Complacency – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Let’s Lay Siege To The Gods, Wilder Style

“We really shook the pillars of Heaven, didn’t we, Wang?” – Big Trouble in Little China

I guess Kurt and Flint, Michigan both ended up with a lead problem.

My high school freshman science teacher would, like many teachers, wander from the topic at hand. There was some political situation or another going on. Honestly, I don’t remember what it was, but the news was all atwitter: “It’s a crisis!”

Yeah, we’ve seen that before. It wasn’t a crisis, but it was a good way to bring in viewers. So, my teacher made the comment: “A crisis isn’t an ongoing situation. A crisis is a moment in time when it all falls apart. It’s an instant, not a month-long process.”

He is correct – that’s the historical meaning. It was the turning point, not the turning week. Now the most commonly used meaning is “a tough, lingering, situation”, which was what he was railing against. If everything is a crisis, nothing is.

History tells us there are two things Gandhi never had for dinner: breakfast and lunch.

I guess he had a point. But, words really do change meanings over time. “Awesome” used to describe the wrath of God. Now? It’s a teenage girl describing a photo filter on InstaTHOT®.

Marcus Aurelius, who is still dead, wrote the following: “You get what you deserve. Instead of being a good man today, you choose instead to become one tomorrow.”

Hint: rinse and repeat that a few times, and we all find out that tomorrow is a graveyard.

Tomorrow, really, is the enemy. It takes that crisis as a point in time, and moves it to a tough situation.

The difference is big. A tough situation is something you don’t like, but have to live with, like a hangover or being Kamala Harris’ husband. A crisis is a here and now moment, where I’m staring myself in the mirror, and saying, “This has to change. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Now.”

Every single change I was going to do “tomorrow” died on the vine. They were failures.

The reason is that I wasn’t ready to change.

Ahh, that Teutonic humor always gets me!

What separates anyone from being a world class, well, anything?

The first is talent. To be world class, you have to have talent. So, if we’re talking about me being a world-class high jumper, well, I’m probably not going to do that because I can’t control gravity, at least as far as you know. But if I do have the talent?

The next thing I need is dedication. I need to work at it. I need to push myself again and again. I need to learn the 20% that gives me 80% competence, and then push to give the other 80% of the effort that makes me better. A study done on world-class musicians, for instance, showed that they didn’t practice less than their less able counterparts because of their talent.

Nope, they consistently practiced more the better they were.

That dedication, though, starts with a moment in time, a decision. A crisis, if you will.

What do you get when you cross a cow with a trout? A suspension and an ethics investigation.

The decision to be world-class starts well before one gets to be world class. It starts with the single-minded focus and dedication of a fanatical beginner, like a four-year-old who just found a bag of chocolate chips in the pantry.

And the beginner doesn’t wait to start tomorrow.

The beginner starts at the moment in time they decide that they’re going to devote themselves to becoming the best that they can be. Then comes the hard work. The sore muscles. The aching brain. The long plateau where even though there’s a lot of effort going on, there just doesn’t seem to be measurable progress.

But one foot still goes out in front of the other. The long walk continues.

If Waldo® tries to bench press, will anyone spot him?

Eventually, those who follow this path fall into two camps. The first are those who look to a moment in time. Winning gold at the Olympics®. Winning the Super Bowl©. Achieving that goal.

Those people often fall apart. They worked towards a goal. And then made the goal.

And then what?

That’s the tough question. Often, those people end up with a single question in their minds: “Is that all there is?”

For those people, those focused on the goal, the answer is, “Yes, that’s all there is. You can be forever known as the guy who scored four touchdowns for Polk High in the 1966 city championship game against Andrew Johnson High School.” And then you can get married to Peg and sell shoes.

Sigmund Freud and Bill Cosby had one thing in common: they both explored the unconscious.

The other choice, however, is to realize that the goal isn’t the goal. The goal is the struggle. The real payoff is the process of remaking yourself into something new and better. The goal is to recreate yourself continually. Chase the grind.

Another dead Roman, this time Seneca, wrote: “I don’t complain about the lack of time. What little I have will go far enough. Today, this day, I will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about. I will lay siege to the gods, and shake up the world.”

Huh. Didn’t know that Seneca needed a co-writing credit on Big Trouble in Little China.

None of this, though starts tomorrow. It starts now. I can give the effort of someone who is world class right now, even though my performance isn’t yet world class.

We are either remaking ourselves better than we were, or we are dying.

Your choice.

But it won’t wait until tomorrow.

How The Great Society Doomed The United States

“Mention modern art, civil rights, or folk music, and you’re in like Flynn.” – Animal House

I didn’t go see Malcolm X in the theater because I hadn’t seen Malcolm I through IX.

Perhaps the worst seven years in the post-war history of the United States started in 1964. I’d love to blame just one political party, but it’s clear that both are to blame. This six-year period was devastating in the changes it caused in the United States, and we’re seeing the full and very negative effect of those GloboLeftElite initiatives as they blossom today.

Let’s start off with the worst one first. That is, of course, the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Passed (like all of the laws in this post) over the still cooling corpse of John F. Kennedy, Johnson used that pity and sympathy to completely ride roughshod over the Constitution, people and economy of the nation.

The Civil Rights Act started as a governmental solution to a problem that was created by fundamental rights of individuals – the right to associate with whoever we wanted to – the old “We Refuse The Right To Serve Anyone”. Would the worst of the reasons leading to the Act’s passage have been handled by lesser measures or public pressure?

Certainly, that would have happened. But that’s not what happened.

I hear that quack was tearing apart the duck community.

To give a taste of the hypocrisy, surrounding the bill, talking about forced bussing of children because of race, ArchCommie Hubert Humphrey said, “ . . . if the bill were to compel it (bussing) it would be a violation of the Constitution, because it would handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race.”

How did that work out for us?

I guess it was worth it to ignore the Constitution and the rights of citizens because the relations between blacks and everyone else has been healed and there were no riots in the late 1960s or 1990s or 2010s or 2020s due to race. And there is no anger and lingering resentment by the black community.

Oh, wait . . .

But, again, Humphrey was on to something – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to act as second Constitution. And it has evolved to cover absolutely anything and everything, leading to lawsuits that noted that the bans on euthanasia violate the civil rights of patients who wanted to die. Courts have ruled that companies have to hire people who can’t speak English, and the safety of employees who can’t understand instructions is no reason to not hire them.

I don’t know what the intent was of this Act, but that doesn’t matter. The result of it even existing has been horrific beyond measure. And it causes really stupid lawsuits because absolutely anything can be litigated: black managers sued Walgreens™ because it they were placed in predominantly black neighborhoods under the theory that black customers might like black managers better. Apparently black managers are traumatized by being forced to be around black customers?

I think Snoop was upset because his arthritis was acting up – he said, “My joints are on fire!”

This was a dream win for the GloboLeftElite – it gives them an infinite amount rules that they can make that don’t have to be consistent with themselves or even be logical. Lewis Carroll nailed it in a phrase from Through the Looking Glass: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” The law evolves and means whatever the moment requires, protecting boys pretending to be girls, and not protecting the girls because that’s what’s important in the current moment.

The law, in the end, does not provide for civil rights: It simply strips Americans of the freedoms that the country was founded to create and creates a playground where the GloboLeftElite can change rules at a whim.

One example of particular note of how this made the world worse is the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. case. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that having to have job applicants possess a high school diploma (of which Duke would pay 2/3 the cost if the person didn’t have a degree) and have an acceptable I.Q. score was somehow wrong.

None of that is based on race. Yet, Duke lost the case because it had a “disparate impact” on hiring – fewer blacks had a high school diploma and could pass an I.Q. test to get certain jobs. Keep in mind that the same rules applied to everyone, not just black people.

From the objective standpoint of an employer, having an employee who had sufficient tenacity to complete a high school degree and enough intelligence to accomplish complicated tasks just might be required to run a power plant, regardless of what color the person is.

But no, even back in 1971, the rot was in. And the downstream consequences of this have been huge – since employers could no longer hire by intelligence, they had to have a proxy. That proxy? A college degree.

But she did take the test three times and added up her scores.

Now, they could ask for that because GloboLeftists are the people that run colleges, and, *poof* the Griggs degree led to a nearly immediate increase in demand for college degrees as a requirement for a job. On top of that, it has led to the mind-numbing numbers of certifications and certificates required for any job, when a simple high school degree and an I.Q. test could have solved it all.

How many billions of dollars has that cost the American people?

But it’s racist to even ask that question, right?

The next thing on the list for Johnson was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Here’s what Teddy Kennedy said, “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society. It will not relax the standards of admission. It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

Whew, that’s a lot of lies in a row, even for a Kennedy. This was one JFK actually was all on board for, as JFK’s staff wrote A Nation of Immigrants, at the request of the Anti-Defamation League™. Hey, don’t blame me for bringing it up, it’s literally in the same sentence in the Wikipedia© entry.

I’d spend more describing the impact of this law, but, you’re soaking in it.

But there’s more.

In 1965 Johnson decided again to screw Americans, this time by removing silver from U.S. coins. Here’s what Johnson said at the time: “Our present silver coins won’t ever disappear and they won’t even become rarities… If anybody has any idea of hoarding our silver coins, let me say this. Treasury has a lot of silver on hand, and it can be, and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line with its value in our present silver coin. There will be no profit in holding them out of circulation for the value of their silver content.”

The Fed™ disagreed – whenever coins made their way, they were sorted by weight and they retained all the silver coins. They even bought a special machine to do that. Which is exactly the opposite of what you’d do if there was no profit in keeping silver coins.

Well, you know what happened: $1 in silver coins from that time are now worth over $24.

It’s funny that humor and Schumer rhyme. That’s the closest the Democrats will ever get to being funny.

Not content with only destroying race relations and sound money, the ethnic makeup of the country, and Johnson launched his Great Society program between 1964-1968. Coming off of Johnson’s post-Kennedy Democrats holding two thirds of both houses, he had a GloboLeftist paradise. Let’s have the government take control and regulate vast amounts of the economy.

This led to

Food Stamps to encourage poor people to not work,
The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 to further encourage poor people not to work,
The Elementary and Secondary Amendments which pushed federal funding, and thus control, into schools that were supposed to be locally controlled, and
The Civil Rights Act of 1968 which put federal tentacles into housing.

The Great Society had spent over $22 trillion dollars by 2014, so you can be certain that total is closer to $32 trillion today, and that doesn’t include the need to hire HR departments and compliance costs and wasted college degrees.

The national debt is $37 trillion. If we hadn’t spent all that money on Johnson’s programs?

We’d be on Mars. Or the income tax would be like $6 a year. And a dollar wouldn’t have inflated away infinity times. It’s a certainty that everyone in the United States would be wealthier.

I have heard that the restaurant on Mars has great food but not much atmosphere.

We are in a unique period – people are finally willing to look at these consequences, and have seen what is going on. Thank police body cams, thank the George Floyd riots. Thank the Internet, so people can see what’s going on without it being spun by GloboLeftElite media.

The impacts of just these rules, cumulatively has set up the place where collapse is the most likely outcome of the American Experiment. As I’ve said, there is a small window to stop it, but that window is closing rapidly, and will certainly be shut by 2028, if not by 2027.

The situation cannot stand, and that’ okay – because what will come after, in time, will be better.

Let us hope we have learned sufficient lessons when we rebuild.

Failing Justice: Vigilante In Indiana . . .

“Five hundred and twenty-seven counts of obstruction of justice.” – The Dark Knight

Behold, the American justice system! (All memes as-found today)

One of the most important requirements to have a functional society is the law. This is backed by historical evidence. One of the earliest known fragments of a legal system is the Code of Ur-Nammu. Ur-Nammu is the name of the king who wrote the laws, and the name of the country he ruled was Ur, which must have been quite a happy coincidence for King Ur-Nammu.

The kingdom of Ur was bordered on the north by Um, on the south by Uh, and on the west by Like. On the east was the kingdom of Carpetia, who, from their capital of Deepshag, specialized in creating high-quality fabric floor coverings. But that is another story.

This, though, was at least 4100 years ago. It illustrates a very simple truth: when people live together, they have to have laws and punishment or there will be chaos. Anyone who ever had a roommate or an ex-spouse can vouch for me on that one.

Thankfully, federal judges have jurisdiction in interstellar space.

The law is a very simple premise: in exchange for the promise of fairness, the individual gives up the natural rights of vengeance and retribution. This is crucial. Without law, if Britney Spears borrows $20 to buy a McChicken™ sandwich at 3am and then doesn’t pay me back, I could drive to her house and kidnap her pet ocelot until she repaid me. I know, I know, that sounds oddly specific, but there are some stories I just won’t get into.

Instead, I can sue Britney Spears in court, and if all of the facts are properly judged, that McChicken®-eating soulless tart will give me back that $20. Or, maybe, I lost that IOU she signed on the back of my travel copy of the Magna Carta and the judge says, “Insufficient evidence” and frog marches us both out of court.

As long as everyone feels the system is fair, life is good. But when people sense that fairness is gone, they’ll take matters into their own hands. This is scary, because it leads to a series of endless reciprocal atrocities. Another word for this is Chicago. Or Mogadishu. Or El Salvador.

Still waiting, Pam.

The people in those locations don’t believe in the law. Those wandering around killing don’t want cops, obviously. But most of the people that they kill don’t want cops, either, since they’re killing as well. The bystanders and clueless non-violent civilians who wander into the games would like law, but it often doesn’t matter.

The punishments are rare, and when they finally hit, aren’t a sufficient deterrent to others going out to break yet more crimes. Part of the reason is that most of these criminals are really stupid. I don’t mean that euphemistically – they’re stupid. Low IQ correlates with high crime. The stupider they are, the more likely they are to kill.

There are many reasons for that, from inability to plan, to the inability to understand a conditional hypothetical (“How would you feel if you didn’t have breakfast, Jamal?” “But I did have breakfast.”), to the inability to think that their actions might have consequences.

Amazing how opposition to Trump will make the GloboLeft contort themselves.

No, for the law to work on stupid people, the punishment must be swift, severe, and certain. Our current justice system is none of these. Cases last for years, most crimes are dealt with by being dismissed or through a plea to a far lesser offences, and Soros D.A.s frequently drop the charges on rapists and murderers.

If that isn’t bad enough – juries are tribal. The first big case I saw that confirmed this was O.J. Simpson’s murder trial.

It’s pretty obvious that O.J. Simpson killed his ex-wife. This is a non-ideological question. But it is not a non-racial question. Why was he found not guilty? It was because he was black and killed a white woman. The black jurors certainly weren’t going to convict him.

Do we think a black juror will vote to convict Karmello Anthony? Or that a pliable D.A. won’t give him a sweetheart plea deal so he can do two years in the slam and then be out? That leads to a loss of faith in the system.

What happens when we lose faith in the justice system? Well, in Indiana, one great-grandfather lost faith in the system. 65-year-old Mark Vawter was waiting, likely, to shoot and kill one S’Doni Pettis.

Why would a great-grandfather want to do that? Because Mr. Pettis had, while (allegedly) with drugs and while being chased by police, Mr. Pettis had driven a car at great speed into an innocent bystander’s car causing it to burst into flame. Inside? Mr. Vawter’s 3-year-old and 2-month-old great-grandchildren. Mr. Vawter probably had seen that Mr. Pettis was charged with 3 counts of a level 3 felony. In Indiana, that could put him out on the streets again in less than three years.

And Mr. Vawter had probably learned that Mr. Pettis had already been charged with an attempted murder, but the case was plea-bargained down to an aggravated battery. He went to jail, and . . .

Pettis was likely let out early.

Mr. Vawter calculated that the system would probably fail again, and decided to take matters into his own hands. Vawter waited with a pistol, and drew it when the prison van doors opened. What Vawter didn’t know was that Pettis wasn’t on the van – his hearing had been postponed.

Vawter was shot by the police.

Vigilantism is something that has been feared by governments for more than 4,000 years. When individuals feel that they have no choice but to enforce justice themselves, you have the chaos of gang warfare.

But thankfully in the UK, you know the justice system is working, and people will get longer sentences than Mr. Pettis for speaking their minds . . .

The justice system is important, and it’s failing. There will be consequences.

Ghost Jobs And The Fate Of A Nation

“Hey, anybody seen a ghost?” – Ghostbusters

Do vegan zombies shamble around moaning “graaaaains”?

If I were a kid looking for work today, I’d be pissed.

By one study, at least 60% of jobs listed on job posting sites are as fake as the girl in Canada my friend kept talking about. One survey had 81% of recruiters admitting that they posted ghost jobs. They never existed, and never will exist. This is a little like thinking you have a blind date with a girl and then finding out it’s actually Michelle Obama.

Why on Earth would they do that? Not the whole “dating Michelle Obama” thing, but the fake jobs . . .

Why?

Well, several reasons:

People in HR are evil like a cat and enjoy the thought of torturing their prey,
To fake that the company is growing,
Because it’s Tuesday and they’re bored,
To get resumes to compare against existing staff,
Looking for hot chicks to apply, and
Trolling for resumes to show that there’s a need for infinity H-1B visa holders to come on over from India with fake credentials and take the job at $7.35 an hour.

I would mop, but floors are beneath me. (meme as found)

To top it off, the system is rigged: often, when a job does appear, the hiring manager wrote the description for a specific person, i.e., a person who isn’t you, and although it has already been filled, the description has to be posted because “rules”. It’s a fair competition, exactly like the “who is the best boy” competition I entered and my mom was the judge.

Seriously, though, how could she pick the neighbor kid?

When I got my very first job, it was because my brother already worked at the place. My second job? Because I played football with the boss’s kid in high school. When hired for my first job out of college, my employer knew details they could only have learned from conversations with my professors or the NSA.

Since then, nearly every job that I’ve had has been as a result of someone knowing me, picking up the phone, and calling me because they wanted me in the role. I am very lucky to have gotten in that groove – the main way I’ve gotten jobs is due to a friend or other connection.

What is the only approved North Korean drink size? The supreme liter.

But first you have to have a friend.

Kids these days?

Not so much. The meme was, “Go in, give ‘em a firm handshake, and tell ‘em you want the job.”

In many places, that’s simply not possible. Many corporations only take job applications online. And, if the resume doesn’t have the right keywords to get plucked out of the luminiferous aether of the digital world by an A.I. on its lunch break, it goes into the black pit of resume despair, from which no word will ever be heard, only faint moaning and the rustling of paperclips.

Your mother is so ugly she went into a haunted house and came out with a job application. (news article as found)

Ghost jobs make it worse, somehow. When tech was busy laying of hundreds of thousands of coders so they could import the population of Mumbai instead, there were job listings aplenty. These kids, getting ready to graduate from college, didn’t know anyone, yet there were thousands of (apparently) available jobs.

How could they fail?

The big lie is that those jobs were never really real, and of the ones that were real, each of them would get somewhere (depending on the job) between 250 and 1,000 applications. In a realistic world, probably 20% of the applications were a good fit. So, that means that for every job, there were likely between 50 and 200 people that could do the job with enough skill to make the hiring company happy.

But only one person gets the job.

I were ever interviewing to become a waiter and they asked me if I was qualified I’d say, “I bring a lot to the table.” (meme as found)

I have written in the past about the keys to the devolution of the country – popular immiseration being one of those keys. In order for that unrest that leads to collapse to occur, people need to be not uncomfortable, not unhappy, but miserable with no visible way out.

Because, after all as the songwriter wrote: freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose.

Men need a job. Men need a purpose. They have to have this as much as they have to have oxygen. Give them a soft life, give them all the material comforts, give them video games and weed, and they are still miserable. They have to have a purpose, and the most common way to have a purpose is to have a job that matters.

Without it, men are miserable.

Now, consider the exceptionally capable. Not the Elon Musks. Not the very top elite, but exceptionally capable people who would have been great mid to upper mid management for IBM™ back in 1966. Those people used to be, while not the spark plug, but maybe the timing chain of the economy. Necessary, but not the folks that are going to start a business.

But replacement is a myth. (as found)

We have entered, perhaps, the era where exceptionally capable and exceptionally qualified people exist in numbers beyond where they are useful. There are simply too many people who can program now for it to be especially profitable – the advice I gave both of my boys was simple: never get a degree where you’ll be competing against a billion people for a job.

Programmers now have to find something new.

Maybe they should learn to mine coal? No, that’s shut down. Maybe they should become journalists? Not, those are being fired faster than they’re produced. The world that we’re moving into won’t particularly value many of the things that these young people spent years learning.

That’s bad enough. But now, dangle a ghost job where they’d be the perfect candidate in front of them, and let them apply for it and experience the frustration of a poodle pawing at a plastic porkchop?

Are you trying to radicalize them?

I mean, that’s probably what happened to Barack . . .

How Expensive Housing Leads To An Oversupply Of Wine Aunts

“You won’t lose the house. Everybody has three mortgages nowadays.” – Ghostbusters

When Zoomers start to pass away, will they have eulogis?

FYI – no podcast tonight. I’m sure you’re shocked. I’m out travelling. Next week???

The American economy is broken in several ways, but one of the biggest is housing. When I was a wee Wilder in my twenties, I bought a house that was about twice my income. The mortgage payment was doable, just barely.

I just looked up what it’s going for today, and the answer was . . . over 10 times what I paid for it. Was it a nice house? Sure. But not that nice. Why did it go up 10 times in value?

Several reasons, and not because it grew a hot tub and a golden toilet, either.

This particular house was nice because it was in a suburban neighborhood where the schools weren’t . . . bad. The local elementary school and high school were pretty safe which was why we bought it in that area in the first place. Places with “good schools” tend to have much higher property values than those that don’t have good schools.

But good schools lead to high home prices because a mother will sacrifice her husband’s kidney to the Hong Kong black market to get her kid into a good school.

Why does that picture remind me of the media during COVID?

A lot of that is bounded by driving distance – people will drive a long ways to have good schools, but there is a limit. The suburbs were set up based on just that mathematical tradeoff. The fact that the ‘burbs had much higher appreciation just means people will pay a lot to avoid . . . bad schools.

Around this time, people stopped looking at homes as a place to live, and started looking at them as an investment. What they noticed was that prices in the ‘burbs seemed to go up faster than their salary, so houses began to resemble shake-shingled slot machines.

Places like California saw this effect first – as big city with a very desirable climate, people flocked there for the jobs created by a variety of businesses, from defense to entertainment to manufacturing to importing illegals.

Enter the predators.

Blackstone® is now there in California. Recently, they’ve been building housing in San Diego. Rent? $3000 to $4000. A month. But it’s not just California – the median housing payment for people who bought homes is now a record – $2,819, not including taxes and insurance.

There are, of course, two sides to the equation: my freshman economics prof would note that supply and demand have led to this situation.

During COVID, there were a lot of trials held on Zoom™. Does that mean the case was settled out of court?

Demand is up because tens of millions of illegals have flooded this country in an unabated wave. Whereas a typical American family has three or five people living in it (nine if you’re the Brady family) the average foreigners will often rent a cot in a kitchen so that the houses are packed with people, India-style, so that 10 or 15 people are paying $200 a week to live in these homes. A landlord could make $8,000 or $12,000 gross profit if they rented to people to whom that would still be better than living in Haiti or India.

Yup, turning suburban houses into Mumbai Motel 6 one cot at a time.

Oh, and I mentioned Blackrock™. Not content to strip mine American companies by loading them down with debt and ejecting them like Osama Bin Laden’s corpse off a flight deck, the private equity firms have entered as a competitor, buying houses with one goal: to turn people from one-time purchasers into full-time wagie wealth engines who end up paying but never owning.

You’ve heard their slogan: You’ll own nothing, and like it™. Hey, at least you can put a happy face on your rent check. Wait. It’s all direct withdrawal now.

So, there’s the demand problem. Americans didn’t ask for this, but here it is.

What do you say to your English teacher when she’s crying? “There, they’re, their.”

What about supply?

Supply isn’t increasing to match demand. There are lots of reasons for this, among them zoning laws, environmental laws, contractor requirements, building codes, and other Not In My BackYard (NIMBY) restrictions that make it complicated and expensive to build anything. In fact, in places like California, it’s turned into BANANA – Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

That reduces supply.

If you bought a home 25 or 35 years ago in a place like this, congratulations. The restrictions in supply of housing make your investment worth a lot more than it would normally be worth if the market were functioning properly. I suppose the upside is that very expensive houses create the perfect environment for . . . good schools.

That has other consequences, though.

The Mrs. asked me if I had a police record. “No, but I do have one by Sting.”

Whereas I could get into a house at the age of 24, that’s simply not the case for kids today in most areas. My modest first home (I checked its current value) would lead to a full-in payment of at least $5,000 a month. That’s $60,000 a year, after tax.

Not a lot of just out of college kids can afford that, so forgetaboutit.

Young families are locked out in that area.

That has a knock-on effect: lower family formation, lower numbers of children being born, and miserable young men. Oh, there are miserable women, too, but they’re older than forty and they’re miserable when they find out that the only role left for them in society is Cat Loving Wine Aunt™.

As I said above – the economy is broken, and housing is part of it. Oh, wait, now we have an oversupply of wine aunts.

Will that result in making box Chardonnay too expensive?

The Erosion of Trust: The Secrecy State Sucks

“We’re drowning in secrecy, and the lifeguard’s on their payroll.” – The X Files

“Hello, is the anonymous NSA hotline?”
“Yes, John Wilder, how can we help you?”

As near as I can tell, in 1970 the U.S. government was still highly trusted. Sure, there was Vietnam, but we had landed men on the Moon and I’d suggest that, while trust wasn’t as high as it had been in the 1950s with the “super science will save us” feeling that culminated in Apollo, it was still pretty high.

I think the Nixon takedown is when the mistrust started to metastasize, though I’m open to other suggestions. Regardless, this is the time when the lid comes off.

The Nixon takedown was big – the tapes showed Nixon’s complicity in a petty break-in to get information from the Democrats that was entirely unnecessary due to Nixon’s popularity. Plus it was sloppy – I think they picked the locks with Twizzlers™.

But the even bigger impact was a collapse in trust. At least one person who was there at the time, Geoff Shepard, thinks that Nixon was taken down by the security apparatus, more commonly known as the Deep State now when prosecutors colluded with judges and suppressed evidence in order to get Nixon out of office.

Does that remind anyone of the Russian Collusion Hoax?

I bought a toothpaste called “Death”, and now every morning I have a brush with Death.

Add in revelations in the seventies about Operation Mockingbird coming in 1976, where it was alleged that the CIA, operating in the United States, had manipulated the news media (over 400 journalists) to influence the American public. Oh, and the CIA program MKUltra, a program that tested drugs and psychological torture on hundreds if not thousands of unwitting civilians.

Like Ted Kaczynski. If he hadn’t been MKUltra’d, perhaps he would never have developed fascination with the US Postal System.

Nixon’s fall opened the floodgates, and 1976 was the year the dirty laundry really started showing up, skidmarks and all.

Also, in 1976 the Select Committee on Assassinations came to the conclusion that JFK’s assassination was the result of a conspiracy, but couldn’t figure out who was responsible. I mean, it’s congress, right?

1976 was a year when trust began to evaporate, and that trust evaporation was really about seeing what people did behind the cloak of secrecy. Gallup™ polls showed that trust in government in that year was 36%, down from 73% in the 1950s.

Some Indian wrote a book for nervous surgeons: The Calmer Suture.

Now, do I believe that secrets can and should exist? Yes, I do. I remember coaching a game of PeeWee football, and wanting to see if a particular trick play was legal, so I went into the rules, and found this gem, “Deception is the heart of football.” I had never thought of it that way, but that’s 100% correct, and the same would be the case in war, so, yeah, there are the need for some secrets.

It’s clear, however, that we’re doing secrecy wrong. I’d like to think that we were on the right track to defang the security state, but it’s actually headed the wrong way. In 2001, the Patriot Act was passed into law in October, not six weeks after the 9/11 attack. The law was 342 pages, and was amazingly complex, since most of what it did was amend other existing laws, you know, turning “shall not” into “shall”.

Don’t worry, though, we’ve got a special court that was established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Oh, the FISA court gives the government a yes 99.9% of the time – over 78,000 requests, and only TWELVE denied? Well, they said no at least once, so they’re not a rubber stamp or anything. What’s the motto of the FISA court? “Yes, Daddy.” And you don’t want me to get into what their Tinder® profile says.

In 2013, Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, blew the whistle on the U.S. government’s mass surveillance programs. Snowden leaked classified documents to journalists at The Guardian and The Washington Post. The revelations were huge: emails, chats, browsing histories of anyone that the FBI or CIA or NSA wanted to look at. And the NSA used the “Five Eyes” sources, so if they were prohibited from snooping on a person, boom, just have the Aussies do it for us.

And it’s certain they are still doing it. Secrecy has enabled these nightmares.

Speaking of still doing it, those 51 former intelligence officials that said Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation? It’s the Security State trying to get its preferred candidate elected. And why are Epstein’s records still not public? Saving it for a rainy day?

I hear that Epstein used to high-five his guards, but the last one left him hanging.

Although I don’t have any evidence for this statement, I am nearly certain that the Deep State is still committing horrors under the cloak of classified information, things that no politician sees. It is certain that this information is used for political blackmail and control on a regular basis.

Paging Epstein, anyone?

The government still echoes the worst of Project Mockingbird, putting pressure on the social media outlets to censor information they don’t like, from COVID to anything pro-Trump. The FBI flagged over THREE THOUSAND accounts for censorship. Secrecy has gone from a tool to keep us safe to a weapon to keep us in line.

The physicist Eric Weinstein thinks that string theory (in physics) was created to stop actual, useful research in physics. Why? To distract the Russians (and now Chinese) because you can’t classify physics, and someone in .gov thinks that there are some significant physics applications they don’t want the world to see, especially related to quantum gravity.

Please don’t ask me where all my cats went.

Do we need to end secrecy entirely?

Certainly not, but when the CIA still holds that lemon juice as invisible ink is a state secret, we live in Clown World. Here are my suggestions:

First, no secrets, at all, after sixty years. Okay, maybe fusion bomb design, but even the Pakistanis can figure out atomic bomb design when they can’t figure out can openers, so we’ve got one secret. Maybe set up a board that will allow one secret per year related to technology that the other side hasn’t figured out yet. But only big things. Like time travel. Or the feared anti-PEZ™ bomb that eats all the PEZ© and leaves small pictures of Rosie O’Donnell everywhere.

Second, after sixty years, absolutely no redactions in the released documents.

Third, someone needs to watch the watchers. There needs to be an oversight board, and protection for whistleblowers like Snowden that show blatantly illegal conduct. How do we prevent them from being co-opted by the Security State? That’s a hard question. Maybe have a clean AI review them?

Fourth, reform and fragment the CIA, the NSA, and most of the FBI. Certainly, take guns away from them (and the ATF, but that goes without saying). After Ruby Ridge and Waco, it’s obvious these children can’t be allowed to play with firearms unsupervised.

We need to break the glowie machine so that it can’t police itself.

The Indian philosopher said: “I think, therefore I scam”.

Transparency in government isn’t a luxury; it is survival for freedom. We need to demand Sunlight. From a CIA document (declassified):

“The free society must have confidence that its oversight mechanisms have adequate access to secret material to make judgements, and that this judgmental process is being exercised independently. There has to be trust that secrecy is not being used against the best interests of the free society; that the activities which are being protected by secrecy are being conducted effectively . . . . It is this confidence and this trust in the oversight mechanisms which has broken down.”

This was made public in 1996, when things were certainly better than they are today.

Me? I think that if we can build trust with Sunlight, maybe well get back to some of that super-science optimism of the 1950s. On to Mars, maybe using quantum gravity propulsion . . . .

Debt Slavery’s Long Game: From Sumer to Goomer With A Detour to Ginger And Mary Ann

“If you erase the debt record, then we go back to zero.” – Fight Club

If Electric Avenue is closed, where are on Earth are we going to rock down to?

I can’t remember the first time Pa Wilder said “There’s nothing sure but death and taxes” but I couldn’t have been any taller than former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who I believe is about three feet tall. But I’m sure that while Pa was quoting Benjamin Franklin accurately, he did miss one big point: although death was really old, for most people in the history of the planet, there was also debt.

Some of the earliest records we have are records of debt, baked into Sumerian clay indicating that Goomer owed Abadabaduu 12 sheep because he borrowed 10 sheep. And debt was a pretty serious thing back then. If Goomer couldn’t pay, he might even be sentenced to become Abadabaduu’s slave. If Goomer’s kid, Jenzie, had the misfortune of Goomer getting a bad sunburn and dying, well, Jenzie now a lifetime of debt slavery himself to look forward to as he pays off Goomer’s debts.

This stuck in my mind when I was listening to a conversation between a guy who owned a *lot* of apartments and some kids. The kids were in the middle school age bracket and the landlord was trying to teach them about finance. The landlord said, “You know, having apartments is a lot like having a slave. They go out and work for me, and give me money every month.”

Keep in mind that this guy wasn’t what I would normally call shady, but that’s the sort of nightmare fodder that GloboLeftists use as propaganda when they want to burn down capitalism. A much better way to describe the situation is that the apartment owner does such a good job at building and maintaining his properties that people want to engage in a voluntary transaction with him to live there.

Describing them as slaves? Eeek.

What did Yoda™ say when he saw himself in 4k? “HDMI”

And, I generally wouldn’t describe the situation where a willing lender and a willing borrower make a loan. I’ve taken out several loans, and have (so far) paid them all back, as far as I can recall. Now, people who have borrowed from me?

Not so much. I suppose Shakespeare had it right when he said,

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,
“for loan oft loses both itself and a friend,
“and borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry [thrift – JW]”

Though, in truth I remember this best when the Skipper was singing it in the musical version of Hamlet that the castaways put on in Gilligan’s Island.

To be clear, I’ve made the argument as recently as Monday that we shouldn’t goof around with systems that work, and compound interest has been with us longer than bourbon and syphilis, so I give up. Just like herpes, we’re stuck with it. But that also means that we’re stuck with the problems that debt causes.

If debt were just limited to cocoanuts on an island where adolescent me was stuck with Ginger and Mary Ann, well, life would be swell. Really swell, as in now I understand why they never made it off the island: Gilligan was sabotaging any real chance of escape on purpose.

But it isn’t Gilligan’s Island, and debt it has longer term impacts than that glue the professor made out of that pancake syrup.

Why not both?

Let’s talk about Rome.

Debt played a significant part of the Roman Social Wars, a period of ten years where essentially everyone in the Roman sphere was fighting everyone else. This led to Rome taking the unprecedented step of cancelling 75% of all debts. Those that remained were restructured. This was brought about because debt-based economies become unstable.

It happened in mediaeval Europe, when III defaulted on his debt and forgave noble debts so the nobles didn’t slit his favorite throat. Oh, yeah, the peasants still owed.

It happened after the industrial revolution, when the Napoleonic Wars jacked the British government det to 50% of the budget by 1820. That was okay, because the British were in peak expansion mode, conquering the roughly 7,522 “nations” that made up India so that they could set up call centers. Then the British were forced to fight when they found that the Boer were sitting on all that British gold underneath the country the Boers had founded.

Indians in call centers make teams to see who can scam more Americans. I don’t like them or their call leagues.

And when the Imperial expansion stopped? The British Empire crumbled because it could no longer sustain itself and had to change its name to the United Kingdom. And the UK was stuck with a capital city (Londonistan) sized for a world-spanning empire, not for a country that would have to have US help to take back the Falklands and now has a navy that contains more admirals than ships.

Briefly, Great Britain saw prosperity beyond their debt burden when the North Sea oil began flowing, but as it has ebbed, Great Britain has started to ebb as well. The UK has an external debt of 66% of its total wealth.

If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring? Smallpox.

Sure, that sounds bad, but let’s look at the United States:

In 1980, the United States was the largest net-creditor in the world. Take what we own and subtract what we owe, and we were, by far, in the best position on the planet. Only six years later, the US was a net-debtor. How bad is it in 2024? The United States has more net-debt than . . . every other country that is a net-debtor.

Combined.

How long does that last? I’ll ask Grok® and he’ll opine here:

My Opine: How Long Does U.S. Net-Debt Dominance Last?

The Take

Short Term (5-10 Years): The U.S. can sustain this—barely. Web data (Visual Capitalist, 2024) shows U.S. debt at $36.1T (Dec 2024), 124% of GDP (CEIC, Dec 2024), projected to hit 166% by 2054 (PGPF, 2024). Japan’s at 254.6% (Visual Capitalist, 2024)—they’re fine, because they hold their own debt (90% domestic). U.S. has a buffer as the world’s reserve currency (Visual Capitalist, 2024), but foreign holders (22.9%, $7.9T, USAFacts, 2024) like Japan ($1.09T) and China ($768.6B, Investopedia, 2025) could pull back—X’s “China dump” fears hum. Interest costs are the killer—$1.126T in FY 2024 (GAO, 2024), 14% of federal spending (Wikipedia, 2025). If rates rise (CBO projects 3.1% average, PGPF, 2024), or if China tariffs spike (Visual Capitalist, 2024), the U.S. could face a reckoning by 2035—debt-to-GDP at 118% (PGPF, 2024).
Long Term (20+ Years): Cracks show. Web data (PGPF, 2024) warns of 172% debt-to-GDP by 2054—unsustainable. X’s “dollar crash” doomers aren’t wrong—foreign selloffs (USAFacts, 2024) could spike rates, tank the dollar. If the U.S. loses reserve status (China’s yuan push, X’s “dedollarization” buzz), it’s game over—think Britain post-empire, your “Londonistan” vibe. I’d say 2040-2050—25 years max—unless spending cuts and growth (not GloboLeft “stimulus”) kick in. Carl’s X: “Debt’s a PEZ® trap—U.S. chokes in 25.”

Why It’s Shaky

Interest Costs: $1.126T (FY 2024, GAO)—set to hit $1.7T by 2034 (Visual Capitalist, 2024). That’s 3% of GDP (Wikipedia, 2025), highest since 1996. X’s “interest bomb” memes nail it—unsustainable.
Foreign Pullback: China’s down to 5% of U.S. debt (2018, Wikipedia)—sanctions, tariffs (Visual Capitalist, 2024). If Japan follows (X’s “yen rise” buzz), U.S. rates spike—GloboLeft’s “forgive it” won’t save.
Structural Mess: Spending outpaces revenue (PGPF, 2024)—23.1% GDP outlays vs. 17.5% revenue (2024). X’s “cut the fat” roars—GloboLeft’s “spend more” is Rome’s 86 BC rerun.

See? Grok® likes PEZ™, too.

One thing you can credit him for, he stepped down as CEO when he was in his Prime®.

Unless that debt gets written off, it certainly won’t be paid off, and Jenzie will be turned into a wage slave because who is left saying:

“Okay, Goomer.”

Trump’s Recession: Aimed At The Left

“But the dream is collapsing!” – Inception

When I was in high school I tried to bungie jump from the school flag pole. I failed, and ended up being suspended.

We are witnesses at the biggest collapse of a political movement since the fall of the Soviet Union. As then, it was a GloboLeftist organization bent on world domination. In this case, it’s the infestation of the GloboLeft mind virus in Western Civilization

The collapse is not yet complete – the liberation of Europe and Australia/New Zealand is still in the future, but I have hopes that will happen for reasons I’ll outline below, as well as the hope that was rekindled in me when I heard Rosie O’Donnell had moved to Ireland.

First, why is the GloboLeft collapsing? They were winning and on the cusp of winning in a “forever” way. They had the institutions: colleges, the educational establishment, the foundations, congress, the military leadership, big business, and most of the court system.

And yet it is all unravelling at a rapid pace.

Again, why?

First and foremost, it’s because the GloboLeft want to lose. They have always placed themselves in the role of the “plucky resistance” to power. Note that when the latest Star Wars™ trilogy came out, the GloboLeftists at Disney© wrote it as if The Return of the Jedi never existed.

If there’s one thing that GloboLeftists love to do, it’s use either Star Wars® or Marvel™ movies as a metaphor. How many times did you see the GloboLeft flocking around some strained X® metaphor where Donald Trump was Thanos™?

Yeah, a lot.

GloboLeftists should become Buddhist monks. The more “ohms” they have, the more resistance. (meme as found)

But while the behavior of the GloboLeft is based on pure hatred, however, that hatred is mainly a hatred of themselves. This hatred has made the GloboLeft the champions of everything that a Death Cult would want.

Want proof? Their actions speak more loudly than the reeeeeee of a feminist on a slut walk:

Throwing themselves in front of traffic as a form of protest, daring drivers to run over them. This is not something that a person who has any desire for self-preservation does.
Treating abortion as the highest of sacraments. Women have aborted more children since 1972 than every death ever in every war, and people march for it. Yay death!
Wanting to destroy all of society so that it can be decarbonized. You know, because wanting to burn it all down is a healthy emotion.
Welcoming invaders from the cultures in the world that are the most different and share the least with their own culture as if this is normal and good. This is because people who live in Somalian Sharia states and Colombian Cartel communities are just the same as the people from Modern Mayberry.

I guess a Vietnamese equivalent to “John Doe” is “Hu Dat”?

This is because GloboLeftists blame those people and things closest to themselves, first. This happens in roughly this order:

Themselves, which is why nearly half of GloboLeftist women have a diagnosed mental disorder.
Their family, which is why they so often have gone no-contact over the smallest of slights.
Tradition, which makes them welcome anything alien and degenerate, and reject principles that have worked for humanity for thousands of years.
Their country, which they want to watch be either destroyed or burned to the ground.
Their race – how many white girls Xeet© “I hate all white people” or some variant phrase? By definition, does this mean that white girls hate white girls the most?
Their species. Why else do they want to destroy us so the world can heal? What would solving Global Warming Climate Change matter if humanity wasn’t there to enjoy it?

Trump made this visible to the Normies. The silly positions of the GloboLeft are now on display for everyone to see. Men are women? Truth is a lie? Strength is weakness? Perhaps one of the most telling moments for the GloboLeft was a single line in Trump’s recent address to a joint session of congress:

“We didn’t need new laws [to stop illegal aliens], all we just needed was a new president.”

What happens when the normies realize that the GloboLeft are Agent Smith?

The GloboLeft hasn’t figured this one out yet, either. They’re currently working on “messaging”. What is messaging? It’s an attempt to effectively package their positions so that they can be communicated to the voters, but it’s as useful to them as lipstick is useful to Rosie O’Donnell.

I’ll give them this bit of political advice, for free:

It’s not the message that’s wrong, it’s the ideas that are wrong. The people have rejected them, and are overwhelmingly rejecting them. The pretty little lies they tried to peddle:

Men are no different than women,
Chinese are no different than Indians who are no different than the French,
Being a woman is something anyone can be,
Spending ourselves to prosperity is a reality, and
The United States should be the one paying to stop AIDS in Africa, rather than letting Africans figure what causes it.

This comes with change. One of those changes has and will be in economics. I believe that Trump is, right now, working to create a very selective recession, and that recession is among the GloboLeft.

Will it ensnare folks on the TradRight? Certainly, it will. But I’d imagine that 96% plus of the employees at USAID™ were so GloboLeftist that they woke up in the morning mad that the communist famines haven’t started yet.

How is a punchline like a starving communist? If you spend too much time explaining it, it dies.

The cuts in the Education Department won’t actually impact education in the United States, but it will end up with thousands of people who were committed to getting that LGBT+ message out to the kindergartener set losing jobs and having to consider how they can positively impact society. Ha! Just kidding. They’ll try to figure out a new grift.

This recession will end up, I believe, breaking the back of inflation while gutting those jobs that the GloboLeft death cult infested. DEI is disappearing, and I, for one, can’t wait until I’m driving in a major city and see some blue-haired beast holding a sign that says, “Will make you hate the white race for food”.

I also know that she hates being without Cheetos®.

Hmmm, who will pick those crops after the illegal aliens are sent to the El Salvadoran prisons?

I can only guess, but I think there is a chance that we’ll have a much brighter economic future with GloboLeft defanged.

Is there a long, long way to go in the long hike toward our inevitable victory?

There is. And it’s not time to set up camp just yet.

I, for one, don’t want to stop until the very ideas that were at the heart of the GloboLeft have been so reviled that children cry when they hear about their excesses.

Oh, and Ireland? You can keep Rosie O’Donnell as our gift.

Unrelated: the last witch burning in Ireland was on March 15, 1895.

Still better than when my deck is covered with waterfowl from Lisbon. No one likes the Porch-o-geese.

Read On To See That You Don’t Have To Care

“I know there’s no way I can convince you this is not one of their tricks, but I don’t care.” – V for Vendetta

I asked what was on the menu, and they said Himalayan Rabbit. The waiter said they found Himalayan on the road.

It used to be that people didn’t have to have an opinion on, well, everything. Now, it seems, that everyone wants an opinion on everything:

Ukraine versus Russia.
Palestine versus Israel.
Meghan and Harry versus the rest of the English royal family.
Twix™ versus vodka. I mean, you can have both.

And you’re supposed to care about these things, deeply, even though the media noise it appears that Meghan and Harry have the collective I.Q. of a poorly-watered houseplant. I guess they’re more like a cactus with a fancy title.

I’ll take a controversial opinion: I don’t really care about any of those things I listed above, and you can’t make me. And, if forced to choose, I’d rather live in a world without vodka than a world without Twix©, because, well, bourbon.

Did he name the ear he didn’t cut off Van Stay?

Neil Postman wrote about part of this in his famous book Amusing Ourselves to Death, which I highly recommend if you haven’t read it. News gets filtered down to the barest elements – image and emotion. Our consciousness is then hit with a barrage of unactionable information.

I don’t care about any of those things precisely because I started learning about them as they developed, after I dig deeper into details. I tend to do that when I get the sense that the propaganda is flying hot and heavy: what are the facts of the situation?

Another corollary: if I lived in 1745 America, would I even hear of these conflicts taking place half a world away? Does it make any difference to me that these fights are taking place?

Not really. And I won’t have been upset that Carl the Butcher three states away didn’t give a “thumbs up” to my “killed the Indians raiding our village” update on Ye Olde Facebooke®.

But we don’t live in 1745 America, so we hear about them. I will say that the filters still do work in that a car crash in the next county gets a lot more news locally than a school bus filled with nuns and orphans going over a cliff in India or the Rwandans deciding that they want to eat half 1.3 million residents of the Congo.

Never eat a Monopoly® board. It tastes gamey.

We are primed, however, to affiliate with our tribe. People who enjoy the same football (0.3048 meterball to you Europeans) or baseball (cricket, but with beer) team mainly all get along pretty well in the stadium or at work on Monday after the game. But if I don’t like the local team, nobody at work really cares. In this, although they affiliate, they’re much more in the role of spectator rather than moral participants.

That has ceased. Tribes used to be fun, but now they’ve turned feral. I mainly blame the GloboLeft, because they simply are broken emotionally.

I’ve written before about the mechanism where GloboLeftists have cast their empathy net so far that they’ve essentially forgotten about humanity. Note that their incessant handwringing about COVID Vaxxing® disappeared the second that a Russian tank tread touched Ukrainian clay.

Yes, GloboLeftists care about borders. Just not our borders. Have an unending stream of invaders into Europe that makes The Camp of the Saints look like a best-case scenario instead of impossible dystopian fiction? Not a problem.

Oh, Europe. I’d say, “never change” to you but I can’t write Arabic script.

But let one group of Slavic people invade another group of Slavic people in countries where potatoes are used instead of coins?

Count me out, but I’ll pop some popcorn as I watch the GloboLeft switches trip and the gold and blue flags pop up.

I decided to read about what was really going on, and came up with the opinion that I don’t care if the Russians are attacking the Ukrainians. And no one can make me care.

Frankly, I’m happier to let those things go. If I want to spend my energy caring, I’ll care about things much closer to home, and spend it on things that are much more important than if one quasi-dictator takes out another.

By all means, please, feel free to care about any or all of those things.

The reason that I blame the GloboLeft is that they have always cared more than the TradRight about what the people care about. The high point of these were the communist governments of the 20^th century. Stalin’s minions cared what you thought about Stalin. Mao’s Long March Through the Institutions was built on rooting out people that didn’t think like Mao.

It didn’t matter if you were a good bricklayer, you had to be a bricklayer that thought like Mao.

Since eggs are more expensive now, are people more likely to poach them?

One of the commentators had previously described this as an essentially feminine characteristic. I guess I can see that. Ma Wilder cared what I thought. Pa Wilder just wanted peace and quiet.

What’s next?

From what I see today, I think we’re moving into Pa Wilder territory – Trump absolutely doesn’t care what I think about him. Trump just deported a bunch of Venezuelan gangsters to “entertainment camps” in El Salvador. Normally, the GloboLeftist media would have brought up a storm of complaint.

I’m sure those prisoners will soon be El Salvadorable.

Now, not so much. Why? The pendulum is moving, rapidly, right. When even CNN sees that the party of “caring” is less popular than Ebola at a Methodist potluck in Minnesota, even they can read the room.

Me, I care about our borders first. And, I’m also glad I live in a Universe where I can have both vodka and Twix®.

What Will Come From The Current Recession?

“No tomorrow? That means there’d be no consequences. No hangovers. We could do whatever we wanted!” – Groundhog Day

An economist falls off a cliff. During the fall, he notes, “So far, so good. It’s different this time. Soft landing ahead!”

Note: no podcast this week. Hoping to have a new computer that can hear things as soon as my staff gets the specifications together.

Last week I let on that I thought a recession was coming. I mean, I always think a recession is coming, so that was no big surprise, but it looks like from preliminary data that the economy is actually contracting this quarter, so, if we match it with one more quarter of contraction that’s the textbook definition of a recession. Or maybe the economy is having a baby. I slept through that part of health class.

It is a long-used trick of sitting presidents to treat the economy like a 1980s high school kegger in order to get re-elected. The plan is generally simple: lower interest rates, make great big troughs of money available, and, bada-bing, the economy is bada-booming on election day and the cheerleaders are doing keg stands.

Nixon mastered this with his re-election bid in 1972.

Well, add the hangover from Nixon’s economic Everclear™ to the crude oil embargo (thanks, Israel) and the result was the miasma of suck that was the 1970s economy – stagflation. Every president has done some variation of this act since then, with varying degrees of success, but since 2000 or so, each president has tried to avoid all of the consequences of the Boozing. How? Boozing some more.

And I heard they were banning cheese in Great Britain. Or at least extra sharp cheddar.

I’m guessing that one can avoid a hangover by staying drunk all the time, though I don’t have personal experience in attempting that strategy. Although it is probably more enjoyable than a hangover, there are always consequences to replacing all of your blood with ethanol.

There is a difference with this current economic hangover that we’re working on because, first, we’ve been drinking soooooo long. Like I said, this has been going on since at least 2000.

So, there’s that. But that’s not the only thing impacting the economy right now.

Another major factor is Trump. I think, like many people, Trump sees the size of the national debt and knows that this can’t go on. He’s also a guy who has nothing at all to lose. He can shoot the Moon and try to go for all of it.

He’s doing exactly that. Tariffs? As I’ve written before, when the United States had tariffs, we were a strong economy with manufacturing. Post WW2, when we went away from tariffs to help the rest of the world rebuild out of the rubble? Not so much.

If Trump puts tariffs on Canadian goods, no one can say he has ties to Poutine.

Trump’s America also (so far) is an America that wants peace. For decades we’ve been shadowboxing against Russia, which is like Hulk Hogan™ attempting to defeat a room full of kittens. I mean, jeez, Hulk®, their eyes aren’t even open yet. Russia is not a threat to the United States. Except for the nukes.

Others want war, though. The neocons and people like Victoria Zoolander want war the in the Ukraine, probably because Russia gave them a wedgie in the 1980s or because they have Raytheon© stock. I saw one Canadian tweet, “Well played, Americans, look at all of the billions of dollars in weapons you won’t get to sell.”

To be clear, I’m all in favor of weapons, just ask The Mrs. when I make goo-goo eyes at a .50 cal. I think every father should be given their choice of an M2 or an M60. But to try to mock the United States for not getting profits on weapons that are killing people, right now?

That’s . . . disturbing.

Also as a factor, in Trump’s America government is likely to be D.O.G.E.’d into shrinking for the first time since we demobilized from World War II. When that happened, we transitioned more-or-less seamlessly into the economic boom of the 1950s, but it didn’t hurt that the rest of the world was like Sergeant Hulka: “All blown up, sir!”

This shrinking government sector will take the heat off of inflation in many things, but tariffs will raise prices. Where it ends up is uncertainty.

Who doesn’t like uncertainty? Wall Street®.

Physicists should never look down at their speedometers. If they do, they’ll have no idea where they are.

The final big factor in this recession is that the insiders who have been putting the Bacardi 151™ into the punch bowl for all these decades don’t want to help Trump. That’s probably a good thing. The more government meddling into the economy, the longer it normally takes to shake itself back into order.

I want the recession to be:

Short.

Sharp.

Cleansing.

Like hangovers, recessions are painful. They can wreck lives. But they are required to clean out the economy from time to time.

And the economy hasn’t been cleaned out in forever. Some areas where it really does need a bit of sprucing up:

Government.
Banks.
Real Estate.
Manufacturing.
Education,

These spring cleanings will be painful. A lot of people in these industries are out there doing the important work of going to Zoom™ meetings and making PowerPoints©, rather than engaging in useless tasks like growing and making food, or fixing potholes, or picking up the trash.

So, yes, this is probably a recession coming. The Government-Media-Education complex will certainly try to blame Trump, just as they tried to blame him on day two that he hadn’t yet fixed all of Biden’s booby traps.

Is the most popular red wine in prison Penal Noir?

To be clear, Trump will be partially at fault, but if the result is a true cleansing of the economy? It will be worth it. Now, where’s that black coffee?