Category: Complacency

The Five Laws Of Human Stupidity

“Don’t call me stupid.”  – A Fish Called Wanda

I hear of you hold a pistol like that, you can hear the Rittenhouse.  Alternatively, this might be an Alec Baldwin gun safety video. 

Carlo M. Cipolla is a dead Italian economic historian.  So, not a dead economist, because we know that a dead economist was at least right one time.  I don’t know much about him, outside of:

He has ceased to be. He’s expired and gone to meet his maker.  He’s a stiff.  Bereft of life, he rests in peace.  If you hadn’t nailed him to the perch he’d be pushing up the daisies.  His metabolic processes are now history.  He’s off the twig.  He’s kicked the bucket, he’s shuffled off his mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible.  This is an ex-economic historian!

Sorry, I went full Monty Python on you.  Never go full Python, unless of course, you’re pining for the fjords.

But, Dr. Cipolla is dead, as I think I have abundantly established.

About the only other thing besides his condition of demise is that Dr. Cipolla is most known for writing a goofy little essay called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.  He wrote this essay originally in 1976, which proves that he might have had time to meet Joe Biden before writing it.

What do you get when you cross an economist with the Godfather?  An offer you can’t understand.

Text in italics (and those in quotes) beyond this point are direct quotes from the former Dr. Cipolla, except the snarky things I say underneath the memes I have handcrafted in the Wilder Meme Lab.

The First Law:  Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

Tongue in cheek, Cipolla notes that “any numerical estimate would turn out to be an underestimate.”  So, it’s clear that there exists a nearly infinite and inexhaustible supply of stupidity in the Universe.  I have observed this in action:  I have been to the DMV.

The Second Law:  The probability that a certain person will be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.  

Cipolla felt strongly that stupid people weren’t made stupid, they were born stupid.  And, just like the First Law would predict, they are numerous and everywhere.  They inhabit colleges (I think Harvard™ is full of them) the government, and the Pentagon.  Stupidity can also be found at McDonalds®, but that’s excusable.  If When someone is stupid at McDonalds©, an order gets screwed up and I get not a Sausage McMuffin® without the muffin, but just a warm muffin (this happened) at the price of a Sausage McMuffin©.

When someone is stupid at the Pentagon?  They get promoted after the cover-up.

It has also been my experience that if you ask the right questions and listen to the answers, it’s amazing where you will find intelligent people.  Just like there is no bound on where you will find stupid people, there is no bound on where you will find intelligent ones.

Roses are red, violets are blue; no one in Washington cares about you.

One personal example is that every time (not occasionally, but every time) I felt full of myself, soon enough an intelligent person from a place I’d least expect would correct me.  The lesson I learned?  Listen.  Ask questions.  Just as idiocy hides everywhere, gems of wisdom are often when you don’t expect.

Great stuff.  But what, exactly, is stupid?  That’s what the Third Law is for.

The Third (and Golden) Law:  A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

The third law is what really caught my attention.  Here, Cipolla defines what stupid is – and this is an especially interesting definition:  a stupid person screws something up, and doesn’t get any benefit.  At all.  Here Cipolla constructs a chart to define it:

One of my girlfriends in high school was arrested for bank robbery.  She made out like a bandit.

Cipolla dices up the world into two parameters: do they help or hurt society, or do they help or hurt themselves?

Help Self, Help Society:  This is the quadrant that Cipolla reserves for the intelligent.  They end up creating a harmony where they help not only society, but end up helping themselves in the process.  Take the makers of PEZ®, for instance.  They make money by selling the sweet, sweet PEZ™, and society benefits, because, PEZ©.  In this instance it’s a win-win.  Society wins, and the makers of the product win.

These are the people that create the upward drive for society.  They make things better, and they make the people around them better, too.  This is SpaceX® Elon Musk.  He’s revolutionizing space transport and making it cheap to hit orbit ($25 a pound within 10 years???) while raking in piles of cash.

What next?  The helpless.  Helpless people, by Cipolla’s definition, are those that make bad deals.  The bad deals end up helping someone else (even society at large) but end up hurting the people making the deals.  Note:  this wouldn’t be people who help others and get joy from it – they’re getting a benefit.

The biggest group I can think of that represents the Helpless group in 2021 are Biden voters.  Man, I’m thinking they’d take that back if they could.

Joe Biden’s press staff is mainly women, I guess because he doesn’t have to pay them as much.

So, that’s two out of three.  That leaves most politicians bandits.  Bandits, according to Cipolla, come in two flavors.  The first is the net zero bandit.  A net zero bandit just takes $20 from one person and keeps it to spend on themselves.  Bernie Madoff and most conmen are net zero bandits.  They take money and then enjoy it themselves.  Society as a whole (outside of the trust and breaking the law things) isn’t hurt.

Bernie Madoff may make a lot of rich people angry, but he’s not going to create the fall of western civilization because his clients can’t afford to donate money to Harvard© so Harvard™ will let their third-rate children in.

The worst kind of bandits are the asymmetric (my term) bandits.  These bandits cause an outsized amount of trouble for a small gain for themselves.  I can’t think of any real-life examples, but what if some politicians subverted the monetary system just so they could buy votes for themselves while causing massive inflation?  Of course, something that crazy could never happen, right?

That, of course, leaves the subject of the essay:

Stupid People.

Most people do not act consistently. Under certain circumstances a given person acts intelligently and under different circumstances the same person will act helplessly. The only important exception to the rule is represented by the stupid people who normally show a strong proclivity toward perfect consistency in all fields of human endeavors.

Stupid people, Cipolla opines, are even more dangerous than bandits, because they screw everything up.  Stupid people take wonderful ideas, destroy them, and then hurt themselves in the process.  They’re the equivalent of a six-year-old sticking a knife in a toaster and getting knocked out, and then doing it again.  Repeatedly.

Think of it as evolution in action . . .

Again, from Cipolla:

Essentially stupid people are dangerous and damaging because reasonable people find it difficult to imagine and understand unreasonable behavior. An intelligent person may understand the logic of a bandit. The bandit’s actions follow a pattern of rationality: nasty rationality, if you like, but still rationality. The bandit wants a plus on his account. Since he is not intelligent enough to devise ways of obtaining the plus as well as providing you with a plus, he will produce his plus by causing a minus to appear on your account. All this is bad, but it is rational and if you are rational you can predict it. You can foresee a bandit’s actions, his nasty maneuvers and ugly aspirations and often can build up your defenses.

With a stupid person all this is absolutely impossible as explained by the Third Basic Law. A stupid creature will harass you for no reason, for no advantage, without any plan or scheme and at the most improbable times and places. You have no rational way of telling if and when and how and why the stupid creature attacks. When confronted with a stupid individual you are completely at his mercy.

And because there’s no rationality to the attack it’s impossible to defend.  How do you defend against a naked person covered in sex lube attacking you with a rubber chicken?  No, really, how do you do that?  I don’t ever want to be in that place again.

This takes us to . . .

The Fourth Law:  Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

This should be called the Rittenhouse Law.

Kyle was attempting to help society.  And, perhaps he did because I don’t think the world is a worse place off after he was done, but stupid people managed to ruin his night.

And, remember that stupid people vote.

Stupid that night, stupid on the stand.

The Fifth Law:  A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.  Corollary:  A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

Here is where Dr. Cipolla might have lost me, but only because, perhaps, he never imagined that bandits could operate on the scale that they do in 2021.  What if you could steal from everyone at once?  Just print money, and you can.

What if you could get yourself two (or six!) more years at a job in Washington, D.C. and all you had to do was bankrupt the country?  That’s banditry that, perhaps, aspires to stupidity.  The end of the system will end up being the end of their banditry.

See?  Stupid.  So, maybe he was right after all?

Demoralization? No. Remoralization.

“Hold them back! Do not give in to fear! Stand to your posts! Fight!” – LOTR, Return of the King

Chuck Norris threw a boomerang.  It’s afraid to come back.

It’s Friday.  Thankfully.

On Monday and Wednesday, we have heavy topics.  On Friday?  It used to be health focused.  But then after a year or so I had most of my health topics (things I wanted to say) completed.  Sure, more will show up over time, but most of health is either really, really simple or so blisteringly complex that it’s not solvable.

That’s why on Friday (in most recent posts) I have had the ability to focus on:  remoralization.

Life has a known beginning.  It has a known ending.  For religious folks there is a promise of a lot more.

Demoralization is simple:  the idea is to make you feel that you’ve lost.  Put into context, demoralization is fear.  The idea is to make you afraid.  And what does fear do?  Fear sells products.  Fear sells politicians.  Fear sells.  Heck, even suicide bombers have a fear:  dying alone.

When I look at a scene like this, I expect that a coyote and a roadrunner were involved.

Fear is also the basis of almost every negative action.  The proof of this is left to the reader, as many of my textbooks in college said.  My proof is this:  whenever I’ve acted in a manner that was in some way against my values, I can look back and see those actions were based in fear.

Sure, I’d like to place myself in the category of fearless, but I’m human.  Or at least I can pass for human in dim light, according to The Mrs.  But as I looked back and realized that nearly every action I had ever taken that I regretted was due to fear, I decided to get rid of fear.  Thankfully overcoming my fear of escalators was a one-step program.

Does just deciding to not be afraid anymore work?

Well, mostly.  Fear is (amazingly) just another choice.  I discovered I don’t have to feel fear at all.  The decision was simple – I stopped focusing on outcomes.  If I worked every minute at my best, and worked according to my values, well, if it turned out wrong?  It turned out wrong.  Heck, I’m even slowly getting over my fear of speedbumps.

What do you call a chicken crossing the road with no legs?  A speedbump.

I discovered something weird.  People hate it when you’re not afraid.  People want you to focus on fear, especially bosses.  I had one conversation where my boss said, “John, do you realize that (my great, great, great grandboss) would be upset about that?”

My response was simple, “Well, I’d love to tell them my story.  Have them call me.”

His response was, “Whoa!  Why did you bring them (great, great, great grandboss) into it?”

Me:  “I didn’t.  You did.”

Strangely, that implied threat . . . disappeared.  And was never used again.

As I said, people hate that.  Especially bosses.

My boss asked me to make fewer mistakes at work.  That means I get to come in later!

Another example was when I was working at a company that was experiencing significant financial difficulty.  My boss came up to me, and said, “John, do you know what kind of difficulty this company is facing?  How can you walk around so happy all the time?”

Weirdly, I have never understood how being unhappy and worrying about impending doom has helped, well, anyone.  I explained that to my boss.  I told him I would try to appear less happy around the office.  And, while I make a lot of jokes in my posts, this isn’t one.  This really happened.

I really had a boss upset with me for having too good of an attitude.  Go figure.

Being happy is a weird superpower.

It makes people uncomfortable.  A salesman makes a joke that, “Hey, I bet you’re overworked and underpaid,” and when I respond, “No, the work is fairly interesting and I’m satisfied with my compensation,” the look I get is priceless.

I love my couch, it makes me feel regal.  I am “Sofa King” happy!

I also look at most of my choices like I look at a menu.  It’s a choice of something good or something better.  “Do I want the ribeye or do I want the . . . of course I want the ribeye.”  Seriously, if there’s steak on the menu, all of the other pages are wasted.

To be honest, this superpower wasn’t because I was born on a far-distant planet named Krypton® that orbited a red star.  Even though that’s true (I told you I was adopted but wasn’t too specific for, well, reasons) the reason I came to this Truth was the way that I think nearly everyone comes to Truth:  the long, dark night of the soul.

As I have found it, this is the Truth.  There is no aspect of character that comes without scars.  This may be personal, but in my life I recall a very simple pattern:

  • Something awful happens. It may or may not be related to my actions.  Often it is not.
  • There is a decision for me to make. It is a moral decision.
  • I think about it. Often (if time allows) I consult people I trust – people of moral character.
  • I take action.

The important bullet point is the last one.  And when I decided to do whatever was right, regardless of the consequences?

Freedom ensued.  When I stopped focusing on the outcome, and started focusing on what is good, True, and beautiful?  I stopped caring about the outcome.  When I became the embodiment of those things?

I ceased being myself.  I was working for a higher purpose.  The phrase, “let the chips fall where they may” comes to mind.   Oddly, the more I act in accordance with my principles, the better the (average) outcome is.  Not that I care.

I’m disappointed.  I went into the restaurant restroom and waited for hours.  Despite the sign, no employees came to wash my hands.

This is freedom, acting upon principles, regardless of outcome.  The secret is a simple one:  each of us is capable of doing this.  It’s a choice.

Freedom isn’t a document.  Freedom isn’t what someone gives us.  Freedom is what we take.  Freedom is a choice.  And the most good and True freedom is acting upon moral principles.

And then?  Not caring what happens.

There is a word for that.  Courage.

So, there’s a choice, and it’s a choice we face every day.  Courage or fear.

When you give in to fear, you have that stain for life.  Courage?  It outlives us all.

The better news?  We all have the seeds of courage inside of us.

The very best news?

We can all let those seeds grow.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Special Wednesday Edition: Are We There Yet, Part III

“Yes, I shall certainly choose revolutionary France for my holiday again next year.” – Blackadder the Third

There are two types of people:  those that can extrapolate from incomplete data.

Generally, I plan my posts in advance, sometimes weeks ahead of time.  I try to research the topics, and, quite often I’m surprised by the thing that I thought that were true that simply weren’t true.  Things that are “common knowledge” are often incorrect.  Who knew that telling an upset woman to “calm down” would have the opposite effect . . . every single time I’ve ever tried it?

That being said, the comments from the last Civil War 2.0 Weather Report pulled me off of my schedule.  As usual, the commenters at this site are generally at least one to two standard deviations of intelligence above the norm.  It’s a smart room, and a tough one.  When I make an error, even a grammatical error, I get called on it.  I hate to think that I make one grammatical error and then my post is urined.

Oddly, I really appreciate when people point out those errors.  Even though  I will eventually die.  My chances for a legacy on this planet are:

  • my children,
  • the things that I have done (think, work),
  • my PEZ® dispenser collection,
  • the lives that I have touched,
  • and the ideas I was able to share or spread.

Truth, with a capital T, is more important to than me “being right”.

By my reckoning, I’ve popped down in excess of 65,000 words on the conflict in American that is coming to be called Civil War 2.0 over the span of years.  I keep writing about it because it has hit a nerve:  these are some of the most viewed posts that I have written.  People are interested because, like me, they feel something big coming.

Does a nurse need to carry a red pen in case they want to draw blood?

The comments on the November edition of the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, though, are special.  There is a great division in what we even consider the ongoing conflict.  Is it even a war?  Will it ever be a war?

When I think about this I look to analogies from the past.  When Germany decided to take a fall vacation in Poland, Great Britain and France declared war on them.  And then, after Poland was gobbled up by the Germans and the Soviets in September 1939?

Nothing, or, mostly nothing.

For about eight months, the largest armies in Europe did (mostly) zilch.  Newspapers have to have something to write about, so they wrote about the war that just wasn’t happening.  This no-war version of war was called names like Sitzkreig, and the British started calling it the Bore War.  The name “Phoney War” finally stuck.

Well, at least the French won that war.

Then?  On May 10, 1940 the Germans attacked realized that the French were sitting on a lot of stuff that they wanted (mainly, France).  By the middle of June, Germans were having wine in Parisian cafés.  By the end of June, the jokes about French military, um, “prowess” started.

I bring this up because I wonder if we’re in a lull like that right now.

In an attempt to catalog the progress to a war, I tried to use existing international standards to codify the steps towards war.  On my ten-point scale, last six points were:

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

Point 5. is beyond dispute.  Point 6. is ongoing, right now.  I have had dozens of people in real life and on the site talking about moving away simply because they did not want to be in Leftist-controlled state.

I’d tell more jokes about the Civil War, but I keep getting Stonewalled.

Point 7. was very common.  Violence has, to a certain extent, dropped backwards due to rioting becoming “so 2020”, although societal violence levels are still increasing.

But Aesop had this gem in his comment:

“And those 1000 casualties? In a 12-month period? That rolling criteria is rolling backwards, not forward. We’re currently back at maybe 6½, not 10.

In the way I thought about my model, these were ratchets – point 6. supported point 7., and so on.

But Aesop is right.  Violence (especially of the riot-y kind) has decreased.  At least for now.  I’ll state that point 8. has happened and can’t be undone.  The structures are far better organized on the Left – Charles Péguy said it well:  “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”  But when faced with real, proximate threats the Right has shown that it can organize thousands in a week.

Point 9.?  I would say that this level of terror continues in American cities, right now.  Leftist violence (though not always pointed against the Right) continues and isn’t punished.  Leftists can commit a huge variety of crimes and be walking the streets in the new “no bond” world the next morning.

Non-violent people who walked unopposed into the Capitol building on January 6, 2021 are being held in conditions that approximate a Soviet GULAG.  Don’t take my word for it, you can read a letter from an inmate here (LINK).  So, is number 9. happening?  It clearly is.

Aesop continues:

But the most obvious reason it’s not midnight, nor anywhere close, is because you’re even asking the question.

No one had to tell the ship’s band on the Titanic that the sh*tfestivus had begun. They knew the minute they sat down to play that the performance would end with their shoes getting cold and wet, before they even sat down.

I don’t think we’re taking on water, and I don’t even think we’ve even hit the iceberg yet. I do think we’re barreling towards it blind in the night, at flank speed, in a fog.

But that’s a far cry from taking on water, and doomed to sink.
Yet.

Those are good points.  It’s sort of like the definition of drowning.  If have the breath to ask, you’re not drowning.  At least I told my kids that when I taught them how to swim.  You can’t have a Civil War if nobody comes.

And yet . . . we’ve been in a cultural war since long before most people ever realized we were.  And one thing we’re good at (as humans) is normalizing life.  We get complacent, and behavior that would have led to social ostracism becomes almost acceptable in a few years.  We can get used to that level of violence, too.  If you look at the Google® trend for the term “riot” it spikes with the first Floyd riot, but goes back to the same level of interest after only a few weeks, despite riots being prevalent all summer long.

We get used to things, even bad things, very quickly.

One or two people might get this one, but they’ll really enjoy it.

Various other comments –

McChuck:  “The cultural, political, economic, legal, and demographic war has been waged against US for generations, and we are losing badly. If we don’t fight now (or very soon), we lose by default.

When only one side shows up for a war, it’s called genocide. That’s where we are now, even if it’s being done slowly.”

The Docent:  “We have a fight between factions for control of the government. So I would suggest that the issue is whether it rises to more than “civil disturbance.” This is where the minimum yearly body count of 1,000 (with at least 100 per side) comes into play. If we are only looking at the BLM/Antifa riots, we are at a civil disturbance level. If we consider COVID jabs for the kill count, we get over the 1,000 minimum, but because it is unilateral it is a genocide rather than a civil war.”

jojo:  “Yup. Wilder – throw away your charts. Look at what’s going on. It’s on already. And has been for more than a little while. Add in political prisoners locked up in D.C. for trespassing with no bail – you got a chart for that?”

It’s clear that there is some feeling that we’re not seeing any sort of war – just flat-out genocide.  And that’s the reason for the charts.  People who are invested in the system, who feel that they have something to lose are generally willing to put their heads down and keep quiet.  I will keep the graphs going.  I’m plotting something.

Well, that’s one way to properly fill out a ballot in Georgia.

So, are we there yet?  Ask some folks, it’s clearly a yes.  Ask others, it’s clearly a no.  It’s also, clearly, likely to be the biggest event that we’ll see in our lifetimes.

And in places like Modern Mayberry, I imagine that there is a good possibility that we may never see any direct violence related to this, except on YouTube® reports.

But, I can see spending time to review the markers – these are two and a half years old now.  I might even stay with them, but recalibrate them with some objective markers.  We’ll see – I’ll give it some thought.

It is clear.  We will never be able to return to the nation that was, and what we will become will be born from the next few years.

Who will we become?  We all have a stake in that.

The Funniest Tax Post You’ll Read Today

“Hey, I gotta uncle that lives in Taxes.” – Duck Soup

They just put in a new speed bump at Pugsley’s school.  I mean, I hope it was a speed bump.

What is a tax?

Most people think about taxes are money siphoned off from people and businesses.  Admittedly, the best kind of a tax would serve the public good, and also be in proportion to use of that public good.  A gasoline tax that’s used to fund the construction of roads certainly passes that muster.  The more a person drives, the more gas they use, and the more they pay.  Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s hard to find a perfect tax.  However, from their perspective, the Taliban have created the perfect tax:  Americans pay, the Taliban get all the stuff.  We even deliver.

There are plenty of other things that function as a tax.

Unions function as a tax.  They take a market commodity, labor, and make it artificially scarce.  This increases the price.  In theory, unions can provide an assured level of labor quality, in stereotype they provide lowered profitability.  In practice, I’ve seen both.  Jeff Bezos is so against them that he got rid of his wife because someone told him marriage was a union.

Gameshows Jeff Bezos avoids:  Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Child labor laws were instituted for the same reason – to lower labor competition.  Oh, sure, in 2021 we tell ourselves that it’s for the benefit of the children.  Keep in mind that when these laws originally went into effect, 10-year-olds were working 12 hour days in mills.  And those were the good jobs.  “Nippers” as they called them, were young boys handling explosives and getting into situations that were too dangerous for adult male miners.  So, you need a minor miner for major danger.

Child labor laws act like a tax.

The body of regulations that businesses face likewise act like taxes.  Some of them are pretty reasonable, but when OSHA named that new regulation after me?  That was tough – it was for wearing too much aftershave.  They called it a “fragrant breach of regulations.”

If you hold a hardhat up your ear, you can hear the OSHA.

Other regulations are just meant to bring prices up, like the 42 page standard that the USDA has for lemons, which specify that they all are within 6/16ths of an inch in diameter in any given box.  There are thousands of pages of regulations on fruits that cause many to be discarded.  I’m raisin awareness.  But regardless, it lowers the amount of fruit that farmers can sell and people can eat.

It’s a tax.

Bad taxes take money from one person and just give it to another.

There are certainly plenty of those schemes.  Based on its current productivity, NASA is just a wealth redistribution scheme.  It used to have a mission of getting people into space, but now apparently has the mission of (I kid you not) making braille books for blind kids about eclipses.  At least they’re better at making books than launching humans into space, since putting people into space is something they haven’t done in over a decade, and I’m willing to bet they won’t do for years.  But, hey, books for blind kids, right?  It’s a bad tax, but it’s just dysfunctional.

With NASA, the sky is the limit!  Because they can’t go higher than however high Southwest® 737s fly.

NASA isn’t alone, but if they’re dysfunctional, stuff just doesn’t happen and we have to wait for Elon Musk to rescue us.  What happens if people listen to government idiots and take them seriously?

Up until the ‘Rona hit, the CDC was pretty good about doing next to nothing – sending out silly warnings at Christmas about “don’t eat cookie dough” that absolutely every human worth talking to ignored.  The precursor to the CDC got rid of malaria.  Since then?  Everything they focus on gets worse.  So, the cookie dough thing was something they could do and not screw stuff up too badly.

Yes.  People are losing their jobs because liberals are taking the word of a government agency that would make eating raw cookie dough illegal if it could . . . seriously.  It’s the ultimate in government incompetence turning into a pure evil tax.

High energy prices are a tax as well.  They touch every physical item in the economy.  If it has to be moved, energy is what moves it.  It’s a tax on people who have to commute.  It’s a tax on people who have to eat.

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls.  The Toll House tolls for you!

Shortages are a tax, too.  A shortage increases the cost by limiting supply.  But let’s look at the shortage of pickup trucks.  Why are they in short supply?  Because of a shortage of computer chips there are a limited number of trucks that can be made.  Does that make Ford® happy?  No.  The shortage tax doesn’t help them.  About the only people that the tax makes happy?

People who have extra cars to sell.

Finally, the ultimate tax:  inflation.  It’s a tax on every dollar you’ve ever saved, making it smaller, day by day.  The early effects of inflation make people happy (ish), if they have something to sell.  Inflation, though, always ends in tears.

High taxes result in lowered freedom.  In (almost) every case, the taxes don’t produce anything but envy.  As an example, historically low energy prices equate to higher freedom, and higher energy prices equate to lower freedom.  I’d extrapolate that to most of the other taxes I’ve mentioned above.

To make the opposite argument, the interstate highway system was made with taxes, but it is an anti-tax.  It lowered the cost of goods and services across the country and paid for itself many times over.  Let’s compare to the “war on poverty” where we’ve spent trillions, and taken exactly zero people out of poverty since the poverty rate was dropping before the “war on poverty” started.

I beat The Mrs. at Scrabble®.  Now she is sending me threatening letters.

You know, when the interstate highway system was just getting going?  Huh, I wonder why we didn’t build the Taliban one of those?  Well, Biden still has three more years.

I’m Back. Also? The Economy Is A Mess.

“Good. Then climb up, get inside, and make it spin.” – Cobra Kai

Oh, wait, then she couldn’t circle back?

JW Note:  Monday was the third day (I think) that I had to skip a scheduled post since 2017.  It’s nice to be back.  Thanks for waiting.

I was driving down the road.  It was Christmas Day, back a zillion years ago.  There had been a fresh few inches of snow on the paved road.  I was going to see my parents.  The day was overcast, and cold, with temperatures hovering around 0°F (101.325 kPa).

My car was going around 70 miles per hour.  There wasn’t another car on the road, and I could see for miles.  Little did I know that I would soon have an auto-body experience.

Instead of snowplows, the county had used road graders to scrape the snow off the asphalt.  One result of that was that there was a continuous tiny hill of snow in the center of the road where the yellow line would be.

As I drove along, I reached to change the cassette tape.  Perhaps a switch to AC/DC® from the Crüe?  I wandered off just a little bit toward the center onto that little hill as I reached into the tape box.  It slowed my car.  On one side.  Just a little.

The result wasn’t little.  A force applied to one side of the car led to the other side going forward faster, a result most people call . . . spinning.

Or in this case, Tyrannosaurus Rexth. 

The car went into a very fast spin as the car’s forward energy was transferred into angular momentum.  I could probably describe the amount of energy in math, but I was concentrating right then and there on not being reduced to my personal lowest common denominator.  But you can think about it this way:  how fast would a car going 70 miles per hour spin if all the forward energy went into spin?

Fast.

This spin forced the weight of the car onto the driver’s side wheels as the car bled linear energy into rotational.  As the car spun, out of control, there was no real way to do anything.  Everything was happening far too fast.

The spinning car spun up a small tornado cloud of snow from the road.  Finally, the car tilted up on the driver’s side tires, and tilted up, 30 degrees from horizontal.  It stopped rotating.

The car then slammed down, at a complete stop, engine stalled, and every light on the dashboard on.  The defroster was blowing snowflakes into the car, and every window was covered with white flakes of snow, outside and inside.

There is only one thing I could do.  I got out of the car and stared down the asphalt at the path I had been on.  It all happened so fast that had little time to feel any fear.  Besides, who can be afraid when Bonn Scott was busy telling me all about Rosie?

How does he like his eggs in the morning?  Ohhhhhmmmmlette.

I had been going due east, facing right into the ditch.  I was now pointing due south.  The entire time, not a tire had left the narrow two lane asphalt road.  I looked back on the track the wheels had made, and it looked like the path of a figure skater doing a pirouette.  I got wiped off the car windows, got back in, backed up, and headed east again.

Much more slowly.

Back when the ‘Rona first started, the long-term implications (to me) were clear.  The immediate shutdown of large segments of the global economy would be disastrous.  It was certain to leave a mark.

The toilet paper binge was signal one.  When people panic, they feel that they have to do . . . something.  Buying toilet paper wasn’t rational.

Here at Casa Wilder we actually had a relatively ludicrous amount on hand before the whole mess hit.  It was (sort of) a prepping situation.  We kept buying more than we needed, and it kept adding up.  And up.  Before too awful long, we had the basement bathroom stacked pretty high with the stuff.

I hear that two guys stole a calendar from Capitol Hill.  Each of them got six months.

When the storm hit?  Well, let’s say that we were squeaky clean.  And we didn’t buy a single sheet.  We weren’t part of the problem, but part of the solution.

But the economy wasn’t.  Every bit of initial distortion from the economic dislocation was amplified.  It echoed down the system.  What kinds of shocks?

  • Initial runs on supplies.
  • Federal stimulus.
  • Initial lowered consumption of fuels.
  • More Federal stimulus.
  • Lower demand for office space.
  • More Federal stimulus, which increased unemployment benefits, distorting labor incentives.
  • Eviction moratoriums, distorting housing costs and lowering profits of building owners.
  • More Federal stimulus.
  • Spiking stock markets with contracting GDP.

I’m thinking that, in retrospect, Federal “aid” was probably the worst thing we could have done.  It provided the greatest expansion of government powers since FDR nearly destroyed the economy with the New Deal.  If the Federal government could tell a landlord in Podunk, Iowa that he couldn’t kick out people that refused to pay, it’s only a tiny step to saying that the landlord should let people move into his guest bedroom and feed them pancakes when they demand them.

French pancakes give me the crepes.

That might be the worst.  But the economic situation has all the charm of a pitbull that just quit smoking, and it will be the spark.

Wilder’s Law (might as well grab one when I can) says that Federal debt doubles every eight years.  The debt is right now at $29 trillion.  That means that (on average) the debt will rise by $3.5 trillion each year.  That’s a lot of money.  Some people work a whole year and don’t make that much!

I think we’re on track to more than double it in the next eight years, regardless of who is in the White House.  The end state of any exponential curve is, well, exponential.  The headwinds we are now facing are strong.

  • Medical costs, which are growing faster than Germany between 1939 and 1941.
  • Infinite Leftist “free” programs to see who will be trained to be the poet in Collective Farm #8675309 (I bet it will be Jenny).
  • Whipsawing energy availability. I promised Lord Bison I’d do an energy post again sometime soon, and we need to review where we’re at.  Is energy expensive because of political reasons, or because of physical reasons?  We need to have a great documentary about oil.  We can save it under non-friction.
  • Political division that mirrors only a few times in our history. Hint:  all of those ended in historic levels of bloodshed.  I’m sure this time will be different.
  • The man is a potato.
  • Lashing waves of inflation and shortage, as I predicted back in July. Heck, I priced cheap electric outlets the other day.  They were shocking!
  • China and Russia seeing their moment. Why didn’t anyone Xi that coming?
  • Joe Biden’s America? Borders are open, no jab required.  Oh, wait, have a job?  Jab required.

I wish that I could tell you that things will get better soon in the economy.  It is certain that they won’t.  The economy is shifting in unpredictable ways.  When you have a system that is working at its limits every single day and then subject it to amazing levels of stress?

It will fail.  No chips for new cars.  No drivers for trucks.  Chicago getting ready to lose a big chunk of cops.  The worst dislocations are yet to arrive.

The government solution will certainly make things worse.  How can I tell that?  It already has.  The dreams of those who assume that prosperity can be bought at the price of new law or regulation or printing more cash has always failed.

Second place winner, Collective Farm BR-549 poet competition.

Prosperity is hard.  Really hard.  The natural state of humanity has been one where starvation was always a possibility, where actually consequential diseases (see:  The Black Death or The Justinian Plague) was inevitable from time to time.  It was so bad that episodes of that show you love were on the streaming service that you don’t have and you’re not going to buy another one.

We live in a world that has become just like my car on that Christmas Day so many years ago.  It was moving down the road at full speed.  One tiny two-inch hill of snow caused it to spin.

I assure you we haven’t been anywhere close to the worst that this downturn will bring.  Prepare.  Stay away from crowds.  And if you and all you love all still there when all four wheels drop back on the ground?

Say a prayer.

Of thanks.

We can’t have too many of those.

Recharge Yourself.

“They recharge? I just keep buying new phones.” – House, M.D.

It’s cool everyone in the world charges their phones with an American Bee. Oh, wait, they call it a USB.

Some things just wear me out faster than the inseam of Oprah’s pants.

Thankfully, some things just make me feel as excited as the Autopsy Club at open Mike night.

Things that wear me out are, thankfully, not so common. Besides, if I listed those, I’d just be whining. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to focus on the positive when I can.

Here are a sampling of things that recharge me:

Learning new things.

The older I get, the more I realize that my ironclad knowledge of youth was . . . wrong.

Not virtue, mind you. What is true and virtuous hasn’t changed. The lessons of morality from my youth from parents and grandparents have been constant guides. So, not that.

But how many things were skipped in history? What’s left to learn in science? Amazing amounts. Heck, I was shocked about some of the things I learned about electricity.

That’s one tough cut of meat.

Writing a post that I like.

When I write a post where I felt that the beginning, middle, and end all work and mesh seamlessly together with the bad jokes and memes? I’m in heaven. I hit the “go” button on the software to schedule the post, and then hit the comments. If it’s a particularly late night, that’s the worst, because I’m excited about what I wrote, but it’s two hours before the alarm goes off.

I took my goldfish to the vet. “He’s having seizures.” The vet responded, “He looks fine to me.” “Sure,” I said, “but wait until I get him out of the bowl.”

It’s worth it even though the two most common synonyms for unemployed are “writer” and “blogger”. One thing to note: some of the posts that I personally like the best aren’t the ones that get the most traction. That’s okay. I’m still learning (see the first point).

Teaching someone something new to them.

When I, with ten minutes and a few hundred words, can change the world view of someone, I cherish that moment. It’s all well and good to go through my daily life just doing my thing, but when I have the opportunity to change the way a human mind works and sees the Universe, forever?

That’s the best. Doing my own thing, I’m limited. The surest way to multiply my impact is to share ideas. I’ll die. If the ideas I taught live on and spread after that?

I still win.

Coming home and sitting down in my chair.

I have a chair upstairs. It’s a nice, soft brown chair, next to a coffee table stacked with too many books. I walk in after a day away, pop my book bag on the floor, and ease down into the chair. From there, I can go anywhere. Most often, The Mrs. will curl up on the couch and we’ll talk about the day. Or if she’s not there? I’ll sit and read. Or sit and sleep. Or . . . whatever.

I told my son that if he’s got a paralyzed girlfriend to take her wheelchair if she wanted to break up. She’ll come crawling back.

Getting up and drinking coffee in my chair in the dark morning in an empty house after everyone but me has headed away.

There is something peaceful about sitting in the chair before the chaos of the day begins. I often turn off all of the lights and sit in a still, quiet house, reading about what happened while I slept. I look at my watch and follow the time until it’s time to go.

A crisp autumn day.

Winter is my favorite time of the year because I love the weather, the colder the better. An autumn day is nice, too. The heat of summer has burned off. The potential for a cool autumn day is endless. Work outside? Sure. Open the windows and paint a room? Sure. Weld up the mailbox supports? Can do. An autumn day gives a last look before winter.

Autumn days are filled with infinite possibility. I guess that makes me a Fall Guy. I got that nickname through the school of hard equinox.

One out of our four cats.

We had one cat, and it is an awful cat. Last November, The Mrs. and Pugsley conspired to bring home a second. I was against it. My reasoning was that atheists own more cats than Christians. Pugsley countered that it’s illegal to own Christians.

But about the cat? Sadly, I was wrong. That cat is a pretty good cat. I like it.

The two cats that showed up afterward? I’ll pass, thank you, and they can stay outside unless the apocalypse comes and we need extra flavor for the ramen.

But I like that one cat quite a bit.

I have the reflexes of a cat. Remember, a dead cat is still a cat.

A full Saturday afternoon reading a good book.

A few weeks ago it was cool during the week, but hot on the weekend. I grabbed a book around 9AM and started reading. I read through the morning (stopping for lunch) and then read until I took a nap.

That was nice. I hadn’t done it in years. There’s a magic in getting lost in a world, letting it open up in your mind. One boss of mine said that, “Books are the only way that one human can talk to another through time.” He was right. But I make it a point to never read a braille horror book – I can always feel when something is coming.

Sleeping in on Saturday but still being the first up.

The stillness of the house in the morning brings possibility. What will happen next? Who will the next person to walk down the hall be?

My friend kisses his wife goodbye every morning. The Mrs. asked me, “Why don’t you do that?” It’s a good question, but I don’t even know my friend’s wife that well.

As I look through the list, there’s a pattern: I seek new knowledge so I can share it. I look for stillness so I can create thoughts, and then put them into action. While I love taking action and making things happen in the real world, I like to think that the knowledge I pick up along the way and share might make any action I take look, over time, quite small.

What charges you up?

General Milley, The Vanguard Of The American Caesar

“What else is a TARDIS for? I can take you to the Battle of Trafalgar, the First Antigravity Olympics, Caesar crossing the Rubicon, or Ian Dury at the Top Rank, Sheffield, England, Earth, 21st November, 1979. What do you think?” – Dr. Who

What do modern people call socks worn with sandals?  Birth control.

History doesn’t always repeat, but it rhymes.

On January 10, 49 B.C., Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River at the head of his troops.  He had been ordered to leave the troops beyond the Rubicon.  After crossing the river, it is said he uttered, alea iacta est, or Latin for “I know you are, but what am I,” (Caesar was a big Peewee Herman fan).

Caesar didn’t pay any attention to the order to leave his troops behind, and Legion XIII, Gemina, followed him to Rome.  What followed was a four-year civil war that ended up with Julius Caesar taking over the Roman Republic and founding what soon became the Roman Empire.  That lasted until the Empire was split in two by a pair of Caesars.

One of the most scrupulous traditions in the United States has been that there are three independent branches of the Fed.Gov:  the legislative, the judicial, and the executive.  What’s missing?  The military.  That’s just as intentional as Biden wearing Depends® the day after he eats prunes.

What determines the length of a Biden press conference?  Depends.

That’s because the military is unique:  the legislature controls funding it and declaring the war it should fight, and the executive is their commander-in-chief.  It should be pretty straightforward.

Except:  the military went from a citizen-militia type military fairly early on.  Even then, it was still pretty lame by today’s standards:  it had a core of officers and smallish numbers of troops.  The armed forces were expanded during times of war, of course, through citizen volunteers.  This lasted until the Civil War became such an unpopular party that you had to force Northerners to come and play because the Southerners were being such meanies.

Sure, the military wasn’t always used just for wars – Congress has authorized use of force 23 times since the end of World War II, and at least once of those times wasn’t related to “scaring up some hot chicks with daddy issues” for Clinton.  Declaration of “War” has become out of vogue since war has such nasty connotations.  Thankfully people can’t die unless war is declared.  I’m surprised the Department of Defense isn’t called the Department of Peace.

I guess both of these guys rubbed women the wrong way.

But, sorta, the idea has still worked out.  Congress authorizes the use of force, and the President wages war peace with tanks.  What’s missing there is the military deciding what it should be doing.  The military is a verb:  kill and break stuff.  The civilian government provides the noun, which is as simple as the name of a person or nation.

The system has some drawbacks:  in my view, it’s much easier to use the military than it should be.  I can understand in a world that has grown much smaller due to things like missiles and the Internet why we can’t wait a year to get ready to make war peace with bullets, but that should be our last resort.

This brings us to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

General Mark A. Milley is the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS).  That particular job is not really as cool as it sounds.  The JCS isn’t technically even in the chain of command for war peace with artillery.  They have no command authority over combat forces – that goes from the President to the Secretary of Defense to the commanders of the various Unified Combat Commands.

What does the JCS do?  The short version is that they’re the Human Resources group for the armed forces where they make diversity policies and pick who gets what job.  They also help make sure that “stuff” like food and bullets and goes to the right places.  It’s important – but the JCS aren’t fighting wars providing peace with torpedoes.

I’m not saying he’s woke, but his favorite animal is a pander.

This makes me wonder what General Milley was up to when he decided to tell the Chinese that he would let them know if we were going to attack them.  Of all the things that a General in the United States Armed Forces should be, promising to our (potential) enemies that he would give them a heads up if the elected Commander In Chief decides that even more vigorous peace with a particular country is required, is . . . not his job.  He’s Human Resources, and his job isn’t to set the priorities of the country or conduct diplomacy.  His job is to decide what happens if Jeff steals Julia’s salad in the break room fridge.

Yet, here General Milley was, conducting a policy discussion and taking orders from a sworn enemy of the United States:  Nancy Pelosi.  I kid:  Pelosi isn’t completely evil.  She only wants the complete destruction of the United States after she retires.

I put Jesus as my lock-screen picture.  Now he’s my screen savior.

But here is the danger:  Leftists will talk about how wonderful General Milley Cyrus is.  He won’t be charged with any crime.  He’ll retire from the JCS in 2023, and write a book about how great all of his decisions were.  He’ll get hired by a company that makes components that the Chinese will buy to make weapons for their military.  He’ll get to fly corporate jets and eat bacon-wrapped shrimp at parties with very fancy people.

That’s (mostly) not dangerous.  Unless you have to read the stupid book he’ll write.

What’s dangerous is that it sets the military up as being able to define the noun.  They get to do all the killing of people and breaking of stuff, but now they get to pick who they kill and what stuff they break.  That’s the dangerous point – the Rubicon.

I’ve warned in the past that I see two possible futures for the United States – a balkanized America.  For two decades beyond World War II, the nation was coming together and becoming less regional and more homogeneous.  The influence of television gave us another set of shared experiences.

But splits have been engineered, and now even though New York has a McDonalds® and so does Des Moines, the two places aren’t remotely alike in values or even, in many cases, language.  A balkanized America is one very real possibility as the polarity of the nation increases.

That’s one possibility.

I never judge a book by its cover.  I use that little paragraph on the back.

An American Caesar with a follow-on American Empire is another.  Besides being treasonous, Milley’s call with China is scarier:  it was an independent act of the military at the highest level to circumvent civilian leadership.

There is no doubt – this is close to crossing the Rubicon.  If the allegations are true, Milley should be tried, and if guilty, convicted.  As I said above – I think Milley’s insubordination will likely be rewarded and then he’ll be praised like a pet poodle, and he won’t be punished.

Somewhere there is a colonel taking notes, and waiting for an opportunity to strike in the coming unrest, getting ready to cross the Rubicon.

We’ll see if he has the chance.

When Times Are Tough, First, Sharpen The Saw

“You have personal habits that would make a monkey blush.” – Red Dwarf

I know a lot of broken pencil jokes, but they’re all pointless.

Stephen Covey made roughly a bazillion dollars with his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which at least makes his marketing pretty effective. I read it back in the early 2000s when I found a copy sitting on a shelf in an office when I started a new job. This was lucky for me, since I could never find the self-help section at the library. The librarian just would say, “Well, if I told you where the self-help section was, that would defeat the purpose.”

I couldn’t name most of the 7 Habits unless I cheated with Duckduckgo®, but I do remember the last one of the seven: Sharpen the Saw.

You might think that this would be a reference to Jason or Michael Meyers, but no. In the book he relates a story about Abraham Lincoln, who, when asked if he were to race to cut a tree down, how he would do it. “Well first, I would sharpen the saw, and then I would hire the neighborhood kid to do it and then I would invade the South,” Lincoln replied.

Talk about a one-trick pony.

How many Amish people does it take to change a light bulb? None.

But Covey picked up on this idea: if you’re not sharp, you’re not at your best. You can look at that through several dimensions, and include things like fitness, but you know how to get in shape. That answer is simple – even if you don’t want to do it.

The dimension of sharpness that I want to write about is mental. I know how to exercise to get fit, but if I’m so burned out that I don’t have the motivation to do it, I simply won’t.

The first level of control I do is to control the intake of my mind.

Around 2016 I went full-stop on listening to NPR® radio. NPR™ had always had a lefty slant, but in 2016 they went Full Throttle Leftist. The conclusion that I came to is that if I felt like shouting at the car radio that the host was wrong, I should probably just stop listening to them.

And I did. The reason I did wasn’t that I was afraid of the facts – no. I embrace finding out when I’m wrong. The reason was that the opinion that had always been in the backseat of the car became the driver. And I don’t like the opinions of Leftist NPR© hosts unless they’re midgets: the midgets always know what’s up.

Cats kill more birds than windmills. Heck, I can’t recall the last time I heard of a cat killing a windmill.

The Mrs. relayed to me that some journalism schools were now teaching that journalists should be, rather than impartial reporters on a story, a good journalist should actively intervene in favor to further Social Justice narratives.

My site isn’t a news site. My site is generally an opinion site – your opinion and my opinion. We can all have them, and as long as we agree to that, it’s fine. But NPR® began peddling opinion as fact, and editorializing during straight news stories, “discredited” and “false” were used as modifiers in news, as in “Fauchi debunks the false and discredited idea that people should wear masks,” a week before Fauchi says you need to wear six masks.

NPR® was harshing my mellow without giving me anything that I couldn’t get elsewhere.

The next level of control is to rest.

If I’m going all out, working and blogging, I might average five hours of sleep Sunday through Friday morning. That’s probably not enough. I play catch-up on weekends, but that’s not quite enough. A few weeks ago I decided I wouldn’t go in to work until after lunch on Friday.

It was glorious. I started the weekend with a full tank and that Friday was amazingly productive.

There are only so many hours in a day, and I have a list of things I have to get done. I do often live with a sleep deficit, but I do try to at least monitor it. I did find a scientific test on sleep deprivation online. It told me how much sleep I needed: just five minutes more.

And Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a watch. He decides what time it is.

The third thing I like to control is chaos.

Okay, I can’t control chaos. But I can control what I care about. I can prioritize. I can plan. I can make lists.

Make lists? How does that help?

I find that when I’m feeling whelmed, that just making a list turns a chaotic list of things to do into something I can attack. And sometimes, I just pick something I can do, something I can complete from the list, and just do it even if it’s not the most important thing.

A shopping center burned down – nothing left but Kohl’s®.

The best catalyst for action is . . . action. When I start getting things done, more things get done. Then things begin to disappear from the list as I cross them off.

At the end of the day, I feel good. Things are done. Sure, some aren’t, but finishing tasks and crossing them off the list makes me happy.

The fourth thing I do is step away. Turn off the chaos by connecting with other people. By reading. By writing.

There is always the danger in distraction. If done too often, it is simply running away.

But a moment to pull back, reflect, and work with the important connections in my life? That’s keeping the reason I face the chaos in perspective. I do those things for the people I love, for principle, or because it’s virtuous and has meaning.

Reading? That’s how I get ideas. That’s how I hit the reset button by focusing on other ideas.

Writing? That’s how I work through ideas. When I put it in writing, I begin to understand where the holes are in my thinking. Then I research. Then I get closer to the Truth.

Again, done too often, it’s an escape, not a refresh.

When the aquatic mammals escaped from the zoo, it was otter chaos.

Finally? I pray.

YMMV, but prayer does wonders for me. Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard said, “Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards,” except when he said it, it came out more like, “Livet kan kun forstås baglæns, men det skal leves fremad,” and it probably sounded like Søren was gargling a mouthful of small wet frogs.

But Søren was right. Life is tossed by uncertainty and fortune, good and bad, and no one is getting out alive. As I get older, I begin to understand, and see the structure, though I have enough wisdom to know how little I really know.

Prayer brings me peace.

Thanks for sharing in my saw-sharpening. I hope it wasn’t too dull.

How Single Suburban Soccer Moms Are Killing The Country

“Train yourself to let go . . . of everything you fear to lose.” – Star Wars, Episode III

Childhood is like being drunk.  Everyone remembers what you did but you.

I’ve written a lot about fear, and how negative it is.  But fear is a very potent persuasion technique.  Fear motivates people to action.  Heck, I had a fear of elevators, but I took some steps to avoid it.

That’s why it’s used.  David Frum (press “S” to spit) recently wrote an article in The Atlantic titled, How to Persuade Americans to Give Up Their Guns.  I’m not going to link to it because I don’t want to drive traffic to this screed.  That just encourages them to pay Frum to write other crap when he’s not sleeping in the warm chest cavity of the “conservative” money laundering schemes think tanks.

In the end, David takes his Canadian* sensibilities to tell the benighted Americans that they should be horribly afraid of guns.  Guns are scary!  I believe, in technical terms, they are so scary that they make Frum wee a bit in his pants.

I guess we know Frum’s favorite drink:  pop.

Policy Exchange, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, Weasel Hair Added By Wilder

In the end, who, exactly was Frum writing this article to?

Well, let’s eliminate who he wasn’t writing to, first:

  • He wasn’t writing to you. He wasn’t writing to me.  If you’re a regular here, it’s nearly a lock that you’re at least sympathetic to the idea that the Second Amendment provides, in clear language, an individual right to own and carry weapons of war.  And we don’t wee our pants about it.
  • He wasn’t writing to the Left. They don’t need to be convinced.  The Second Amendment is probably the biggest single impediment to their plans (see:  Australia).
  • He wasn’t writing to rural folks. We have so many guns that our guns have guns.
  • He wasn’t writing to urbanites. Most people deep in the hive are already Leftists.
  • He wasn’t (for the most part) writing to guys. Guys (generally) like guns, and are generally less in favor of restricting them.  Women, for instance, are 30% more likely to support restrictions on standard size magazines.

Single Suburban Soccer Moms have such high double standards.

What does that leave?  Suburban women, specifically Single Suburban Soccer Moms.  Frum even admits as much in the article – he references both Mothers Against Drunk Driving® (MADD©) and Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense In America™ (MDAFGSIA®).  No, I didn’t make that last one up.  It’s what happens when the wine aunt tries to come up with a catchy name and everyone is so blitzed on the white zin that they don’t tell her, “Oh, Mabel, that is an awful name.”

But, yeah, the weasel-faced Frum was trying to manipulate the SSSM, because they’re often the swing voter in elections.  And, they make decisions based on fear, unlike me.  I like my emotions like I like my beer.  Bottled.

MADD© and MDAFGSIA™ are an excellent example of fear being used to manipulate Moms.  Did MADD™ do some good?  Certainly.  But even the founder thought they went too far and quit in 1985 because MADD©, founded to stop drunk driving, became (in her words) “neo-prohibitionist”.

That has been the problem:  fear drives decisions which then result in laws that take away freedom.

The SSSM has been the most reliable target of the “if it only saves one life!” and the “what about the children?” level of logic.  And that’s what has led us to the path we’re on today.

As Yoda taught us:  fear leads to hate.  Who does the Left hate now?

People who won’t take “the jab”.  Not everyone, of course.  BIPOC seem to be exempt from this hate, so it’s pretty much people who like freedom and people on the Right.  I’m surprised there isn’t a group called Mothers Against Icky Infected People Not Doing What I Say (MAIIPNDWIS).

It’s healthy to eat dried fruit.  I’m just raisin awareness.

Really, where we’re at is hysteria.  Remember how the ‘Rona crisis started – grainy videos of people walking down the street in Wuhan and collapsing, apartments being welded shut to keep the residents in, and Chinese denials that there was any issue.  It was just like the first four minutes of the average Hollywood® “plague destroys mankind” movie that has been made dozens of times since 1950.

Is the ‘Rona real?  Certainly.  It does have a body count, though I think the one being reported has been artificially inflated.

So it is real.  I’ve had it.  And it seems to kill people somewhat randomly, though in very, very small numbers as a percentage of those who catch it and are captured in the statistics (I’m not).

And the perfect way to beat the fear drum so that Single Suburban Soccer Moms forget the clown show exit engineered by Biden.  The specifics of the “vaccine” mandate don’t matter as much as the process, which never changes:

  • Suck at leading.
  • Have bad poll numbers.
  • Make use of either an existing or contrived “scary” situation.
  • Come down hard on the “scary” situation: propose something that takes away rights, if possible.  The Leftist base will be fine with it, and it will engage the SSSM crowd.

Oh, and I forgot:  always pass the buck.

This is what passes for Leftist leadership.  Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s Chief of Staff, said the quiet part that you’re not supposed to say out loud:  “Never let a crisis go to waste.”  If there wasn’t a crisis, the Left would invent one.  Drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was one.  The Keystone pipeline from Canada is another.  These are manufactured to enrage and engage people on the Left.

But the crisis had to be a specific one:  a crisis that could engage the SSSM brigade.  As the de facto swing voters, political policies are determined by how the fears of this group can be exploited.  COVID-19 is just one example.  Why do you think images of little kids in cages were trotted out to show how actually enforcing immigration law was mean?  Me, I only get upset when I see a hamburger bun in a cage – that means it was bread in captivity.

I bought a knife that can almost slice five baguettes of bread at once – but it’s only a four loaf cleaver.

Since there is nothing a SSSM loves more than safety, they’ll vote for it every time.  And it doesn’t matter if liberty is on the line – the SSSM essentially views government as her spouse and protector.

Perhaps, though, there is an alternative?

Maybe we could convince the SSSMs that, historically, governments have committed murder on the wholesale level.  Maybe we could get them up in arms about that?  Heck, I even have a name for it if they want to use it:

Mothers Engaged Against Tyrant Politicians Exploiting Everyone (MEATPEE)

Which is weird, because that’s exactly what I think David Frum probably smells like.

*Technically Frum got American citizenship in 2007 or so, but I think it should be revoked because he’s a tool

The Mrs. went to a lot of trouble to create an advertisement for the livestream on Wednesday at 9 Eastern.  Here it is:

Bikini Economics And The Money Supply

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

One of the few things that Pa Wilder left me in his will was his bed. I guess you could call it an heir mattress.

On April 5, 1933, Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order that made the owning of more than trivial amounts of gold by individuals illegal. Owning gold wouldn’t be legal again until Gerald Ford signed a bill into law that reversed that abomination of a policy.

That law went into effect on December 31, 1974, and people could once again buy gold.

In 1933, the price of gold was fixed: $20.67 per ounce. It didn’t vary, because the value of the dollar was pegged to the price of gold. The Fed© couldn’t print dollars unless they had at least 40% of that value in gold to back it up.

Pro tip: If you have a balloon elephant that won’t fit in your backseat, you can always pop the trunk.

What did the government then do?

It defaulted on the dollar. A dollar had been worth (around) 1/20th of an ounce of gold. After the government stole it all, they decided that a dollar was now only worth 1/35th of an ounce of gold. Poof. Immediately, and with the stroke of a pen, the government stole 43% of the value of every dollar in existence.

The penalty for “hoarding” gold was a big one: a $10,000 fine and up to 10 years in the slammer. I guess the government didn’t (and doesn’t) like competition when it comes to stealing.

It was the biggest heist in history – until Nixon severed the link between the gold and the dollar completely. After that, people could own gold again. There was no real reason for the government to not allow them to own it: they had now stolen the rest of the value of the dollar.

If you rob a vape store, is that a Juul® heist?

And it only took 41 years from 1933 to 1974 to convince people that was acceptable.

Since Nixon removed all gold connection, a dollar is worth (today) about 1/1800th of an ounce of gold.

But that isn’t enough to feed the beast.

The (metaphorical) printing presses have been shoveling money into the economy under the mistaken assumption that all we need is additional debt to keep the engine going. It’s like a demented congressman who doesn’t understand engines deciding to open up the hood of an F-150® to just pour gasoline on it using the dim understanding of a toddler that, “gasoline makes engines go, so if I pour enough gasoline on the engine, it will be as fast as a spaceship.”

That’s really what passes as logic in Washington, D.C. now. I keep writing about the economy in the slim hope that whatever passes for an intellect in the halls of congress will get distracted enough to spend at least a minute or two learning before returning to the concept of, “Ugh, free stuff good. Grug pay for stuff easy because all money free. Wonder why Grug’s armpit’s stink?”

I swear, AOC couldn’t spell “cat” if you spotted her the “C” and the “T”.

See, economics can be interesting!

The Fed® has gone all-in on this economic shadow puppet theater, shoving pools of money toward banks to shore up their balance sheets. Some of the people who are on the winning side of this great wave of money being sloshed around have even spent some.

Blackrock® buying up all the houses for sale? Yup. They see what’s coming. All the rich and powerful buying farmland that will never produce enough via crops or cattle to justify the price? They see what’s coming. They’re moving as quickly as possible to use this money to buy everything they can.

And people are happy. “Hey, I sold Ma’s old house after she passed away for twice what she paid for it in 2000! I made out like a bandit.”

It’s not all bad. Thankfully, the velocity of money is down.

What’s the velocity of money?

That’s how fast a dollar gets spent. Poor people move money the fastest – a dollar comes in and, poof, out it goes again. They have to spend it because they don’t have any spare money. They get paid on Friday and on Saturday it’s turned into rent payments and insurance payments and Cheetos® from Target™.

Roses are red, roses are blue, depending upon their velocity relative to you.

But the velocity of money is now slower than Joe Biden when he’s asked difficult questions, like, “What is the year, Joe? Hey, we’re talking to you. Dammit, he’s gone catatonic again. Someone get those squeaky toys he likes. And keep Kamala out of the vodka.”

Things would be far worse if the velocity of money hadn’t dropped so far that it was moving as slow as Oprah trying to get off of a couch. Since poor people slosh it around so much, that means it’s exactly where the Fed® put it: with the rich people.

So, if the money supply has gone vertical, then why hasn’t the price of everything doubled?

And most of it is sitting in pools right now. Except for the early adopters who are looking for something, anything to buy so that when the dust clears out of the coming inflation that they are richer than ever and Oprah has even more Twinkies®.

I’m not against capitalism – but this isn’t capitalism. It’s a rigged card game where your money evaporates – first slowly, and then all at once.

The engine of debt isn’t driving economic growth anymore. What the debt is doing is papering over the holes in the system so that it keeps going another week, another month, and hopefully another year.

But the downside to this is the longer a failing system is kept going by speeding it up, the more energy it stores, the bigger the crash, the bigger the collapse.

Why did Princess Diana cross the road? Inertia.

The economy has inertia, though. Even though it’s working on the most significant collapse in the history of the United States, people still believe. They take dollars because they believe. They believe the rules aren’t going to change.

They will.

Since we’ve seen this game before – we can take at least some steps to protect ourselves. I suppose it’s time to buy PEZ® before the rush . . . .