Complacency – Page 24 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

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

UFOs, Tiger King, Oil Prices, and Bulgarian Models

“But you have to tell her before the show is scheduled to be on. There is this guy, and he is always requesting shows that are already played. Yes . . . no. You have to tell her before. He couldn’t quite grasp the idea that the charge nurse couldn’t make it be yesterday. She couldn’t turn back time, thank you Einstein! Now he . . . he was nuts! He was a fruitcake, Jim!” – 12 Monkeys

When I woke up from surgery the doctor came in, “John, you brain was thrown outside of your body. Thankfully, I was able to put it back in.” I said, “Doc, thanks for reminding me.”

“World turned upside down” is probably an overused phrase – most times it’s used by people when there is a fairly normal surprise, like getting to work late because of a traffic jam in the hallway between the bedroom and the stairs to the basement. On Tuesday, however, the world really did turn upside down if you owned any oil. Not baby oil, my probation officer told me that baby oil really isn’t made from actual babies. Crude oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. The contract for crude oil turned sharply negative. How negative? Holders of some contracts would be paid $40 a barrel to take that bubbling crude.

Yes. You read that right. People were being paid to take crude oil. How can the industry make up for a negative price?

Volume?

If you bought gasoline around the year 1999, you might have seen $0.79 per gallon of gasoline to fill up your Ford® Probe™. The Probe© had the bad fortune of being named probe right before the X-Files© came on the air and gave probe a whole different meaning. You UFO abductees know what I mean.

Yup, politicians and aliens have one thing in common.

If you bought gasoline around July, 2008, you might have paid nearly $5 per gallon while you and Walter White were the only two people who ever actually bought a Pontiac© Aztek™. But in no case did 7-11® ever pay you to fill your tank. Buy you could drive over to Saul’s place.

That won’t happen today, either, so you can forget your dream of filling your swimming pool full of gasoline for fun and profit. Although, come to think of it, it would be humorous to watch the Olympics® if the swimming was done in a pool of gasoline. Since gasoline is so much less dense than water, Michael Phelps couldn’t float and would sink straight to the bottom. Since my swimming looks more like drowning anyway, swimming in gasoline might be just the thing to even the odds so I can finally win that gold medal.

Well, I guess everybody won at least one swimming race.

Though, there is some part of me that would love to take barrel after barrel at $40 each and dump it in a metal aboveground pool and just burn it. You’d be able to see the black cloud for miles. I’d take pictures and send them to Greta Thunberg so that she would know I’m doing my part to put valuable CO₂ back into the atmosphere. After all, she did dare me to do it.

I think that some of my readers might have read back over the past dozen or so posts about economics and thought, “Oh, John Wilder, he’s gone full doomer.” No, I really haven’t. I still have a very positive outlook about the future. But one think I don’t have is illusions. For instance, I have no illusions that the future will look much like the past. I’m not going to be 18 again, and the world won’t party like it’s 1999 again. Besides, who would want to? You’d have to actually remember phone numbers again and talk to people during dinner again.

The price of oil is a big deal to the economy of the world, and the economy of individual nations, too. I read today that over 10,000,000 jobs in the United States are tied directly or indirectly to the oil industry. Those are jobs that typically pay well, too. At least those jobs used to exist before Tuesday. Next week, I imagine many of those people will be home being introduced to the hypnotic train wreck that is Tiger King™ on Netflix©, and wondering if there is a hair-crime against humanity (crimes against hairmanity?) law in Oklahoma.

When the most normal person in a documentary is the guy whose life might have been used as the basis for Tony Montana in Scarface? It’s a cat-astrophe.

Your life changes. It’s not a static thing. A lot of the people being laid off will either blame themselves, or be bitter about losing their job. That’s natural, but being mad about losing your job is like being mad at the wind, or mad at Joe Biden. You can jump and yell, but it doesn’t matter because neither of them will remember what you’re saying, anyway.

When I was a kid, I remember being bothered by a particular idea. Pugsley brought it to mind when he showed me a piece of Plexiglas® from his computer case, scratched from his handling it over several years. “How do we fix it?”

“We don’t. Learn to live with it,” was my answer. I could see the disappointment in his face.

It was then I recalled breaking a glass in the kitchen when I was a kid. Sure, Ma Wilder didn’t like it when that happened, but what bothered me the most is that I couldn’t make it better. No amount of effort would reassemble that glass from the hundreds of shards on the linoleum floor back into the original.

That idea followed me through life: seeing a scratch in a car door, watching the tread wear down on my shoes. These were one-way events. The future seemed to be a one way street. People got older. Paint on the house faded. Keanu Reeves . . . well, I guess not everything ages.

Physicists have a description of this: entropy. Entropy means that things age and wear down. It never happens in the opposite direction.

The reason that this bothered me is that my hobbies were based on the opposite – most things in my life I could fix. When I built a model of an airplane, or a car, or a tank, in that moment it was new I felt that I had made a small piece of perfection. For me, I could look at it and see that moment in time where it would never be better. It was very satisfying to see that model take its final form because I had made the world just a little bit better. I recall holding a finished model in my hands, not wanting to paint it because it looked so perfect. Then after I’d painted it, being pleased because it looked even better.

I hate Bulgarians when they use profanity. Bulgarity is something I just can’t stand.

As I grew older, woodworking as a hobby filled made me feel those same emotions: the smooth feel of freshly sanded wood and then the sight of the grain soaking up the stain for the first time. It would never be more perfect than that moment in time. The second that I finished, it would start aging. Dust and time would take their toll. They’d be dropped. Or things would drop on them. Regardless, without effort, they’d never be the same as that moment.

But at that moment of creation, it was perfect, or at least as perfect as I could make it. Yes, the physicists are right about entropy – everything becomes more disordered over time. But the one thing they don’t mention is that entropy only increases when there’s no energy flowing into the system.

If you look outside, there’s a huge thermonuclear reactor that powers the Earth every day, sending in a really ludicrous number of watts of power. But watts is a silly metric unit, so I changed it to horsepower. It turns out, if you were to measure the Sun’s output hitting Earth in divisions of the Ford™ Shelby® 350’s 526 horsepower engine, it would take 18,377,411,500 (yes, I did the math) of them running for 24 hours straight at 7,500 RPM to equal the Sun’s output for a single day. For those of you doing the math, that’s 2.42 Shelby© engines for each person on Earth.

I think we have figured out the real reason for Global Warming®. The Sun. Or 18.4 billion Shelby’s® running at the red line every day.

If we have another ice age, we could heat the Earth with these babies. In the process, we’d solve the oil glut crisis, and hit full employment just at the Ford® plants alone. Plus I heard their exhaust kills Coronavirus. That’s my green new deal!

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to accept change. A lot of changes that have happened, I didn’t get to choose. Like my back hair, they just happened. That doesn’t make me a victim, though. I get to choose how I feel, how I react to those changes. Sometimes, changes just are. I get to choose, each and every time, how I react to them. For instance, braiding might be a solution.

Sometimes they are shattered glass type changes are like the first bra a young man runs into: it can never be undone. Sometimes, the changes are a block of wood to be smoothed, something that can be made into a temporary little bit of perfection that will enter my life. But I’ll never know what kind of change that it is until I work at it, and see what it is.

Not long after I saw Pugsley’s face after telling him to live with his scratched computer case, I looked it up. There are lots of ways to get at least some of the scratches out of the Plexiglas®. We’ll give it a shot, to see if we can’t make it better.

Spoiler, it might not be perfect, but it will be better. And it will be ours. We’ll own it.

Change is coming.

Deal with it.

Inflation? Sure. But not right now. (Special Edition Includes Greta Thunberg Joke)

“In 1899, my grandfather, Henry ‘by God’ Ford, was walking home from Edison Illumination after working a double shift. He was ruminating. That morning, he had himself an idea that changed the world. Sixty-five years, and 47 million automobiles later, what shall be his legacy? Getting it in the tail pipe from a Chevy Impala?” – Ford vs. Ferrari

If Stephen King were at the Fed: “All the interest rates float down here, Georgie.”

The government is getting ready to blast enough paper money into the economy that even Zoomers get the joke. The Boy has said, on multiple occasions, “Money printer go brrrr.” By that he means that it’s visible to anyone who is looking that government is willing to just add a zero to every piece of currency coming off the press just to toss money everywhere like Charlie Sheen on a night out with Johnny Depp when one of them is dressed like a Muppet® and the other one gets to be the hand.

But the point is, even teenagers anticipate immediate inflation.

But I can be better than Shoeless Joe: I can say it ain’t so.

See, even the kids get it. Not my meme, probably the work of a 12 year old Anon on 4chan.

In fact, I’ve said before and will say again, I expect that many items will not go up in price, but down. Here’s an example: Pugsley is a young man, at that tender age after puberty begins its hormonal onslaught, but before he has a driver’s license. Generally, that means that the thing he thinks the second-most about is: cars. You can probably figure out what first is. He says it’s the Bible, but I’m not sure he owns one, and that surely wouldn’t explain the Internet data rates I’m seeing.

He’s had me price some beautiful cars, some that do amazing things like go from zero to sixty in a short enough time that I’d worry that I’d look like Shrek® got caught under a steam roller if I put the hammer down. One of them is the Ford Shelby GT350®. This particular car can be purchased used, a year or two old, with less than 10,000 miles on it for about $50,000. Just for grins, I thought I’d check out what they were going for last week. $45,000. That’s a 10% drop, in two weeks.

Why?

Because absolutely no one older than 18 is looking to buy one right now, and everybody under 18 has, ahem, the Internet. Potential buyers are also anticipating further price drops. Why buy that Shelby™ at $45,000 when you can have it for $40,000 next month?

Anticipation of cheaper cars is one factor that leads to deflation.

But who will be able to a-Ford® it? I’ll admit it, I’ve even priced insurance.

There’s another powerful force pushing towards deflation: people just don’t have money. I’ve mentioned before that something like 80% of Americans can’t afford an emergency spend of $1,000. Now, people are losing jobs faster than Hillary Clinton’s witness list is shrinking, and it doesn’t take long for rent, phone, and food to add up to $1000. There won’t be inflation if nobody is buying, and you can’t buy if you don’t have money.

I was slightly concerned during the first few weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown because of empty shelves. Not a lot, because the way the food system works ensures that there is some slack in the system: grain isn’t grown and then immediately shipped to the pizza factory as flour. There are silos. There are cows in the field. There are vats of wine fermenting, and barrels of whiskey aging, and the porthole to the alternate dimension where marshmallows come from is holding up fine. A lot of our food is in the process of being made at any given time.

But this week the shelves were full. In Modern Mayberry, we had full shelves of everything except toilet paper. There was sugar, meat, eggs, milk. Okay, there wasn’t any chicken, but isn’t chicken really just poultry Jell-O®? But there was plenty of nearly everything else. How much of those full shelves wasn’t because of the distribution system, but because people were out of money?

That scares me. People need food.

Finally, there’s a third force. People who do have money are hanging on to it. In a very rational fashion, they’ve decided that they have no idea what’s coming next, so best to keep all the spare change in the candy dish available, so to speak. And spare change in the candy dish doesn’t move in the economy. It just sits there.

In part, our financial system is built around a concept called money velocity. In simple terms, after I spend a dollar, how fast does that dollar get spent on something else? When it moves around quickly, it can account for a lot of transactions in a short period, it seems like there is more money than there really is because it keeps being spent, again and again. It sounds like a hot check, but it’s not.

I actually liked economics classes in college. It was like a nap, but with a grade at the end.

If you consider that this money came from a checking account, in general according to the statistics a dollar in a checking account bounced around over five times in 90 days at the end of 2019. That means:

I got paid and,
I bought some toilet paper from Wal-Mart™ and,
Wal-Mart® paid their cashier with my dollar and,
The cashier bought my old bicycle and,
And I bought some more toilet paper from Wal-Mart©.

It’s simple. But what if there’s no toilet paper? Well, then the second half of the transaction never happens. I just sit on my dollar. It’s not moving around in the economy. That means, even if the Fed prints trillions of these dollars, it’s not enough to offset the fact that there’s no toilet paper to buy and that no one is going out to eat for the last month.

Those transactions just never happened.

And people like me that sit on a chunk of their pay? That drops the velocity on that stack of money to zero until I use it. Right now, people are in general sitting on every dollar they can, unless they have a good source for bargain toilet paper, and I guess they’re sitting on that, too.

Because of those conditions, a lot of things will cost less instead of more, at least in the near-term future. Does that apply to everything?

No.

Things that are in demand, and are in genuinely short supply, will increase in price. Take gold and silver, for instance. The price of silver today is $15 an ounce, according to Kitco™. To buy a silver coin? That’s $24 a coin. The $9 difference? That’s the price to get a coin by the United States Mint or from the Canadian Mint. Silver bars, which have a generally smaller premium? Forget it. Kitco© doesn’t have a single one in stock.

So not everything will deflate like my ego after losing that fistfight to William Shatner at Fight Club. Oops. Wasn’t supposed to mention that. Shhh.

Pugsley tried to Photoshop® something for me, but I told him that teenagers can only do minor editing, at least until they turn 18.

But houses will deflate like a bouncy castle after being jumped on by a dozen toddlers covered with hypodermic needles – but enough about New York City. How many people are buying and selling houses now? No one is. How many people are moving for a new job?

No one is.

Let’s take another example, the New Zealand dollar. The New Zealand dollar is a currency I’ve followed for several years, just for grins. I like to imagine buying a New Zealand winery and retiring there to be a funeral director. I just found out where New Zealanders bury lopsided people – asymmetry. Trust, me it’s funnier if you read the last word in a New Zealand accent.

In the last 15 years, the very best the New Zealand dollar has ever done against the United States dollar was a little shy of $0.90. Right now, you can get a New Zealand dollar for about $0.60. If you look at history, as long as people think of the United States dollar as “safe,” you get people jumping out of currencies like the New Zealand dollar into the United States dollar whenever they get skittish.

Here’s hoping the sheep don’t figure out they outnumber humans in New Zealand.

The United States having a zillion nuclear warheads probably makes people think it’s safe, so they take their money from all over the world. Instead of buying New Zealand dollars, they buy United States dollars, which makes United States dollars increase in value.

The New Zealand dollar has deflated.

I would have bet that would happen, and it has. Imagine all the sheep and, um . . . more sheep you could buy with your new expensive United States dollars?

Can I predict what assets are going to drop in price, by how much, and for how long?

No, I can’t.

But be aware that the rules that you are used to aren’t going to apply.

Will there be inflation?

I think so, after a while, and depending upon where and when the Federal Reserve tosses all those scads of money from the printer that goes brrrr. But if you had just lost your job, and got a check for $10,000 would you spend it on PEZ®, pantyhose, and elephant rides right now? Of course not. But it may be farther off into the future than you anticipate. Houses won’t inflate until people have enough money to buy one. Unless the Fed fills people’s pockets with money and forces them to buy a house, they won’t. Would I buy one in San Francisco for $2 million right now? Would you?

No.

Hmmm, makes those Oklahoma double-wide jokes seem a little, umm, self-serving?

Those assets are frozen, harder than a two-year-old’s grubby grip on a Gummy Worm©. And good luck borrowing money on a house for what it was “worth” yesterday. In the last bust, I went from bankers offering me more money than I could pay back on my signature before the housing bust to having to having to find a receipt to prove I hadn’t stolen that Spice Girls™ CD I listed as one of my assets. Banks always seem to close the barn door in a timely fashion, at least one month after the horse ran away.

Inflation? Sure. But before then that Shelby GT 350™ will be down another 20%, I bet.

Money printer go brrrrr.

Shelby GT 350® go Rawarrrrr? But on a budget, right?

Survival Mindset: City vs. Country. Bonus? Country Girls.

“I’m so tired of all of this traffic. I just can’t wait to get out of Africa.” – Upright Citizen’s Brigade

Especially when I’m explaining.

When we moved to Alaska, we were moving from a mid-sized Midwestern city. The town we were moving from was not big enough for an NFL® franchise, but also not nearly small enough for a letter to Penthouse© about my experiences with an entire college sorority when I was a naïve college freshman in my first week at a small Midwest college.

But this town was a big enough town that there was still a reasonable degree of anonymity. If the person in the car next to me at the stop light was knuckle-deep up their nostril mining for mineral resources without even so much as an endangered species permit, well, the chances are I’d never see them again. And if I did, I could practice a pre-Coronavirus version of social distancing, which involved awkwardly “spilling” 173°F coffee over the hand they had extended for a welcoming handshake. I hope Grandpa forgave me after the burn surgery, but all he would do afterwards was waive that restraining order when I came over to say, “Hi,” and call the police.

He was such a scamp!

Sometimes when you sober up as a naïve freshman, you get udderly surprised.

Not too long after we moved to Fairbanks, The Mrs. had called me and asked me to pick up some canned bananas, sushi flavored ice cream with calamari chunks, and diet flavored peanuts (which turn out to be just a packet of salt) at Safeway™. I managed to get them. Did I mention that The Mrs. was pregnant with Pugsley at the time?

Anyway, after I got back into my car, I had to make a left turn to leave the Safeway© so I could head back to my house. Not a problem – it was a two lane road I was turning on to, but it was 6pm in February in Fairbanks – the traffic was as sparse as original hair on Joe Biden’s head, and it was colder than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s womb, so at least the ice cream wouldn’t melt.

I was third in line to make the left turn. The first turning car stopped, looked left, looked right, looked left and took his left turn. Boom, off he went, never to be seen again.

Now, second in line, behind a minivan. In front I could see the driver wasn’t looking left or right. As a battleship sized (really) opening to turn left opened and closed in front of her, I could see that she was arguing with her kids, probably about how the mean blonde man shouldn’t have taken the last of the canned bananas. Finally, when enough openings for the 7^th Fleet to safely make a left turn had been there and left, my hand hovered over the horn.

I paused.

I took a deep breath.

I we got a mushing dog when we were in Alaska, but he identified as a she. I guess it was a Trans-Siberian Husky.

What had I lost out of my life waiting behind this woman? 45 seconds? I put it in perspective. Was it worth it to add stress to a mother who was currently in a battle of wills with three junior high aged kids? No. I let out a sigh, and realized that getting upset about something small like this really was, was something I could let go of. Forever.

Why be stressed? I’d be home in less than 10 minutes anyway, and Alaska would still be in its own time zone, which was a decade earlier than the rest of the world. I exhaled slowly. Stress drained away.

The woman finally pulled out into an opening large enough to be considered an interplanetary distance. I followed, right behind. At the lights, she went straight. I went straight.

And then I followed her for seven miles. At the next right turn, she turned. I followed. At the next left turn? I followed. She turned down the secluded driveway that held four houses. I followed. She turned right one last time, and I didn’t follow, because she turned into her house.

Her house? Right next to mine.

Mainly we didn’t garden, we just raised our herds of mosquitoes.

Lesson learned. Living in Fairbanks was tough enough. No reason to make it tougher by being the jerk, especially when it’s a small place.

But the lessons learned from living in Fairbanks were bigger than that. I had grown up in the country, so I generally never left the house without things like a blanket, jumper cables, a knife, good shoes, or yak-flavored fruitcake. You never know when disaster will happen, and I’d seen Pa Wilder rescue some idiot flatlander at least once a year.

When you grow up in the country, you never know when or even if a car will come along. I’ve driven mountain roads in winter where my tracks were the only tracks that had punched through 6 inch (7 meter) deep snow and I knew that if I went off the road, the only thing that would keep me alive was between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat. You have a lot of time as you pick your way through a winding road to think of the things that should be in the car with you. You also know the only thing that will save you is . . .

You.

Second place, Jack London Memorial fire building championship (LINK). Link related.

I contrast this with living in an urban area. Sure, there are dangers there, but those dangers are man, not nature. Nature, in places like New York City, has been tamed to the extent that the only dirt you’ll see has been trucked in from miles away. In an urban setting you are reliant on people to do everything for you. Come get your trash. Heat your house. Wax and filet your Chihuahua. In New York City, they even have a number to complain, 311. In 2010, Wired (LINK) did an article and listed the complaints, graphing them. What complaints were sent to this number?

Graffiti. Consumer complaints. Traffic signals, damaged and overgrown trees, dirty conditions, chlorofluorocarbon recovery, problems with taxis, illegal building uses, property taxes, noise, and rodents.

In a rural world, graffiti is solved by talking with the neighbor boy’s dad.

Traffic signals? If you see three in a day, you’re doing something wrong.
Consumer complaints? Don’t shop there anymore.
Damaged trees and overgrown trees are solved with a chainsaw. Which also might solve the graffiti, if you know what I mean.
Illegal building uses? What’s that? When cousin Kaiden uses your barn to make meth?
Property taxes? Call the county commissioner. He lives down the road apiece and you know that Wanda is NOT his cousin.
Rodents? You do have a barn cat, right? And if by rodents you mean coyotes, that’s what the .223 is for.
Chlorofluorocarbons? The pigs eat those, right?

With a few exceptions, all of those issues are taken care of by rural residents themselves. The other things don’t even exist. Chlorofluorocarbons? Sounds like Bigfoot to me. Unless you mean sweet, sweet Freon®, which is necessary to keep the sushi ice cream cold.

Godzilla was flipping houses before it was cool.

I remember reading the Wired® article when it came out, incredulous that city dwellers would call the government and bother them with such petty things. In my mind, this call-in number over shallow inconveniences almost seemed like an experiment in conditioning people to be helpless when nearly all of these problems could easily be solved with either small arms or artillery.

In a rural setting, you’re prepared to save yourself. In an urban setting, you’re waiting for someone to save you. And in an urban setting, you’re anonymous. Do you think people would act like such fools on Black Friday if they had to face those same people the next day?

No. Good heavens. Want to see a polite Black Friday? Come to Modern Mayberry. We have to live with each other, and performing Brazilian ju-jitsu over a Spongebob Squarepants™ 50-piece socket set is just not something you can do and still nod and smile at the Dairy Queen® afterwards. Heck, it’s not like it was the Hello Kitty® smoker, right?

One of the stories that presents the biggest case for learned victimhood in cities is that of Kitty Genovese. Kitty was a bartender coming home from work one night in March in 1964. She was murdered. Some accounts say that dozens of people heard her murder, which lasted half an hour. Apparently there were one or two calls to the police, but no one came. At least one person that heard it said, “I just didn’t want to get involved.” Did I mention that happened in New York City? Yeah. It did.

Contrast it with this:

When I was driving in Fairbanks, I saw a car by the side of the road. It was -50°F outside, and it was a January night. The car was obviously stuck. I stopped, and rolled down the window. The other car did the same, and I found myself talking to a (maybe) sixteen year old girl, plainly embarrassed that she’d run off the road.

John Wilder: “You okay? Got someone coming?”

Unknown Teen Driver: “Yes. It’s all fine. I just wish everyone wouldn’t keep stopping!” They say that no man is an island, but to me it’s ironic that you’re more on an island in the sea of humanity that is New York City than you are in an isolated island of sub-arctic tundra in the snow on a rural road in Fairbanks, Alaska.

I kid. I only saw it snow once in June in the two years I lived there.

The other day I was at one of the nine stoplights (in the entire city of Modern Mayberry) and was thinking about some wonderful blog topic and not really paying any attention to the light. The light turned green. My car was as immobile as Bernie Sanders’ love of communism. There were two cars behind me. Pugsley, however, said, “Dad, get the lead out! Are you waiting for a special color of green? Are you waiting for it to grow vines and pull you through the intersection?”

None of the cars behind me honked.

When it comes to community cohesion, where would you rather be?

Okay, probably not behind me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But dying because of small magnets?

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

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

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

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

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

Ha!

JartsÂ®, when played right.

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

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

Everything.

Chuck saved me some joke writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But are we the same people who did that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How I Learned To Love The End Of The World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

I blame the heat ray vision.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think Baltimore jokes are just a riot!

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

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

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

Trust me. We will.

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