

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

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

BIKINI

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

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

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

LUNCHBOX]

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

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

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

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

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

  • Annoying People

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

JESUS

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

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

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

…

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

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

“Old.”

“I’m not old.”

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

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

“I do,” Dunbar told him.

“Why?” Clevinger asked.

“What else is there?”

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

ex

And you pay half of all your stuff.

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

Use them all.

I suggest skeet.

Corona Virus, with a Slice of Recession?

“Global? Oh, great. I’ve doomed humanity.” – Ash Versus Evil Dead

china

I hear it can only be caught from crowds.  Introverts everywhere smiled as they stared at your shoes.

The other day I was emailing back and forth with James M. Dakin, proprietor of the Bison Prepper (LINK).  I mentioned that I’d bring up an old essay we’d both read back when Jim and I went to different high schools together.  That essay was I, Pencil.

I, Pencil was written by Leonard Read and published in 1958.  The essay is available here (LINK).  I, Pencil is a fairly short essay with a fairly long introduction.  Spoiler alert:  Leonard felt that no single person on planet Earth can make something as simple as a boring old yellow No. 2 pencil.  And, he’s right.  A pencil, even a 1958 version, uses components that are sourced all over the globe.  Mr. Read makes a great point – the free market takes components from all around the world to make even the simplest and most mundane object.

pencil

I cut myself with a pencil – I drew blood.

Likewise, the knowledge required to make that pencil is distributed across the globe.  No single person can make the pigments for the paint by milking the Tanganyikan paint turtles, and pick the aluminum from the Australian aluminum trees to make ferrule that holds the eraser on.  And that eraser?  It’s made of rubber from the Congo.  I’d make fun of the Congo, but, really.  It’s the Congo and they have enough problems (LINK to a really fascinating story of crossing the Congo).  Plus the wood is made from sustainably farmed free-range vegan trees in California.  Don’t forget the graphite – it’s from the Sri Lankan graphite glaciers.

The humble pencil is a creature of Globalization.

How much Globalization?  Sadly, it looks like Dixon Ticonderoga used to make most of its pencils in the United States, but now apparently makes only enough pencils here to claim that it actually makes pencils in the United States (LINK).  There were a few pencil jokes I was going to make here, but they’re pointless.

While we talk about globalization as being a new phenomenon, Globalization has been a thing since the days of the American Revolution – the tea that Sam Adams threw in the harbor during the Boston Tea Party came from halfway across the planet.  Even back to the days of Rome, there is evidence of far flung trade – shipwrecks found in the Mediterranean are often found filled with wine or olive oil being shipped across the Empire.  Sadly, the Romans abandoned those cargos after they broke the V second rule of being on the bottom of the ocean.   

ROME

X/X

Globalization provides a huge advantage.  Some things aren’t available around the world – resources come from other places for a reason – corn is imported to the South Pole because corn grows rather poorly in ice.  Shockingly, wood comes from places with trees, and having Saudi Arabia export timber is probably not a great business strategy.  But having Saudi Arabia export oil is.  And having the United States export food also makes sense – we grow more than we can eat.

When done right, Globalization provides the benefits of bringing together resources and knowledge from far-flung corners of the world to meet the needs of people that most of them will never meet.  But Globalization doesn’t consist only of benefits.  With Globalization, Ticonderoga® can decide to make pencils in China.  Hundreds of jobs are then lost in the United States.  A typical journalist would indicate that the people who lost pencil-making jobs should, “learn to code.”  When those same journalists lost their jobs due to Globalization, they cried on Twitter® when told that perhaps it was their turn to #learntocode.  The journalists even got people banned for suggesting they take their own advice (LINK).  Still missing:  journalists who became coders.  Also missing:  journalists with a sense of humor and irony.

Although the United States spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on yellow No. 2 pencils made in China, should pencils stop showing up from China, there won’t be chaos and anarchy in the streets except around SAT® test taking time.  I mean, we all remember the No. 2 pencil riots of 1989, right?

But that is just a humble pencil.  What other things are imported from China (LINK – warning – quite an addictive set of graphs)?

crust2

You can tell that toothpaste was invented in New York City.  Otherwise they would have called it teethpaste.

A lot of the things the United States imports from China are trivial, or convenience items that we could live without:

  • Lots of toys are manufactured in China, including trikes and video game consoles, virtually all Christmas decorations, and (the census has a category for this) practical jokes. Yes, the Corona Virus could directly cause a shortage of fake dog poo.
  • Strollers and toasters are almost all made in China. Why did I combine these items?  No reason.  None at all.
  • Millions of wet heads could result.
  • Artificial flowers. Now here the Chinese are particularly cunning – they’ve cornered the production of not only plastic artificial flowers, but also artificial flowers not made from plastic.  This is a true strategic threat.
  • Nearly every thermos. The United States could bankrupt itself in additional ice costs.  Also, cold soup?
  • 100% of lawn edgers are made in China. 100% of my lawn edger hasn’t left the garage in five years.

Okay.  There is a lot of stuff that comes from China we live without.  Unless you work at Wal-Mart®.  Without those imports to be sold, the impact should be minimal.  Very few people have ever had a life or death situation that could be solved by fake dog poo.  I’m pretty sure this is the first time that last sentence was ever written in the English language.

polystat

Had much super fun time inserting receptacle into hand.

But . . .

  • Nearly every “portable digital automatic data processing machine not weighing more than 10 kilograms” comes from China – all $37 billion worth.
  • 65% of cell phones – $72 billion.
  • 80% of “other radio telephones” $44 billion.
  • And, oops, it seems that 80% of pharmaceuticals and 97% of antibiotics in the United States are imported from China ().

Amazingly, everything that China exports to the United States only amounts to (about) 3% or of the United States economy.  Stopping Chinese imports to the United States would have an immediate impact because of lowered sales regardless of what we import.  But as the bullet points above show, slowdown of imports from China could also have an immediate effect because of what we import.

The third impact would come from what we make out of the things that China sends us.  Things like . . . cars and pickups.  Where does the housing for the alternator in the Ford® pickup come from?  Touch screens?  How many are made in China?  How many days until Chevy™ can’t build a car because it’s missing a switch that runs an air conditioner?  Last time I checked, most cars need nearly 100% of the parts to be called a car.  At least until I work on the engine – then I always seem to have a few bolts left over.

headlight

Not one of my repairs.  But I have used zip ties as a structural material.

The third impact of reducing manufacturing in the United States would be large.  I don’t have precise figures but I can guess – it might be as much as a 10% drop in the economy in the year it happened.  For reference, the Great Recession of 2008 had a 4% drop in economic activity.

I’m probably not the guy to talk about how the Wuhan Flu is going to spread.  I’m certainly not the guy to tell you how to treat it if you get it.  But I do know that something like the shutting down of factories in China can spill over to the United States and cause recessions or worse, even if the Corona virus never became an epidemic here.

Stock up on pencils while you can . . . .

The Revolutionary: A Wilder Review

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

MAORIT

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

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

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

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

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

Sidney who?

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

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

rittenarm

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

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

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

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

attack

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

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

Spoiler alert:  Not at all.

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

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

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

lmao

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

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

He had.

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

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

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

Easy!

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

Oops.  But he’s not done yet.

grtlp1

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

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

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

pretend

They also pretended to make steel.

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

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

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

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

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

cultbomb

The nuclear spinach helped the most.

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

Oops.  Too late.

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

SIDNEY

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

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

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

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

DINNER

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But I didn’t want that.”

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

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

The Lighter Side of the Apocalypse

“It’s the Apocalypse all right.  I always thought I’d have a hand in it.” – Futurama

spider

I make apocalypse jokes like there’s no tomorrow.

Wednesday’s are normally a day to talk about wealth, and when you’re prepping, what is wealth?  Is it gold coins?  Is it ammunition?  Is it beer?  Is it a paid off house?  Is it a decade’s worth of PEZ®?

In many cases when I go to other websites that discuss either economic or social dislocation I see people arguing in the comments section about the way to prepare.  In some cases, these arguments have even occurred here at this humble bastion of Internet civility and decorum.  All of the people arguing are right.

No, that doesn’t mean that John Wilder is out there awarding participation trophies for comments, far from it.  The problem is one of definition.  As Tolstoy said in Anna Kareninananana, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”  Each of the stunningly attractive and freshly washed (and waxed!) geniuses that comments here has an IQ that would put Joe Biden to shame.  Yet they disagree because they’re talking about different things – each apocalypse is unique in its own way.

charlie

Protip:  if you’re a mortician, tie all of the corpses shoes together – that way if we do have a zombie apocalypse, it’ll be funny.

Therefore, I’ve decided it’s important to talk about the W.I.L.D.E.R. Scale.  It’s like the Richter Scale for earthquakes or the Fujita Scale for tornados or the Joe Biden Scale for Lying Dog Faced Pony Soldiers.  But this one is better, because I came up with it.

Most importantly, what does W.I.L.D.E.R. stand for?  It’s the:

Wilder Index of Life Disruption and Economic Ruination.

See?  W.I.L.D.E.R.  No, wait . . . W.I.L.D.E.R.™  There.  That looks better.

The scale is broken up into a ten point scale, as described below.  Why ten?  Besides being my mental age, it also describes the number of fingers that I had before using a table saw.  It’s also metric.  So, all of you people who live in countries that haven’t nuked Japan (excluding the Japanese) can have this one in metric.  But you have to keep the soccer.

NOTE:  This is not a comprehensive financial guide or preparedness guide.  Depending on the W.I.L.D.E.R.™  level you’re preparing for, this is only the barest bones of a start. 

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 0:  All Quiet

Everything’s fine.  Life is good.  Life is projected to be good – you have a job, it’s fairly secure and has good benefits and it pays the bills, mostly.  Save money in your 401k, grill some burgers and watch the game.  Go back to sleep.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 1:  Local Slowdown

What is it?

A W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 1 is the lowest level of economic disruption – local job loss, minor and non-chronic civil .  It’s not great if you’re caught up in it, but it’s pretty mild.  There may be widespread local job loss – a factory was closed.  It’s not pleasant for those caught up in it, but the underlying economy outside of that local area is sound – you may have a longer commute, but you can get a job.

What to do?

Have savings.  Have minimal debt.  In many cases, you’ll be able to keep doing what you’ve been doing, but you might have a farther commute or reduced wages.  The nice thing about a Level 1 is that if you’re willing to move to a new city, chances are you’ll find something.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 2:  Regional Slowdown

What is it?

One thing that was more common in the past in the United States was a regional level of economic slowdown.  Entire areas would remain stagnant for periods at a time, sometimes years.  In the case of New Mexico, no one really knew it was a state anyway, so we’re not even sure if New Mexico has an economy.  As we have been in the “Boom Everywhere, All the Time” mode for the last 20 years (with the exception of that pesky Great Recession), the economy of the United States seems to be far less regional, but more centered in larger cities.

But regional economic slowdowns do occur – an example would be in the Oil Patch when the price of oil first goes up, and then collapses like my resistance to a steak on Friday night.  The good news is that when the oil price collapses, you can buy a small child in Oklahoma for the price of a cheeseburger.  Not a plain cheeseburger, but the fancy one with lettuce and tomato and onion.  Oklahomans have standards.

What to do?

Have savings.  Have minimal debt.  Have a realistic budget and know the difference between what’s really required and what’s nice-to-have.  Have a house that you can either sell or walk away from.  Be prepared to change careers – have an additional skill that people will pay you for if you have to change careers.  Be prepared to sell a kidney – grow an extra one or two if you can for a rainy day.

philoso

Philosoraptor.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 3:  National Recession

What is it?

Since World War II, most recessions have lasted, on average, a little less than a year.  Recessions mean that, broadly, the economy is shrinking.  Since the entire economic (and banking) system is based on continued expansion and growth, a recession typically kicks people out of work.  During a national recession it’s easier to drive drunk and text Shakespeare from memory while smoking weed than to get a raise.

Even though the economy “recovers” after a year or so, the failures and economic transitions that come from the recession linger in many lives for up to a decade – careers at failed businesses may not be viable anywhere.  If the entire factory is shipped to China, chances are slim that the Chinese will want to import people – it’s not like there are enough bats for everyone.

What to do?

If you are graduating from college, think twice.  People who graduate during a recession and take a job during the recession typically earn less for their entire careers.  Several of my friends went to graduate school instead of into the job market during a recession.  It worked out well for one guy – he became a dictator of a country in the Middle East.  He’s generous, too.  I heard that he last week at the bar he ordered shots for lots of his friends.

If you have a job – do what you can to keep it.  Pay down remaining debt, but understand what bankruptcy might mean if you don’t have six months (or more) of cash to cover expenses.  Stock weeks of spare food, if you can.  If you can’t, start making friends with neighborhood cats.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 4:  The Great Depression

What is it?

The Great Depression, and, to a lesser extent, the Great Recession of 2008-2009 and the Stagflation of the 1970’s fit here.  These are much greater economic hits than a recession.  They are nationwide, and may threaten the economic collapse.  Expect extreme measures to get the economy working again, many of which will actually be counterproductive, but it’s government, so you expect that.  Banks will fail.  Weird things will happen to the money supply.

What to do?

If you have spare cash, this is the time to pick up great bargains.  As the Great Recession hit, the price of gold dropped significantly.  People who had debt but too many toys had to sell them – it was a great time to buy boats and cars and motorcycles and mistresses and admission for your kid at Harvard®.  Several stocks were selling at ridiculously low prices.

Why was this?  Money had dried up, so there were bargains everywhere.  Of course, I didn’t have enough money then to buy anything.  Except a house.  Before the prices collapsed.  (Spoiler – I got out of that house okay.)

Again, having no debt and cash to cover expenses is key.  Having a spouse who doesn’t work (but could) is also key – in a pinch, they can work, too, or you can sell their kidneys for buckets of wheat.

Diversify your banks.  Diversify how you keep your money – is one currency enough?  Desperate people will be desperate.  Be able to protect yourself and your family.

home

Hey, don’t laugh – I can almost buy two packs of gum in 2024 with the money in that picture.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 5:  National Collapse

What is it?

Governing structures cease to function in a meaningful way.  This is also known as “Tuesday” in most African nations.  Weimar Germany, and the late Soviet Union are examples.  They didn’t collapse in the same way – Weimar Germany collapsed in an explosion of hyperinflation.  The Soviet Union collapse was the collapse of an entire economic system, and now nobody knew who got to take the cow to the dance on Saturday.

What to do?

When nations collapse, their currency collapses.  This always happens.  In surviving any of those collapses, a pocketful of gold was more helpful than a pocketful of paper.  If the nation collapses, it can be difficult to predict the system that will replace it, but they generally are totalitarian strongmen who take over in the chaos after collapse.  The Soviet Union was a happy departure – as rough as it was on the former Soviet citizens, it could have been far worse.  Chef Boyardee was originally chosen as Gorbachev’s replacement, but they didn’t like that he called his secret police the Gazpacho.

Six months of food isn’t extravagant in a situation like this.  Some means of protection are mandatory.  Realize that changes could happen in a second, so plan.  Have friends.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 6:  Civil War

What is it?

The American Civil War, the French Revolution, and the Balkans War are examples of civil wars.  Civil wars are probably more vicious than any other type of conflict.  When the Germans started fighting the French and English in World War I, they weren’t really into it – they even stopped the war for Christmas in 1914.  But when the French finally snapped before the French Revolution?  They were ready to throw down like a rabid epileptic cat in a strobe light store.

What to do?

Moveable assets like gold or foreign bank accounts, a second passport, and lots of lead are preferred.  Be in a place (if you can) surrounded by like-minded people.  It helps if you’ve been there for years before trouble breaks out – being an outsider during a civil war isn’t preferred.  Have food – a year?  Have weapons.  Have a supply of necessary pharmaceuticals if you can.  Be aware that your side might lose the war.  What would that mean?  Oh, and don’t forget to floss.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 7:  International Collapse

What is it?

World War I and World War II are modern examples of this, but earlier examples include the fall of the Roman Empire and the late Bronze Age Collapse (~1200 B.C.) (LINK).  These are collapses that take down multiple nations and re-write borders and history.  They are cataclysmic, and are often followed by the mass movements of people, either as invading conquerors, or fleeing refugees, or in the 2010’s, fleeing conquerors and invading refugees.

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Some things never change.  Image:  Lommes [CC BY-SA 4.0)]

What to do?

Be away from where the war is happening.  That may be more difficult than it says on the label.  All of the suggestions for Level 6 responses still fit, especially flossing, but finding a place not torn by conflict is exceedingly difficult.  Events have the ability to move very, very, fast.  If you’re in continental Europe, learning German is probably a good idea.  A year of food will likely not be enough.  Lead is recommended.  Gold may or may not help at all.  If you think it won’t, I’ll watch it for you.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 8:  Regional Extinction

What is it?

Regional extinction last occurred when the population collapsed after the Europeans brought disease to the New World.  Smallpox, measles, and high cholesterol (eventually) killed an estimated 90% of the pre-Columbus population through either disease or carryover effects.  That amounted to, perhaps, 10% of the world population at the time.

What to do?

Don’t eat bats.  Don’t welcome Spaniards.

mayans

I fell in love with a calendar.  Together we had a lot of dates.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 9:  Continental or Multi-Continental Extinction

What is it?

This hasn’t happened in recorded history.  There are some scientists that theorize that the supervolcano Tomba that erupted 75,000 years ago nearly eliminated humanity.  How close?  Genetic evidence indicates that it might have been as low as 1,000 breeding pairs of humans.  However, some people think those scientists are bunch of cotton headed ninny mugginses, and say that people were just fine – the restriction in genetic variation shows up because some people were MUCH better at propagating their genes, if you know what I mean.  Also?  Asteroids aren’t your friend.

What to do? 

Be lucky.  Wear clean underwear.  You cannot save enough food for this contingency – it may last years and the task will be nothing less than rebuilding civilization.  Read Lucifer’s Hammer for a lighthearted look at life after a Level 9.

W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 10:  Planetary Extinction

What is it?

Game over, man.

What to do?

Save money in your 401k, grill some burgers and watch the game.  Go back to sleep.

 

And there’s the W.I.L.D.E.R.™ scale.  Drop me an email or leave a comment if I missed something.