Category: Complacency

If You Live In A Big Leftist City – Why Haven’t You Moved?

“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

RIGHTMEOW

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?

GREENACRES

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.

CONAN

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.

ALUM

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.

RAIDERS

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.

NEWYORK

Riots, Misplaced Virtue And The Parasite Class

“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

PARASITE

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?

DIABETES

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 in isolation are bad for survival. But if several features are combined with other features that in isolation are counter-survival, sometimes that package is awesome.”

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.

PORPOISE

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.

TRUST

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.

STARVE

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.

RIOT

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.

Why?

Though born of misdirected virtue, Antifa© and BLM® have their own traits.  They contribute nothing to society.  They’re destructive, and feed off of the energy and resources provided to them by productive people.  In the long run, they may even kill off the productive society that created them.

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.

ANTIFA

Well, now that Antifa® has been named a terrorist organization, when will the Democrats start funding it? 

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.

INSPIRE

Accountability: Now With Cheetos and Vicks

“There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.” – Terminator 2

ZERO

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®.”  As all of our beverage fridges were downstairs, Mosquito buzzed downstairs to get Alia a Coke™.  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.

At least I think I did.

Mosquito bounced back up the stairs.  He proudly presented Alia with a can of Coke©.  It was already open.  Alia was surprised – she didn’t think that Mosquito had learned how to open cans of Coke®.

“Did you open this?”  I could hear the pride in Alia’s voice, a pride that her son had figured out how to open a Coca-Cola™ 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.”

711

No one every asks how Coke® is doing – it’s always:  “Is Pepsi™ okay?”

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

Buzzwords, do you speak them, Mister Falcon?  (Hint:  Google® “Mister Falcon”)

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.
  • Living your “Best Life” (The Lie of Living Your Best Life (now including cookies))?
  • Realizing that your strategy of “delaying gratification is hard and only pays off later, while eating Cheetosâ„¢ always pays off now” has resulted in you catching Cheeto® lungâ„¢ and weighing as much as a Buick©?

CHEETOS

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:  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.

THEORY

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.

VICKS

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?”

JW:  “Yup.  And I got it fixed for half that.”

Pa:  “So, why does that mean that you’re entitled to that money?”

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.

But even better than getting the Alice Cooper© tape back was in knowing that I’d done the right thing.  I understand now that she had been accountable for fixing my car.  And I was accountable for doing it in the most cost effective way possible.

Did I give her that money back?

Well, as Mosquito would say:  “Somebody did.”

Why The Left Fears The Right, And Why The Right Will Win

“Oh, haven’t you noticed?  We’ve been sharing our culture with you all morning.” – 300

TRUTH

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.

CATTLE

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?

Obviously, it is.

Don’t be like Ephialtes (LINK).

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?

STLOU

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.

ROWLING

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.

PAINT

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.

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

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

DEHI

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.

BURKA

The head of Old McDonalds® Farm is the CIEIO.

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

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

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

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

DYE

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

KOBE

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.

>Uh-oh.jpg

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

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

BEANIE

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

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

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

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

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

CARGO

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.

But I could be right.  What then?

Have some water on hand?

Too Much News? Take A Step Back.

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

ANTIFA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SPAIN

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

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

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

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

WWN

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

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

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

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

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

We don’t have to live like this.

CAT

Wait until he reads what the mice are up to.

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

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

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

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

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

PREP

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

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

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

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

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

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

But wherever does The Mrs. get such tender meat?

hannibal

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

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

OPRESS

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

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

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

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

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

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

KAREN

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

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

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

WARREN

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

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

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

IRRITATE

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

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

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

SQUAD

But what do we want when we have a victory?

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

Back to the fun.

FLAG

Deflation, Inflation, Collapse – Now With Muppet Jokes

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

FEDPLANE

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

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

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

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

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

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

STONKS

I hate stonks.  Gentlemen prefer bonds.

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

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

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

Kinda.

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

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

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

MUPPET

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

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

But I still think I have $100.

But the bank lent out $90.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

JOKER

My-my-my-Joker® face . . .

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

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

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

PPT

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

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

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

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

FEDBAL

I’m sure that it’s a coincidence.

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

Deflation might be hiding under the bed.

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

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

CLOCK

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

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

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

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

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

Welcome to Issue 12 of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (Link) for links to all of the past issues.

You Knew Where This Was Going

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LENIN

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

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

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

More on that, below.

Violence and Censorship Update

No politician has ever captured the attention of the Left like Donald Trump.  They hated Reagan, and George W. Bush was famous for “stealing” an election.  But something about Trump drives them nearly crazy enough to try to get a job.  The media’s portrayal of Trump as the anti-ChristObama, perhaps?

The violence, of course, is plain for anyone reading any news to see.  It’s not in just the United States:  these protests have been coordinated across nearly every Western nation.  If the protests had been confined to Minnesota, I could buy the idea that they were organic.  And to the extent that they are peaceful gatherings to seek political redress?  I celebrate them.

LOOT

It’s not looting, it’s just an involuntary clearance sale.

But to flash across the world with violence and destruction?  That takes amplification and organization and is clearly the seed of revolution against the West.

The amplification of the signal comes from both mainstream and social media.  Whereas the original death that started the protests was (rightly) exposed, the subsequent deaths of protesters, rioters, and innocent civilians hasn’t been mentioned much at all.  How many dead?

I’m not sure.  This should be a fairly easy number to get to, but I’ve seen numbers between 12 and 18.  Absent media tracking, I’m not sure how you’ll count them up.  If we wait long enough, I’m sure they’ll all be counted and attributed to COVID-19.  To add to the butcher’s bill, thousands have been injured.

Regardless, I have seen, at minimum tens of millions of dollars in damage.  I would expect the number to increase to hundreds of millions, at least.  A fire is, as I write this, blazing in downtown Phoenix.  Odds that it’s related to the rest of the violence?  Nearly 100%.

Censorship is on the rise, as well.  I already spouted off on that last week (Free Speech: Endangered Species – WRSA is Down) in response to Western Rifle Shooters Association being shut down (You Can Find Him Here).  I expect to see that it will be on the increase during the next six months – the election is too important to the Left to leave it in Biden’s hands – chances are good he might wander off to try to buy a rotary phone at Montgomery Wards™.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

May was again a difficult month.  I had to re-scale the graph on violence as this month nearly pegged every meter.  I will assure my faithful readers that I spent extra time this month finding just the right bikini-clad girl, since I want to at least reach the journalistic integrity standards of the Washington Post®.

Violence:

VIOLF

Up is more violent.  Violence had been down because everyone was stuck in the basement.  I predicted that May would be mellow, and then we’d see the uptick in June.  I was almost right.

Political Instability:

POLF

Up is more unstable.  Instability is up only slightly, which might seem weird, but the system is still stable overall.  I may look into another graph next month to measure political change, because it sure feels like we crossed over into a regime where big political changes are more likely – and this graph was meant more about the overthrow of a sitting president, hence the peak in December.

Economic:

ECON2

Down indicates worse economic conditions, and it’s down yet again.  I did change the basis somewhat for this month.  Previously it had been a spot measurement, but this shows more a relative measurement from a baseline.  But did you come for that, or for the bikini?

Illegal Aliens:

BORDF

Down is good, in theory.  This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.  Down, probably related to WuFlu.  Until Mexico’s economy collapses. Then what?  Regardless, this is at a nearly five-year low.

Balkans or Caesar Might Be The Best Case Scenario

I’ve written both about the idea of the United States breaking up into regional governments that run either as autonomous countries, or close enough to autonomous that it doesn’t matter.  This irritates Right-thinking folks “behind the lines” in Leftist states.  They clearly don’t like the idea of being left behind in a People’s Republic of California or the New York Soviet Oblast.  I can understand that, especially since the divide is so much more rural/urban than on a state by state basis and the Right just wants to be left alone.

Being Balkanized remains a possibility, and probably guarantees border wars for decades unless we put up a big, beautiful wall around California.

I have, over time, began to think it’s much more likely that the nonsense will continue until a strongman arrives and proclaims that he’s “President for the Duration of the Continuing National Emergency.”  I certainly don’t think Trump is this person.  Biden is even less this person.  But some Cuomo or other acting as Wall Street’s puppet?  I could see that being more likely.  If we had a military hero of some stature, that would also make sense.

Maybe Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos?

BEZOS

I guess Jeff divorced his wife because she was past her Prime™?

Is having a Caesar that bad?  Absolutely.  But a strongman will try to have to have some sort of legitimacy and will at least (in theory) have some desire to keep a relatively strong country together to turn over to his children.  The old forms of government will be nodded to.  The Senate may not have power, but there will be Senators pretending to have power.

Not good, especially since that pesky Constitution will be entirely ignored, rather than mostly ignored like it is today.  But Caesar’s United States probably more peaceful than a Balkanized America.

But there is one possibility that scares me more than either of those:  Soviet America.  The riots that started nine days ago (yes, it’s only been that long) appear to be the Left making the first push into creating violence to go along with our economic issues and the lingering Coronavirus.  I brought up the Russian Revolution earlier, because that more than anything is what this latest round of violence feels like:  violence, in part funded and provoked by a foreign enemy with the aim of destabilizing America and making people welcome those who promise what they never can really provide.

Links

links

From Hank:

Sheriff Thinks 4Chan meme (Boogaloo Bois) is real.

From The Mrs.:

Soviet America?  (Great article behind WSJ paywall).

Description of Russian Leftists from the article:

“The idea was that since they knew the theory, they were morally superior and they should be in charge, and that there was something fundamentally wrong with the world when ‘practical’ people were. So what you take from your education would be the ideology that would justify this kind of activity—justify it because the wrong people have the power, and you should have it. You don’t feel like you’re the establishment.”

These are from Ricky this month:

And a few others:

Twitter® shows Mayor with at least some backbone

Saker on Unz.

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

LEATHER

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.

STACEY

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.

CUTU

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?

GRETA

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.”

NAILEDIT

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.

FREE

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:

ACKBAR