Creating havoc since 2006. Fair use is claimed for images on this site, but they will be removed (if owned) on request out of politeness. movingnorth@gmail.com
“You guys taking it all in? Because this is what it looks like when Google acquires your company for over 200 million dollars. Look: Dustin Moskovitz. Elon Musk. Eric Schmidt. I mean, Kid Rock is the poorest person here.” – Silicon Valley
I hear Elon Musk’s car insurance premiums are astronomical.
I’m a fan of Elon Musk. Singlehandedly, he’s shown that even though getting to space is very, very hard, that he can do it. Beyond that, when working with NASA®, they noted that working with SpaceX™ they accomplished in a month what would normally take NASA™ a year. NASA® kept saying the work was too Falcon Heavy.
Musk has also proven that if you focus on getting things into space, you can do it. NASA® gave up on getting things into space right after Von Braun died and is now a jobs program that hires gender and grievance studies majors. I’m not kidding. Really.
If Elon Musk’s wife breaks up with him while he’s on Mars, will that make her his Space X?
Because that’s the important thing, right? We don’t want people thinking of the Eskimo Nebula or Siamese Twins Nebula. Because . . . colonialism? I forget. Is there a scorecard I could download?
One thing I’ve been fairly consistent about, though, is that Elon Musk’s car company, Tesla® is a scam. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great scam. I’ve heard that the cars are wonderful. And from a speed standpoint, the Tesla™ can go from 0-60mph (that’s 27.39 parsec per eon) nearly as fast as any car on the planet.
I think most people have invested in Tesla® because Elon Musk gets things done. And, it amuses me that Elon Musk takes the money he’s earned from Tesla™ to work on arguably the best space program since Apollo, back when NASA™ had real engineers working on real engineering problems and done it in his spare time.
Tesla® is a symptom.
I hear that Coronavirus symptoms start right off the bat.
When money is flooded into a market by bankers looking to prop the market up, it flows oddly. The faster the flow? The bigger the imbalances. When people are rushing to put money into the market, they look for the shiny objects. One of the shiny objects in this case is Tesla®. There are others. Dozens of them.
It is my theory that the entire market is filled with imbalances right now. The money that was flooding in to prop the market up is leaking everywhere. Reasons don’t matter. That’s the way that markets work over the short term. Silly things happen – you’ve seen it earlier this year with toilet paper. What I’m saying is that, yes, Tesla® is just like the toilet paper of the stock market.
The best way to steal a Tesla® is to put it on auto-pirate.
The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 was just that – markets working in a panic. The world is ending, so what do I do? Make sure that I can poop in comfort. Like getting into a war with Italy as one of your allies, it’s not a great strategy, but is a strategy. In mid-late 2020, the market is flooded with money, attempting to buy whatever looks best and prettiest.
As I get older, I’ve discovered a simple truth – I have no idea if my kids will enjoy getting shares of Tesla® when I die. But I do know that if they each got a suitcase of untrackable gold and silver, half a dozen rifles and a few thousand rounds of ammo at my funeral, they’d smile.
My buddy Ty won a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics®. China won’t give him the medal because they won’t recognize Ty won.
I know this column is short, but I stared at that last line for about an hour and wouldn’t change a word. Not a bad place to end. Let’s call it a day. I know that NASA already has . . . .
“If M.A.D starts making gold out of lead, it will undermine the world economy!” – Inspector Gadget
I invested in a series of walking trails for mental patients, but it failed. I guess Psycho-Paths® was a bad name.
By the time the stock market crashed to signal the beginning of the Great Depression, the economy of the United States had already gone through an amazing decade of change. Electrification was moving rapidly across the country, and prisons could finally retire the acoustic chair. Radio was a miracle that was now bringing masses of people together as the radio waves propagated across the country at the speed of light. Natural gas, long a nuisance in the oil patch, was being piped and compressed and shipped across larger areas of the country, bringing instant heat (and some explosions, since they hadn’t added the stuff that makes it smell bad yet) to millions.
Perhaps one of the biggest dislocations was that horses were rapidly being replaced by cars and trucks. The economy was being motorized. Some have even come to the conclusion that part of the dislocation in the economy was that the millions of horses required to plow, move freight, and move people weren’t required anymore, leading to an oversupply of horses. That’s not a situation that lasts long – the oversupply of horses, can, um, be solved. I mean, too many horses for the barns? That’s un-stable.
But if once the oversupply of horses is solved what about the oversupply of food for the horses?
Well, what are they going to do with all of that farmland, now suddenly made even more productive through the addition of tractors and cheaply made nitrogen fertilizer?
Produce more. Which drives prices down. Which leads to . . .
Deflationary depression.
It’s hard for the Amish to travel – their system is a little buggy.
I would say that “for the want of a horse, and economy was lost,” but in hindsight the real problem was the bankers. The bankers during the 1920’s and 1930’s even developed the first birth control – their personality. The Federal Reserve Bank® (which is neither part of the government nor really a bank) managed to destroy the economy through poor currency manipulation choices.
Part of the secret of the efficiency of market economies is that there is no controller telling people to start restaurants or PEZ® vineyards or bikini ranches. The feedback from the economy is measured in customers buying the product, and if the product is good enough, profit encourages people to make it.
The flip side of that is business failure. I originally wrote that was the down side. It’s not. Businesses, in a normal economy, that can’t produce a viable product should fail. Note that I’m forced to write in a normal economy. 2020 has created the situation where tens of thousands (I’m not exaggerating) of businesses have failed due to the restrictions from the reactions to COVID-19. It’s even been an international problem – Finland closed their border. No one will cross the Finnish line.
The riots in Detroit don’t get many news stories, but I heard the rioters there have caused $20 million in improvements.
That’s not normal, of course. Hair styling places are failing in the more restrictive states. In Modern Mayberry? Not so much. But in San Francisco? You can’t get your hair styled, unless you’re Nancy Pelosi. I guess that the rules prohibiting business operation are only for common people. St. Nancy can go in and get a cut and a blow dry when no one else can. Sadly, Nancy wasn’t wearing a mask, which was the only positive thing about CoronaChan since the whole thing started.
In normal times, business thrive or fail, and both of those things lead to a stronger overall economy. The services and goods that aren’t wanted anymore go away, like Beanie Babies®. Thank Heavens. But in these times of artificial economic crisis? Good, strong businesses fail.
Regardless of the type of crisis we have now, it is upon us. Whether or not the business would have failed is irrelevant. The only real question is what happens next.
One thing that is sure, the economy after this crisis passes won’t look like it used to.
I hear that Space-X has designed electric grass for Mars. They call it E-lawn.
So what to invest in?
Yourself.
Time is potentially quite short. How should you invest your time? In yourself.
There are so many skills that are required of a human. PowerPoint® is probably not really high on them, so I wouldn’t spend much time there.
The first place I’d begin to prepare is mental. In the United States, we have become very used to the most modern conveniences. Air conditioning when it’s hot. Central heat when it’s cold. Even in Modern Mayberry, day or night I can go and get gasoline, a gallon of milk, and some beef jerky. Fast Internet that allows me to stream a television show that’s been off the air for nearly 20 years.
What happens when you don’t have those things for a day? A week? A month? When you’re used to being able to see what the temperature is in Moscow, Manila, Manhattan or Manchester, what happens when the weather becomes a mystery?
At least Biden can hide his own Easter eggs.
When you’re used to seeing real-time riots in Kenosha or Portland, what happens when you don’t know what’s happening in your own city?
I’m not saying that’s going to happen – the Internet is robust, and the systems we have built for delivering milk, gas, electricity and natural gas have redundancy.
But still, these things are possible.
Have you put your mind in a place where they have happened? What would you do? I mean, if your spouse convinces you to go to a psychiatrist, will your couch talk you out of it again?
After the mind, invest in your body. If you’re out of shape, get in better shape. Anything will help. Get out and run. If you can’t run, walk. Being able to count on your body is always good – and if you’ve been neglecting it because of work, it’s time to pay back that debt, with interest. I am fortunate enough to already have the body of an athlete already – a sumo wrestler.
Hmmm. Maybe I need some work, too.
I got a sumo wrestler for Christmas one year. I had asked for a heavy sweater.
What other ways can you invest in yourself? There are thousands of skills that are valuable, no matter what the future brings. Can you do basic medical care? I’m not asking if you can sew up a lung, but can you clean a flesh wound? Do you have Band-Aids® and Neosporin™ for a year or two? Iodine? All of that is cheap and available now. Will it be in six months?
The Mrs. bought a book on medicinal plants that showed up the other day. I was surprised that it didn’t list thyme as a remedy – I heard that thyme cures all wounds. What kind of books do you keep?
Can you garden? Annually, The Mrs. spends about $117.53 to grow about seven tomatoes. I would make fun of that, but I would also say that The Mrs. has learned lots of ways to not grow tomatoes, too. Her gardening knowledge is better than mine. It’s a little late to invest in gardening this year, but it wouldn’t hurt to start to understand what it takes. There’s a whole Internet. Heck, you could practice by killing some houseplants, like I used to do.
This isn’t a bad time for a hobby. What kind of hobby?
Lots of farms have auctions and I’ve seen farmer forges there.
Carpentry, with and without electricity.
Small engine repair. Small engines can do a great deal beyond weed eating.
Always easier when ammo isn’t so dear, but we are where we are.
Making wine or whiskey – both are great for barter, and legal to make in most places.
Fixing things around the house. When’s the last time you patched a leaky roof?
I could probably come up with a dozen more in ten more minutes, and I imagine the comments will fill up with them. Again, in some circumstances, these are nothing more than hobbies, and if you pursue them with a local club or group, you’ll build more community in addition to building yourself.
Regardless of the future we will see, investing in yourself pays dividends. Plus? It’s always better to try to grow tomatoes and fail when failure is just results in a humorous story.
“Can the stock market survive a nuclear holocaust? Yes, says our next guest, and he’ll tell us what stocks to buy and what to sell in the event of a thermonuclear exchange right after these messages.†– Head Office
Superman® won’t take Bitcoin as payment after dark. He avoids crypto night.
“Housing prices only go up.â€Â I first heard that in the 1990’s when I was buying my first house. The realtor was quite clear that a house wasn’t just a house, it was an investment in the future. He had no idea what my kids could do with Sharpies®, hot sauce, and matches. And that was just the living room carpet.
“The dollar is as good as gold.â€Â I haven’t heard that one used about the dollar in my lifetime, because the dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since August 15, 1971.
“The stock market is the place to put your money.â€Â That’s still what people are saying.
One thing that I’ve found throughout my life is that, generally speaking, if everyone believes in it, it’s wrong. The major exception to this is physics, which explains gravity well enough that almost nobody can argue with it. I read a book on anti-gravity once – couldn’t put it down.
I always fall for gravity jokes.
This is especially true in human systems. If the entire crowd believes it? It’s nearly certainly wrong.
As mentioned above, a perfect example of this is housing markets. It was really common knowledge in the 1990’s that, barring a setback in a recession, housing prices always go up. Buy a house, wait, and sell it 10 or 20 years later, and you’ll make a bundle.
In certain times and places, that’s true. And during the 1990’s and the early 2000’s, the idea that “housing prices always go up†became firmly fixed in the minds of, well, most everyone. That made it true, for a while. As the banks noticed this, they decided that mortgages weren’t a risky investment at all, unlike when I broke COVID-19 lockdown to go play board games. That was a lot of Risk.
On top of that, banks decided to make changes to the way that they had lent in the past. Houses were a sure thing, right? They could make them even safer by creating mortgage-backed securities. Some of these were really unique. You could buy the “best†performing loans out of a group of loans. If there were 100 houses in the group, 90 would have to default on their mortgages before your security was impacted.
This mastery of risk was amazing! Now all you need are more people to loan money to. But not everyone qualifies, which is a problem. They tried offering 0% loans, but there was no interest.
Solution? Everyone qualifies. No income? No job? No problem. These were even called NINJA (no income, no job) loans. The pool of borrowers expanded more rapidly than Joe Biden’s memory loss. And if we add in refinancing of home equity?
That added even more borrowers!
What could go wrong?
And, hey, housing prices have reached new records. Certainly they won’t fall?
Well, gravity kicked in on housing prices. They dropped. And when they dropped, the entire industry built up around building houses dropped. And then the industries that supplied lumber, and pipe, and wire, and pavement, and concrete for driveways . . . dropped.
This mathematical fiction based on a delusion created a massive recession. But, hey, housing prices always go up.
Except when they don’t.
Just like the dollar fell from its perch. Originally, the dollar was backed by actual, physical gold. That’s when the phrase, “as good as gold†was first used. Why? Because at any moment, you could go and change your dollars into gold. Walk into the bank with a $20 bill, and walk out with $20 in gold.
This wasn’t always the case, there were periods in the history of the country where this wasn’t so (greenbacks issued during the Civil War backed by the credit of the country), but it was generally the case. But after Franklin Roosevelt made gold possession by Americans illegal (yes, this happened) then you couldn’t go in and get gold for your dollar. Once that link was broken, the government was free to print money more or less at will, creating inflation even in a “gold backed†currency.
You can plainly see that women are shorter now that the purchasing power of the dollar has dropped.
Now? The dollar isn’t worth but a few percent of what it was in 1940.
And other countries realize it, too. As the multiple trillions of dollars are printed this year to prop up everything from the airlines to the banks to the stock market, the value of the dollar has dropped. Why? The rest of the world can count. There is only so much printing you can do before it starts to add up.
The dollar has dropped 10% in the last three months.
The dollar’s fall is fast, but not as fast as when I fell into the coffee. It was instant.
Speaking of up and down – I got a free yo-yo. No strings attached!
While the economy is still stuck in lockdown in many parts of the country, massive unemployment, and a “riot-a-day†social structure, the Dow Jones Industrial Average® is only down 3%.
“Smile and smile… I don’t trust men who smile too much.” – Commander Kor, Star Trek (TOS)
When Pugsley was little, he was excited that about his birthday. “Daddy, I have a birthday coming up and I’ll be this many old!” Then he held up four fingers. The police still don’t know where they came from.
Smile.
Shhh. Don’t argue.
Smile.
Do it for, say, thirty seconds.
I’ll wait.
(Really, I mean this. Smile. Thirty seconds, look at a clock if you have to. Everybody do it.)
Feel better?
You do.
I’m not sure what kind of day you’re having. But smiling makes you feel happier. There’s a study I could link to, but I’m pretty sure all of you know how to use the Internet, so look for it if you want.
Doesn’t matter if you look it up or not. Smiling makes you feel better. Smiling is good for you. Smiling changes your mood. Change your mood? Your output is better. Not only more, but better.
Once upon a time, I had a job at a company that was failing. Not because of me, but because they had spectacularly failed on some business that they were doing. How spectacularly? They were losing millions of dollars. Some work that I was involved with was likewise losing money, but in this case only a few thousand dollars.
My Boss pulled me into his office. This is a real conversation, not one I made up.
Boss: “John, do you know what position the company is in?”
John Wilder: “Sure. Two of our divisions have lost enough money that we are in danger of becoming bankrupt.”
Boss: “Well, then, why are you so happy? The company is in trouble. People have noted that you’re too upbeat.”
When I get sad I cut myself. Another piece of cake.
I was being told that I was being too happy and positive in the workplace. How do you even respond to that? Rip and tear your clothes and cry? Sacrifice pigeons and stray raccoons to some ancient Sumerian god? Gather up a group of warriors and go raid a competitor and steal their business so you can hear the lamentation of their women?
Willkommen to das Hötel Kalifornia.
I sort of understand what my Boss was getting at. You don’t whistle, hum, crack a beer, and then sing Sammy Hagar songs at a funeral, even if there are headbangers in leather picking a three lock box. But I sort of didn’t understand it, either. How on Earth do you turn the business around, how do you make things better if you’re gloomy and you’re certain you’re going to die?
You don’t.
This week, a post at a great blog, Tempest in a Teardrop (LINK) mentioned St. Philip Neri. I hadn’t read about him before. I certainly hadn’t met him, since he died in Anno Domini 1595, which was about when your mom was finishing high school.
Neri’s quote that impressed me was: “A joyful heart is more easily made perfect than a downcast one.” It would be a conceit of the highest measure to think a single sentence I ever wrote would be quoted 400 years from now (though in my dreams I imagine there will be thousands of young students getting their degree in Wilder Wisdom Studies in the year 2356), but Neri absolutely nailed it with this line.
I wanted to be a standup comedian, but with Coronavirus? Now they’re all inside jokes.
You have a choice. Be mad. Be sullen. Be angry. Be filled with wrath. Give up. Be jealous of those who have it better.
That’s five of the seven deadly sins (The seven deadly sins and society. How do they fit together?). Eat seven bacon cheese burgers and think about your neighbor mowing the lawn in a bikini and you’re up to the full seven. I mean, assuming your neighbor would look good in a bikini.
You don’t have to feel that way. At all. Ever.
Smile when you feel down.
When I was in college I had the opposite experience. I had one particular professor, one of the most fun professors ever. He was Swiss, and had been a mercenary in the 1950’s, and had done everything. I was his student, and when I was in grad school, I was his Teaching Assistant. His advice, coming between puffs of cherry-smelling smoke from his pipe?
“Keep smiling, John.”
Smiles are contagious, so my state says I should wear a mask.
If you did what I said earlier, and smiled, you felt better. And you should do it as much as you can. If you have a choice to be happy, why wouldn’t you choose it?
There are other hacks as well.
Sigh. A deep sigh. You will feel your tension lower. Actual clinical studies that I think I read about show that this lowers blood pressure. I feel better when I sigh, and I also stop sweating blood, which I think means my blood pressure is lower.
Another trick:
Stand like a superhero, chest thrust forward, hands on your hips. There’s a reason the artists draw it that way – it makes you feel confident. Powerful. Competent. I can recall falling asleep at night in a pose just like Superman™ flying – one hand out, the other back, and one leg up.
I woke up feeling great! But, of course, my liver didn’t have the mileage on it that it does now. I still sleep like that most nights. However, if you stand like a superhero? You’ll feel like one.
If you ever listen to Scott Adam’s videos, “Coffee With Scott Adams” he starts them with a Simultaneous Sip. To participate, all you need is a beverage in a container, and you sip when he says go. It’s a dopamine hit to the brain, which he says will “make everything better.” And it works. You feel better when you participate. Heck, I feel so much better that I often won’t even start listening unless I can do the Simultaneous Sip.
These are just a few hacks that immediately change your mood. Yes, I understand sometimes these might not help. More than a dozen years ago, I had a back problem that made sitting horribly uncomfortable. When I walked, it was fine, but when I sat? Excruciating pain.
I tried the ancient Chinese needle treatment for back pain. The heroin worked best.
In my case, the solution to the pain was the body, again. I started working out (especially my torso) and the back pain has been gone for (fingers crossed) nearly 13 years. But if you want to feel better, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t?
Check your mood.
Check your posture.
Check your surroundings.
Check your attitude.
Check the things you are allowing into your mind.
You own your mind. It does what you say. You own your feelings. They are what you allow them to be.
Me? I try to practice relentless reality optimism.
I’m gonna die. That tells me I have to hurry in the things I do. I don’t have time to waste.
I’m gonna fail. That will tell me things I can do better next time.
I’m tired. That means I’ve been working as hard as I can.
I want every component of my body to be absolutely used up on the last day of my life. I’d like the organ people to look at me and say, “Nope, nothing for us. Unless we can transplant the smile.”
Smile.
Hold it.
Now you don’t have excuses. Go and do it, whatever it is as long as the stakes are high enough.
I had to cut my last duck out of my life. He was addicted to quack.
Clock is ticking. And failure is just a teacher to make you better.
Oh, and the company that was failing? Because of some changes I made in dealing with their major client, they managed to get over two hundred million dollars in business when they were near bankruptcy, generating millions in profits after I left them. They’re still around today.
“A day may come when the courage of men fails, but it is not this day.” – Lord of the Rings
After the police are defunded, we’ll only be able to afford cyborg hobbits. That’s okay, I like Frobo Cop.
I’m probably in the minority on the following thought: there is actual evil in the world. The rule has been over the last century or so to try to play off evil as, well, things other than evil.
Psychological problems.
Different cultures.
Bad parents.
No parents.
Being my ex-wife.
But the reality is that these are just excuses, though I do know that mummys aren’t evil – they just have a bad wrap.
I hear that Frodo is volunteering build houses in the Shire for Hobbitat for Humanity.
Thankfully, all I can remember of my younger life was (mostly) evil-free. It was good. Like many kids who read too much, a lot of my first experiences in life weren’t first hand – I was transported to the depths of the oceans and the poles of Earth and then to Mars and the Universe beyond by reading. In fifth grade my teacher read The Hobbit to the class – spoiler alert, it was much shorter than the recent movie. But then I was off to middle school.
I stumbled across Tolkien again. He had written a series that had done a wonderful job of describing what True Evil® was: The Lord of the Rings. I still remember the chills that I got as 11 year-old me read The Lord of the Rings night after night in bed before I went to sleep. Ma Wilder was especially disturbed, because she’d hear me saying things like, “Frodo” and “Mordor” and “Gandalf” at night.
Ma Wilder was concerned I was Tolkien in my sleep.
I know the puns are bad – but Bilbo gets mad when I try to kick the hobbit.
I had goosebumps reading about the ring wraiths and was transported into the story, hearing the hoof beat of their horses, feeling their evil presence as they searched for Frodo and the One Ring. The Nazgûl (ring wraiths) were evil personified, so I’m willing to bet Tolkien knew a thing or two about True Evil™.
Tolkien had even planned a sequel, but couldn’t bring himself to write it, despite starting on it at least three times. He described a bit about it in a letter to a friend after he had given up trying to write it:
“I did begin a story placed about 100 years after the Downfall, but it proved both sinister and depressing. Since we are dealing with Men it is inevitable that we should be concerned with the most regrettable feature of their nature: their quick satiety with good. So that the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice, and prosperity, would become discontented and restless – while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors – like Denethor or worse. I found even so early there was an outcrop of revolutionary plots, about a centre of secret Satanistic religion; while Gondorian boys were playing at being Orcs and going around doing damage. I could have written a ‘thriller’ about the plot and its discovery and overthrow – but it would have been just that.”
A Nazgûl floats into a bar. The barman says: ‘I’m sorry, we don’t serve your kind in here.’ The Nazgûl replies: ‘That’s Wraithist.’
In his quote is what I think we’ve been seeing now. The “quick satiety with good” is sometimes what drives us toward True Evil®, though in Paris in 1789 just like in Russia in 1917 it was the greed exploited by the communists to convince people that the terror and murders would be what led to a prosperous future.
In the last sixty days I’ve seen a lot of evil in the videos taken during the riots. Murder rates are up in those cities. Portland normally has 30 or so murders a year, but in the last two months there have been twenty. That doesn’t make the news.
Why?
The riots are described as peaceful protests. To mention that the lawlessness and rampant evil accompanying it has cost dozens of lives and since more black people have died as a result of the protests than the number of unarmed black people killed by cops last year. They’ve resulted in half a billion dollars in damage to Minneapolis alone, but that doesn’t account for the lowered property values. And what about all of the uprooted lives?
That sort of destruction, especially in the middle of an economic collapse is devastating. Inciting and participating in this riots was a choice, and those who chose to riot were doing nothing short of evil, in service of that same evil force that had taken Moscow early in the twentieth century, though this time because times were good and they were bored.
Hipsters burned their mouths because they ate Hot Pockets® before it was cool.
I’m quite certain that they think they’ll run the new organization, and their socialist dream job awaits. This is the same sort of greed that, in The Lord of the Rings, destroyed men and turned them into ring wraiths. From Tolkien’s Silmarillion:
Those who used the Nine Rings became mighty in their day, kings, sorcerers, and warriors of old. They obtained glory and great wealth, yet it turned to their downfall. They had, as it seemed, unending life, yet life became unendurable to them. They could walk, if they would, unseen by all eyes in this world beneath the sun, and they could see things in worlds invisible to mortal men; but too often they beheld only the phantoms and delusions of Sauron. And one by one, sooner or later, according to their native strength and to the good or evil of their wills in the beginning, they fell under the thraldom of the ring that they bore and of the domination of the One which was Sauron’s.
Evil is popular because the benefits it provides are often immediate and significant. The rewards for being virtuous are sometimes never going to show up other than feeling good about yourself, at least in this life.
I’ve heard that hobbit flowers grow using Frodo-synthesis.
“We have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light, the eternal truth that is with God. Indeed only by myth-making, only by becoming ‘sub-creator’ and inventing stories, can Man aspire to the state of perfection that he knew before the Fall. Our myths may be misguided, but they steer however shakily towards the true harbour, while materialistic ‘progress’ leads only to a yawning abyss and the Iron Crown of the power of evil.”
“I don’t know what you do in New York, but around here we don’t give a man a funeral unless we’re pretty sure he needs one.” – Green Acres
I think I ran over Schrödinger’s cat. Not sure if I feel guilty or not.
Growing up, Green Acres was one of my favorite television shows. I was far too young to have seen it in the first run, but the local television station showed reruns that were on after the school bus made it all the way to the top of Wilder Mountain. The bus rides were long, but I learned a lot about kindness – one time I saw someone give up their seat for a blind student. In retrospect, the bus driver probably showed poor judgement in letting that blind girl drive.
For those of you that haven’t seen it, Green Acres was about a New York attorney (Oliver Wendell Douglas) that decided he was through with city life. Mr. Douglas quit his big city life and moved to the rural town of Hooterville. The show never discusses exactly where Hooterville is, but the best theory is that Hooterville is in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri.
The show was funny in a way that television isn’t now. Oliver always tried to fit in, but never could quite adjust from his city ways. A lot of the humor was making fun of that disconnect between Oliver and the humorous cast of townspeople, though the relationship between Oliver and his wife was loving, strong, and funny. Here’s a scene when there were looking for clothes to donate:
Oliver Douglas: Why don’t we give away this one?
Lisa Douglas: No that’s the dress I graduated from high school in.
Oliver Douglas: How about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the dress I wore the first day of college.
Oliver Douglas: [holding a black, low-cut dress] What about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the one I got expelled in.
Why do I bring this up?
If I ever get a barn I’ll make sure I have an Internet router in there, so I can have stable wifi.
This weekend, The Mrs. and I were snoozing and were listening to the Watchdog on Wall Street, a radio show about investment. In the latest episode/podcast (Expedition New York – LINK), the host advocated what he called the Sam Kinison solution. Give good people U-Hauls® so they can leave the cities that are turning into scenes from Mad Max. “The reality of many urban areas is . . . it’s going to take a long, long time to come back.”
“Move.”
I was slipping in and out of sleep, but discussed the show later with The Mrs.
“He’s right you know. The era of law in those big cities is over. The District Attorneys in those large metropolitan areas have been bought and paid for by the far Left (LINK, LINK, LINK and I could go on forever with links). The DAs are no longer concerned with Justice,” I said. “These DAs are concerned with Social Justice. Try to defend yourself in a lot of these large urban monstrosities, and you’ll find out what the inside of a jail cell looks like pretty quickly. And that scares me because my brother got stabbed in jail. We took Monopoly® just a bit too seriously when I grew up.”
“Well, they can’t move here. We’re full.” That’s not exactly what The Mrs. said, but I can’t repeat it exactly since this is a family-friendly blog.
Although The Mrs. isn’t a social butterfly, she doesn’t exactly hate people. And it’s not new people moving to Modern Mayberry that was bothering her. It’s Leftist ideas.
I donated $50 to a Leftist group the other day. I hope they find a cure.
“They residents of those cities are the reason the cities are in the condition that they’re in. Then they’ll move here, and want to turn Modern Mayberry into what they left.”
The Mrs. is not wrong. Here’s an example.
My brother, John Wilder had this problem in his midsized town. (Yes, his first name really is John as well. Our parents were caught in a soap opera episode and got amnesia and forgot they had him and named me the same thing by mistake.) He was at the neighborhood homeowners’ association meeting when they were selecting a trash company. They recently had an influx of people from the United Soviet Republic of California who had gotten approval to leave the state from the Supreme Soviet.
“Well,” one transplant said, “we certainly must be environmentally friendly. We should pick the trash company that offers the mandatory recycling. They only cost $35 more a month.”
After about an hour, my brother talked the homeowners’ association into picking the cheaper trash company. Is recycling bad? Not at all. Junkyards have been recycling cars for decades. Aluminum recycling makes beer cans cheaper. But in my brother’s town, the only thing that was really recycled was aluminum – the rest of the trash went into the dump whether or not it was neatly sorted.
That’s what scared The Mrs.
I always get sad after crushing aluminum cans – it’s soda pressing.
Modern Mayberry is nice because it doesn’t have those things the big cities have, including all of their problems.
And the economy appears to be in a pretty bad state. The dollar bubble appears to be in the first phase of ending. The gold bubble may be inflating, and inflation will follow a deflation of the dollar, which is exactly as I predicted, but it’s about six months earlier than I had expected.
The median price (right now) for a house in San Francisco is $1,108 per square foot. In Modern Mayberry, I couldn’t find a single house that cost more than $100 per square foot. Sadly, you have to do without all of those San Francisco amenities like people pooping in the streets, riots and the San Francisco 49ers™. On the plus side, the Oakland Raiders® have moved, and if San Franciscans are lucky, what goes to Vegas stays in Vegas.
This is a true statement.
If I were in Seattle or Portland or New York or any of a dozen other large cities I would be moving if I had children. The best time to move is ten years ago. This gives you time to build the relationships and integrate into the community. In Modern Mayberry, I’m still one of the New Guys, even after a decade.
The second best time is now. The worst time to move is after the bottom drops out and escaping from New York looks like something that even Kurt Russell couldn’t do on his best day.
And, if you decide to move, here’s hoping that you find a place as nice as Hooterville. I hear they have good hotscakes there.
Remember that the worst time to move is one day too late.
“Don’t worry. Many women learn to embrace this parasite. They name it, dress it up in tiny clothes, arrange playdates with other parasites.†– House
But my parasite kept looking over its shoulder. I guess it was a nervous tick.
I recall seeing a story about twenty years ago about a Native American tribe, the Pima. This particular tribe had gone through periodic famines over the course of their existence since they lived in a desert with little water and no Kwik-E Marts®. They had, through surviving those continual famines, developed a resistance to dying when there was no food for an extended period of time. This makes sense – those who were susceptible to starvation starved; those who were thriftier with their metabolism lived.
Nowadays, the Pima have the distinction of suffering from one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world. Those biological traits slowed their metabolism enough to save them from starving in a famine. Those same traits, in a food-rich world, are now killing them.
That’s one description of a trait that while good in an environment of scarcity isn’t so good in an environment filled with Twinkies™, Ruffles™, and two-liter Coke™ bottles.
What got me thinking about all this?
What do you call it when a diabetic won’t follow directions? Insulince.
Eaton Rapids Joe shared several thoughts with me a few weeks back in an email exchange. I’m certain I’m not taking this in the direction that he had originally intended, so don’t blame him for this piece.  For me to write about a topic, it has to come together in my mind. One of the ideas he shared sparked my imagination. Here it is, in Joe’s words: “Biologists make the case that periods of easy living followed by harsh purges accelerate evolution.  Their reasoning is thus: many features inisolation are bad for survival. But if several features are combined with other features that in isolation are counter-survival, sometimes that package is awesome.â€
If you’re not reading Joe’s stuff, you really should be (LINK). He’s thoughtful, intelligent, interesting, and funny. His comment resulted in me thinking, and although I wandered pretty far off of his original point, I wanted to give credit to him for the inspiration.
Is evolution overkill? Did it defeet the porpoise?
As I started thinking not about biology, but about society, and the traits that either make society work, or destroy it – rather than organisms, I wanted to think about group survival strategies.
Society is made up of individuals, so I thought I’d look at the individual traits that lead to a successful societal strategy. When I looked at positive human traits, two immediately come to mind:
Altruism
Empathy
These have been common throughout most of the history of the United States. They’ve been common in other places, too, but I’m going to focus on America.  These traits were the basis for and result of a “high-trust†society. A high-trust society is one where most interactions aren’t governed by regulations, or kin groups, or hierarchy, or law. Where I live, there’s no law that says you have to stop and help someone whose car broke down. It’s just something we do.
I heard that Shetland ponies are the least trusted horse, at least according to the Gallop poll.
Likewise, for most of the history of the United States, welfare wasn’t a government program – people were helped because groups of ordinary citizens donated their time and effort to help them. This had a benefit – it was a healthy outlet for the altruism, and empathy that most people felt. It was virtuous for the person helping, and the person being helped.
Government started to take over the role of private charity in the 1930s, and completed the job in the 1960s. The insidious part of government-based charity is that it does two things:
It turns the act of charity into taxation. Charity moves from being a voluntary program into a mandatory feature supported by taxes. Last time I checked, if I decided I didn’t want to support ‘charity’ by paying taxes, men with guns and bad attitudes would take my money and then give me free room and board at a Federal Camp for Wayward Wilders for five to ten years. This removes all virtue for taking part in charity. Forced charity isn’t charity, it’s extortion.
That’s bad enough.
But it gets worse.
Crabs don’t donate to charity. They’re shellfish.
The second thing that forced charity does? When a person gives another person help, they’re often grateful – it’s human working with human. When a government agency gives that same person help, they’re resentful. Why? There is no end to the needs an individual has – and when government doesn’t give them as much as they think they deserve they feel resentment. Let’s face it – nearly every government welfare program sucks – it’s just enough to get by in ratty conditions. Not only that, these same programs are designed to create an angry perpetual victim class by being easy to stay on and difficult to escape.
Add in the impersonality of the cities. Mix with a globalized economy and a country that has let in enough foreign competition to depress the wages in jobs ranging from manual labor to software programmers. Dollop in a bit a host of useless yet expensive college degrees. Toss in a diversity of cultures and religions not seen since the late Roman Empire while vilifying the common culture of the last 250 years through the government education system.
Stir.
The result is chaos. The altruism and empathy which worked so well in that high trust society of the past now work against society. Add in that the problems are actually in the process of being solved: as an example, the black poverty rate has dropped over 30% between 1988 and 2018.
What to do with all of that altruistic, cooperative, and empathetic energy?
Whoever had “go crazy in an orgy of destruction and violence†fueled by misdirected virtue is the winner.
Is it riot season or COVID season? I want to make sure I have the right decorations up.
I thought a bit about how Antifa® and the Marxist portion of Black Lives Matter™ grew. The traits of altruism and empathy, generally good, have allowed them to grow. Heck, even more than allowing them to grow, they’ve increased the growth rate. In any sane society, neither of these groups would be tolerated.
There’s a word for an organism living in this niche. The name for that organism is parasite.
It becomes increasingly likely that Antifa™ and BLM® will leave city after city economically destroyed. Who would want to move to Minneapolis right now? Portland? Seattle? The governments of those forever Democrat-controlled cities has been tailor-made for incubating the parasite class.
Well, now that Antifa® has been named a terrorist organization, when will the Democrats start funding it?Â
The District Attorneys in those Leftist cities are crucial to this incubation – criminals aren’t charged with felonies, but are let off with the lightest of charges. Unless, of course, they are people defending themselves from the parasite class. If that happens, the greatest possible charges will be conjured up, and damn the circumstances. Defending yourself from a parasitic criminal mob on your own private property is something that simply can’t be allowed.
Parasites generally are quite healthy as long as they don’t kill the host. The mosquitoes I fed tonight didn’t kill me – just left me with a few bumps that will itch for a day or so. But it looks like the traits of altruism and empathy may have done more damage than the famine resistance of the Pima.
“There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.†– Terminator 2
I believe there is a man we cannot see who watches our every action, passing judgement, and deciding who lives or dies. But enough about the NSA.
My daughter Alia S. Wilder came to visit, and brought her son, Mosquito. As we were sitting upstairs chatting, Alia looked over at Mosquito. “Mosquito, please get me a Coke®.â€Â As all of our beverage fridges were downstairs, Mosquito buzzed downstairs to get Alia a Cokeâ„¢. There wasn’t anyone downstairs, but that was okay – I had removed all the anti-personnel mines and deactivated the laser defense grid for the weekend.
“Did you open this?â€Â I could hear the pride in Alia’s voice, a pride that her son had figured out how to open a Coca-Colaâ„¢ can. Hey, we all know that kids are stupid. I can prove it, too. I can draw better than 94% of kids 7th grade and younger.
There was a pause. Mosquito replied: “Someone did.â€
No one every asks how Coke® is doing – it’s always: “Is Pepsiâ„¢ okay?â€
Since the Family Wilder has a habit of leaving semi-full Coke™ cans around the house like the Easter Bunny leaves spent radioactive fuel rods around the Former Soviet Union, we were all pretty sure that Mosquito had found the remnants of Cokes® from a bygone era. Maybe the Upper Pugslevanian epoch?
We laughed, and then sent Mosquito back over the wall to get an unopened can of Coke®.
Mosquito had inadvertently provided me with blog fodder. The topic?
Accountability.
The reasons I love accountability is what it means: it’s the person who is ultimately be the one who will reap the rewards or suffer the consequences of their decisions and actions. One of the reasons I hate accountability is that it has become a corporate buzzword which tends to turn a good word into mindless mission-statement-speak parroted by unthinking corporate lackeys.
Like me.
Buzzwords, do you speak them, Mister Falcon? (Hint: Google® “Mister Falconâ€)
One of the things missing from society today is accountability. I really think that this lack of accountability is at least partially responsible for the riots we’ve been seeing. What are the rioters accountable for, besides roasting Air Jordans® over a gently crackling police precinct fire? Are they even accountable to get up tomorrow and go to a job?
No.
Thankfully, real life provides some help in giving great examples of accountability. People are ultimately accountable for many of the decisions they make:
Choose a horrible degree in “French Medieval Gender Studies†and spend $273,432 getting it? You have to pay it back.
Have a baby at 16 from a daddy who skipped to Canada? You have to raise it.
Miss an appointment for your dream job because you slept in? I’m sure they’ll understand.
Decided to spend your twenties travelling to distant continents while your friends worked hard? No, it’s not luck that they’re comfortable in that house in the suburbs and having kids while you can’t afford a studio apartment.
You can tell a college student: they’re looking for breakfast wine that pairs well with Cheetos®.
But I am here to announce an amazing idea:Â accountability is freedom.
The thing I normally see is that people run from accountability. They don’t want to be judged by what they did. They don’t want to sign the bottom line.
But seeking accountability is really freedom.
Why is it freedom? Being accountable is being in charge of your own life. Too many people seek to run away from accountability, but deep down, they know that fleeing accountability is weakness. The reality is that you are in charge of your own life, just like Darth Vader® was accountable for not one but two Death Stars™.
If, like me, you’re carrying a few too many pounds? PEBCAP – the Problem Exists Between Chair And Plate. The alternative is that you make yourself a victim of some vague conspiracy between biology and high fructose corn syrup. You take the conspiracy route? You’ve made yourself a victim.
When I was working at a convenience store I got the idea that 7-11 was an inside job.
Who likes being around a victim? Nobody. People like those who are accountable, and stake out that position. It’s one of strength. It’s the path of the virtuous.
But it has to be earned. And, in my case?
Learned.
When I was going to High School, I often spent time at my long-term girlfriend’s house. Her family was great. Her father’s favorite movie was Patton. General George S. Patton was my personal hero at that time in my life, so let’s just say that he and I got along very well. When I went over to his place, he treated me like his son.
But one particular night, his daughter backed her car (a Mustang®) into my 1972 green GMC™ pickup. It sent a long dent up the back end on the driver’s side. Her father told me to go get an estimate to fix it, and I did.
The estimate was about $700. My girlfriend wrote me a check from all of the money she’d made working fast food for several years. I cashed it. But then I found someone who promised they’d fix it cheaper. How much cheaper? Half.
I got the pickup fixed. It looked better than new.
Great news, $350 buck for the John Wilder fund, right? I imagined all the things I’d spend it on, since my girlfriend and I had already broken up – probably a car horn that played Judas Priest songs and maybe a car stereo that got FM as well as AM.
This truck belongs to my friend, Ben Thunder. When I borrow it, I’ve Ben Thunder’s truck.
Pa Wilder rained on my parade.
Pa: “Did your girlfriend pay for you to fix the truck?â€
JW: “Yup. And I got it fixed for half that.â€
Pa: “So, why does that mean that you’re entitled to that money?â€
Dang.
Dang.
Dang.
Pa Wilder had it all figured out. My ex-girlfriend had made herself accountable for fixing my car when she gave me that check. My implied promise was that money would go to fixing my truck, not buying a collection of small pewter animals with all of that money that she’d made working at the local chicken restaurant.
So, that put me in the uncomfortable position of having to go to an ex-girlfriend’s house and give her a check for several hundred dollars. The upside? That was a good time to ask for my old Alice Cooper® cassette tape back – bonus points for anyone in the comments that figures out which Alice Cooperâ„¢ tape it was.
“Oh, haven’t you noticed? We’ve been sharing our culture with you all morning.” – 300
When I was a five or so, my parents had horses. One of the horses had a foal (baby horse for you city folk), and Pa Wilder brought the foal and the mare (momma horse) into the barn – it was brutally cold, and the barn was much warmer. They brought me down to see the foal. It was young and awkward as new horses are.
Inside the stall was a series of closely spaced rails in a square, about four feet by six feet.
I asked, “What’s that for, Pa?”
“Well, when the foal is in here, he’ll find that he can’t walk across the bars. His hooves won’t quite fit. That will train him so he won’t do that when he gets older.”
Even at five, I had seen cattle guards and knew cows wouldn’t try to cross them. But here was a horse.
From Library of Congress.
“Won’t he try to jump over the cattle guard, Pa?”
“Some horses, the smart ones, will figure out and a cattle guard won’t work on them. But most don’t. Heck, you can just paint parallel lines on an asphalt road and some horses won’t try to cross them.”
The little training bars were a device, a device to train the horse that he was in a prison made up of parallel bars on the ground. In that, the horse restricted his own freedom.
In the last post (Money, Power, Politics, and Soros), I discussed the difference between Money and Power. I actually finished most of the last post before I wrote the conclusion. Money and Power as described through most of the post were entirely materialistic concepts. Ending it with just that discussion wasn’t right, since the theme of my writing is often to balance the material with the concepts of spirit and virtue. We live in a material world, but the reason we live is for a purpose greater than this moment.
Freedom isn’t important to either Money or Power; Freedom is actually the enemy of both Money and Power. Throughout most of recorded history in the West, when either Money or Power get too out of balance, there is a backlash, and Freedom eventually wins.
It has for thousands of years.
And it will again. I firmly believe that the destiny of the West is in the hands of those who love Freedom, especially in the United States.
Why?
The Left is utterly afraid of the Right. Though they put forward a great front – they are shaking. The American people on the Right compose the largest potential army in the history of the world.
The numbers:
There are at least 400,000,000 guns in private hands in the United States by one estimate. That seems right.
There are 800,000 or so cops. Assume they have two guns each. Heck, assume they have three. Round up. Three million guns. The Military in the United States owns about 4.4 million guns. Round up. That’s a total of less than 10 million guns in the hands of the United States government or other governmental authorities. And that assumes that they stand with the government, which is questionable at best.
Assume only 35% of the American public owns guns, a number I think is very low. Call it 100,000,000 people. Assume that those owners skew mostly Right – 80/20? That’s 80,000,000 on the Right. Let’s do 80/20 again on those that will not stand for a communist uprising in the United States. That’s 16,000,000 Americans ready to stand in the breach. The largest army in the history of the world (so far) were the United States armed forces in 1945: 12,000,000 Americans under arms.
I’ll state it again: American people on the Right have the potential to compose the largest army in the history of the world. Period.
People on the Right, men and women, also have more and better training for field conditions. I’d put The Mrs. up against most people on the Left if it came to a rural setting, because Leftists have no idea that trees are even made of wood, and I doubt that many on the Right will want to make the Stalingrad mistake and get caught in the cities as Leftists consume themselves. How many people on the Right have their homes on the market to escape from Minneapolis? From Seattle? From any of dozens of cities where they know that they no longer belong?
I have no idea. But they’d be fools to stay.
And even though we have the numbers on our side, there’s more good news. We don’t even need overwhelming numerical superiority:
How many apostles peacefully changed the religion of Europe?
How many Spartans defended all of Western Civilization at Thermopylae?
“But John,” you say, “most all of the people in your examples died for their cause.” Yes, they did. And we remember them for that, because they changed the world. Thousands of years before Robert Heinlein said it, they knew the truth of his quote: “You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.”
Besides, everyone is going to die. Is it better to be a Leonidas or a St. Peter?
We outgun the Left. We have Truth, capital T, on our side. The other day Vox Day had this inspiring clip at his blog (LINK).
It was a good clip, and one I’d forgotten. So we watched the movie again tonight – it’s one that could not be made by Hollywood® today. That clip also makes the point I tried to make earlier much more eloquently than I ever could.
The Black Riots Lives Matter riots are demoralizing to people of good character. This is intentional. The riots are meant to make you feel alone. The riots are meant to make you feel that the Right has already lost.
The Right has not lost.
How did the Modern Sporting Lawyer make you feel?
That’s why he and his wife are condemned. That’s why they have vowed to cancel him, to make an example of them, to find a way to charge them with crime. They are the opposite of demoralization.
The Modern Sporting Lawyer and his wife drive the Left crazy. Here, their desire to destroy as a senseless mob was turned back by only two people.
Can you imagine if the Right was united? I can.
The corollary is obvious: quit fighting each other in the right. Stop. People don’t believe in your exact brand?
You can’t stand Libertarians? You can’t stand Lutherans? Baptists? Catholics? Vox Day? That atheist friend that doesn’t mind Christianity but still believes in freedom? The idea to fix our situation isn’t exactly yours?
Too bad.
We are in the same foxhole. Stop (metaphorically) shooting each other. Now. If you’re not with us, you’re against us. And if you’re fighting us, you’re against us.
How do you know if you’re with us?
We like building statues, not tearing them down.
We like building civilization, not tearing it apart.
We like the reason of facts and truth, not the politically correct statement of the moment.
We like justice based on law, not the social justice of the mob or judges that twist “shall not” into “sometimes.”
We like a culture of honor, not a culture of victimhood due to the self-imposed prison.
And that is the difference. The Left is bitter. The Left is seething. The Left is angry.
Why? Because, just like the foal with the cattle guard, they’ve made themselves prisoners. They’ve forgotten that becoming a prisoner might not be a choice for a horse, but it is for a person. But for the Left, that prison mentality is preferred.
The prison mentality is the chosen mentality of the Left. They see themselves as weak. Since they see themselves as weak, there is no choice but to hate themselves for that weakness. But outwardly, the Left rationalizes that weakness as being, somehow, good. They have to, because that’s all that stands between them and the unending self-hate. The Left raises an “anything goes” sexuality and sensuality to the highest plane because they are rooted in the Material, and cannot understand the Spiritual, the Transcendent.
The Right rejects that. All of it.
Sex isn’t a virtue, chastity is a virtue. Sex isn’t evil, but making it the focus of your life is no different than any other addiction – it is a vice. But which of those does the Left celebrate? Inside, they know that it’s wrong, and that also fills them with self-hate.
Because of that hate, and seek to make the Right weak like them. How? By demoralizing the Right, by taking virtues and attacking them while publicly celebrating things we use to call sin. By coming up with never ending list of impossible demands and nonsensical redefinitions of the English language on an ever more frequent basis. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling has recently been excommunicated from the Left for being brazen enough to indicate that women might be, well, women.
The Right has built Western Civilization, and built it with a compassion for the weak. That makes the Left hate the Right even more. They seek to make us doubt our morals and virtue: everyone is racist, every historical figure is fatally flawed. That is justification enough in the minds of the Left to tear down everything that has made their prosperity and wealth transfer possible. The Left makes no real art, just caricatures of the genius that has gone before, photographs of Christ soaking in urine. The Left is a parasite that, failing to create, destroys.
But those games won’t work anymore. The Right is strong. The Right is virtuous. The Left seeks to build nothing because that is the province of the Right. And to the Left, those who are strong and build statues to the virtues of flawed men are evil.
Was Columbus perfect? No. Did he open up a New World? Yes. How many people in Mexico City would prefer to revert to the charnel house of the Aztecs? Some, but every hand that goes up will belong to a member of the Left.
The Right is not evil. We hold the light of Freedom, of civilization, of the future of mankind in our hands. Why? Because they could never build it. The Left seeks to delegitimize our moral achievement, because they feel small and envious next to those that compete and create.
Remember, the Soviets never looked stronger than they did immediately before they collapsed.
I don’t think we will win.
I know we will win. We are the foals that recognize the painted lines on the asphalt for the lie that they are. We are the horses that realize that they have the strength to jump over the cattle guard that we used to think was our prison.
From Library of Congress.
I feel sorry for those who stand against the Right when we find our backs are to the wall. We have created the most powerful and free and prosperous culture in history. The Right doesn’t know its own strength. But it will learn, and the Left is afraid.
We will win. Maybe not this year. Maybe not next year. Maybe not even in the next decade. And the future won’t look like the past – that past is what led us to this crisis. We have the opportunity to remake our civilization, to remake America and to make it better.
And we will make it better.
And we will win.
We always have.
What is your profession?
I rarely ask people to share these posts, but if you have people you know are feeling down – please do.
“Whenever Corey and Trevor go out with Ricky and Julian, what happens? They come home crying. Dehydrated. Mysterious wounds. They won’t tell me what happened because they’re scared to death of those guys.” – Trailer Park Boys
And people say I have a dry sense of humor.
I remember hearing about dehydrated water as a kid – probably the first time was a joke from my science teacher in 7th grade. He also told us (I’m not making this up) drinking stories. He taught us that if you go out drinking when you have just donated blood, you get drunker faster. Who says that middle school science doesn’t teach important life lessons?
But the idea of dehydrated water as a product still got filed away somewhere in the six million neurons I have that are dedicated to 7th grade science. It’s filed somewhere between “don’t stare at the Sun directly through the telescope again Wilder” and “mercuric oxide might look like cinnamon, but it’s not as tasty.” And dehydrated water popped into my mind as I was preparing to write this post today.
Why?
The economy of the United States is dehydrated water at this point. The unemployment rate from Shadow Stats® is somewhere around 35%. Even the Department of Labor thinks the number of people that are unemployed is somewhere north of 20%. Heck, I heard a guy was upset about losing his job at McDonalds™ even though he worked for a clown.
The head of Old McDonalds® Farm is the CIEIO.
As I first predicted when the WuFlu was just coming over the horizon and the first lockdown hit, this is devastating to the economy. The difference between 2% growth year over year and -2% growth is enough to cause Washington D.C. to be as uncomfortable as a Joe Biden voter when Joe starts talking about how he thinks that JFK has the plan to save us from the Spanish flu.
I was not surprised by the quick action money shower from the .GOV folks. What did surprise me is that they used the occasion to juice the economy also by giving money to working people rather than just bailing out banks. Many people on unemployment are actually making more money on unemployment than they made when working, thanks to the extra $600 a week the .GOV folks are adding to their unemployment insurance check. Some could be making up to $50,000 a year. For not working. But Congress makes $174,000 a year for not working, so there’s still room for career growth!
Bonds are really just loans. A company, say, Apple® decides it wants have more slave labor camps factories built in China. So, it calls up the Chinese partner, and says that it will pay. But since the cushions in Steve Jobs’ couch have been raided for quarters already, they decide to borrow money. You or I would have to go ask someone to borrow money from them. But Apple™ sells their debt in the form of bonds, or promises to pay the borrowed money back, plus interest.
When James Bond was offered a sandwich, he had a choice of ham or turkey. Of course he chose bacon, not bird.
The stock market needs to be propped up, and so does the bond market. And after hundreds of millions of loan payments haven’t been made. Which of those loans are good? Where is the cash to pay the lender coming from? No one knows. No one wants to take a risk. Money is like me on a vacation day, it just sits there.
Markets are freezing up because the money isn’t moving, because the economy is freezing up. What the Fed® is doing is artificially injecting money into the market because the market has ceased to work. It’s like my can of dehydrated water – there’s really nothing in it. The joke is that you can add a gallon of water to the contents of the dehydrated water can to make a gallon of water.
The Fed® is adding billions of dollars to an empty economy and pretending that nothing’s wrong, that they didn’t just make an economy out of nothing. “Hey, instant economy. Just add money.”
Planes are different than an economy. Planes only crash once.
My prediction is that the extra $600 a week won’t go away, unless Congress wants the economy to crater even more before the election in November. Why? Since giving away money to people and companies that haven’t earned it is literally the thing Congress loves most in the whole world, I think they will. And I think they’ll ultimately manage to extend it. Probably for at least 100 weeks.
We’ve borrowed more in the first quarter than we spent in 2011. What’s a few more zeros on the national deficit?
But when I wrote that first post about the crash, I was (more or less) assuming we’d be done with the economic mess associated with COVID-Forever no later than July. I thought that people would, as much as possible, not go licking all the doorknobs that they see and the disease would run out of people to infect. Yay, normal summer. And given that, I still predicted at least five years to recover, but more likely a decade.
Nope. States are re-locking down right now. States that never experienced the devastating deaths caused by the nursing-home stuffing Governor Cuomo set up in New York are seeing cases rise.
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When large segments of the economy simply disappear, you can’t simply replace them with money. In the end, money has real purposes in the economy:
Money provides incentives for good behavior, like starting successful companies and saving. Blowing it all on Three Stooges® videos from Amazon™ is probably not the best investment strategy I ever had.
Money provides an allocation of resources throughout the economy without central planning – it’s a way to allocate the productive energy of the economy without a team of Central Politbureau Commissars picking and choosing winners and losers. Congress hates How can you get votes if you don’t mismanage the economy?
She was upset when the prices crashed. I tried to tell her she’s not worthless – her kidneys are worth a lot on the black market.
But money isn’t the economy – money only has value if everyone believe in it. You can’t just give everyone money and expect that good things will happen. At some point, people need to make things. And people need to believe that money has value.
The French, of course, had to jump on the Cargo Cult bandwagon, so they called it “Special Cargo Cult”, or S-Cargo for short.
In the 1940s, massive amounts of men and material flowed into the South Pacific so that we could beat the Japanese back from Australia so it could be handed over to the Chinese in the 21st century. Several cults known collectively as “Cargo Cults” formed. One speaks about their deity, John Frum, or, as I prefer to think of it, John From Wilder’s house. (Seriously, they think the name of John Frum came from “John from America”.)
The idea behind these Cargo Cults was that if the natives built symbolic airstrips and symbolic airplanes out of bamboo (or whatever they had) then the flow of cargo that the American and British armed forces brought in would resume. Then? Perfect prosperity. Hurray!
The Fed™ has become infected with the idea that the economy can be summoned. That’s the definition of a Cargo Cult.
Sadly, I have bad news. It won’t work. It can’t work.
You can’t make an economy by rehydrating it with money. But you can regress an economy. And you can destroy the belief in the money you’re flooding the system with.
Just because it’s gone exactly the way I’ve thought it would and told you it would, don’t mind me. In all seriousness, I could be wrong.
