Complacency – Page 23 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Amazing, Collapsing, Dehydrated Economy! Just Add Water!

“Whenever Corey and Trevor go out with Ricky and Julian, what happens? They come home crying. Dehydrated. Mysterious wounds. They won’t tell me what happened because they’re scared to death of those guys.” – Trailer Park Boys

And people say I have a dry sense of humor.

I remember hearing about dehydrated water as a kid – probably the first time was a joke from my science teacher in 7^th grade. He also told us (I’m not making this up) drinking stories. He taught us that if you go out drinking when you have just donated blood, you get drunker faster. Who says that middle school science doesn’t teach important life lessons?

But the idea of dehydrated water as a product still got filed away somewhere in the six million neurons I have that are dedicated to 7^th grade science. It’s filed somewhere between “don’t stare at the Sun directly through the telescope again Wilder” and “mercuric oxide might look like cinnamon, but it’s not as tasty.” And dehydrated water popped into my mind as I was preparing to write this post today.

Why?

The economy of the United States is dehydrated water at this point. The unemployment rate from Shadow Stats® is somewhere around 35%. Even the Department of Labor thinks the number of people that are unemployed is somewhere north of 20%. Heck, I heard a guy was upset about losing his job at McDonalds™ even though he worked for a clown.

The head of Old McDonalds® Farm is the CIEIO.

As I first predicted when the WuFlu was just coming over the horizon and the first lockdown hit, this is devastating to the economy. The difference between 2% growth year over year and -2% growth is enough to cause Washington D.C. to be as uncomfortable as a Joe Biden voter when Joe starts talking about how he thinks that JFK has the plan to save us from the Spanish flu.

I was not surprised by the quick action money shower from the .GOV folks. What did surprise me is that they used the occasion to juice the economy also by giving money to working people rather than just bailing out banks. Many people on unemployment are actually making more money on unemployment than they made when working, thanks to the extra $600 a week the .GOV folks are adding to their unemployment insurance check. Some could be making up to $50,000 a year. For not working. But Congress makes $174,000 a year for not working, so there’s still room for career growth!

But the .GOV isn’t just juicing the average unemployed worker. As noted in a previous post, the Federal Reserve Bank™ is engaged in “plunge protection” where money is strategically pumped into the stock market to keep it from crashing. That’s generally accepted. But now? The Federal Reserve© has been, for the first time in history, buying corporate bonds.

Bonds are really just loans. A company, say, Apple® decides it wants have more slave labor camps factories built in China. So, it calls up the Chinese partner, and says that it will pay. But since the cushions in Steve Jobs’ couch have been raided for quarters already, they decide to borrow money. You or I would have to go ask someone to borrow money from them. But Apple™ sells their debt in the form of bonds, or promises to pay the borrowed money back, plus interest.

When James Bond was offered a sandwich, he had a choice of ham or turkey. Of course he chose bacon, not bird.

Normally, Apple© would sell those bonds to places like pension funds and 401k’s. But in 2020, the Federal Reserve™ buys them. Yes. One of the most profitable companies in the world gets its debt purchased by the Fed®.

Why?

The stock market needs to be propped up, and so does the bond market. And after hundreds of millions of loan payments haven’t been made. Which of those loans are good? Where is the cash to pay the lender coming from? No one knows. No one wants to take a risk. Money is like me on a vacation day, it just sits there.

Markets are freezing up because the money isn’t moving, because the economy is freezing up. What the Fed® is doing is artificially injecting money into the market because the market has ceased to work. It’s like my can of dehydrated water – there’s really nothing in it. The joke is that you can add a gallon of water to the contents of the dehydrated water can to make a gallon of water.

The Fed® is adding billions of dollars to an empty economy and pretending that nothing’s wrong, that they didn’t just make an economy out of nothing. “Hey, instant economy. Just add money.”

Planes are different than an economy. Planes only crash once.

My prediction is that the extra $600 a week won’t go away, unless Congress wants the economy to crater even more before the election in November. Why? Since giving away money to people and companies that haven’t earned it is literally the thing Congress loves most in the whole world, I think they will. And I think they’ll ultimately manage to extend it. Probably for at least 100 weeks.

We’ve borrowed more in the first quarter than we spent in 2011. What’s a few more zeros on the national deficit?

But when I wrote that first post about the crash, I was (more or less) assuming we’d be done with the economic mess associated with COVID-Forever no later than July. I thought that people would, as much as possible, not go licking all the doorknobs that they see and the disease would run out of people to infect. Yay, normal summer. And given that, I still predicted at least five years to recover, but more likely a decade.

Nope. States are re-locking down right now. States that never experienced the devastating deaths caused by the nursing-home stuffing Governor Cuomo set up in New York are seeing cases rise.

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When large segments of the economy simply disappear, you can’t simply replace them with money. In the end, money has real purposes in the economy:

Money provides incentives for good behavior, like starting successful companies and saving. Blowing it all on Three Stooges® videos from Amazon™ is probably not the best investment strategy I ever had.
Money provides an allocation of resources throughout the economy without central planning – it’s a way to allocate the productive energy of the economy without a team of Central Politbureau Commissars picking and choosing winners and losers. Congress hates How can you get votes if you don’t mismanage the economy?
Money provides ways for people to trade for “stuff” without bartering. I could trade your (for example) a vast quantity of Beanie Babies® for a pickup truck. But then you’d be stuck with all of those Beanie Babies™ and have to trade them for the goat milk and pantyhose that you really need. Unless you can milk Beanie Babies© and then use their skins for leggings?

She was upset when the prices crashed. I tried to tell her she’s not worthless – her kidneys are worth a lot on the black market.

But money isn’t the economy – money only has value if everyone believe in it. You can’t just give everyone money and expect that good things will happen. At some point, people need to make things. And people need to believe that money has value.

You can’t grow plants with Brawndo©, you can’t fight crime with a macaroni duck, and you can’t rehydrate an economy with money.

But the Fed© is trying to do that. Not grow plants with Brawndo®. But make an economy work by sprinkling money on it.

The next phase of our economic crash, however, is default. Unless the Fed© keeps rehydrating, eventually people will stop paying back money – it will be a Cashpocalypse – borrowers won’t have money, and lenders won’t get paid. But that’s okay, we can simply have the Fed™ just shower the money onto both of them?

The French, of course, had to jump on the Cargo Cult bandwagon, so they called it “Special Cargo Cult”, or S-Cargo for short.

In the 1940s, massive amounts of men and material flowed into the South Pacific so that we could beat the Japanese back from Australia so it could be handed over to the Chinese in the 21^st century. Several cults known collectively as “Cargo Cults” formed. One speaks about their deity, John Frum, or, as I prefer to think of it, John From Wilder’s house. (Seriously, they think the name of John Frum came from “John from America”.)

The idea behind these Cargo Cults was that if the natives built symbolic airstrips and symbolic airplanes out of bamboo (or whatever they had) then the flow of cargo that the American and British armed forces brought in would resume. Then? Perfect prosperity. Hurray!

The Fed™ has become infected with the idea that the economy can be summoned. That’s the definition of a Cargo Cult.

Sadly, I have bad news. It won’t work. It can’t work.

You can’t make an economy by rehydrating it with money. But you can regress an economy. And you can destroy the belief in the money you’re flooding the system with.

Just because it’s gone exactly the way I’ve thought it would and told you it would, don’t mind me. In all seriousness, I could be wrong.

But I could be right. What then?

Have some water on hand?

Too Much News? Take A Step Back.

“I’m a reasonable guy, but, I’ve just experienced some very unreasonable things.” – Big Trouble in Little China

An Antifa member, a communist, and a guy living in his mom’s basement walk into a bar. He orders a drink.

“That’s it, I’m going to have to stop,” The Mrs. said.

John Wilder: “Stop what? I mean, please don’t stop gourmet* night.”

The Mrs.: “No. The news. I’m going to have to stop reading it. I’m just so mad I can’t see straight.”

I agreed with The Mrs. I usually do: she knows where most of the shooting irons are, and I sleep pretty heavy. The Mrs. had been following the news of our current national situation, which is usual. But in this case, The Mrs. had been getting pretty mad.

It was fairly obvious. The Mrs. often talked politics with me when I got home, but this week it was different. Her voice was louder, and she was visibly angry. This wasn’t like her at all, unless I had forgotten to install that hardwood flooring I’d promised to put in. Five years ago.

“If it bleeds, it leads” was first used in 1989 to describe the practice in journalism of focusing on the most horrific story possible. Even though the phrase was new in 1989, the practice wasn’t: there’s a reason that we got into a war with Spain, and it didn’t have a lot to do with the U.S.S. Maine.

Really, this was like picking on that one kid whose parents dressed him in a collared shirt and tie for school.

But back in 1989, news was different and less available: there was the evening news, newspapers, for the first five minutes on the top and bottom of the hour on the radio, and monthly magazines. Sure, if you had CNN®, you could get a constant stream of news.

In practice most people didn’t hook into the news. They spent time living their lives. You’d think that would make it easier for tyranny to take root. Not so. But more on that later.

Back in 1989 the news simply occupied a much smaller place in public consciousness. I think that 9/11 was what changed Americans (I can’t speak to other countries) for good, and addicted us to a continuous stream of atrocity and terror, as we all waited for the next event that would transform our lives.

I still miss Weekly World News. Wonder what ever happened to batboy?

Now news is created and brought into our lives constantly. We’re never more than a click away from news. And news is crafted to trigger our brains. Which parts? Not the parts that glow or fizz or sparkle or whatever it is a brain does when we’re happy. No, the news is crafted to stimulate an easier and more powerful set of emotions: rage and fear.

The news is extreme. And since we now have news that casts a net across the world, you can see:

Time-tested principles and values tossed in a heap weekly,
New divisions in society delivered daily,
And new outrages, fed straight to your smartphone hourly.

It seems like too much. And it is. Tyranny seems to love this situation. The important portions of news are buried in the static. When we watched half an hour of news, we had to focus on the important parts. Certainly it was easier to bury things from the American public back when news was less a part of our immediate lives, but now the news is a minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour source of distraction, how often are we so inundated we can’t sort the out the important threads from the millions of false leads?

We don’t have to live like this.

Wait until he reads what the mice are up to.

Scott Adams, Dilbert® cartoonist mentioned in one of his articles that he didn’t watch scary or sad movies. He avoided them because he didn’t want to watch things that made him unhappy. It wasn’t a casual choice for him – it was a rule.

Mr. Adams probably wouldn’t do so well in our house, since we consider Predator to be kid friendly. Heck, when Pugsley (then about 9) saw me field dressing a deer I was worried that he’d be squeamish. Nope. Pugsley was ready to put it on the grill.

I think Mr. Adams is probably a bit on the extreme side. I’m not criticizing, the special sauce on his burger is working out pretty well for him. You don’t have to remove yourself that far from the reality of the situation.

But like The Mrs., you can step back for a bit, too.

Sure, things are rough in this minute if you watch the news. You can only control so much, and can’t (at all) control the actions of Leftist big city governments in Seattle or Minneapolis or in dozens of other cities across the country.

Beer is probably a good start with your preps. Don’t forget to rotate the stock!

None of this is telling you not to prepare. You should. If we’re this far down and you don’t have a Plan B? Shame on you. Work on that. But the news won’t help you prepare for 2021 when the aliens show up. Shut out the noise, step back, and think. If you want to prepare by stocking up on food, do that now. If you want to prepare by stocking up on ammo, do that now. And if you plan to bug out at friend’s place when things go bad? You’d better toss him some money now so you’re showing up to your supplies that he’s keeping for you, and not expecting that he has planned for 34 of his closest friends to show up and eat his preps.

For most people reading this, in this moment you have every physical need met. The troubles you have already conquered are in the rearview mirror. You’ve done great. Congratulate yourself.

The troubles you may face aren’t certainties. There’s no need to fear them now. Prepare yourself? Certainly. But do it cheerfully. Tomorrow will be a great day. The Sun has yet to go out of business.

Turn off the news and your cell phone. Enjoy this day, and prepare for the rough days ahead. You’re up to the challenge.

*Gourmet Night was inspired by the ABC® television show Hannibal. Hannibal was a series about Hannibal Lecter, the character from Silence of the Lambs, but portrayed by Danish actor Mads Mikklesen, who does even better than Hopkins with the character. But the show itself has some wonderfully creepy scenes where Hannibal is cooking a fancy dinner and you have no idea if he’s cooking pigs or people. Oddly enough, this inspired The Mrs. to cook intricate dishes for dinner like beef Wellington or ribeye with crème sauce. Hence, gourmet night, which has been a success at our house.

But wherever does The Mrs. get such tender meat?

Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals: Now For Use By The Right?

“I have a radical idea. The door swings both ways, we could reverse the polarity flow through the gate.” – Ghostbusters (1984)

I haven’t figured out how to publicly indicate that I’m against protesting.

I was talking with a friend a few weeks ago, and casually mentioned Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals as a playbook that had been used by the Left back when they controlled very few of the country’s power centers. Top Hollywood® stars like John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Frank Sinatra were openly patriotic – it was the norm. Politics is one reason I think Frank Sinatra would hate 2020, and the other would be whenever he started coughing he’d think he had Crooner Virus.

But the Leftist rot had already started long before the 1960s. It started in academia. Sure, that seemed safe. Let the Leftists work quietly where they had little money. It was thought the most important decision made was what the professor’s wife would wear to the faculty dinner and the most important rumors were about that new cannibal professor, Hannibal Lecturer. But once it took root, Leftism spread from the colleges and out into the streets.

Alinsky started his quest to organize in the 1940s in Chicago, and the Chicago Tribune described his legacy this way:

“Rubbing raw the sores of discontent may be jolly good fun for him, but we are unable to regard it as a contribution to social betterment. The country has enough problems of the insoluble sort as things are without working up new ones for no discernible purpose except Alinsky’s amusement.”

The Tribune was one of the few papers that were negative about Alinsky. By the time Rules for Radicals was published in 1971, the editorial departments of most newspapers had been taken over by Leftists that those “harmless” college professors had indoctrinated. Most newspapers applauded Alinsky by 1972 when they reviewed his book.

Professor Karen wants you to think for yourself, but will grade you based on her politics.

As I’ve documented in previous posts (some that include Stormtrooper® bikini shots and pictures of a lot of slave Princess Leia impersonators) You Are The Resistance, Plus? Lots of Star Wars Bikinis and American Civil War: Four Fates, From Freedom to Soviet Tyranny, the Left has taken control of the following sectors of life, not only in the United States, but also in most of the Western world:

The K-12 educational system.
Colleges and Universities.
Most Protestant religious organizations.
Most Catholic organizations.
The psychological establishment.
The American Medical Association.
All mainstream news media.
All mainstream entertainment media.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Many (but not all) Fortune® 500™ companies.

Professor Warren now explains why free speech doesn’t apply to you.

One of the methods the Left used to obtain power was the vigorous application of Alinsky’s Rules. Here they are – along with my annotations:

“Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” – Most of the Leftist power is based on fear – fear of what they might do. That’s the reason the takeover of the media was so important to them – they use it to divide and minimize people on the Right so feel that they are as alone as a Joe Biden basement thought.
“Never go outside the expertise of your people.” – Which may explain the rioting and violence of the Left in the riots today. They’re not good at building things, but they sure can hit a plate glass window with a brick from thirty yards.
“Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” – The idea of the riots is to go beyond every expertise. It has been decades since a president had to deal with riots across the country, and even then, they weren’t all at the same time.
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” – For instance, Christians must be made to live up to Christian principles – that’s the example Alinsky himself used.
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” – Saturday Night Live® used to make fun of politicians on the Right and Late night comedians used to make fun of the Right and Left. Now? Only the Right is mocked, and (for reasons I’ve explained before Why The Left Can’t Meme) even then, poorly.
“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” – Whatever it is, it should give them emotional payoff – the people crying at the Trump protests early on were an example – they enjoyed feeling the pain and rage. And as we’ve learned in 2020, who doesn’t love riots?
“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” – Sit ins? That’s so 1960’s. Burning down Wendy’s®? That’ll teach them to, um, exist.
“Keep the pressure on.” – Ideally, it should be one event followed by another – don’t give your target a chance to think straight
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” – Alinsky threatened to do things – all of the time. The word “threat” appears 38 times in Rules for Radicals. Often he would leak the threat of a plan, and never even have to do it as the opposition gave in to the threat alone.
“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” – Back to point 8 – think of things that can be kept up for a long, long time. Riots in the spring and summer nights can go on for months. In December in Minnesota? Not so much.
“If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” – A great example of this is how BLM has kept the narrative moving about police violence against blacks, when the truth is, statistically, that blacks are shot less often than their level of police involvement would indicate, and whites are shot more But push it long enough?
“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” – The Left no longer does this – rather than have a constructive alternative, they want things like “removal of the systems of white supremacy” and “defunding of the police.”
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” – Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II and now Trump. It’s hilarious that they thought W. was the anti-Christ, and Romney was the Devil when they are now nearly saints of the Left.

Sometimes, you can hear the “Reeeeee” from here . . . .

But can the Right use the same playbook? Absolutely. And they are.

“Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.” – The Left is really afraid of the Right, and fear the most the Right creating a coalition in the same way the Left has. They will do anything to stop that. Sadly, we on the Right seem to be very, very picky on who is in the foxhole with us. A heretic on one point? The biggest power the Right has is in joining together.
“Never go outside the expertise of your people.” – Protesting violently isn’t in the Right’s DNA. We have jobs. Rioting isn’t in the Right’s expertise. Planning is. Communicating is. Through years of necessity, we’ve also learned to meet quietly.
“Whenever possible go outside the expertise of the enemy.” – Memes are a good example. The Left ceased to be funny in 2004, and ceased to any sense of humor around 2012, so using memetic warfare is nearly as unfair as playing Twister® with a colorblind super model.
“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” – /pol/, the politically incorrect part of 4chan, did exactly that when they posted signs around Seattle telling the homeless that CHAZ would have free food for them. “No borders” and “sharing” were in rules for CHAZ, so, they ran out of food on day two. Plus? It was hilarious – point 5.
“Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” – This, in part, explains why I write some of the things I do. It was particularly satisfying the day I saw one of my memes being made fun of by Leftists on Reddit®. They don’t fight back unless you’re over the target.
“A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” – I love poking fun at the Left, because I know that it bothers them. I enjoy it. Other things I see people on the Right enjoying are planning and organizing and communicating and moving away from California.
“A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” – Expecting things to go back to “normal” isn’t working for the Right. You can come up with other examples of these – but in large part the playbook needs to be re-written.
“Keep the pressure on.” – The closest that the Right has come to doing this is The Donald himself and his use of Twitter® as a continual agency of chaos. He pokes. He prods. He shakes things up and looks for advantage. He’s had Democrats so tied up in nots they said that Haiti was a paradise.
“The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” – The Right hasn’t been very good at making threats or even having a cohesive plan.
“The major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” – Again, outside of Trump, there has been little pressure made on the Left, and next to no organized pressure on the mainstream Left. When has the idea of freedom of speech been used against the Left in an organized way on a college campus? This started with academia, and a good solution will leave college departments where the Leftists lurk defunded. Imagine a Grievance Studies professor having to look for a real job because they violated the campus speech code?
“If you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” – Opposition to illegal immigration is just one issue of the Right that, if it were pushed is a winner. There are others.
“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” – What is it that the Right wants? Do we know?
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” – Groundwork has been made with people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the rest of her Leftist group, but the Left is expert at this – Justice Cavanaugh is a textbook study, even though they lost.

But what do we want when we have a victory?

Long term, I’m not sure Alinsky’s rules will be enough for the Right as we wander towards Civil War 2.0, but they’re a start, and they’re certainly fun. As I mentioned above, it has lost institution after institution to the Left, and many of those without even a fight. None of this will be quickly won, and the Right must begin to think in decades, and also look to make common cause with people who aren’t exactly fitting some sort of mental ideal for the perfect person on the Right, since they don’t really exists.

Back to the fun.

Deflation, Inflation, Collapse – Now With Muppet Jokes

“Well those are whole pennies, right? I’m just talking about fractions of a penny here. But we do it from a much bigger tray and we do it a couple a million times.” – Office Space

If being in the Federal Reserve® offices give you a cold, what should you do? Sudafed.

The Federal Reserve© is scared. And inflation is currently not on their list of Halloween boogiemen –the monster they fear is deflation. Well, deflation and accidentally mixing up Pride Month and Bulgarian History Month. I think the main reason that the Fed™ is worried about deflation is that then people become like me in 2000 when I was looking to buy a computer.

Every six months I waited, the computer I could buy for the same amount of money was much faster with more memory. Computers were really a deflationary item at the time as advances kept making them better and better on a nearly monthly basis. It made sense to wait, because I could get a better deal later.

For computers, that was okay – there was a solid market for them at the time, and Intel® wasn’t going to go out of business because its next chip was going to be faster next year. But if you apply that to the entire economy, then people would have been steering clear of the toilet paper aisle in February. Live and learn.

Deflation is great for consumers – they get more stuff for less money. Deflation also discourages debt – why borrow money when the dollar you’re borrowing will be worth less than the dollar you have to pay it back with?

But deflation in an economy slows everything down worse than a Kardashian trying to take a college entrance exam. Most economies in the world are built on endless growth. Part of the economic growth is required because more people enter the labor force every year. The other part is the system is built on growing income, growing revenues, growing the bottom line – stock prices are built (mostly) not on the intrinsic value of a company here and now, but on the value of the company in the future.

I hate stonks. Gentlemen prefer bonds.

I’ve written about deflation before, but it’s probably a good time to mention some of the clues coming from the financial system. But first, I have to explain that when a loan is paid back to the bank, money is actually destroyed. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I’m a trained professional, and we’ll get there. And by trained, I mean trained as a cook at a Chinese restaurant. Okay, not trained – it was more of a wok-through.

Let’s start with a bank. In this case, my bank.

If I were to deposit $100 in my account, I have $100 in my account, right?

Kinda.

The bank now thinks it’s their money. It turns out that when you open a checking or savings account with a bank, you’re actually lending them money. The banks in the United States are actually what’s known as “fractional reserve banks” in that they only have to keep a portion (or fraction) of the money that I deposited on hand for people who come in and want cash.

Traditionally, that fraction has been around 10%. So, if I open an account with that $100 in it, the bank can lend $90 of that money out. The theory is that not everyone wants to come in and get their money back all at once, so you only have to keep that 10% on hand for people who want their money back on any given day for whatever purpose. It’s like stealing, but totally legal.

If too many people come in, the idea of the Federal Reserve™ (the Fed®) is that they’ll send the bank some cash if needed because tons of people borrow money all at once from the bank. That way if Lady Gaga is coming to Modern Mayberry and everyone decides to fork over $1000 a seat for VIP tickets to listen to her sing about her her her Poker Face, the Fed will give us extra cash. That’s why it’s called the Federal Reserve® – it’s a reserve for banks if they need cash because Lady Gaga is coming to town.

When you microwave a Muppet®, it will even countdown with the timer!

I didn’t want to go see Lady Gaga, so I still have my $100 in the bank. Therefore, my bank has loaned out $90 to Johnny Depp who was a little short for the show after buying some killer weed.

But I still think I have $100.

But the bank lent out $90.

And Johnny Depp puts his money in his account in another bank until it’s time to pay for the ticket. So, that bank now has Johnny Depp’s $90, and can immediately lend out $81 to someone else, who deposits it back in my bank.

Thus, my original $100 deposit now accounts for $171 in the economy.

As soon as the loans are paid back, the transaction unwinds and the actual amount of “money” in the system disappears. There’s a theoretical limit to the amount of money that can be created with a certain reserve rate.

But I said the Fed was scared. And I said it was scared of deflation.

My bank used to have to keep $10 in the vault in case I come back looking for my $100. Used to. As of March 15, 2020, that reserve that banks are required to keep is – drumroll please – zero. Yes. I’m not making that up. It’s right here on the Fed’s own website (LINK). The press release is here (LINK).

What this means is that banks have to keep enough cash around so if yokels like me want to withdraw $23.73 for a trip to buy some really nice earplugs the night of the Lady Gaga concert, the bank had to have that much actual cash. But now, the banks are free to loan all of it out. They could loan not $90 to Johnny Depp, but the full $100. And when he put it in his bank, they could loan out $100 as well.

In the 10% reserve, there was at least some limit to the money that the banks could create by lending the same $100. But at zero reserve? The number of times that $100 could be lent is only constrained by the number of people who want to borrow it. My original $100 could (in theory) create infinite dollars. That’s Congress level math!

My-my-my-Joker® face . . .

This means the Fed is worried about keeping banks lending, so they can keep the money supply up. The Fed also wants to keep the money moving – they want me to buy my Lady Gaga earplugs and the person I bought them from to buy some PEZ® from Wal-Mart® and Wal-Mart™ to pay that money to an employee who buys ice cream sandwiches. If people save their money, it’s nearly the same as there being less money in the economy.

That’s where the Plunge Protection Team comes in. People with 401k investments get scared when the stock market goes down. Stock market plunges are deflationary. Plus, they really hurt the investment banks, so the one thing we know about both Democrat and Republican? They both really want to make the investment bankers happy.

Wall Street crashing? Let’s have a series of well-timed purchases of stock to turn it around. Since you can look at the Fed’s balance sheet yourself, and compare it with the stock market, perhaps the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA)® going up 500 points on a day when multiple large American cities are actively on fire. The Plunge Protection Team, it is rumored, buys (or has groups like Goldman-Sachs™ buy) stocks on multiple markets to keep a crash from happening.

I hate it when the Plunge Protection Team kneads my back while I’m sleeping.

The idea is that by keeping the stock market from crashing, the economy is saved. In one sense, that’s a logical conclusion. Falling stock markets have panic as the main feature – people literally are scared to death, so they sell even solid stocks at bargain prices. As a strategy, it’s a lot like buying a drunk guy another dozen shots of whiskey. The problem’s gone. At least for now.

But you can only game a system for so long. Eventually, the game playing will come back to haunt you. And the Fed may be scared of deflation right now, but all of the injection of money via loans and balance sheet inflation and stock market propping up? The system failures get bigger, and bigger. The old tools don’t work. And the system fails. This time for good in a spasm of deflation followed by inflation followed by currency collapse.

I know you’re worried about the investment bankers getting caught up in the deflation-inflation-collapse. Don’t be! Right now, they’re selling their stock after the plunge protection team bumps up the price and buying bunkers in Montana or old missile silos in Nebraska. Yay, free market capitalism!

I’m sure that it’s a coincidence.

I’m not saying that we’ve reached the point where we’ll see the financial systems fail with this cycle. It may not be this leg down. But like the Fed®, keep one eye open.

Deflation might be hiding under the bed.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: The Tsunami Begins, But You Knew That

“If we can stop him, we shall prevent the collapse of Western Civilization. No pressure.” – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

I liked the ticking of the clock I got from the pawnshop, but in the end it was a second-hand emotion.

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

In the first issue of the Civil War Weather Report, I put together ten steps to a new civil war. I did not expect that on the one year anniversary of that first report we’d move from step 6 nearly to step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight.

We are very, very close. I debated internally more than a bit whether we were at an 8. or a 9. this month. I finally decided to stay at an 8., despite multiple jurisdictions doing everything but arming the rioting faction of the protest movement with automatic firearms and bullhorns that make them all sound like Gilbert Gottfried. It is clear we are at least an 8., and you will see in the graphs section that our Wilder Violence Index has reached new highs.

In this issue: Front Matter – You Knew Where This Was Going – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Balkans or Caesar Might Be The Best Case Scenario – Links

Welcome to Issue 12 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.

You Knew Where This Was Going

The most popular posts on this site have been about the political state of the country. The Civil War Weather Reports aren’t my usual form of post, but have proven to be very popular. I’m sure it’s not just for graphs featuring bikinis. Well, at least not only because of the bikinis.

I think the reason these posts are popular is simple: many people could sense the fragile peak that it seems all of Western Civilization is perched on. Whether it is a conscious review of the surrounding culture or just a feeling in the pit of the stomach when confronted with an outrageous news article, something’s just not right. Society has been changing by increments over the years, but those changes are coming faster and faster and faster.

Claire Wolfe, the groundbreaking and iconic Freedom blogger said it very well at her place last week (LINK):

Each day I think I’ve processed the latest craziness enough to blog something coherent. Useful even. But then new waves of craziness wash over the world. I don’t know what to say. I can’t write good sense against the onslaught of the crazy. I don’t know how civilization is holding together under tsunamis of crazy.

But then, of course civilization isn’t holding together — and I’m not just talking about the one-two punch of totalitarian don’tleaveyourhouseism followed without pause by riotandlootallyouwantism.

Chains of rapid-fire events and chaos like this are not generally the friend of those that love freedom. The Russian Revolution promised:

Peace, through ending World War I,
Food, because Communists are well known to produce excess food,
Land, whereby peasants would get parts of land owned by the wealthy,
Minimum wages,
Maximum working hours,
Running factories by elected worker representatives and
Lots of other promises.

In the end, up to 12,000,000 people (mainly civilians) died in the civil war that followed, and the promises that were made were largely ignored. The Bolsheviks said and promised anything to get a force of disaffected behind them. Not sure if this sounds familiar to AOC fans?

Hey girl, are you the French Revolution? Because I keep imagining you sans-culottes.

I get a sense that the Left today is up to the same trick. They’ve “created” media events and have managed them to get power – political power and power in the street. Some of the Leftists may even be stupid enough to believe that there are magic economic levers that they can move to keep the promises they’re making. In reality, they really don’t care: it’s all about the power.

Lenin’s reintroduction into Russia and subsequent funding from foreign sources bring George Soros to mind. Soros continually funds groups in the United States that are directly opposed to actual freedom. The protesters and their associated rioters have a structure that has been funded and provisioned with everything from water and medical supplies to pre-staged bricks and gasoline. Not saying that George is funding those directly, but . . .

Healthcare, Unemployment, and Soviet Nails

“Point of interest? Offering to shoot us might not work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.” – Firefly

But that’s not as bad as the unemployed jester: he’s nobody’s fool.

As I looked at the headlines today, two of them jumped out at me. The first was this (capitalization same as the original):

82% WANT MONTHLY STIMULUS CHECKS . . . . (LINK to actual study)

As usual, there are some misleading bits behind the headline. If you clicked through the fluff pieces (several times) to the actual study on the stimulus checks that I linked to, it really says that 82% want stimulus checks as long as the government is mandating a shutdown. That’s a lot more reasonable, since it’s not asking for that money, you know, forever. Except in Michigan, where I believe governor will keep the economy in shutdown mode until scientists develop immortality.

So, the headline was misleading, and people didn’t want the money forever. That made me happy. Until I read the real story embedded in the study and saw this statistic:

74% of Republicans and 84% of Democrats agree that we should move to a universal health care system.

Stick a fork in it, folks, like a doughnut around Stacey Abrams, it’s done. If the numbers in that study are correct, regardless of how you or I might feel about it, nationalized health care in some form is now probably just a matter of details and whose name goes on the package.

At least the Washington Post can explain that unusual eclipse on the East Coast now.

I could spend a lot of time talking about how and why we got here, including discussion of how the system we have is just like Michael Moore: it incorporates the worst aspects of capitalism and the worst aspects of socialism. But I won’t. This battle, I think, is effectively lost. A shrewd candidate for president will make this a centerpiece of his campaign, and the only difference will be if the final version is called TrumpTreatment© or BidenBenefits®.

Obamacare has served the only purpose it was designed for: it is the capstone of a series of Federal mandates since the 1980s that have served to make the costs of healthcare in this country so incredibly high that literally anything is better than the status quo. Healthcare in the United States doesn’t in any way mimic a free market, except in plastic surgery and laser eye surgery. Those costs have gone down because insurance generally doesn’t pay for them and doctors have to actually compete. I guess the other nice thing about being a plastic surgeon is that they get to see new faces every week.

Healthcare should remind everyone of the mantra of the Left: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” This crisis has been made through successive actions of the Left to make hospitals have to charge responsible people for every drug addled meth and crack head and pregnant illegal alien that drools or waddles their way into the emergency room. But there’s enough blame for everyone, since the corporatist wing of the Republican party has taken action to ensure that insulin makers can charge Americans six times the cost for a life giving drug (insulin) in the United States as compared to our neighbors to the North.

If the first headline wasn’t bad enough, the second headline was:

68% Of Unemployed ‘Eligible For Payments Greater Than Lost Earnings’ . . . . (LINK to study, and not three layers of journo-fluff)

This is one with which the extended Wilder family has some experience. Alia S. Wilder was recently working from her home composing Mongolian throat-singing mix tapes for the black market. Normally she does this in an office, but due to BatFlu, she was sent to work from home. Her boss called and told her they were temporarily shutting down the business.

The cat then told me, “Snitches get stitches.” I had no idea he was closely watching health care policy.

Since the market they serve of throat-singing aficionados was entirely shut down by Corona-chan, it was a logical business move to make. Alia S. Wilder was also one of the first people to get called back. Good? Well, yes. But she had to take an income cut to do so, since her job pays less than unemployment insurance plus the $600 a week that Uncle Sugar was kicking in.

I was proud of her that her complaint level was exactly zero: she was roaring and ready to get back to work. Those mix tapes won’t make themselves, after all. But how many people would just love to stay home and collect the WuFlu bucks? Get paid for doing nothing? It must be that “new normal” that people keep talking about.

I actually understand the reason people would like free money, and would prefer to stay home and eat nachos and smoke weed on Gram-gram’s couch rather than deliver pizzas. However, the $600 a week bump sets up bad incentives: I read one story of a guy who needed pizza delivery dudes, and no one would take the job because unemployment paid so much more. I can see that, given the horrible hiccup in the economy, why the government would want to print lots and lots of money encourage consumption, but the increased payments have essentially raised the minimum wage to somewhere between $20-$25 just to break even with current unemployment payments. How much more would you have to pay people to actually work?

For markets to work, there needs to be some sort of connection between supply and demand. If you pay people $1000 a week, how many will think that working for $1200 a week is a good idea? Not many. And I’m willing to bet that if the economy is as bad as I think it is, the Federal government will continue the payments for longer than the current end date in July. During the Great Recession, the Federal government continued unemployment insurance for 100 weeks. Two years.

What kind of distortion will that have on the labor market?

Yes, this happened on a CNN special last week.

In thinking about this story, I was reminded of an old story that I heard about the Soviet Union:

There was a Soviet nail factory. In the factory, the communist leaders from Moscow called and told the manager, “Make sure you increase production of nails! You must increase the tonnage for Comrade Stalin!”

The manager hung up the phone. “Yuri,” he called for the production foreman, “make a production schedule change. Make very, very large nails this month.”

Accordingly, the factory had a record production month in tons of nails produced. The communist leaders printed a picture of the factory manager receiving an award. But soon enough, the leaders in Moscow realized that not a lot of people needed nails that weighed two pounds each. The communist leader called the manager back. “The tonnage was good. But this month, make more nails for Comrade Stalin.”

The manager hung up the phone. “Yuri,” he called for the production foreman, “make a production schedule change. Make many very, very, small nails this month.”

Not my translation. The KGB spy school told me to pretend I don’t speak fluent Russian.

I wasn’t able to verify the basics of this story, but I did find the accompanying cartoon which at least hints that the Soviets themselves were aware that something was broken in their system. And I did find a story about a Soviet plant that made a machine to help make tires. They developed new technology that allowed the machine to make tires much faster, but refused to make it.

Why?

Then they would make fewer machines. In a market-based economy the company would celebrate their new, better machine and use it as a selling point to beat their competition. But in this case, the incentives were to make more machines rather than make better machines.

This is the primary failure mechanism of socialist systems. They have bad incentives. I read once that in Great Britain that people ring up the ambulance to take them to the doctor. Why not? It’s “free,” right?

Once a “free” system takes hold, however, it will never leave until the economy collapses under all the “free” money and “free” services. Why? People become dependent on free things. If you want to make someone dependent on you? Give them things. Proof?

Ever hear your parents say, “My house, my rules?” Giving is a form of control.

I think the last person I saw driving this windowless van was named Bernie.

Freedom comes from saying “no” to free things, but I have the sense that people are going to be saying yes to free stuff.

Always think back to what Admiral Ackbar says at a time like this:

Stalingrad, Democide, and Maybe The Government Isn’t Here To Help You?

“What does a Nietzschean mother hope for her son when she names him Genghis Stalin?” – Andromeda

Actual Joke From the USSR (via Wikipedia©): Stalin reads his report to the Party Congress. Suddenly someone sneezes. “Who sneezed?” Silence. “First row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot, and he asks again, “Who sneezed, Comrades?” No answer. “Second row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot too. “Well, who sneezed?” At last a sobbing cry resounds in the Congress Hall, “It was me! Me!” Stalin says, “Bless you, Comrade!” and resumes his speech.

In August of 1942, the civilian inhabitants of Stalingrad probably totaled about a million people. That number included the normal residents, but also a huge influx of Soviet refugees caused by the Axis push through the Ukraine. However, the German Army Group: South was on the attack, and had been pushing toward Stalingrad for weeks.

According to Google Maps™ at the end of July, 1942, Stalingrad was less than a nine hour stroll from the German position. I assume that includes a lunch and bathroom break and maybe a juice box at halftime, but you never can tell since those Germans were sticklers for keeping to the schedule. Besides, I’m not sure that the Germans had good cell reception at that point, so they might have had to ask for directions.

Stalin decided that the Soviet soldiers would fight best if they had their backs to a city filled with innocent civilians, so he had absolutely forbidden any evacuation of Stalingrad. At least, any evacuation of people. The Soviets did take the time to get the grain, cattle, and railway cars out of Stalingrad. At least Stalin had his priorities straight, right? I mean, railway cars don’t eat and don’t complain.

Popular German Joke During Stalingrad: Our troops have captured a two-room apartment with kitchen, toilet and bathroom, and managed to hold two-thirds of the apartment, despite heavy enemy counterattack.

Not evacuating the inhabitants of Stalingrad was entirely consistent with Stalin’s fun loving and carefree personality. Stalin insisted that his own firstborn son become a Soviet artillery officer. When Stalin’s boy was captured by the Germans in the first few days after Operation Barbarossa kicked off and then rolled over Soviet troops like the media over inconvenient stories about Joe Biden, Stalin was upset.

Why?

Stalin was upset that his son hadn’t killed himself rather than be captured. So, yeah, Stalin wasn’t exactly a sentimental guy, but at least he was consistent. And he was consistent throughout decades. Between 1917 and 1987, the Soviet Union was responsible for (roughly) 62 million deaths of their own people. All but 6 million of those deaths occurred while Stalin was in some position of high leadership.

I guess you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few Kulaks, right? (Stalin’s Cannibal Island and Distracted Driving)

Sadly, Stalin’s line of Stalin-themed lingerie was less than successful, probably because it was made of unwashed wool and aluminum shavings.

I think I first understood the joke, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” when I was about 10 years old. It displays a pretty simple sentiment that was common in the rural area where I grew up: government wasn’t the solution to our problems, government was the problem. Reagan used both of those phrases during his campaign and inaugural address, but he could have been speaking for most of the farmers who had coffee in the local café.

Now, sure, those farmers were fine taking the government’s money, but what they didn’t like was when government told them what to do. From the farmers’ perspective, government was out of control even back in Reagan’s 1980. Those farmers had grown up in a different world: when they were young, say 12, they could have saved up enough money from their paper route or whatever Pa paid them to milk the cows, and marched down to the local hardware store and purchased a .22 rifle of their very own along with a box of ammo to go shooting with their friends.

Not at their friends, with their friends. City folks in the current year still can’t seem to figure that one out.

I tried to look up “ATF jokes” on Google®, but all Google™ would do was show me pictures of the ATF agents who planned the Waco operation.

The dads of those kids could go into the hardware store and purchase dynamite, without a license or even a reason. Want to build a dam on your own property? Go for it, though the states might have a rule or two if they ever caught you, which they probably wouldn’t. Want to build a combination strip club and church on your own land? It’s a free country, ain’t no one stopping you. Endangered species? Well, there was probably a reason for that – if it were tough enough or not so darn tasty, they would be fine.

In 1952, there were roughly 20,000 pages of Federal regulations in the “Code of Federal Regulations” – the big book that has all of the rules. In 2020? There are roughly 180,000 pages. Of rules. That’s (using my estimates) nearly two words of regulation for every person in the United States. My two are promulgate and trout. And you can go to jail for violating many of the regulations on those 180,000 pages. Why do we need 160,000 more pages of regulations than in 1950?

Control.

How are you supposed to keep track of that many rules? I’ve heard that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” so I’m thinking that the people in America must be psychic, because there’s no way that any single person could know what they’re either:

required to do or
prohibited from doing or
free to do.

It’s actually the preferred end state of government: everything is either prohibited or mandatory, and thus you can selectively prosecute anyone for anything at any time. Everyone is guilty, and like Stalin’s buddy and head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, said: “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.” Everyone’s guilty – it’s just a matter of picking the person you want to prosecute.

But one man at a time? That’s how amateurs operate.

Government regulations: keeping you safe from trucks that might be slightly taller than a number written in a book by a regulator who has never seen a truck.

When I spent time last year researching the causes of death between 1900 and 2000 (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!), one statistic popped out: 262 million people were killed by their own government. That’s more that every murder in the twentieth century, and more than every person killed in every war during that same period. More people were killed by their own government than were killed in every natural disaster during that century. It’s almost governments could use a warning label. Oh, wait, government regulations are what mandate the warning labels.

I’d post this warning, but the font is probably not legally the right size.

Thankfully, the decline in deaths caused by government decreased when communism ceased to be an active ideology. The end of the Soviet empire was one event, and the death of Mao and the adoption of a capitalist incentives in a still authoritarian China was another that made the citizens of the world their own nations safer.

But what led to those ideologies taking over in the first place? Generally, four things.

An Economic Crisis
A Governmental Power Vacuum
A Civil War
The Idea That Equality of Outcome Is More Important Than Equality of Opportunity

It’s ironic that the two countries both at the forefront of killing their own citizens advertised themselves as the most equal in human history, but not surprising. Stalin and Mao did their part to create an equal society – one where anyone could be killed at any time for any reason. They were also the reason a word was invented: Democide.

Well, they all look equal to me.

Democide means, in a really short definition, your government deciding you’re wasting too much of your country’s valuable oxygen. It doesn’t matter why. It’s that your government decides that’ it’s not them, it’s you. It doesn’t mean the Russians killing German soldiers. It doesn’t include the Germans bombing the Russians, soldiers or not. It includes the Russians killing Russian civilians. It also includes the Russians killing German civilians after they take over the places where the Germans were living, and vice-versa. So, Stalin didn’t kill only Russians, but that was who he was most fond of killing. And Mao? Mao pretty much exclusively killed Chinese during his bouts of democide, perhaps because take-out had yet to be invented.

If you want to look more into it, here’s a website devoted to it (LINK). It has the look of a Geocities website circa 1996, and some of the links that the site points to have been Clintoned: abandoned like Bill’s ex-girlfriends and eliminated like Hillary’s enemies. The site, however does lays out the numbers of dead for governments that decide that there are just too damn many of their own people hanging around. Did I say hanging? Sorry, poor choice of words.

Reprinted with permission.

Stalingrad’s number of civilians dead “officially” was 40,000. But it’s thought that 40,000 died just on the first day of German bombing back in August of 1942. A more credible estimate is that up to half a million civilians died during the six month battle. These citizens aren’t even listed in Stalin’s total above – these are “just” war dead, and not attributed to the Soviets.

Whew. I bet Stalin would be pretty embarrassed if it took the Soviet total up to 62.5 million instead of just 62 million.

Why do I bring this up now? Hmm. No reason.

None at all.

How Dead Romans Can Help You Be Happy

Jack: (tapping on the walls) Two, three feet thick, I’ll bet. Probably welded shut from the outside and covered with brick by now.
Wang: Don’t give up, Jack.
Jack: Oh, okay, I won’t, Wang. Let’s just chew our way outta here.
-Big Trouble in Little China

I keep turning negatives into positives, which may explain why I can’t jump start a car.

I have, from time to time, been accused of being an optimist. I don’t really think I am. I am certain that I am going to die. I am certain that, of the things in life I have to face, the toughest ones are ahead of me, not behind. Gentle retirement in the world that we’ve made and are preparing to go through now?

Probably not.

I’ll argue that the strange things that we’ve seen so far aren’t even close to the strange things we will see in the days and weeks ahead. And the last six weeks our lives? Who would have expected that the state house in Michigan would be filled with armed protesters? Not me. Although some people have predicted the way that the next financial crisis would happen, I certainly didn’t see it happening because of a Chinese bat.

But what I’m not particularly good at is giving up. The real enemy of life isn’t death – the enemy of life is giving up because life isn’t what was planned. Seneca put it pretty well:

True happiness is to enjoy the present, without anxious dependence upon the future, not to amuse ourselves with either hopes or fears but to rest satisfied with what we have, which is sufficient. For he that is so wants nothing.

I wonder how long he had to sit still for this selfie?

One way to read Seneca’s quote would be to read it as justifying laying around smoking weed and eating PEZ® on the couch until you exhibited a gravitational field that could influence minor planets. I assure you, that’s not what Seneca meant. Seneca and most of the other Stoic philosophers that I’ve read were accomplished people in the real world, not professors at some East Coast liberal arts college. Seneca had worked and made himself one of the wealthiest men in ancient Rome. Marcus Aurelius was a Roman Emperor who daily wrote down notes to himself on humility and virtue and being of service. Marcus himself pours cold water on the idea that inactivity was the point of life:

So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being?

So, giving up isn’t the point, and sitting around feeling “nice” isn’t the point, either. Despite all of this, there’s no reason not to stay in bed all day in your footed pajamas with a cup of hot cocoa, right Marcus?

At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work. I’m a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for, the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm?

Nope, I guess that won’t work. I think there’s a chance that Marcus wrote this while out campaigning with his Legions against the Germans. In winter. After millions of Romans died in a plague that’s named after him, the Antonine Plague, his full name being Marcus Aurelius Antoninus. How bad was that particular plague? It’s estimated that one out of nine people in the Roman Empire died. Unless you’re a communist, having your own people die is considered a bad thing.

When the Romans counter-attacked, they always went for the German with the ax, hence the phrase: “We’ve got to get to the chopper.”

I probably would have given a good, long thought about staying in bed, too. But Marcus didn’t give up, he probably worked harder. Part of being a Stoic is to go out and give it your all. That’s what you’re supposed to do.

What you’re not allowed to do is get fixated either on success or failure. Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. There’s virtue in neither of these. There is, however, virtue in going out and doing your best, leaving nothing back, fully committing yourself to your cause.

None of us will escape death. All of us will fail. Suffering? Yeah, that’s going to happen, too. To all of that, I have a simple response:

So what?

All of those things will happen to every human that’s ever lived or ever will live. You’re not a special snowflake that the world revolves around. There is no particular way your life “should” turn out. Your life right now is mainly the sum of all of the choices you have made, both good and bad. Was there luck in there, both good and bad? Sure, but not as much as you might think.

You may have been sad, but you’ve never been Ronald McDonald™ in a McDonalds® crying and choking down fries sad.

And if you made bad choices that have led you to a present that you don’t care for? Deal with it. And even today on most days if you look around life might appear to be dark, but this very second you probably aren’t suffering. You have electricity. You have Internet. You probably have some sort of food in the house that you wouldn’t mind eating. And if you’re thinking of making a tuna sandwich, I’ll take one, too. You know, while you’re up.

I don’t imagine PJ Boy does a lot of quoting Seneca. Unless Mommy makes him.

Part of life is getting rid of excuses. Most of the time when we say, “I can’t” we mean “I don’t wanna try (I might fail).”

Others?

I’m too young, or too old, or just too darn pretty. It’s probably the pretty one, right?
I’m too busy. Good news! After the economic Coronacane passes through, we’ll probably all have time on our hands.
I don’t know how to do ______. Unless it’s differential equations. Then just do what the book says. Nobody really understands differential equations.
Skipping today won’t matter/I’ll start tomorrow. These two excuses are the same excuse, and they’re exactly the same one as Marcus Aurelius mentioned when he talked about being warm and toasty in bed instead of doing your job.

It’s today. What can you get done today?

What are you waiting for?

American Factory and Thoughts on the Future American Economy

â€œChina is here, Mr. Burton. The Chang Sing, the Wing Kong?Â They’ve been fighting for centuries.â€ â€“ Big Trouble in Little China

I mean, the camo looks so good, maybe they wanted to show it off?

I watched the documentary American Factory this weekend, and it seemed like a good jumping off point to discuss several topics â€“ globalization, employment, and JengaÂ®.Â In 2008, the General MotorsÂ® plant in Dayton, Ohio was closed during GMâ€™sÂ© bankruptcy.Â According to American Factory (now streaming on NetflixÂ®), 10,000 people in the Dayton area lost their jobs when the factory closed.Â In this current climate, Iâ€™m trying to come up with more unemployment jokes, but they all need work.

Fast forward to 2016, and a Chinese company, Fuyao Glass AmericaÂ®, started a new business making windshields for cars in the old GMÂ© plant.Â Fuyao bought the empty factory and spent on the order of $500 million dollars setting up the glass factory.Â Then Fuyao brought hundreds of Chinese supervisors over to start the facility and train the American workers.Â This makes sense â€“ you donâ€™t want to come across an ocean and have an employee like me when I sold used cars.Â One customer, looking at a minivan, asked me, â€œCargo space?â€

I answered, â€œCar no fly.Â Car go road.â€Â Obviously that didnâ€™t go very well.

One of these Chinese supervisors mentioned that he was committed to stay for two years.Â This was a father of two, and heâ€™d receive no extra pay for being away from his family.Â The Chinese supervisors were sleeping four to an apartment with furniture from the offices supplies aisle at Wal-Martâ„¢.Â Living with a roommate is tough.Â One roommate suggested I had schizophrenia.Â The joke was on him â€“ I didnâ€™t even have a roommate.

Poster from the documentary.Â Thatâ€™s it.Â No joke.Â Move along.

Clips from workers talking as they were just starting their work at Fuyao made it clear that the Fuyao jobs were nowhere near the pay of the GMÂ© jobs:Â At GMâ„¢, one worker made about $29 an hour in quality control until the plant closed.Â In the new Fuyao plant, she made less than $13 an hour.Â I talked to a local dog breeder about a summer job for Pugsley.Â She said that she only paid in expensive pure-bred puppies.Â Pugsley thought about it, and decided it was income-petable.

And the work is tougher than the GMÂ® work was.Â The temperature in some parts of the production area was 200Â°F, or about 63 kilograms.Â One worker spent over an hour a shift in ten minute increments in that heat in the furnace room, and the plant safety guy was trying to figure out how to keep him from overheating.Â But that level of heat had a plus side: Â during the filming I saw two hobbits throw a ring in the furnace room.

What surprised me was that the Chinese gave such access to the people making the documentary.Â They caught candid moments with the Fuyao founder, Cao Dewang, (called simply â€œChairman Caoâ€) throughout the documentary.Â There were moments where he was clearly doubtful, arrogant, or out of touch.Â We all have those moments, but most of the time billionaires try to avoid looking stupid in public.Â I mean, except Elon Musk.

I kid.Â I actually admire Mr. Musk, who seems to be able to do what NASA forgot.Â Fly people into space.

On starting the plant, production levels were described as â€œlowâ€ so Fuyao took the step of sending several of its plant supervisors to China.Â The clash of cultures was obvious at the start of the documentary, but it was during the sequence in China that really showed the difference in the way Americans and Chinese do business.

The conflict started at the first meeting.Â All of the Chinese business people were in suits. Â Most of the Americans were in jeans and t-shirts â€“ one of them was wearing a JawsÂ® movie t-shirt.Â In what was probably pretty embarrassing for the Americans, in the next scene you see them wearing Fuyao company logo polo shirts.Â How did that conversation go?Â â€œExcuse me, perhaps you would be more comfortable in a new company polo shirt and not your mustard-covered t-shirt advertising a forty year old movie?â€

But it was far, far beyond just the informal dress thatâ€™s common with line supervisors in a factory.Â One sequence showed all of the employees singing the corporate anthem.Â Another showed line production employees in a line, yelling out productivity slogans and propaganda like Marines responding to R. Lee Ermey when he was a drill instructor.

They were all out of bat.

One of the American supervisors (who had learned Chinese) was bad-mouthing his employees to a Chinese supervisor.Â To me, the American supervisor came across as someone who would do anything to make the Chinese like him â€“ he was a suck-up.Â After one negative comment about his own team, the Chinese supervisor said, â€œYou should all be united and concentrate your efforts.â€Â It was a subtle but nuclear insult â€“ the Chinese supervisor was slamming the American for not being united with his own workers.Â And the Chinese supervisor was right.

So, refresh the page.Â Am I still dead?

And working in China sounds as bad as Iâ€™d expected.Â Workers typically only get one or two days off a month â€“ a five day work week hasnâ€™t made it to China yet.Â The workers also work 12 hour shifts.Â The Chinese want their workers engaged in the company.

In fact, the American supervisors were there for the company annual Chinese New Year party, where the show was put on entirely by the employees.Â And as for engaged?Â There were several marriages performed at the company party.Â One of the Americans was so overcome with the sense of belonging around him that he was as emotional as a teenage girl watching Titanic.Â Me?Â I like my emotions like I like my beer.Â Bottled.

A quick trip through the Fuyao workers union (which is also the companyâ€™s communist party headquarters) showed that the division between company, country, party, and worker is non-existent.Â The Chinese are certain that they are superior to Americans â€“ several times in the film this is stated by Chinese people on camera.Â But they are also very proud of being Chinese â€“ when Chairman Cao was talking to his Chinese employees in America, he told that that no matter where they go, or where they are buried, that first and foremost they will always be Chinese.

China is nationalist, (mostly) ethnically homogeneous, and unambiguously pro-Chinese at the expense of everyone else on the planet.Â Work is for the government and the party.Â Why are the Muslims in China in reeducation camps?Â Because Islam isnâ€™t Chinese.Â China is a country built on unity and Islam isnâ€™t on the menu.Â And if youâ€™re not on board?

Literally.Â Â

Next, Fuyao fired the plant manager when production and profits were too low, but it was probably the lawsuits on safety that sent him over the top.Â The plant manager had been an American â€“ they replaced him with a Chinese guy.Â Iâ€™ve actually seen this in real life in one company I did business with.Â When things werenâ€™t going well, the owners fired the American and replaced him with a person from their country.Â I mean, if youâ€™re going to yell at the guy, you probably donâ€™t want to do it through a translator.

The documentary ended with increasing tensions ahead of a vote to bring in a union.

Iâ€™m torn.Â Nearly every union person Iâ€™ve ever worked with has been the opposite of what I see on television.Â Theyâ€™ve worked hard and with great skill.Â But to listen to a labor organizer for a union talk makes me feel nothing but that I want to keep one hand on my wallet.Â They have a sense of entitlement that seeks to make the worker feel that they are a victim, and to a certain mindset thatâ€™s an easy sell.Â One person who early in the documentary had been so thankful to have a job, any job, had now put himself in the role of a victim at a union meeting.Â Heck, in America we even have unions for pirates â€“ but their claims always end up in arrrrbitration.

As noted above, safety and adherence to American laws wasnâ€™t really a Chinese priority, at least at first.Â But with the union vote on the line, the Chinese gave a $2 per hour raise across the board and the Plant Manager committed to solving most problems in just one day.Â The plant workers voted to reject becoming unionized, by a 2-1 landslide.Â After that, the Chinese terminated several vocal union supporters, but since this wasnâ€™t China, that wasnâ€™t a literal termination.

Some thoughts that this movie brought out:

The Chinese like being Chinese, and like being around Chinese people. They donâ€™t have much use for everybody else on the planet except economically.Â Iâ€™m sure they keep visiting the United States to measure to make sure that their stuff will fit.
A factory worker used to be able to support a family as a sole breadwinner. The same can be said of the skilled trades.Â Immigration (illegal and legal) destroyed this because demand for jobs didnâ€™t increase, while numbers of workers did.Â â€œGreedyâ€ factory owners get blamed, but the reality is open borders means all jobs that donâ€™t require certificates or diplomas are under pressure from about several billion people willing to do it cheaper, especially if it can be done over the phone by â€œBobâ€ from Bangladesh.
Every union worker Iâ€™ve worked with has been awesome. Every union organizer Iâ€™ve ever seen on a documentary has reminded me of a conman.
This documentary showed the aftermath of the outsourcing of American manufacturing, a transition that has been ongoing since 1995.
The next economic transition is upon us. The new jobs that will be created are going to be quite a bit different than the ones disappearing.
The Mrs.â€™ Grandmother would offer her a shiny nickel to rub her corns. Thereâ€™s a job that wonâ€™t be taken away soon.
The documentary ended with discussions on how the Chinese were trying to automate the factory even more â€“ replacing workers with robots. It was less than thirty seconds of the documentary and the equivalent of writing something at the end of the essay that you wanted to write about but forgot.Â Given Chinese recent history with something as simple as eating bats, I imagine that automation will turn into automated killer robots that will kill all of humanity.Â But, hey, productivity is up!!!

I purchased some suspenders a few weeks ago.Â Pugsley immediately pounced.Â â€œWant me to get your varmint rifle, Pa?â€

Iâ€™d like to think that globalization is doomed, however I read a story two weeks ago about a surgical mask and protective equipment maker in Dallas.Â During the Swine Flu wave back in 2012, the owner had expanded capacity to meet with demand.Â What did the buyers do after the rush?Â They went back to sourcing from China.Â The owner was left with high unemployment insurance cost and new equipment that he had to pay for even though it was unused.

This time, the owner was more than happy to expand production, but heâ€™d only do it on a long-term contract.Â Last I heard?Â No takers.

But nah, Iâ€™m sure that weâ€™ll figure out that at least partially, globalization was what made our economy so fragile that a virus could cause it to collapse like a JengaÂ® game played by a drunk Michael J. Fox.

Groundhog Day: COVID-19 and The Long Now

“I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster. Drank piña coladas. At sunset we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day. Why couldn’t I get that day over and over and over?” – Groundhog Day

It’s Quarantine Day. Again.

Groundhog Day is one American film where the word “treasure” isn’t used lightly. It features Bill Murray in his last collaboration with Harold Ramis – a duo that together made the funniest movies in the world for more than a decade. But there’s something different about Groundhog Day: mixed in with the comedy is a story of personal consequence you don’t see in Ghostbusters or Stripes.

The movie also features a suicide with a groundhog driving a pickup off of a cliff ending in a fireball. Harold Ramis had originally written Groundhog Day to be a typical Bill Murray comedy. Murray wanted something deeper and more meaningful. Together that tension created a thoughtful movie about a weatherman who takes a bath with a toaster.

If you are one of the three people on planet Earth who haven’t seen it (I exclude people from France, for obvious reasons) I’ll give you a short synopsis: Bill Murray plays a self-absorbed weatherman who is sent to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania for Groundhog Day. Again. The weatherman has done this silly segment for the television channel he works at again and again, and he’s not happy. The entire concept of doing a trivial public event to amuse groggy morning television viewers having their morning coffee is something he feels is as meaningless to him as trying to teach Paris Hilton to read.

Paris Hilton got tired of a man knocking on her door all night. She finally let him out.

Bill Murray’s character and the television crew don’t make it out of town before the roads close because of a snowstorm. When Murray wakes up after spending another night in Punxsutawney, he finds he has to live that very same Groundhog Day over again on an endless loop. The movie’s cue that Murray character is stuck in the same day?

The time on the clock radio flips to 6:00AM with a click.

The radio starts playing the same song to start each day.

It’s bad enough to have to live the same day again and again, but to turn it to a special kind of hell, the song every morning for the rest of his life is: Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe.”

After Cher spent time at Chernobyl, you could tell she was happy when she was wagging her tail.

The only variable is what Bill Murray’s character does during that particular version of his one endless day that has become his whole life. When asked, Ramis said that Murray’s character probably spent “thirty or forty years” living the same day over and over again. But not making love like a sea otter.

Babe
I got you babe
I got you babe

Which is how I (and probably millions of others) feel right now. Corona-chan has infected the county where the Wilder family lives at a rate 10 times less than the nationwide infection rate. Even COVID-19 doesn’t seem to want to vacation in Modern Mayberry. Perhaps it’s because of the human sacrifices we make to Opie, the Old One, at our Harvest Festival? I keep telling the Chamber of Commerce that they should stop advertising that. Let it be a surprise to our visitors!

The recent shelter-in-place orders that have popped up all around the country have changed everyone’s life. I’ve written a LOT about the thermonuclear economic disintegration machine that’s munching at our GDP. But, wait, there’s more. It’s also the cause of the change in the routines of nearly everyone in the country.

I hear even pirates can’t take vacations, since ArrrrBNB® is closed, too.

Normally, families go on vacations. This year, I expect that most family vacations will consist of not taking vacations with the people you’ve been in the same house with for six weeks. Will the NFL® play games to empty stadiums this year, so that 11 people not from Cleveland will play on the field against 11 people not from Tampa Bay? I imagine that the NFL™ players might pay big money to get out of the house. Will the local high school team play? I think the local kids will play because the parents would pay big money to get them out of the house, but who can say? It’s all up in the air.

All of the things that we normally take for granted are likewise up in the air – for many people that includes having a job. Yet, with all that tension lots of us are living the same day, again and again. But for me, it’s not the same day I’m used to. Over time, I built up a schedule around work. Get up at the same time every day. Go to work, hit the gym for lunch, and then come home. When we got home, the family would do something – often that would be going out for dinner. On the weekends? Visiting friends. Eating Midwest sushi. Pugsley’s frequent cross-country corn skiing tournaments.

All of those options are gone.

We had variety in our lives, and choices. Want to drive two hours to go to a big city? Sure. We’d do that once every other month for a $9 hamburger (that’s -$26 in metric dollars). We didn’t do it often, but we could do it. We could still drive to the big city, but why? To eat an expensive burger in our car?

Oh, that’s the Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion? I guess the French don’t know what a $9 burger is.

So, the weekends have looked pretty much the same. We goof around the house, have a nice Saturday dinner, sit on the deck, maybe play a game. It’s fun, and it’s good family time. But in doing that, we’re forced to confront each other. Daily. All the time. Again. In the same situation. And even though we’re bombarded by daily news about the WuFlu and the reaction to it, the only real variable is how we interact in that particular day.

Babe
I got you babe
I got you babe

A few weeks ago Pugsley and I were in Wal-Mart©. We went through the checkout line and the clerk was a girl who had gone to high school with The Boy. Small towns are great that way. She had just started working at Wal-Mart® and even though she had known our family for years, she was surprised. “Oh, having a cookout?” she asked as she looked at the hamburger, bratwurst and steaks on the belt.

“Yes.”

“I guess you’re learning to cook!”

Well, no. Even Pugsley has been able to turn out a tasty dinner from scratch since he was about 10 or so. And The Boy is now the grill master and does a fantastic job, even though I keep him out of the grill master’s secret beverages. Who knew that the ice cold, golden bubbly elixir wasn’t the source of my grilling powers?

What kind of burgers do adopted boys get? Bison burgers.

The Mrs. has been the heavy lifter in cooking forever. And although each of us has been cooking, The Mrs. gets tired of the male preference for “meat and bratwurst every night.” I will admit that after a while The Boy and Pugsley both looked like they were suffering from withdrawal symptoms related to pizza roll and Taco Bell® depravation.

One big missing piece in my new “routine” is exercise. Missing 40 minutes of treadmill time, five days a week? Yeah, that’s easy to skip the discipline I built into my life on days when I’m not even bothering to wear pants.

It’s my fault. I built that routine to make the discipline of daily exercise easy for me. When I traveled for business, I had one that kept me exercising. But now, when staying home is what I’m doing? Have I built that routine?

No. Not yet. Like I said, it’s my fault. And it’s especially my fault because I know how to build that routine. The key is fairly simple. I just need to do it. Even though I don’t know if I’m going to even have a vacation, I do know where I’ll be tomorrow.

Babe
I got you babe
I got you babe