Category: Complacency

The Modern World, Part I: Health And Strippers

“Learning about Cuba, and having some food.” – Fast Times at Ridgemont High

“Sir, I found the IED – Ice Cream, Eggos® and Diet Coke™.”

I had (before Vlad decided to put on the Imperial March and send the tanks down south) promised a three-post series based around a single theme.  As the name of the blog implies, this first one covers the “health” theme of the blog . . . .  Unless events in Ukraine dictate, expect parts two and three on Monday and Wednesday.

What happens when society conspires to make people . . . unhealthy?  We’ve experienced an upheaval in the traditions and previously self-imposed and society-imposed limits to behavior (behaviour is the metric spelling for you in Chairman Trudeau’s People’s Republic of Canada).

By (nearly) any measure the United States is far less healthy as a nation than it was five or six decades ago.  About only good thing we’ve seen is a lowering in heart disease and other diseases related to smoking.  That’s a bright spot.  Many of the metrics are fairly grim, though on other health statistics.  Even life expectancy, which had been increasing, is now trending downward faster than Kamala Harris at the county fair zipper pull.

So, Joe Biden sent her over to manage the Ukraine situation.  I’ll bet she’ll suck at that, too.

I’ll throw out this idea:  many of the health issues that we are facing are the product of modernity – changes in society that break with time tested traditions:

  • I can pull up numerous articles that point to how America is the fattest that it has ever been. Homer Simpson was portrayed as comically obese in the 1990s when he reached the weight of 239.  Now that qualifies him to wear medium clothes.  From the child’s section.
  • We’re also at a high point of kids being raised in broken homes, which causes health issues as well. I mean, if being in jail is a health issue.
  • Finally, we’re in many ways unhappier than ever before – opioid deaths aren’t happening because life is peachy. Kids in high school today don’t think they’ll do as well financially as their parents.  And people are looking for increasing escapes from reality.

Let’s start with weight – I’ll spend more time here since I think it’s a topic where we tend to blame people because they’re fat.  However, I am not particularly a proponent of the idea that self-control just disappeared and that’s why America decided to pack on the pounds.  Nope.  Things changed which made it much easier to pack on the Dorito® muscle.

This is exactly what AOC weighs when she has both her saddle and feedbag on.

Join me for a minute in a time machine back to the 1960s.  What did people eat?

Food.  Duh.

But what kind of food?  Food with much lower levels of processing.  For example, frozen pizzas and microwave Pizza Rolls® and Bagel Bites™ didn’t exist.  If you wanted a TV dinner, they were required to be placed in an oven for approximately sixty years and then pulled out.  I never had a 1960’s version of a TV dinner, but the photos I’ve seen made them look as attractive as Nancy Pelosi.

They were a novelty.

When I was growing up, Ma Wilder made dinner.  Sure, she bought noodles sometimes, but she also made her own, from scratch.  I can’t remember my mother ever making something from a kit.  She bought me some pizza kits about twice a year where you made your own dough because I think it amused her to watch me try to cook.

No, when Ma Wilder made mashed potatoes, she started with . . . potatoes.  Then she added milk and butter and salt.  Four ingredients.  She even made gravy from scratch.  Much of the food Ma bought didn’t have labels.  Why would you need to label a steak?  I mean, the only ingredient is:  steak.  Same with lettuce.  Same with tomatoes.  It’s . . . food.

I think I channeled Aesop for a minute there.

How many moms in 2020 have the time to cook like Ma Wilder did?  How many are, instead, thrown to work and then due to time pressures toss the kids Pop Tarts® and Tropicana™ and Kid Cuisine©?  When I was a single dad (and much stupider than today) I’ll raise my hand – I did.

So did/do a lot of people.  The food that is convenient is categorically different.  And, at least until inflation makes it nigh unaffordable, it’s now ubiquitous.  Soda pop costs less now (adjusted for inflation) than ever.  Buy it in the 2 liter (2 milligrams in metric litres) bottles and it’s amazingly cheap.  Buy the off-brand stuff and you can get it inexpensively enough that you could bathe in it.

Food is also available all the time, everywhere.  When I was a kid, there was breakfast (I always skipped it due to the high quality of my genetics) lunch at school (I nearly always skipped that because I could buy a comic instead of lunch if I saved my lunch money) and then dinner at home.  Mom may or may not have made dessert – it was generally a once a week thing.  And convenience stores are selling Snacky Cakes© at 3am.  When I was a kid, everyone was asleep at 3am.

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day.  But what if there’s no fast to break?

Compare that to today?  All school food is free for all students this year.  Pugsley could have free breakfast, a free snack, a free lunch, and then a free afternoon snack if he wanted.  Every day.  And then dinner, and then a fridge filled with snacks.

The cooks at school aren’t (mostly) getting actual food ingredients to cook, either.  They’re getting highly processed foods that contain (in some cases) ingredients other than salt that were mined instead of grown.  They contain oils and chemicals that were made in facilities that would make an oil refinery blush.  Oh, wait, the “vegetable” oil is made in a refinery that uses solvent extraction and then bombards the oil with hydrogen to create a chemical reaction to make it shelf stable.

Do we wonder why we’re fat?  We’re not eating food.  And what we are eating is so available that we’re stuffing ourselves with it constantly.

Why?

Moms have to work because society says that making PowerPoints® is more important than raising kids.  Besides, it takes a village, right?  Oh, and since all the moms are working, a family can’t afford a house on just one income.  That’s, of course, if the family is intact.  Single moms and dads have even less time.

Yup.  This modern world is a winner, am I right?

I tried pole dancing once, but Kowalski didn’t like it.

That brings us to issue two:  single parents and blended families.  Do I understand that it’s sometimes required?  Yes.  I was married to someone before The Mrs., and it didn’t work because it was a mixed marriage – I was human and she . . . wasn’t.  I kid.  She might be human, but the test kept turning to smoke when her DNA was exposed to light.

Society has made divorce a go-to option.  Again, I’ve been there as a parent.

But not as a kid.

I had two parents for most of my childhood, which was awesome.  (I was adopted after the mother wolf left me on the Wilder doorstep, which was seen as a fulfillment of the Great Prophecy that I would be the one to unite the mayonnaise and mustard – the condisatz haderwich – I even survived the Everlasting Gomstopper© jabbar.) Sure, they argued.  Sure, there were problems from time to time.

I never had to worry, though, who Ma or Pa was going to bring home.

I never had to help them emotionally through a divorce.  I got to be a kid.  And when Ma said, “Wait until your father gets home,” I was damn scared.  They were united in punishment, and they would absolutely not undercut each other.

But Pa saved his blue shield for special occasions. 

If I was in trouble, I couldn’t escape the consequences.

Now?  The pathology of single parenthood is clear:

  • 43% of prison inmates grew up in a single-parent household
  • 90% of repeat juvenile arsonists live only with their mother
  • 75% of patients in drug abuse facilities came from a single-parent household
  • 63% of youth suicides are from homes without a father

I could go on and on.  Society has made divorce by women for “fun and prizes” cheap and easy.  It’s even celebrated by the “I don’t need no man” crowd.  Who suffers?  Society.  And the kids.

So, the tradition of divorce being very, very hard to get and socially undesirable seems so outdated now.  Right?

Let’s add on our final contestant for this post:  the financial pressures and collapsing economy brought out by a relentless globalization and continual change.  Careers are gone.  Gigs are in when an economy has all turned to “services” driven by cheaper labor.

In many cases, businesses are built with just the idea to use cheap labor to financialize the industry.  What’s the forty-year-old guy who used to carve gravestones going to do when the boss buys a laser engraver that does twice his work in half the time?  There’s not exactly a market for monument carvers.

At Mozart’s grave, you can watch him decompose.

Let’s also add this into the mix:  The constant streams of gratification available from infinite Internet porn to infinite Internet social apps (I hear the kids have found something called MySpace®) haven’t created the sort of real-life experiences that were common in the past.  Now, the negatives are accentuated, amplified, and immediate.  Is it a surprise that kids today are nihilistic and escapist and jaded on male-female relations?

Still, in all of this, there is room for personal responsibility.  We are each responsible for our individual outcomes.  I can’t pass the buck for my failures back to society, but I can look at the trend.  Have the people who got fat changed?  Not really.  It’s just far easier to get fat today, but still the responsibility of the individual.

Have plenty of kids from broken homes turned into champs?  Sure!  But the statistics show that parents, shockingly, matter to the outcomes.

If I pick a career that gets replaced, is that on me?  Yes, yes it is.  But how many people have picked careers where they have been replaced?  Twitter® even banned people for telling journalists (who had told coal miners, “learn to code”) to “learn to code.”  We live in a society where careers are ephemeral, coming and going faster than Nancy Pelosi’s bouts of sobriety.  And what do we do about a generation raised by computers that are programmed to be as addictive as possible without creating actual achievement?

I heard an actual journalist was recently at CNN®.  They had Security escort him out.

If I leave a kid in a candy shop politician unsupervised, it’s my fault, as well as the kid’s politician’s fault.  You just don’t leave irresponsible people where they can cause damage, even though the moral choices were made by the kid politician.

Perhaps, moving away from traditions means moving away from problems that have been solved before?

Russia And The End Of The Dollar

“I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure you can inflate construction costs and launder money through it.” – Ozark

I wonder if everyone can figure out why China built their own Internet now?

Biden has miscalculated.  Again.  As he has his entire life.  He has moved from one miscalculation in his life to the next.  So, it’s not surprising that perhaps the greatest failure in the history of the United States has shown up on his watch.  Let’s go, Brandon, indeed.

To be fair, it’s not entirely Brandon’s fault.  The United States economy, as I’ve gone to great pains to show over my posts, has been hollowed out over the years.  We have gone from one that manufactures things and exports goods to one that mainly manufactures movies (we’re very good at that) and consulting and intellectual property and Starbucks™.

The thing that we’ve been best at is printing and then exporting dollars.  For decades now, we have been exporting dollars that we printed and then importing stuff like fidget spinners and PEZ®.  It was a great deal for us.  People used those dollars and we got stuff, but it was essentially a global tax on the rest of the world.

That ability to tax, however, only works as long as people believe that the dollar is worth something, and that the holder of that economic power won’t bend the rules.  Just like the bank runs up in Canada started when Trudeau broke the promise that the banks won’t steal people’s money, so the same principle applies to international affairs.

What could go wrong, stealing cash from random people?

When Russia attacked Ukraine, Biden declared sanctions.  Sure that’s a fine idea when dealing with a tiny random country, but Russia isn’t tiny.  And Russia isn’t any random country.

See, one silver lining!

Russia is of huge importance to world commerce.  Russia exports the stuff that makes modern economies go:

  • Food
  • Steel
  • Fertilizer
  • Titanium
  • Nickel
  • Oil
  • Refined Fuels
  • Natural Gas
  • Coal
  • Gold

In almost every commodity listed above, Russia is in the top five exporting nations.  In several commodities, it is the world’s largest exporter.  Check out the graphs on energy and wheat when the market gets disrupted:

What does Russia import?

  • Telephones
  • Car Parts
  • Computers
  • Medicine

Russia also exports nearly double what it imports.  If there is a country that is nearly self-sufficient in this world, it’s Russia.  There is an economic concept called “autarky” – or a nationwide independence from imports.  Looking at the list of companies that are leaving Russia, well, could it be that Russia is better off without them?

Yes, Pornhub® and OnlyFans™ are on the list.  I wonder what the effects will be?  21-year-old girls will have to find jobs that involve wearing clothes?

Russia isn’t independent.  But it’s close enough.  Most things that it is missing can be bought from either India or China.  No iPhones®?  China has a bunch of other kinds of phones.  And all those businesses that left?  It’s not like the Russians don’t know how to make hamburger and buns, so McPutins™ could open up tomorrow, though I’d skip the polonium sauce.

Russians are talking about nationalizing all of the assets of companies that have abandoned them.  Why wouldn’t a country do that?  Well, other countries could seize the overseas Russian assets.

Oops.  Too late.  So what’s stopping the Russians?

What is the threat from the West?  That Russian audiences won’t have Netflix®?  The things that Russia has been denied are, frankly, not very scary.  They won’t get to see the next Marvel© movie?  Oh, yeah, they also went after Russia’s money and tried to cut it off from the dollar-based economic system and . . . entertainment.

The Babylon Bee has the real impact figured out.

What happens when that bluff is called, when Russia and China decide that they don’t need dollars?  What happens when Russia will sell natural gas to Europe only in yuan?  Or for gold?  Or that they won’t trade their commodities for anything at all?

The tent collapses, and by that tent I mean the dollar.

I actually think that Joe’s head is so far up . . . well, I’ll be kind and guess that he has Alzheimer’s rather than being this stupid.  Oddly, this is viewed as an ideological opportunity by the Leftist henchxirs in Washington.  They hate fossil fuels to the point of not caring about the relative plight of the American consumer.  Don’t believe me?  Listen to them:

Why would we want to solve problems?

Let them eat electric cars?

And Joe’s responsible for the invasion, too.

Leaked pictures from Joe’s energy briefing.

The goal.  No matter what it costs.

There are even well-meaning Lefties starting to write articles to cope with the failure:

But here’s a sign:  Joe tried to get meetings with the Saudis and the very friendly folks over at the United Arab Emirates.  They wouldn’t return his calls.  Imagine:  a foreign leader refusing to even talk with the President* of the United States.  It’s almost like he’s a fraud?

I wonder if he’s going to drunk-text the Emir tonight?

One person sums it up . . . .

Beyond that, the price of wheat is getting ready to go even higher.  Together, Russia and Ukraine produce over 25% of the wheat exported in the world.  A quarter.  Ukraine’s planting season has been slightly impacted by current events, and Russian exports might be diverted to feed Ukraine.

The United States is certainly self-sufficient in wheat, but the prices of wheat are like oil:  they’re tied to the international price.  What happens when a loaf of bread is six dollars?  Nothing good.  But if there are price controls?  Bread will be priced at two dollars.  There just won’t be any in stores.

Domestic inflation is bad enough, but what happens when the Saudis start taking gold for oil from the Chinese?  Or start paying for Russian wheat with the gold they got from the Chinese?  The dollar, once indispensable, is done as the international currency.

The message is loud and clear – the end of the dollar is near.  Why is gold up over $2,000?  My question is why is gold only up to $2,000?  I fully expect that, should Russia succeed, 90% of the dollar’s purchasing power will be gone in the next 14 months.

That will lead to massive changes in our economy, political unrest, and, potentially, the dissolution of the United States as we know it.

Thanks, Joe!  Where is ¡Jeb! when we need him?

When Change Comes

“There have been three major disasters and you were the only one unharmed.” – Unbreakable

What’s white, loud, and makes you spill your morning coffee? An avalanche.

There is a time and place when everything changes.

Sure, summer turns to fall which turns to winter which turns to, um, Daylight Savings Time. Regardless, like the seasons, some changes are reversible. I can freeze water and turn it into ice. Then, I can melt it and it’s water again and then I can freeze it. I then put it over my eyes – at least that way I look cool.

I saw Vanilla Ice at the local arena recently. He sold me a hot dog.

Reversible changes surround us. But there are irreversible changes, too. If I burn a piece of paper, it’s just gone. Forever. There is no physical process that can unburn the paper. Or bring back that Tweet® once you hit send – just ask Rosanne.

Changes like that happen to people and systems, too. I’m not going to focus on Russia tonight, but looking at Russia and Ukraine is instructive. When the ruble fell, it’s reversible. Will it reverse? Probably. At some point.

Maybe.

Will Ukraine ever be uninvaded? Nope. Heck, if you look at the history of Kiev/Kyiv it’s invaded approximately once every seven months. If ever there was a country that was more invaded, it wasn’t China, since only one person would take the Khansequences. The Ukrainian currency is called the hryvnia and it appears to be missing vowels. If Russia ends up conquering Ukraine, it won’t need any, since it, like the Roman denarius or the Babylonian shekel, will cease to exist.

There’s going to be so much losing. You’ll be tired of losing.

There are some things that you just don’t go back from. And that’s life. I wish I could go back in time and tell Pa Wilder to buy all the gold he could when anyone could purchase it all day long for $35 an ounce. If he had done that, I would have been a bullion heir.

In retrospect, it looks obvious. When Nixon did the irreversible – disconnected the dollar from gold, what did Pa Wilder think was going to happen? He thought the dollar would keep its value.

Why?

Because, after decades of the dollar being worth $35 an ounce, why would it ever change? For forty years of Pa’s life – gold had been priced at $35 an ounce. Gold would be (in the average person’s eyes in 1973) not a great investment.

But people, including Pa, missed the point. There was no physical process that would ever result in the dollar being backed by gold again. Nixon took the United States off the gold standard because he’d printed too much cash. And, as Biden will soon learn, prosperity doesn’t come from a printing press.

Wait, he made his money in Ukraine . . . .

I was watching a video from TIK History tonight when he brought up the conversation between a German and his banker back during Weimar Germany. “If you had only bought Swiss Francs (backed by gold) you would not have lost half your fortune.”

“But these are government bonds. Won’t they pay back?”

“The government that issued them no longer exists.”

In the United States, we have been in a very, very fortunate position. Our currency has been only ravaged by inflation and political theft over the years. We’ve been able to print up large quantities of dollars and just ship them over to people in other countries and they send us iPhones™ and soccer balls made by 12 year-olds since they apparently don’t have printing presses. Or because they have excess 12 year-olds.

Honestly, I’ve had 12 year-olds around the house, and I think one 12-year-old constitutes an excess 12-year-old.

Also, little kids from Nigeria are trying to give him US FIVE MILLION COOKYS.

Many currencies, like the Russian ruble, have been rendered nearly worthless nearly immediately by geopolitical events. That event is coming for the dollar.

I can’t tell you the date. I can’t give you the exact circumstances. But I will tell you that Charles Munger (Warren Buffet’s buddy) was in an interview where he flat out said that the dollar is eventually going to zero. The interviewer missed the point – when a currency implodes and goes to zero there is shock. There is starvation.

There are civil wars. There are revolutions.

But I can tell you after 2020, 2021, and now 2022 so far . . . change is in the air.

War, You’re Soaking In It

“Fiddle-dee-dee! War, war, war, This war talk’s spoiling all the fun at every party this spring. I get so bored I could scream. Besides, there isn’t going to be any war.” – Gone With the Wind

For whatever reason, French players are in “spectator only” mode.

War.  It’s one way we find out the difference between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.

The traditional way that most people think about war involves troops and uniforms and guns and bombs.  That’s why people are focused on Ukraine – it seems like a time when the world might once again see something like in the old war movies.  Biden is especially wanting this, because it could distract the world from the economic and cultural ruin that’s spreading in the United States.  How else do you explain the free crack pipe initiative?

As I’ve noted before, the United States has spent trillions of dollars to try to make the “old” form of war obsolete.  As such, don’t expect the next war to look anything like the last wars.  Just like civilization, technology, and economy have evolved, so have the methods of war.

The aim of war is still the same, however:  to get your enemy to do something they would otherwise be unwilling to do, like watch The View.  You don’t have to use tanks or bombs to do it.  This was what the old Soviet Union planned to do with the United States – subvert it from within.

The Cold War really was a war.  The United States attempted to subvert the Soviet citizens through exposing them to the wonders of capitalism.  Plentiful food, for starters.  Blue jeans.  Rock and roll.  The average citizens could see that something was really, really wrong in their society.  At the end, people in the Eastern Bloc walked away from their governments.  In some cases, they evicted the former leadership 7.62mm at a time.

The Romanians made sure there wasn’t a next season.

The Soviet subversion of the United States was similar.  Just as the United States reviewed the cultural faults of the Soviets and exploited them, the Soviets looked at the problems in the United States and tried to undermine it using those problems.

And the undermining never stopped.  If you looked at the institutions under control of the Left in the 1970s, there weren’t that many.  The Left controlled:

  • Many Colleges and Universities.
  • The psychological establishment.
  • Lots of mainstream entertainment media.
  • Most mainstream news media.

This was, of course, the plan.  Get the Leftist foothold in academia and use it to indoctrinate the next generation.  The Left didn’t control the government schools at the time, because teachers work a long time, and most of the teachers in the 1970s graduated before the colleges fell.

Hippies refused Rolaids™, the last thing they wanted was an anti-acid.

That’s why this war was based on a “long march” through the institutions.  Sadly, even though the Soviet Union dissolved, their plan was still in motion.  Now, the following are mostly under the control of the Left:

  • The K-12 educational system.
  • Most Protestant religious organizations.
  • Most Catholic organizations.
  • The American Medical Association.
  • Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
  • The general officer corps of the armed services.
  • The courts.
  • Silicon Valley tech companies.
  • Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

Very quickly (within a decade, if nothing changes) the last institution will fall:

  • The junior officers and enlisted men of the armed services.

As I’ve discussed at length, part of the core of Leftism is hating the United States, the other is a pathological need to be a victim.  That’s why Leftist entertainment media always portrays the good guys as “the resistance” – what are they resisting?  The remnants of the United States.  Why do the statues have to come down?

Al has a molar pulled:  it was an inconvenient tooth.

The United States (as viewed from a common historical lens) cannot be allowed to have its mythology.  That mythology must be replaced by the new narrative – a mythology based on victimhood and oppression.  Even as they control the levers on every objective means of institutional power, they complain that the system is rigged against them.

Combined with that is the monetary policy of the United States which has been run with all of the discipline of a toddler in a room filled with chocolate birthday cakes.  As the bill for this mismanagement comes due, the tensions in the country will skyrocket.

The only thing the Left doesn’t have, are (at least) 80 million Americans who want nothing to do with the brave globalist/socialist future that’s planned.  I actually think the number will be substantially higher, because I think that when the center chooses sides, it will come down with the Right.

This situation is, of course, absolutely thrilling to China.  When I think about how China must factor in the United States into their plans in, say, the year 2040?  I think they assume that the United States will not be a factor on a global scale.

In the US, dogs are K-9.  In China, they are E-10.

In addition to the Soviet plan coming to final fruition, the United States is amazingly vulnerable to other things we don’t traditionally think of as war.  As mentioned above, we have an amazing mess in our monetary policy – and we have debt.  Think inflation is high now?  What happens when China starts dumping currency in the international market, and starts paying for oil with the Yuan?

Warfare in our current time starts to look like what someone did to the Iranians:  drop in a virus that makes their centrifuges that they were using to process nuclear material break.  Imagine the electrical grid being as reliable as Venezuela’s grid.  Sure, it could be enemy action.  But with current trends, it could also be our own ineptitude at running things in a world where hiring by merit seems to be a thing of the past.

What happens if every tenth financial transaction in our electronic payment system is “missed”?  How many days until the payment infrastructure is shut down and the entire country is in chaos?  What happens if Walmart™ experiences failure in the logistics and tracking system for the billions of dollars worth of goods that it handles?  How many people does Walmart© feed?

Due to the current emergency, Walmart™ has announced that they’ll open a second register.

These are all warfare, and don’t require a single soldier or a panzer division.  Moreover, this is exactly the type of warfare that has already been planned and prepared for in Moscow and Beijing.

I’d love to blame China, but the Chinese are mainly just looking out for the Chinese.  If the United States is in the way, the Chinese are going to pick the Chinese every time.  It’s self-interest.

And Biden and Putin?  One is a church-going Christian who loves his nation, who wants to help his people, and wants to secure his border.  The other is Joe Biden.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: The Jenga® Civil War And Lessons From Canada

“Superhero landing. She’s gonna do a superhero landing. Wait for it.” – Deadpool

What’s more than step 9, but not quite to step 10? This clock.

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful. Things could change at any minute. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – The Jenga® Civil War – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Lessons From Canada – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue 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. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 640 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/

The Jenga™ Civil War

The game of Jenga© has been pretty popular in the United States since it was introduced into the United States. The object of the game should be familiar to most – build a tower taller and taller until it falls. It always falls. Someone tips the table, someone pulls out the one piece that shouldn’t come out, or Islamic terrorists decide to fly a chicken wing into it.

But Jenga™ illustrates something else. If you keep increasing the instability of a structure, it will fail. It’s an when, not an if. Jenga® doesn’t end until the tower falls over, and each pull and replace of a piece reduces stability.

As found on the Internet.

What causes the collapse?

It doesn’t matter, unless you’re the player that does it. What matters are the conditions. As I’ve tried to do below with the graphs, I’ve tried to create a barometer for conditions that might lead to Civil War. And, no, we’re really not there yet. Is the blood flowing? Certainly.

Are both sides engaged? Certainly not. That’s what scares the Leftists in Washington, D.C. to no end. The idea that people on the Right will engage in a strategic sense to start and end the phase of open-armed warfare keeps them up at night.

And it should. But, again, it’s not the spark. Historians in the future will write about the spark, but the spark would have no effect if the conditions weren’t there. What are the conditions? You know them, you feel them. There is no sense of who and what we are anymore.

As found.

As a nation, we have no goals except what hedonism can be sold to us weekly. It’s what’s streaming, what’s playing, and what new McFood© is coming out this week. Commercial activity can’t be the binding for a nation, so our ties are just as tight as those Jenga™ bricks, kept together by gravity, inertia and little else.

And every week the tower gets one brick higher.

Think Joe’s not taking this seriously?

Violence And Censorship Update

Again, not much on the organized violence this January. Censorship, as usual, is busy.

Rogan

Joe Rogan is a podcaster who has managed to become slightly more popular than me. His podcasts regularly pull 11,000,000 listeners. Rogan also was big enough to get serious A-list quests. All of that made Spotify® decide that Rogan is valuable. How valuable? They pay Rogan more than they pay for every bit of music that they stream. Yes. Joe Rogan is more important to Spotify© than all of the recorded music in the history of the world. He’s worth $100,000,000 to them.

And he’s said things that irritate people invested in the Narrative. He’s not vaxxed, and has (like your humble host) had the ‘VID. He took Ivermectin. I got by with chicken soup and loads of decongestant. I’ve never been much to listen to Joe, I’ve probably only heard a few minutes (in total) of his podcasts.

They’ve been after Joe, and it started with Neil Young. Despite being less relevant than greased back Fonzie hair, Neil made the papers with his demand that his music be pulled off of Spotify© because Joe Rogan said things he didn’t agree with. Then other, equally irrelevant artists followed stamping their walkers to demand that Spotify® not play them to the one person that asks for their song every six months.

As found.

That was just the start. Someone has now have gone back through Rogan’s early podcasts and have a supercut of him saying the only word that is now taboo for some people to say. Rogan has now apologized, which is the first mistake, and now his blood is in the water. What happens next?

Who can say?

DOJ

On January 11, the Department of Justice announced a new domestic terrorism task force, because “We have seen a growing threat from those who are motivated by racial animus, as well as those who ascribe to extremist anti-government and anti-authority ideologies.”

I’m not jumping on a limb and being Nostradamus by betting that it’s nearly certain that the people who started CHAZ as an avowed foreign nation won’t be prosecuted. But if someone tries to lead a trucker’s strike like in Ottawa? You can bet that the DOJ, FBI, NSA and every other three-letter agency will be on them. Because terrorism really only applies to things the Right does.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence is down. January isn’t (usually) a big month for violence, so that’s to be expected. I would expect the next few months to remain calm as well, perhaps turning back up in April.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it’s headed upwards, fast. Joe has lost his base.

Economic:

The drop in economic confidence continued this month. Expect a bigger drop this month. The economy is falling apart.

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels for this time of year. All-time record levels. Plus? Airflights for illegals. No DOJ task force for this . . .

Lessons from Canada

Canada has lived under very strict fear COVID restrictions. Trudeau has recently tightened the restrictions, especially with respect to truckers. You can look up the details, but to summarize: it was the last straw for many truckers.

As found, though in this case I don’t think he’s up to invading an ice cream store.

Truckers have a unique place in society. They provide that final lifeline on everything from the chlorine that the water treatment plant uses to food at Wal-Mart® to the toilet paper that everyone panic-bought in 2020. Many of them also own their own trucks. They work when they want to as owner operators.

As found.

Make them mad? Right now, hundreds of Canadian truckers have had enough, and are occupying Ottawa. How serious is Justine Trudeau taking this? He vanished like Saddam Hussein, but with better press coverage. He ran away, and left the Leftists of Ottawa to their own devices.

As found. I wonder what will happen to Justine’s son, Uday?

And they are upset. Apparently, their cats are of the very sensitive type (memes as found):

Also, the Leftists tried to set up a counter protest. /POL/ got into their communication channels, giving conflicting starting and ending times for the protest, and filling the protestors up with doubt, “Boy, that sure seems like a long time to protest, and it’s going to be cold out there. Don’t forget to dress in layers! I’ll be with you in spirit!”

As a lark, it has been a lot of fun for the Right, and already two provinces (they’re like states, but made of maple syrup) have indicated that restrictions are going away soon in those provinces. The convoy is working.

As such, the Ottawa police is now trying to crack down on the logistics of the truckers. Will it work? Maybe. Maybe not.

I think two lessons are that this will never, ever be allowed in the United States in a major Leftist city and will be censored by the major news media working in concert with .gov if it ever starts to develop. The crackdown would be ruthless, especially if it occurred in D.C. Leftists are as afraid of actual workers as they are of actual work.

As found. Also, Leftist logic thought process.

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

Bad Guys (Jan 2022)…

NYC: https://twitter.com/i/status/1478006188856025097

NYC: https://twitter.com/AndrewPollackFL/status/1482023373165285379

Chicago: https://youtu.be/U1G2Gt loP0

Chicago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDN4S-mhplk

Detroit: https://youtu.be/C8ePWbzYTP8

Detroit: https://youtu.be/jv0LvsphFSA

Portland: https://youtu.be/TKnXY3pZWK8

LA: https://twitter.com/streetpeopleLA/status/1484350084439363586

LA: https://twitter.com/streetpeopleLA/status/1484356560956526593

San Jose: https://youtu.be/MfjkUJZFbl0

SF: https://twitter.com/i/status/1479164420148248576

Good Guys (Jan 2022)…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10402917/Two-teens-charged-murder-subway-attack-Good-Samaritan-killed.html

https://6abc.com/philadelphia-carjacking-driver-shoots-carjacker-fairmount-west-kensington/11452980/

One Guy

https://www.wpr.org/gun-kyle-rittenhouse-used-kenosha-shootings-be-destroyed

https://www.dailywire.com/news/kyle-rittenhouse-sits-down-with-candace-owens-discusses-future-plans-theres-going-to-be-some-accountability

Body Count (Jan 2022)

USA Surge 2021: https://invesbrain.com/states-investigating-surge-in-mortality-rate-among-18-49-year-olds-majority-unrelated-to-covid-19/

https://thelibertydaily.com/bombshell-cover-up-cancer-diagnoses-in-the-military-rose-over-three-fold-since-jabs-were-introduced/

USA Fentanyl 2021: https://secureservercdn.net/166.62.108.196/w7l.6b7.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/facts.pdf?time=1640209532

USA Weather 2021: https://twitter.com/NOAA/status/1480574295940161536

Chicago 2021: https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/violence.png?itok=BmL3yEVn

NYC 9 Days In 2022: https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2022/01/11/05/52781909-10389089-image-a-8_1641877588156.jpg

Philly “Safe Streets Violence Interrupter” : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts6XSYE4zNI

Blacks: https://www.unz.com/isteve/cdc-blacks-died-36-more-often-by-homicide-in-the-year-of-the-racial-reckoning/

Body Count (Snoop Dog “F**k The Police” Super Bowl Edition)

https://nypost.com/2022/01/29/snoop-dogg-at-super-bowl-halftime-show-becoming-even-worse-look/

https://nypost.com/2021/12/29/where-is-the-outrage-over-the-killing-of-keona-holley/

https://nypost.com/2022/01/06/cop-killed-with-own-gun-after-pleading-with-suspect-to-spare-life-prosecutor/

https://www.outlookindia.com/website/story/world-news-chicago-female-police-officer-killed-one-wounded-in-traffic-stop-shooting/390867

https://www.foxnews.com/us/nyc-murderer-first-female-police-officer-paroled

https://jonathanturley.org/2021/12/23/the-potter-verdict-was-the-jury-right-but-the-law-wrong-on-culpable-negligence/

https://www.yahoo.com/gma/police-attacked-least-4-us-110120536.html

https://nleomf.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2021-EOY-Fatality-Report-Final-web.pdf

Polled Lives Matter!!!

https://newsbusters.org/blogs/nb/brad-wilmouth/2022/01/02/did-gallup-end-most-admired-74-year-polling-tradition-avoid-trump

https://nypost.com/2022/01/02/34-percent-of-americans-say-violence-against-government-justified/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/1-in-3-americans-say-violence-against-government-can-be-justified-citing-fears-of-political-schism-pandemic/ar-AASld12

https://www.forbes.com/sites/nicholasreimann/2022/01/12/nearly-60-of-americans-worry-democracy-in-danger-of-collapse-poll-suggests/?sh=72ffc315483e

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/democrats-ok-with-fines-prison-mandates-for-vax-deniers-poll

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/partner_surveys/jan_2022/covid_19_democratic_voters_support_harsh_measures_against_unvaccinated

https://www.theorganicprepper.com/survey-unvaccinated/

THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

USA (MUST SEE): https://2000mules.com/

GA (MUST READ): https://www.truethevote.org/ttv-statement-regarding-georgia-ballot-harvesting-investigation/

GA : https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/georgia-opens-investigation-possible-illegal-ballot-harvesting-2020

GA :https://twitter.com/TalkMullins/status/1487299420752334848

GA : https://voterga.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Press-Release-VoterGA-Drop-Box-Custody-Chain-Analysis.pdf

GA : https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/01/huge-georgia-ballot-trafficking-whistleblower-admits-making-45000-stuffing-ballot-boxes-just-one-242-traffickers-possibly-1-million-ballots/

PA: https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/17/video-shows-pennsylvania-official-admitting-election-laws-were-broken-in-2020/

PA: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/biden-s-nearly-2m-mail-in-pennsylvania-votes-in-2020-would-now-be-unconstitutional/ar-AATfqsq

TX: https://www.sos.texas.gov/elections/forms/phase1-progress-report.pdf

TX: https://www.theepochtimes.com/texas-audit-finds-over-11000-potential-non-citizens-registered-to-vote-other-problems_4188076.html

WI: https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/589714-judge-rules-absentee-ballot-drop-boxes-cannot-be-used-in-wisconsin?amp

WI: https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/10/how-a-mark-zuckerberg-funded-nonprofit-turned-wisconsin-blue/

CA: https://ktla.com/news/local-news/no-evidence-of-election-fraud-by-man-found-passed-out-with-300-recall-ballots-drugs-in-torrance-police/

USA: https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/09/politics/gop-election-voting-rights-battleground-states/index.html

USA: https://uncoverdc.com/2021/12/23/heritage-foundation-state-election-integrity-scorecard-puts-georgia-at-top/

USA: https://www.dailywire.com/news/biden-judicial-nominee-said-proof-of-citizenship-is-voter-suppression

They Say It’s Your Birthday…

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10391647/FBI-executive-assistant-director-stays-mum-Cruz-asks-agents-participated-January-6-riot.html

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/588446-division-reins-over-jan-6-anniversary

https://www.ajc.com/news/jimmy-carter-america-on-the-brink-of-a-widening-abyss/2ER2BJ2ZCJGQBBKHLUYSPPMRXU/

https://thefederalist.com/2022/01/17/democrats-are-priming-themselves-to-refuse-to-accept-any-election-defeats/

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/01/14/actor-nick-searcys-movie-capitol-punishment-is-the-best-doc-about-january-6-hed-know-he-was-there-n1549452

The Night The Lights Went Out In Georgia…

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/01/11/remarks-by-president-biden-on-protecting-the-right-to-vote/

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/bidens-disastrous-georgia-speech-threw-away-his-last-chance-to-start-anew/

https://www.dailywire.com/news/mcconnell-blasts-bidens-profoundly-unpresidential-rant-he-propagandized-against-his-own-country

https://www.foxnews.com/media/mike-huckabee-biden-insane-georgia-voting-rights-speech

https://thehiu.com/bidens-georgia-speech-was-a-breaking-point/

https://twitter.com/TulsiGabbard?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1481467050027466752%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_

https://jonathanturley.org/2022/01/11/democracy-autocracy-or-hypocrisy-biden-to-call-for-curtailing-filibuster-rule-in-reversal-of-long-held-position/

Disco Inferno:

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/589888-kyrsten-sinema’s-courage-washington-hypocrisy-and-the-politics-of-rage

http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2022/january/10/we-need-a-revolution/

https://abcnews.go.com/US/oath-keepers-spokesperson-warns-wing-propaganda-dangerous-bullets/story?id=82094999

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/09/what-makes-riots-conspiracies-cabals-and-insurrections-good-or-bad/

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60036911

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/01/06/new-civil-war-about-what-exactly-526603

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/01/12/the-hysterical-fantasy-of-an-impending-civil-war/amp/

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/16/the-next-civil-war-stephen-marche-how-civil-wars-start-barbara-walter-review-nightmare-scenarios-for-the-us

https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/americas-asymmetric-civil-war

https://www.fastcompany.com/90572489/u-s-election-maps-are-wildly-misleading-so-this-designer-fixed-them

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Brookings-2economies11-20a_0.png?itok=EO-pIuFl

The End Of The World

https://brucewilds.blogspot.com/2022/01/if-unrest-soars-in-america-will-looters.html

Choosing A Path In Life, 2022 Edition

“What’s all this talk I hear about you fooling around with the college widow? No wonder you can’t get out of college. Twelve years in one college! I went to three colleges in twelve years and fooled around with three college widows.” – Horse Feathers

In this episode, Gilligan eats the last cookies on the island.  Ginger snaps.

The “traditional” path for students with good grades was to “go to college.”  Honestly, this was pretty good advice for a long time.  The number of high school graduates that went to college bounced between 40% and 60%, of course being higher during the Vietnam draft.  When my uncle was in Vietnam, he killed a dozen soldiers.  Next year we’re going on vacation to a different country.

Around 1974, however, the percentage boomed, with over 80% of high school graduates at least attending some college by 1978 or so.  The rationale was that a college education was a ticket to a better life.  Again, for the most part, the common wisdom was right.

But why?  In 1971 after a Supreme Court decision, companies could no longer use I.Q. tests for employee selection, they had to use something because, despite what the Simpsons™ might suggest, you really want smart people operating nuclear power plants.  Certificates and credentialism had always been nice, but now businesses desperately needed some way to select employees that were smart enough to do the job.

What did Three Mile Island say to Fukushima?  “Nuke, I am your father.”

Thus:  college degrees.  The more selective the college, the greater the ACT® or SAT™ score required to get in.  ACT© and SAT™ scores are actually a very good proxy for intelligence, so, graduate from a good school?  That shows a (likely) innate intelligence along with enough foresight and planning to defer satisfaction until the degree was granted.

In 1970, going to college at Harvard™ could be paid for with the (current 2021) equivalent cost of $22,000 or so a year.  Now it’s over $75,000 for the sticker price.  College prices went up because demand went up.  Harvard’s© prices went up more because they were more selective – it was harder to get in so they were a better sifter for I.Q., I mean, who would have guessed that Hawking had the same I.Q. as Evel Knievel?  I mean, they both loved ramps . . . .

But another factor was the increase in money available.  Politicians looked for ways to encourage people to go to college.  So, colleges increased prices to better soak up all of the student loan dollars available.  Getting students morphed from “here’s where our graduates work” to “here’s what our climbing wall looks like.”  Millions were invested to make a college more of a theme park than a serious place of learning.  They raised prices so high that during COVID, college even became the most expensive video streaming service.

Along the way, though, standards decreased to get more students in the door.  Not only was it easier to get in, inflation hit grades as well.  Right now, the average grade at Harvard© is an A-.  The average.

Harvard®, the vegan Crossfit™ of colleges.

Even now, though, Harvard™ is still a great rate of return for students.  It’s not the education, it’s who a student meets.  Harvard® is useful for the connections with wealth and power a student can make.  Get in good with the right family?  A student can become engaged with that class, though often there’s a cost.

Harvard® is still a good investment, even though it’s supposedly hard to get in.  Heck, I got in.  They don’t even lock most of their windows.

Some colleges are horrible investments.  Going to Podunk U in North Central BFE and majoring in Anthropology of French Basket-Weaving Poets?  Yeah, that’s also known as majoring in pre-barista.  But that student could have been a barista without rolling up $50,000-$75,000 in student loan debt.  And, if the student majored in philosophy, they can ask, “Why do people want fries with that?”

The Mrs. told me I needed to grow up.  I was speechless.  It’s hard to talk with 45 gummy bears in your mouth.

So, if I were giving general advice to a kid who was determined to go to college, I’d suggest that they avoid anything that someone can do over the Internet from Bangladesh.  I can hire 45 Bangladeshis for approximately half of a Slim Jim© an hour, so why compete against tens of millions?  Engineering is good, if you have the knack.  Medical fields are constantly in demand – I saw an ad here in Modern Mayberry for nurses.  Five-figure signing bonus – and that wasn’t $199.99, it was over $10,000.  That’s probably a good idea.  The short answer is that it’s not 1970 anymore.  A student can’t just do any degree – they have to major in something that will pay the cost of the college degree.

Is college a good idea?  Not for all of the 80%.  Probably, college is still a good idea for 40%, at most.

So, what about trades?

Just like college, the economics has been twisted there, too.  Just like supply and demand has tossed prices for college into the stratosphere, an oversupply of laborers has cratered the cost of many trades.  Except for carpenters who build stairs – they’re always thinking a step ahead.

Where did the labor come from?  Immigrants, illegal or not.  Entire construction trades in many parts of the United States are completely staffed by people who speak less English than Pepé Le Pew.  Whereas they often do great work, they are part of the reason that wages are stagnant in many trades.  Sure, in 2022 there are shortages everywhere putting an upward pressure on wages, but that’s a short-term event.

I had one plumber who was very polite.  When he looked at my sink he said, “I am at your disposal.”

Certainly, some trades are doing well.  Which ones?  Once again, those that require credentials and those that require citizenship.  Anything that lowers the competition.

Regardless, the time when most trade jobs had pensions has passed – many have the promise of . . . Social Security.  And in 1970, getting a job that supported a family just out of high school without a college degree?  It was possible.  Tough?  Certainly.  But possible.

It’s still possible today.  A small-town plumber in Modern Mayberry does pretty well, so well that he became a Christian missionary overseas – I guess he’ll bless the drain down in Africa.  The local HVAC guy makes a killing, too.  And power linemen?  They live in some of the nicest houses in town.

Are there still paths for a young person in 2022?  Yes.  It’s far tougher than it was in 1970 for a kid today, though.  The traditional paths are difficult.

Now thank me I didn’t find a picture of Rosie in a bikini – I bet she has a hairy back.  Oops.  Sorry about putting that thought in your head.

The path, like the path between Scylla and Charybdis, is narrow.  On either side are monsters.  It’s sort of like being caught between Rosie O’Donnell and Whoopi Goldberg – you’re always safer if you have a pocket full of hot pizza rolls to distract them.

Pirates, Rail Looters, Fed Looters, And Bikini Economics

“Pirate Ghost would suggest that a pirate died and became a ghost, but a Ghost Pirate is a ghost that later made a conscious decision to be a pirate.” – South Park

What decongestant does the Federal Reserve© ban?  Sudafed™.

Most of the time when a train story hits the news, it involves the comically overloaded trains in India.  The typical headline in a newspaper (back when those existed) was on page 7, and went something like this:  Train Derails In India, 471,320 Dead.  The news story was typically right near, “Local Cat Makes Good!”

It’s been a while since I saw much about trains in the news.  Imagine my interest when I found out that people were hopping on trains in Los Angeles (Translation From Spanish:  Tarp City) and looting them.  What the Corsairs from Compton Boulevard are looking for is . . . merch.  Amazon® packages.  Best Buy™.  Nike©.

If Amazon® delivered by drone, for these folks that would just be skeet shooting, with prizes.

It’s really piracy on the rails.  Mobs attack the slow-moving trains and proceed to loot them.  They’ll load up on televisions and laptops and video game systems and almost everything that you can order online.  Except for books.  And, probably, work boots.

The fact that this is tolerated is a symptom that Los Angeles is now, officially, the Somalia of the West Coast.  There appears to be no effort to stop the mob, and no effort to arrest any participant.  Recent news reports would indicate that an ax-murderer, after arrest, would be given his (oops, California!) xir ax back after getting booked and not even have to post bail.

But try to smuggle a plastic straw in?  It’s off to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495 for you.

When you think about it, using a straw is just like snorkeling in reverse.

The fact that land pirates are actually a thing in 2022 means that, in Los Angeles at least, the rule of law has broken down completely in areas.  Thankfully, that hasn’t translated to other parts of the country, right?

Well, about the Federal Reserve® . . .

It’s not as if the Fed™ governors have been caught in a scandal where they unethically traded stocks.  Oh, they have?  Dallas Fed© President Robert Kaplan and Boston Fed™ President Eric Rosengren and Fed® Vice-Chairman Richard Clarida all resigned in disgrace after trading based on future Fed© decisions that hadn’t been made public?

Say it isn’t so!  Oh, wait, it’s completely so.  Apparently, the Fed© treats their “management” of fiscal policy just as seriously as the Watts Porch Pirates treat their “management” of Amazon® freight logistics.

Well, at least they’ve done well with the economy, preserving the purchasing power of money over time, right?

Of course . . . not.

I’d point out how bad this graph is, but somehow I don’t feel as sad with this one.

In reality, monetary policy since the Fed™ started has been to make your cash worthless, over time.  You can see what a great job they’ve done since 2000.  In effect, the Fed© has been in your bank account, robbing it bit by bit, just like the Hollywood Buccaneers have been boosting freight out of the train yard.  They just leave a bit less trash.

But certainly, they’ve been operating now as a sober bunch.

Ha!

No!  They’ve taken every Fed® interest rate record since 1955 and smashed it!  They are, absolutely provably, so drunk on Jack Daniels® that they can’t feel their collective jaws.  They are knee-walking, porcelain-grabbing drunk.

Wolfstreet.com called them . . . The Most Reckless Fed® Ever.  (LINK)

They put together a nice graph (below) that shows that if you take the Fed™ funds rate (what they charge to borrow money) and subtract inflation, we’re at a LIFETIME level of irresponsibility.  The Quantitative Easing (ahem, helicopter cash) and Stimulus Bills (ahem, more helicopter cash) have pushed inflation up.

The reckless bit is on the right.  No, farther right.  Yes, farther. 

So, all of the “Fight for $15” folks are quiet now, because whatever the minimum wage is, $15 is attainable doing temp work.  Everyone not making big bucks?  Inflation is eating the raises of most people.  So who’s winning?  I mean, besides the insider traders at the Fed™?

People who own stuff.  Inflation makes cash worth less, and eventually worthless.  Owning things makes sense in a world where cash is becoming worthless.  Who owns things?  Rich people.  They’ve done very, very well.  Why is Tesla®, which made 936,000 cars last year, has a market cap of $1.1 trillion dollars.  Doing the math . . . that has Tesla© worth $1,175,214 . . . per car they made.

Huh?  Honestly, it’s not a stock:  it’s a meme.

I guess people have to buy something.  Notice that Elon himself was selling his stock to convert it to (temporarily) cash to convert it to . . . stuff.  Even the tax hit wasn’t enough to deter him – he might well have the biggest tax bill of any individual in history this year.

Why?  Do you sell a stock that you think is going to go up?  No.  You sell a meme.  And let’s not talk about how the Fed© has force-fed banks billions of dollars to prop them up and increase their profitability.

I hear he wears Space-Axe® body spray.

So, we have pirates looting railcars to take home blenders and game controllers.  We’re not stopping them.

We also have much, much bigger thieves – the Freebooters of the Fed™ who have done their very best to, first by inflation, then by recession, to drain trillions of dollars of savings of average Americans, and it doesn’t even get higher up in the newspaper than an Indian train accident.

Looks like the D.A. isn’t prosecuting these guys, either.  Guess they haven’t tried to smuggle any plastic straws . . . at least then they’d get sent to Workers Leisure and Re-Education Camp #495.

Predictions On The Supreme Court COVID Decision

“Did having a girl on the team ruin the Supreme Court?” – King of the Hill

Ginsburg used to steal food at diners.  They called her Booth Raider Ginsburg.

Normally, Wednesday is for topics related to the economy or money.  Given that tomorrow is a big day for the Supreme Court which will announce at least one mandate decision, I thought I’d break from the usual.

Several of the Supreme Court Justices showed that they have all of the cultural awareness of a Hollywood gerbil.  They utterly flunked Current Events.  Justice Grimace Elena Kagan seemed to think that “jabbed” people couldn’t give the ‘Rona to other people, even though the vax doesn’t stop people from getting COVID, and doesn’t stop people from spreading it.  Oops.

But Justice Kagan looked like a genius compared to blithering idiot, Elmer’s Glue® eating Sotomayor.  The “Wise Latina” has zero understanding of the difference the powers of a State and the powers of the Federal government.  Sotomayor also seemed to think that 100,000 kids were in the hospital with the ‘Rona, “many on ventilators.”

No.  Just over 3,000.  And that includes kids in the hospital with COVID, not necessarily because of COVID.

Breyer is fast at math.  He’s not right, but he’s fast.

Justice Skeletor Breyer, though, invented people to have cases.  He said there were 750,000,000 cases, causing our hospitals to fill up.  If correct, everyone in the country has at least two cases right now.  Some poor people would have to have three cases.  Thankfully, Breyer has a driver, or otherwise he wouldn’t be able to find his way home.

Yes.  This is the level of basic life competence that you get when you restrain Clarence Thomas from giving them the occasional sleeper hold and throwing Kagan over the top rope.  Let’s face it:  life would be better if he smashed a chair over Sotomayor’s head once in a while.  It wouldn’t increase her stupidity.

What does Clarence Thomas wear to work?  A lawsuit.

I tend to think the Supreme Court, especially Chief Justice Roberts, is compromised.  Are they told what to rule on every case?  No.  But on some?  Yeah, I think so.  But that might mean something different when it comes to the mandate.

Back in September when Biden first announced his mandate, I posted my take on the situation:  Biden’s Big Bluff (LINK).  I thought then that this was nothing more than a naked ploy to increase his popularity.  As Biden has spent the next five months becoming less popular than back acne, he still needs the mandate.

But now he needs it to lose.

I’m not sure that he ever thought it would have gotten this far.  I think he was (internally) jubilant when it was struck down and put on hold by the Circuit Court.  This is the politician’s best scenario:  “I tried to fix the problem but [INSERT GROUP HERE] won’t let me.”  The politician gets to show that he cared, “but, gosh darn it, our enemies just want to use baby rabbit tongues to lick envelopes for fascist junk mail.”

Losing on the mandate gives Biden the ultimate out.

At least if you have dementia, all of my jokes sound new.

What happens if the mandate is upheld?

  • The economy still is a mess.
  • A group of millions of people are now being forced to choose between having a vaccine that looks more and more to have the effectiveness against COVID of a voodoo spell (except it’s great, apparently, at causing heart inflammation) or to lose a job.
  • OSHA has been weaponized for future Republican use. Illegal aliens have higher rates of COVID or measles or mumps or the flu?  Verify them to make sure they’re legal, because it’s for health and safety.
  • If the adverse effects from the various “jabs” keep getting worse at the current rate? Biden owns it.

Lots of times politicians are like dogs chasing cars.  They love to make noise and run around, but have no idea what they’d do if they caught the car.  ANWAR in Alaska and abortion are two of those issues, and Biden has no idea what he’ll do if he catches this particular car.

Joe was in two states today – confusion and disorientation.

But what happens if the mandate is overturned?

  • The Supreme Court can be blamed, and then threatened with either packing the Court, or not allowing Clarence Thomas to lift weights and maintain his Thor-like physique.
  • The economy gets better and the labor shortage doesn’t get worse. COVID fizzles into irrelevance when omicron gives everyone immunity and the ‘Rona is “solved”.  Biden then claims it was his leadership that did that.
  • The Republicans can be blamed for being evil. Pressure to end the “undemocratic” filibuster will increase on the Left, so the Lefties can push through voting rights “reforms” that allow individual bacteria to vote.
  • Lefties run in the midterm election against the “regressive” Republicans. They still lose horrifically, but not quite as badly as the massacre that’s currently in the making.

As Yogi Berra said, “Prediction is hard, especially about the future.”  And, I didn’t say this was a great outcome for Biden.  In less than a year, Biden and his administration has managed to take a bad situation and make it worse in every single way, and this is just about all Biden has.

Of course, Thursday will tell if I’m right or not.  Whatever happens, don’t make Justice Thomas mad.  You won’t like him when he’s angry.

BLM Has Killed More Blacks Than Lynching Has

“It doesn’t matter who we are, what matters is our plan.” – The Dark Knight Rises

What’s the difference between protestors in Hong Kong and Minneapolis?  In Hong Kong they protested against censorship.

I have written before about the Marxist origin of Black Lives Matter®.  That doesn’t appear to bother the news media, Leftists, or the corporations that shovel money into it like they’re feeding a machine.  Yes, Black Lives Matter™ is a machine, but it’s not quite the machine that the liberal wine-aunts that listen to NPR© think it is.

But challenge Black Lives Matter© while working for a major corporation, even in good faith?  That’s going to shorten your career.

Zac Kriegman worked for Thompson/Reuters®.  “Worked for” is the proper tense.  Kriegman had a bachelor’s in economics topped with a law degree from Harvard® and was working for Thompson/Reuters© leading their efforts in artificial intelligence.  His pronoun is:  “Was.”

A friend go fired from a keyboard factory for not putting in enough shifts.

Then he posted an essay on the internal servers.  You can read it here (LINK).  What was the sin he got fired for?  Objecting to the bias he saw at Thompson/Reuters™ and then, worst of all, proving via statistics that Black Lives Matter© and the Thompson/Reuters© narrative was . . . a lie.  A longer version of Kriegman’s story can be found here (LINK).  Thanks to Ricky for both of those links.

The results are clear.  According to the Tuskegee Institute (who apparently are the official counters of such things) a total of 3, 446 black people were lynched between 1882 and 1968.  Based on Kriegman’s data, it’s entirely likely that Black Lives Matter’s™ focus on “defunding the police” along with the Ferguson and Minneapolis Effects, that Black Lives Matter© killed more blacks in three years than lynching ever did in 86 years.

It is clear that facts like these have to be suppressed.  That’s why Zac Kriegman was fired.  At Thompson/Reuters™, the Truth doesn’t matter – just adherence to the Narrative.

But . . . why?

The answer is that the real goal (regardless of the stated goal) of Black Lives Matter© has nothing to with making the lives of black people better.  This is obvious from one initiative alone:  defunding the police.

No, no I really don’t.

I am skeptical of all police.  I tend to think that many police officers will do as they’re told, no matter who tells them, and no matter what they tell them.  History has proven that most cops will go collect guns from lawful owners or round up people for the “vaxx” camps if they’re told to.  Don’t believe me?  Check out Australia.

But if I were a cop in the liberal utopias where Leftists have put a target on my back, I’d do the bare minimum, while looking for a job anywhere outside places where arrests are irrelevant because the Soros-funded DA has installed a revolving door on the jail.  Oddly, this is exactly the desired result.  Soros wants chaos on the streets, and has found that cops won’t arrest people that won’t go to prison.  Those people are then left on the street, where they keep committing crimes until they get bored enough to kill someone.

Combine the following ingredients:

  • inflamed rhetoric noting that no problem in the black community is the responsibility of blacks,
  • occasional “martyr” victims that are selected not because of their innocence, but because the story (Ferguson) or video (Minneapolis) of the incident makes people really mad,
  • aggressive ignoring of the reality documented in FBI statistics that black neighborhoods are amazingly violent places – 58% of all people murdered in 2020 in the U.S. were black, and 54% of people arrested for murder in 2020 in the U.S. . . . were black, and
  • a news media, Thompson/Reutersâ„¢ included, that is all-in on the propaganda and what do you get?

More death.

Arguing that having fewer cops in the areas where most of the murders are taking place will make things better isn’t magical thinking – it’s intentional murder.  Regardless of the reasons that black people are killing themselves – having fewer cops around won’t help the situation.

According to BLM™, that’s okay.  The goal of Black Lives Matter© obviously has nothing to do with helping actual black people.  What is it, then, that they’re up to?

The real goal of Black Lives Matter® is to create enough discontent and pain in the black community so that they’ll accept any solution.  Of course, the solution that the Left proposes is based on increased discipline, improving morality, focusing on keeping families intact, creating a culture of personal responsibility, and rigorous academic performance.

Ha!  Just kidding!  It’s literally the opposite of all of those things.  The current Leftist solution is like trying to help Charlie Sheen via giving him more porn stars and cocaine.

Charlie’s tested positive for everything except the ‘rona . . . .

And companies that support BLM© are complicit.  In the case of Thompson/Reuters© they reported uncritically on false claim that BLM™ made.  This, of course, provided oxygen for the fire.  Large companies then threw on bushels of cash, which provided more fuel.  The result?

Thousands of people, most of them black, who would now be alive except for Black Lives Matter™ are now dead.   These people had been utterly abandoned by their local politicians, media, and the large companies that earn Social Justice® points by pandering to those same NPR© liberal wine aunts.

The goal is simple:   to create an army of discontent people to increase violence and chaos.  It’s always easier to destroy than to build – and this idea is to destroy everything, leaving an America that’s hollowed out – a place with no center.  That’s what Leftists are good at.

Building and creating?  Not so much.

But at least black people don’t have to worry about lynching now.  They can just worry about how Black Lives Matter™ is going to “help” them next instead.

Currently Reading:  The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu

Gold, Silver, And The End Of The World

“What do you know about gold, Moneypenny?” – Goldfinger

Why don’t pirates travel on mountain roads?  S’curvy.

A reader writes:  “. . . if you could explain to me the rationale behind buying gold or silver as a hedge against economic collapse, I would appreciate it.”  I answered by sending him bikini graph after bikini graph, but yet he persisted in wanting to know an actual answer.

I don’t think anyone will complain that this one is a repeat . . . .

He had me cornered.  I wrote to him (embellished for this post and clarified for readability):

Thank you for the question.  I promise to answer, just as long as you give my dog bag safely.  He may be old and one-eyed and have diabetes and alopecia . . . we call him, “Lucky.”

It’s good that he’s not a dinosaur – he’d probably be called an eyesaur. 

I thought that I had already answered this question and looked for the post.

As I’ve got over 1,000 up, I couldn’t find it after I looked for about 22 seconds.  Maybe I developed notes on it and never posted?  Maybe I’m just lazy at searching.  In the worst-case scenario, a previous version exists, and everyone just has to deal with this new, superior post.

The question is a subtle one.  The first part of the answer is the degree of collapse.  I’ll start out with this idea: how bad does it get?

  1. Another Boring Wednesday: Would I rather have a ton of gold on a Wednesday morning than not?  Of course.  But I’d probably worry about George Clooney and his wisecracking band of thieves breaking into Stately Wilder Mansion.
  2. Personal Economic Problems: Again, in a sequel, having that ton of gold is still great, but I still have that pesky George Clooney problem.  In reality, gold is somewhat less liquid than cash, but having a bunch of it is still nice.  Also, if you bought gold in 1990, you would have had zero profit on it until 2006.  This was mainly due to sane economic policy and high-interest rates that tamed inflation.

Or is this why they were always after his Lucky Charms®?

  1. Recession: What’s going on in the economy?  If you look closely, silver and gold actually dropped in value at the start of the Great Recession in the 2000s.  As people liquidated their “stuff” so they could still buy the G.I. Joe® with the Kung Fu™ grip for their kid at Christmas, the price actually dropped.  For a while.  Then the price jumped up when it became clear that the Fed® would print as much money as required to choke every person on the planet.  In the fiat world, gold and silver are something I’d look to have.
  2. Depression – 1930s Style: This is a hard analogy – back in the 1930s, the dollar was backed in gold, until FDR (press S to spit) stole the gold from the American people.  Now?  The dollar is nothing more than, to quote Aerosmith, “a lick and a promise.”  (See below)
  3. Weimar-Style Hyperinflation: I don’t think we’ll get here, until there’s a lack of faith in the dollar.  Brandon is doing his best to make Jimmy Carter look like a master of economics, so, if hyperinflation hits?  Gold is awesome, and you might be able to repay your mortgage with five or six pre-1965 silver quarters.  So, yes, gold and silver make sense.  A lot of sense.

In a Leftist world, everyone is a Billionaire.  And also starving.

  1. Country Collapse: What happens if the country ceases to be?  It has happened again and again through history, especially with large “empire-like” countries that don’t have any sort of ethnic commonality.  Japan will always be Japan because there are Japanese and it’s a nation, not a country.  China, likewise.  Without a functioning country, there is no nation to fall back on.  This is where we add another precious metal:    So, yes, gold and silver, but understand that it might be some time before it’s useful again.
  2. International Collapse: Rome provides a powerful example here.  In Great Britain, they’re constantly finding hordes of money – including silver money, and gold.  Why?  Because people stopped using it, and you can’t eat it.  Did that last forever?  Of course not, but 100 years is nearly long enough.  Lead is nice here, too.

Who sang “Can’t Touch This” for Caesar?  1100 Hammer.

  1. Civilizational Collapse: What happens if there’s no oil for the cars – anywhere?  What happens if we don’t have phosphorus for fertilizer?  Bad things.  Gold and silver might be helpful, but lead is much better here.  If the warlord wants your stuff and you can’t keep it from him, welcome to no longer having that stuff.
  2. A Kamala Harris presidency: Looks pretty much like number 8, but with more makeup.
  3. A Neutron Star Eating The Earth: I suggest investing in SpaceX®.

I think that we underestimate the likelihood of things getting really, really bad.  To give an example, I once worked at the headquarters of a big company.  They asked me to look at disaster recovery.  I looked at all of the natural hazards that might hit the company.  The most likely disaster would hit the headquarters once every three hundred years.

“Huh,” I said to my boss, foreshadowing future writing endeavors, “a new civil war is far more likely than that . . . I mean if the company lasts that long.  Companies go out of business all the time.”

He was not amused.  Corporations tend to not like actual reality to interfere in their projections.  But, I maintain I was right.  How many companies have ceased to exist – big companies – since 2000?  I’ll leave that work to the reader.  Enron®, anyone?

Country music and calculators are both produced by Texas instruments.

Listen, I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but banks are giving mortgages out at 3.3% and inflation is at 6%, which means that banks will lose money every year as long as inflation is a thing.  How can they do this?  Volume!

No, I’m kidding.  The Fed® is giving them tons of money to lend cheaply to keep housing prices up.  When mortgage rates go up?  Then the housing bubble bursts.  So, we could end up in Scenario 3., 5., or 6. very, very quickly.

Gold and silver (in my NON FINANCIAL ADVISOR) opinion are awesome in most scenarios.  If it devolves past the point where order matters at all, then it comes down to weapons, political connections, preps, and sheer dumb luck.  If nothing happens, then my kids will get to enjoy some shiny metals after I pass away.

What’s the best way to tune a bagpipe?  A pitchfork.

I would, however, not want to put all of my eggs in any one basket.  I will personally limit the amount of gold and silver I own to about 10% of my net worth.  Why?  Random number – not bad if things go well in the rest of the world and gold and silver don’t go up in value.  If things go really south, it’s a decent enough hedge to act as a parachute as the plane goes down in flames.

So, that’s my answer:  it depends.  What do you think?  What Scenario above is the most likely?  What’s missing?

Ohhh, Lucky, come here, boy . . . oh, wait, he’s deaf, too . . . .

(Appended Graph)