Category: COVID

Money In 2021: What’s Next?

“I picked a hell of a day to quit drinking.” – (Randy Quaid) Independence Day

When the aliens finally decided to invade Earth, they started with Poland – didn’t want to ignore local customs.

2020 has been . . . unexpected.

If anyone would have submitted it as a draft for a screenplay, Hollywood would have rejected it since it was too farfetched.  Unless Randy Quaid was in it, flying a biplane to attack aliens.  Then it would have made perfect sense.  Oh, wait, a high ranking Israeli says we’re already in negotiations with the aliens?

Never mind.

That being said, 2020 is (thankfully) nearly over.  That gives us a chance to look forward to 2021.  Keep in mind that no one said that 2021 would be better . . . we just seem to hope it will be better.  It certainly is time, however, to look forward.

I know that whatever things we think 2021 will bring, the actual events of 2021 will be crazier than that.  Regardless of who is inaugurated on January 20, 2021, what are some of the things that we can look forward to?

Here are some of my guesses:

Congress and whatever President we have will keep spending as fast as they can.  Taxes may or may not be raised, but they certainly won’t match the increased spending.  Obama nearly doubled the national debt – he took the United States from $11 trillion in hock to $20 trillion.  Right now, after four years of Trump, we’re at $27 trillion or so in money owed.  This is completely on track to take the national debt to at least $36 trillion in the next four years, which is a little more than I have the last time I checked around the couch cushions.  But I did find out where all the spoons were going.

And to think I’d blamed Pugsley.

The Presidents of the United States must all be Irish – during their terms the debts are Dublin.

But $36 trillion in debt?  That’s certainly gonna leave a mark.  Like Oprah’s dressmaker learned after Oprah demanded Spandex®, you can only distort an economy so far and so long before there are consequences, and I expect that this is near the breaking point for ours.  Thankfully, when Oprah’s dress finally went, the injuries to her crew were covered by worker’s comp.

Of course, I’ve been wrong before.  I would have thought this level of debt was poisonous.  If it was, it’s at least been a slow poison.  The system is so broken that interest rates are low, in some places less than zero.  For now.

Is that enough of a bright side?

The biggest consequences of the money printing will first show up in third world nations with relatively weak economies.  The big consequences of COVID-19 have shown up here already in the damage to the economy of the United States.

In a globally connected world, however, the consequences of United States monetary policy don’t show up in the United States first – they show up first in economies where people don’t make much money.  The “Arab Spring” that led to revolutions across North Africa and the Middle East were a direct consequence of the United States spending money like . . . well . . . Democrats in charge of the presidency and the legislature.  The Syrian Civil War is a direct consequence of the Federal Reserve’s® response to the Housing Bubble.

If you watch an Apple® store get robbed, does that make you an iWitness®?

Don’t tell me that bad lending habits don’t have consequences.  When you see riots in the streets of Cairo or Mumbai or Carcosa, you know that the big consequences from the money printing have hit the world.

Once that happens, be prepared for inflation showing up at home.

Poverty rates will greatly increase in the United States, at least in the first half of 2021.  Sure, there have been billions spent on COVID-19 relief.  Almost all of it has gone into the pockets of big business.  People on the streets?  Not so much.  In some places, businesses are locked down.  In others?  Businesses are going, but limping along due to the consequences of previous lockdowns.

I heard Bernie likes to fight poverty – every weekend he goes out and slugs homeless people.

When businesses can’t afford to pay people, poverty is the result.  The average American had only small amounts of savings – by one measure I found, nearly 70% of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, which is only enough for a minor emergency.  After that, who can say?

The economy is in the process of fundamental change, and the middle class will significantly decrease in the next year.  What has been conserved after the Coronavirus Collapse®?  Big business has done great.  Mom and Pop restaurants?  Horrible.  Modern Mayberry’s main business district got hollowed out long ago by Wal-Mart® – as did most business districts across the Midwest.

All of the small businesses are struggling – imagine owning a theater that hasn’t shown a movie in nine months.  The local theater was even broken into during lockdown – thieves stole $7,000 in merchandise – two small sodas, some Mike and Ikes® and a medium popcorn.

The transfer of economic power from small business to large has been going on for years.  The space for a small business to compete is getting smaller and smaller.  One local shop did 90%+ of its business in online sales.  Amazon® made one small change to the way that affiliates were paid and deleted the business in three months.

That business is now gone, but Jeff Bezos now has a net worth of over $200 billion – which we can all agree is an expensive net.

I got my degree in kids’ medicine online, too.  You can call me a Wikipediatrician. 

And the people going into poverty?  They won’t exactly be customers of restaurants – eating out will become (if it hasn’t already for them) an easily avoided expense.  People will actually learn to cook again.  Which doesn’t help Mom and Pop.

China will be very close to surpassing the United States as the largest economy in the world in actual GDP.  China’s economy grew last year, while the United States contracted.  Even though China has a lot more people, this still translates into political power on the world stage.  Everyone has been predicting that China will collapse for, oh, 25 years.  Instead?  China has grown relentlessly.  Sure, there are structural weaknesses, but it’s hard to bet against that kind of economic inertia.

Why didn’t Chinese factories close during the pandemic?  Kids don’t catch COVID-19.

How does this impact the average person who isn’t Chinese?

Well the good news is that if you like dollars, they’ll still be useful.  But as other countries, like China, grow relatively stronger, the dollar grows relatively less powerful.  Especially if the United States mains determined to keep printing them as fast as it can.

I’ll toss it over to you, now.  Outside of Randy Quaid in destroying the alien mothership, what do you expect to see in 2021?

The United States And The Road From Abundance To Bondage

“Is life in bondage better than death?” – The Ten Commandments

I heard Leftists can’t find tasty mushrooms:  someone said they lost their Morel compass.

Henning W. Prentis, Jr., presented a speech at the mid-year graduation of the University of Pennsylvania in 1943.  Mr. Prentis was the President of the Armstrong Cork Company.  Now, you might think that a cork company would only be of interest to the Swiss Army, but Armstrong was a different breed:  during World War II Mr. Prentis had Armstrong Cork making .50 caliber ammo, tips for warplane wings, sound insulation for submarines, and camouflage.

If your wife can fix a car, fix dinner, and then set a broken bone?  You have a Swiss Army Wife.

Eventually, several divisions were spun off, and it’s certain that you’ve walked on Armstrong Flooring and sat on furniture that was made by yet another Armstrong subsidiary underneath ceiling grids and ceiling tiles that were made by yet another Armstrong company.  All of this was started in a little Pennsylvania cork company way before Pennsylvania’s voting fraud made Kim Jong-un consider moving to Philadelphia.

Anyway, Mr. Prentis seemed to have an awful lot to say – his commencement speech clocked in at 4,953 words.  At 125 spoken words a minute, that’s nearly 40 minutes of straight talking, with zero memes or bikini graphs – looks like he didn’t know how to put a cork in it.  And all of those speeches were before the long lines of diplomas.

Graduation must have taken six days back then.  If you want to read the whole address, it’s here (LINK).

Mr. Henning Prentis’ essay has some very relevant content to today – I’ve posted just a few bits of it below.  I’ve fixed some punctuation, but the words are still Henning’s.  But I still haven’t found the answer to the most important question:  Who the heck names their kid Henning?

The historical cycle seems to be: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more.

At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies. Under such circumstances, the competent citizen is certainly not a fool if he insists upon using the compass of history when forced to sail uncharted seas.

Usually, so-called new remedies are not new at all. Compulsory planned economy, for example, was tried by the Chinese some three millenniums ago, and by the Romans in the early centuries of the Christian era. It was applied in Germany, Italy and Russia long before the present war broke out.

Yet, it is being seriously advocated today as a solution of our economic problems in the United States. Its proponents confidently assert that government can successfully plan and control all major business activity in the nation, and still not interfere with our political freedom and our hard-won civil and religious liberties. The lessons of history all point in exactly the reverse direction.

Prentis’ quote can, thankfully, be summed up in a single chart that won’t take you 40 minutes to read:

Let’s not be like Russia circa 1917, okay? (Source for base: Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA-4.0, J4lambert)

In the United States, we were (mostly) blessed by abundance for decades at a time.  The Great Depression wasn’t the normal condition for the United States – it was an aberration of a fairly prosperous place.  But the Great Depression really was bad – Bob The Builder® was just called Bob then.

Inertia has a quality all of its own, but luck always helps.  After World War II, Europe was mostly devastated by the war.  Half of a decade of bombs and artillery shells and tanks and armies had killed millions, but also destroyed a majority of European and Asian governments plus much of the productive infrastructure.

America, meanwhile, had been untouched.  It had the oil, the steel mills, the agriculture, and the workforce.  It created consumer goods for itself and products for the world.  There was little competition.

Last time I bought land it was in Egypt.  Turns out I fell for a Pyramid scheme.

Oh, sure you could buy the Soviet version of Chevy Camaro® called the Lada Latitude©.  The Latitude™ was modeled on the Soviet T-34 Tank (500 horsepower diesel engine) that went zero to 32 mph in 45 seconds, and sported a stunning 1.17 miles per gallon in the base model.   It was also available with optional dual jet engines from a MiG-21.  Sadly those engines didn’t allow the tank to move, but did allow the wolf to blow down that pesky brick house, along with those capitalist swine.

There are many things you can call Soviet engineering.  Subtle is not one of them.

But post World War II gave the United States, and then, gradually the world, abundance, leading to selfishness.  Selfishness was probably best showcased in the 1970s and 1980s.  Tom Wolfe even titled the 1970s “The Me Decade.”  The 1980s followed suit – the pursuit of wealth was seen by many as the goal.  Morality?  The market (and leisure suits) were the definition of morality.

The 1980s bled into complacency, and finally into apathy.  The Grunge movement was a reaction to materialism.  What did it all mean?  What does any of this matter?  Pure apathy, so let’s not bathe and get a bunch of piercings and tattoos.

Now we are in a nation where citizens aren’t seeking freedom – they’re actively seeking dependence on the government – free money (guaranteed basic income), free healthcare (Medicare for all), and all manner of other support systems.  To quote one Mr. Harvard McClain (1950s?):  “If your government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away from you everything you have.”

Sure, I want everything for nothing from the State, but in every single time that’s been tried in human society, it always ends the same way – with the people becoming the enemy of the State.

And that’s how you get to Mr. Prentis’ last stage: bondage.

For a guy dealing with cork, Mr. Prentis has some pretty good vision.

Oh, and I don’t have to yell to get The Mrs. to come downstairs – she can hear a cork pop all the way across the house . . . .

Black Friday 2021

“Who buys an umbrella anyway? You can get them for free at the coffee shop in those metal cans.” – Seinfeld

I never understood why people got attacked by sharks.  Can’t they hear the music?

Black Friday is easy to make fun of, but I won’t (so much) this year.  As other people go nuts over shopping, I get to sleep in on a Friday morning and not go shopping.  It’s a win-win:  other people get to do what they want to do, and I don’t have to join them.

I can see the appeal – the idea of, perhaps, getting a deep discount on something they wanted to buy anyway is attractive.  And economizing by not wasting money is a very good thing, especially if you’re able to afford something that you normally couldn’t buy.  By not participating, though, I save 100% in every store.

I have no idea how well the sales figures will be on Black Friday, 2020.  I expect that the economy is significantly weaker than people imagine.  Multiple shutdowns for Coronavirus seem to have taken a major toll on the economy, so I’m not sure how many people are going to want to spend extra for new cooking gadgets.   I know that there’s a mask mandate in most places, but please be aware:  around here they expect you to wear pants, too.

If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and flies like a duck, it’s probably a government surveillance drone.

Many retailers, including our local shopping choice, Wal-Mart®, were closed on Thanksgiving.

As we all know – if there’s a buck in it, stores will stay open.  That is, after all, why they’re in business.  Someone did the math and figured out that it wouldn’t make sense to be open on Thanksgiving this year. That should tell you a lot about where the economy is.

The real economy.

The idea that the Dow-Jones® Industrial Average (DJIA) just hit a record 30,000 should also tell you something – the economy has split.  FaceBook® is doing so well that they’re still hiring Congressmen.  As several astute readers here have noted – the DJIA seems to be entirely disconnected from the reality of the actual economy most people have to work in, even though once upon a time there really was a connection.

But there is a connection between Black Friday and Christmas.  Several people I know complete all of their Christmas shopping either on Black Friday or Cyber Monday.  Businesses count on this behavior to make a profit for the year, although big businesses (Amazon®, Wal-Mart©, etc.) have already had a great year.

If you used your COVID stimulus check to buy baby chickens, did you get your money for nothing and your chicks for free?

The Mrs. and I no longer get very excited about Christmas presents – we’re fortunate that we have most of our needs met and the best gifts are the small ones that require some thought, like when The Mrs. bought me that book on anti-gravity.  I just couldn’t put it down!

The Boy seems generally content, and when I ask him what he wants, the answer is generally, “I’ll think about it.”  Pugsley still has a list.

Well, not a list.  A dozen lists.  He emailed me the first one.  Of course, knowing him, I entirely ignored the list.  Never even opened it.

Why?

Because there was a new and entirely different list the next day.  And a new one the day after that.  Finally, he seemed settled.

I named my iPad® Titanic, so when it was updating it said, “Titanic is syncing.”

“I want an iPad®.”

“Why don’t you take my old one?  I never use it.  Enjoy.”  It had originally been given to me by a Chinese friend – I do love homemade presents.

“Wait, what?”  After complaining that it was the 2015 model, he finally accepted that making do with an old iPad® and something else for Christmas was actually a pretty good deal.  Honestly, I think he’ll remember that more than getting a new iPad™.

Like I said, our family is in a good place, but we know that not everyone is.  I expect that there will be a lot less spent on gifts this Christmas.  That’s not necessarily a bad thing.  The best parts of healthy relationships aren’t material.  Long after a gift has worn out or been lost, the benefits of a real relationship remain.

If Schrödinger’s cat went on a crime spree, would he be wanted dead and alive?

I expect that the recession is far from over.  I also think that we’ve moved from a period of relative plenty into something . . . new.

New doesn’t mean bad.  New means different.

And if that meant that Black Friday stopped being a materialist holiday?

We might all be better off.

Fight Club: A Dystopia We Can Learn From?

“Fight for us.  And regain your honor.” – The Lord of the Rings:  The Return of the King

What’s a robot’s favorite Mexican food?  Silicon carne.

When I was a kid growing up, I read 1984 by George Orwell.  This was the grim version, as opposed to the much funnier version by Mel Brooks.  It had a profound effect on my worldview, as books often do when you read them in 7th grade.  In it, a globalist group of communists fought each other continuously, while subjugating the entirety of the human race.  Hmmm, wait, that sounds familiar?

1984 was a bleak book.  I’m not sure who I talked about it with, outside of writing the chicken scrawl of a report in schoolboy block letters and handing it to my really hot 7th grade English teacher.  Since my reading scores were, well, advanced, she just let me read what I wanted to read while the rest of the class all read the same book.  It felt nice being a special pretty pony.

I followed 1984 with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.  I think my teacher suggested it.  Whereas 1984 was a dystopia built on the subjugation of a boot eternally stomping on a human face, Brave New World was a dystopia built on frivolity.

I fell into a vat of chemicals once.  My quick reaction nearly killed me.

Frivolity was where the masses were, more or less, endlessly drugged and entertained and so that their opinions never had a chance to develop, or impaired at birth so they could never think.  The tyranny in Brave New World was the tyranny of a vapid public who never thought beyond the most recent mindless and sexual encounter (strongly encouraged by the state) and the latest movie.

Oh, wait, that sounds familiar too.

Yet another dystopia is the movie (and book) Fight Club.  Fight Club is a 1999 movie based on a 1996 novel that (mostly) tracks the movie.  It is a creation of the 1990s, but, to quote the most excellent YouTube® movie reviewer, The Critical Drinker (LINK, some PG-13 language), it is very relevant to today’s world.  If you haven’t watched this 21-year-old movie and are interested, I suggest you watch The Critical Drinker’s review afterward – he includes spoilers.  I’ll warn you – the R rating was earned, and there are some very dark moments to the movie.

There won’t be any spoilers here – what I have to say doesn’t require me to spoil the film.

Tyler Durden told me handcrafted soap is the best.  No lye.

To really get Fight Club?  You have to watch it at least twice.  It is a thoughtful movie.  Does it have detractors on the Right?  Sure.  It’s R-rated.  Some have called it nihilistic (I disagree) and there are other complaints which I won’t go into here.  Regardless, I won’t beat myself up for going against the grain of other folks who didn’t like the movie.

Very few movies are perfect, but this one is very, very good.

I first watched Fight Club in 2012 or so.  It made over $100 million at the box office, so at least someone talked about Fight Club.  When I finally watched it (which was no fewer than three basement furniture re-arrangements ago) I was stunned.  How stunned?  It’s the only movie that has its own tag on this blog.

Vegan Club?  Everyone talks about Vegan Club.

The constant, pervasive theme of this movie is that the systems of globalism have created boxes for men that make them less than men.  Here’s Tyler Durden (one of the movie characters):

“We’re consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don’t concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy’s name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra.”

This is a simple translation.  A large proportion of the citizens of the United States define themselves by:

  • How much and what kind of furniture do they have?
  • How nice is their apartment?
  • How well can they write reports in a soul-killing job where large corporations seek to avoid liability in a cold, systematic way?  Does that kill their soul?
  • How can they avoid deviating from the norm to wear the right tie to the meeting?

These things are death to the soul.  As the character Tyler Durden explains:

“You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your (deleted by J.W.) khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

I saw a robbery in an Apple® store once.  I was an iWitness©.

Marcus Aurelius and Seneca nod in approval.  They’d follow up:  you are your virtue.

And you, dear reader, are not your money or your clothes.  In many ways we are conditioned by society to believe that those are the things that define us.  We are not.  And if you believe that, you’re not alone.  Tyler describes the twilight of the soul brought about by a life dedicated to consumerism and status.  Live for the material world, and you’ll be swallowed by the material world.  You can never achieve enough, because someone always has more, does something better.

With that philosophy?  Money becomes the god that men seek:

“Damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy (stuff) we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War is a spiritual war.  Our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.”

I saw a meme (didn’t save it, don’t have the author but I’d love to credit them) that I (sort of) reproduce below:

Michigan is going to ban car sales based on popular Internet videos – the governor wants to stop car-owner-virus.

This meme gets me.  It’s the essence of Fight Club.  We’re a species that is, more or less, programmed to achieve.  For who?  For our group.  It’s why the NFL® is popular today.  Okay, that’s why the NFL™ was popular until they showed us that we’re really not part of their group at all.

We run races for a reason.  We play basketball.  We wrestle.  We have swim races.  Well, you guys have swim races.  I was in a 100-yard swim race in sixth grade and placed 11 out of 12.  I wasn’t dead last because some poor kid got the cramps.  My 11th place finish wasn’t close.  I think they ended up timing me with a calendar and an abacus.

Regardless, we compete.

Why?

It’s wired into us.  Competition partially defines us.  And the stakes have to be real.  There is, of course, a religious aspect as well.  A man has to serve a higher power.  It’s not just competing for today.  There is a bigger game, and there are bigger stakes.  That’s what makes it worth playing the game.  Life is more than consumption and procreation.

Q:  Why did the Libertarian cross the road?  A:  TAXATION IS THEFT!!!  

But men who can run a race fairly and lose with grace are men.  They don’t have to like losing – no man does.  But loss is a forge that makes us stronger, gives us incentives.  Thomas Sowell (I think?) once said that if he were designing a car for safety, he’d put a Bowie knife pointed at the driver in the center of the steering wheel, not an airbag.

Incentives matter.

Now?  We insulate children from the Great Game.  Lose?  That’s okay, you tried.

No, it’s really not.  I lost the swim meet because I suck at swimming and am only slightly better than a car at swimming.  Slightly.

Did I cry?  No.

Antifa protestors – never have to take time off from work.

Did I focus my energy on something where I could be as good as nearly anyone in the state?

Yes.

Swimming was pointless.  Telling me that it was okay was worse than pointless.  It was a lie.

Back to Tyler:

JACK, in voiceover:  On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.

CLERK:  Please… don’t…

TYLER DURDEN: Give me your wallet.

Tyler pulls out the driver’s license.

TYLER:  Raymond K. Hessel. 1320 SE Benning, apartment A.  A small, cramped basement apartment.

RAYMOND:  How’d you know?

TYLER:  They give basement apartments letters instead of numbers.  Raymond, you’re going to die.  Is this a picture of Mom and Dad?

RAYMOND:  Yes.

TYLER:  Your mom and dad will have to call kindly doctor so-and-so to dig up your dental records, because there won’t be much left of your face.

RAYMOND:  Please, God, no!                            

JACK: Tyler…

TYLER:  An expired community college student ID card.  What did you used to study, Raymond K. Hessel?

RAYMOND:  S-S-Stuff.

TYLER:  “Stuff.”  Were the mid-terms hard?  I asked you what you studied.

JACK:  Tell him!

RAYMOND:  Biology, mostly.

TYLER:  Why?

RAYMOND:  I… I don’t know…

TYLER:  What did you want to be, Raymond K. Hessel?

Tyler cocks the .357 magnum Colt© Python™ pointed at Raymond’s head.

TYLER:  The question, Raymond, was “what did you want to be?”

JACK:  Answer him!

RAYMOND:  A veterinarian!

TYLER:  Animals.

RAYMOND:  Yeah … animals and s-s-s —

TYLER:  Stuff.  That means you have to get more schooling.

RAYMOND:  Too much school.

TYLER:  Would you rather be dead?

RAYMOND:  No, please, no, God, no!

Tyler uncocks the gun, lowers it.

TYLER:  I’m keeping your license.  I know where you live.  I’m going to check on you.  If you aren’t back in school and on your way to being a veterinarian in six weeks, you will be dead.  Get the hell out of here.

JACK:  I feel sick.

TYLER:  Imagine how he feels.

Tyler brings the gun to his own head, pulls the trigger — click.  It’s empty.

JACK:  I don’t care, that was horrible.

TYLER:  Tomorrow will be the most beautiful day of Raymond K. Hessell’s life.  His breakfast will taste better than any meal he has ever eaten.

How many people would love to have Tyler come into their lives and make them live their dreams?  How many people struggle through life, because they can’t take the next step?

You’re not too old.  If you’re breathing, you can make a mark on this world.  You’re not too poor.

My limiting factor is my imagination.  I realize that – it’s probably yours as well.

Regardless of the dystopias of 1984 and Brave New World, Fight Club shows a dystopia where we can win.  How do we win?

By understanding that our lives are in a precarious balance, just like Raymond K. Hessell.  And the first step to living life?  It’s letting go.  Achieving.

I learned to swim when I was very young.  My dad taught me.  I thought I’d never get out of that bag. 

And if you lose at swimming?  Try again.  Or try a new game.

At the end of Fight Club, men prove themselves to be stronger and larger than the dehumanizing systems that they serve.  It’s your choice.  How will your breakfast taste tomorrow?

Also:

Avoid the clam chowder.

 

 

Unrelated:

Steve is a blogger who is a FOW (Friend of Wilder).  Unlike me, he’s talented.  Because of the idiots who run his state, you’re lucky he has time to create something like this for you.  Do it.  No, I don’t get paid.  Steve does.  He’s Our Guy.

Do it.  Here’s the LINK.  There is just enough time for Christmas.

The Archbishop, Trump, And The Coming Great Reset

“Jahr null. Year zero. An experiment. A reset. A new America.” – The Man in the High Castle

I hear that Noah kept his bees in the Ark hives.

I first became aware of “The Great Reset” last week.  There are quite a few YouTube® videos about it, but one of the more unusual mentions was in a letter to President Trump from a retired Catholic clergyman.  This particular clergyman is Archbishop Carlo Viganò.  I don’t know what the difference is between an Archbishop and a Bishop, but I suspect it has to do with a better quality of footwear.

Anyway, Archbishop Viganò wrote the following in the letter:

A global plan called the Great Reset is underway. Its architect is a global élite that wants to subdue all of humanity, imposing coercive measures with which to drastically limit individual freedoms and those of entire populations. In several nations this plan has already been approved and financed; in others it is still in an early stage. Behind the world leaders who are the accomplices and executors of this infernal project, there are unscrupulous characters who finance the World Economic Forum and Event 201, promoting their agenda.

The purpose of the Great Reset is the imposition of a health dictatorship aiming at the imposition of liberticidal measures, hidden behind tempting promises of ensuring a universal income and cancelling individual debt. The price of these concessions from the International Monetary Fund will be the renunciation of private property and adherence to a program of vaccination against Covid-19 and Covid-21 promoted by Bill Gates with the collaboration of the main pharmaceutical groups. Beyond the enormous economic interests that motivate the promoters of the Great Reset, the imposition of the vaccination will be accompanied by the requirement of a health passport and a digital ID, with the consequent contact tracing of the population of the entire world. Those who do not accept these measures will be confined in detention camps or placed under house arrest, and all their assets will be confiscated.

You can read the whole letter here (LINK).

Okay, the story the Archbishop was sharing seemed like an Infowars® segment, but with less tinfoil.  What was up?

I hear that Alex Jones’ wife left him because she said he was paranoid.  Alex was okay with that – he said he’d rather live alone than live with a government clone.

Well, it is stuff that’s directly out of an Infowars™ segment:  as I dug into the Archbishop’s clues, it was exactly correct.  The World Economic Forum©, which runs that annual Davos conference in Switzerland where 3,000 of the elite of the business world, academia, Hollywood, and the press get together to discuss how awesome they are for sacrificing themselves by flying their private  jets to visit a Swiss resort.

Alex Jones regularly says they’re up to no good when they meet at Davos.  Not everything is a conspiracy:  I’m certain that Alcoa® and Planters™ will never be allowed to merge, since everyone is afraid of the AlumaNutty.

I will say this about Switzerland – their flag is a big plus.

I know the Leftists complain about the 1%, but this is the 0.00004%.  The amazing thing?  The 0.00004% agree nearly entirely with Antifa’s® agenda.  Here’s what the Great Reset entails, as showcased in articles on the World Economic Forum©’s own website (LINK):

  • “We must build entirely new foundations for our economic and social systems.” The Davos folks describing freedom:  “Be free.  No!  No, not like that.”
  • “In fact, one silver lining of the pandemic is that it has shown how quickly we can make radical changes to our lifestyles.” I’d like to point out that some things didn’t change at all:  WNBA games have always been empty.
  • “. . . will require stronger and more effective governments . . . .” I’m against both of those things.  If we have strong government, I really hope it’s Three Stooges®-level incompetent.
  • “ . . . governments should implement long-overdue reforms that promote more equitable outcomes.” Remember – equality is we all have the same chance.  Equitable means we all get the same outcome.  Except, of course, for the 0.00004%.

Not mine.  Why doesn’t everyone just buy a ticket?

There are three main points that the World Economic Forum© is currently selling as the Great Reset:

  • International coordination on almost everything is the first component. If you thought we had too much globalization already?  Get ready for armies of international bureaucrats to write legislation and regulation that no one is accountable for.
  • “The second component of a Great Reset agenda would ensure that investments advance shared goals, such as equality and sustainability.” Who shares these goals?  Well, at least the 0.00004% do, and they know best, right?  Especially when they spend your money.
  • Finally, they want to “harness the innovations of the Fourth Industrial Revolution to support the public good, especially by addressing health and social challenges.” The Fourth Industrial Revolution is Davos-speak for the post-Internet acceleration in information technology and the way that it interacts with the physical world.

But the World Economic Forum dives deeper.  One of the more chilling aspects is that they no longer want individuals to own, well, anything.  You can read the article here (LINK), right off of the World Economic Forum’s© website.  I did a little digging, and found the author was a member of Danish parliament, but prior to that?  She had spent 8 years getting a Masters in theology, became a part-time theology teacher, and then was in parliament.  Sound like a blonde version of AOC?

I you can’t tell socialists jokes – not everyone will get it.  Photo by Johannes Jansson/norden.org, CC BY 2.5 dk

Everything that Archbishop Viganò suggests is an aim of the Great Reset is plainly on the World Economic Forum© website, with the exception for the Archbishop’s claim that that people would be put into camps if they didn’t comply by being vaccinated and chipped.  That, in my mind, makes sense.  It’s not normally something that a country advertises, “Hey come for the free stuff, stay for the concentration camps.”  Or, “Virginia, it’s for Lovers of Barbed Wire.”

I hear the socialist student got top Marx in school.

My review of the Great Reset is simple:

It’s the same hokum that the Left has been selling since before the French Revolution.  The Left promises they will make people into new men and they will share the prosperity with everyone.  But those in control will then ask the question – how many people do we need, really?  The answer is a simple one, and it’s always the same:  fewer than we have now.

In reality, the 0.00004% never even start to share.  The 0.00004% will make life easy and free.  All you have to give up?  All of your freedom.  Hmm, I can get the Devil to grant my wish in exchange for my soul, and I don’t even have to go down to the Crossroads?

Which is why an Archbishop might write a letter in the first place . . . .

2020: More Strange To Come

“So the other shoe drops, and crushes us all.” – The Boys

Bad news – 2022 is going to be the same as 2020, because it’s 2020, too.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the biggest surprises, the biggest events of 2020 haven’t yet happened.  I’m kidding, of course.  I love being the bearer of bad news.

I’ll fully admit that 2020 has been the most crisis-filled year of the United States, at least as long as I have been living.  Each month a new, explosive event.

And, it’s still 41 shopping days until the election.

In August and September the press has been focused on the presidential race.  For the last month, there has been a “major” story every week attacking the President.  By my reckoning, at this point Trump hates babies, troops, and burns thousands of gallons of diesel fuel in an open pit behind the White House to increase Global Warming as fast as he can.

You’d think that she’d be in favor of Global Warming, given how much she hates ICE.

On the Biden side, his painfully obvious quickly progressing dementia has been explained as . . . well, it’s just been ignored.  Biden’s primary advantage to the Left is that he’s not Trump.  His other advantage is, well, you know.  You know the thing.

They fail to talk about his biggest positive, his mind.  Biden’s mind is as sharp as my computer’s browser when I have 23 tabs open:  21 tabs are frozen, and I have no idea where the music is coming from.

In October I’m expecting some new mainstream news media attack against Trump every day.  Here are a few from my top 10 attacks that I expect Trump will see:

  • Sources say Trump to personally use Social Security checks stolen from elderly widows to buy new golf clubs for smashing bald eagle eggs while humming the Soviet anthem.
  • Rumors indicate that Trump to give paper cuts to caged illegal immigrant orphans, pour lemon juice in wounds, sell video to YouTube®.
  • Washington Post® reports that Trump “uses stairs” to taunt disabled veterans.
  • New York Times™ exclusive that Trump demands his taco salad be made from freshly ground kitten.

I tried to use “snowflake” as a password, but after I typed it a second time, my computer told me, “Sorry, your passwords are not alike.”

  • Trump criticized for debate performance – “Why should he talk when Joe is interrupting him?”
  • News that people of Botswana are upset and no longer think the United States is leader of the free world because of Trump’s insistence of turning into a werewolf and killing the cattle during droughts.
  • California Governor Gavin Newsome accuses President Trump of being able to control the weather and intentionally starting the fires on the West Coast using only his mind, later admits it was really Drew Barrymore.
  • Exclusive to MSNBC® – “Trump is the reincarnation of that dude who shot that Austrian royal guy with the big mustache, and this started World War I, so all of that is on him.”
  • Outrage builds as Trump receives three scoops of ice cream at dinner, rather than the two given to other guests. Nancy Pelosi incensed, because Trumps scoops looked bigger, as well.
  • Russians are interfering in the election, according to CNN©, by blocking the Chinese working to get Biden elected.

In any other year, I’d say that the election would be over by Election Day or the day after, and we could move forward.  It won’t be.  Why?

It’s 2020.

What’s the difference between the Green New Deal and a dumpster fire?  A dumpster fire produces affordable light and heat.

There will be mail in ballots “found” a week or more later in just the right numbers to offset leads in crucial states.  A Federal court will rule that, “ballots are valid only if they favor Biden, because his name is first in the alphabet.”

The very best case is that the election nonsense is finished a week later.  But has anything about 2020 been best case?  The good thing is that it should be cold enough to discourage riots in most places.

I think that people are hoping that once 2020 is over, that 2021 will be a magical year of rebirth.  In reality, the tension has been building for four years.  In 2020 we built outrageous amounts of debt.  We also lost tens of thousands of businesses.

And when the pizza place goes bankrupt, you know they’re out of dough.

In terms of being Antifragile® (Fragility, Resilience, or Antifragility) we are spending all of the cash we can, which makes us vulnerable.  This is at the same time that businesses all across the country are finally giving up and closing up for good.   This combination of spending all the cash while losing the ability to have a productive economy reinforces into a downward spiral.  I’m expecting the President elected in 2028 to use the slogan, “Screw it, we’ll spend all the tax money on lottery tickets.”

Echoes and ripples from 2020 will nearly certainly continue into 2026 – and that’s if things go well.

The consequences of this are more than academic.  In my current job, I get a few emails from salesmen a week.  I ignore most of them.  Today?  I got three calls in an hour to ignore.

Businesses are now desperate.  You can keep doors open for a while without revenue, but when the business slows down and there is too much capacity, the only solution is that the most vulnerable business collapses.  Heck, my gym went bankrupt, which allowed me to walk by and say, “Well, who’s the quitter now?”

Repeat those business losses until you reach stability.  The downside of this process is that is a negative spiral.  Investing, as I’ve tried to convey, will be chaotic – and whoever wins the presidency may very well regret it.  It’s bad enough that even governmental flows of money at the state level aren’t certain.

I hear that the pine tree is the most common California tree, followed by the Ash.

Take California.  Please.

California is taking the genius move to tax the rich so that their rate (combined with the Federal rate) might be as high as 54%.  California forgets that rich people aren’t potted plants.  The result?  The rich will move to places that don’t treat them like a rabid poodle treats a pork chop or Rosie O’Donnell treats a chocolate bar.

So, if California owes you money?  You might be in trouble.

We’re in strange times.  They haven’t peaked yet.

And I enjoyed letting you know.

Magic and Money: More Related Than You Think

“It was the most amazing magic trick I’ve ever seen.” – The Prestige

Mimes aren’t magicians, they just have obstacle illusions.

This is a post about finance.  It’s an awesome one, so bear with me.

I’ve always been a bit of a ham.  When I was in third grade, I got up and did impressions and sang a song.  This was in front of the entire school on talent night, Kindergarten through Senior, and all their parents.  My impressions were horrible.  My singing was worse.

The next year, I got to play a drunken uncle in our fourth grade play.  I’m not making that up.  I had a flask and everything, and the teacher pinned the neck tie of my costume up over my shoulder, since drunks apparently can’t wear a tie properly.  However, you can bet that I delivered my lines with the best drunken slur a fourth grader can muster.

It was another time and place, where we could make jokes with the idea of being funny.  If they did a play like that today, I’m sure that the school district would be shut down, burned, and exorcised from Twitter™ and Facebook®.  I mean, the parents in the play were a man and a woman played . . . by a boy and a girl.  And they were married. And they didn’t have tattoos.

Sacrilege!

The floor collapsed during the fourth grade play.  I guess I was going through a stage.

As I’ve mentioned before, I lived pretty far out on Wilder Mountain.  The nearest kid to my house lived nine miles away.  The nearest McDonalds™ at that time was a two hour car trip.  So, a trip to a magic store was entirely out of the question.  But then came college.

Where I was still a ham.

In college, I was living near Capitol City, and they did have a magic store.  So, I bought three magic tricks.  All three were fun, because they were professional grade, and if you had the mechanical dexterity to open a beer can, you could do very professional, close up magic.

One was a coin trick.

COVID shut down the mint?  It makes no cents.

It’s still my favorite trick.  I haven’t done it in years, but it’s fun to do.  First, I’d show the person I’m doing the trick with (we’ll call them “Mark”) two coins – a United States $0.50 coin, and a Mexican 50 centavo coin.  Then, I put the coins into their right hand.  By the time the coins are in their hands, it’s not a half dollar and a 50 centavo piece – it’s now a half dollar and a United States $0.25.

I’d then ask Mark to put one coin in each hand, while his hands were behind his back, so I can’t see them.  Once each hand has a coin in it, I ask them to hold their hands straight out in front of them.  I’d then guess where the $0.50 piece was.

That wasn’t the trick.

Then, regardless of if my guess was correct, I’d bet them something (say, a Coke® or a beer – remember I was in college) that they couldn’t show me the 50 centavo piece.

They’d smile, and then open their hand, and then show me the quarter and look amazed that it wasn’t the 50 centavo piece.

Except the first few times, it didn’t work.  At all.  It’s not that I messed up the trick, one hand had $0.50 in it, and one hand had a quarter.  But the first few times I did the trick, the Mark immediately recognized that it wasn’t the 50 centavo, and knew it was a quarter.

Well, that sucks.

You have no idea how long this meme took.

But then I thought back – at the magic store where I’d bought the trick, the salesman performing the trick had said, “notice how much smaller the 50 centavo piece is than the half dollar.”  I tried that the next time I did the trick.

Perfect.

Mark, merely by my suggestion, had developed the mental image that the 50 centavo piece was small.  Every time I’ve done the trick using that phrase, and I mean every single time, ever, it worked like a charm.  Without saying “notice how much smaller . . .”?  Over half the time the person could tell that the second coin was a quarter.

The next refinement was the reveal.  Remember when I told the Mark to hold his hands out front, and I’d guess which hand had the fifty cent piece in it?  Amazingly, 90% of people put the half dollar into the same hand.  Which hand?  I’m not giving up all of my secrets.

I would, on purpose, guess the wrong hand after telling Mark not to show me the coins, right or wrong.

They’d smile and tell me I was wrong.  They felt awesome – they’d beaten the magician.  Obviously, the trick was going wrong.

All part of the plan.

The next thing I said was, “I bet you a beer Coke™ that you can’t show me the 50 centavo piece,” and then they opened their hand to see an ordinary quarter?  After seeing the quarter, I’d ask Mark to open the other hand where they’d see a normal fifty cent piece.  They were always amazed when I did it right, but in order for the trick to work, I had to say the right things.

The trick paid for itself in, um, beverages and things.  And the Mark didn’t mind – Mark was amused, and I got paid a small fee for that amusement.

But the things that sold the trick wasn’t the mechanics and metal, it was what I was saying, and how I was saying it, and, even being intentionally wrong was part of the final sale.  You can buy this trick yourself, for about $12 – search “Scotch and Soda Trick” on Amazon.

You’re welcome.

But what does this have to do with money?

A lot, actually.

His version of Purple Rain was awful.

Number One – People who sell stuff know how to sell.  Like my magic trick, salesmen do trial and error to learn what works.  If you buy a car every five years from a dealer, and they have contact with 30 customers a week, who has the upper hand?

If you’re listening to a politician who’s spent his entire life just getting elected, what likelihood to you have of understanding their real character and values?  They probably don’t remember them themselves.  If you’re buying a car, a house, or even a burger at McDonalds, they know the game.  There’s a reason that every well-trained McDonalds© employee asks, “Do you want fries with that?”

They know the game.  McDonalds® knows that a potato costs them pennies, but a basket of fries can go for $3.  Profits may be fleeting, but the pant size increase is forever.

One of the tricks that Bernie Madoff used with his customers was to dress very frugally.  Despite the fact that he was stealing billions ($20 billion by the best estimate I found), he knew the game better than his Marks.  He also was selective with clients – he wouldn’t accept just anyone.  No, you had to apply and be approved.  You had to know someone.

Number Two – Knowing the trick is everything.  When I did the coin trick, only I knew what was coming.  It was all scripted, and I knew exactly what the outcome was going to be.  When I asked people to let me guess which hand the coin was in, they thought that was the trick.  No, the trick was that there was no fifty centavo piece.  But because I created the structure, I knew where the trick was.

That’s a tremendous advantage.  I can use that knowledge to create a scenario where I can manipulate emotions to get the reactions and responses I want.  Why?  I control the conditions.  I control the reveal.

What sorts of tricks are out in the world?

  • “No money down.”
  • “I never got your text.”
  • “Yes, I’ll hold your beer, there’s no way this could go wrong.”
  • “No interest for the first six months.”
  • “Housing prices always go up.”
  • “CNN – The Most Trusted Name in News.”

Number Three – Things are rarely as they seem.  Mark saw only what I wanted him to see during the trick, and I carefully made sure by closing his hand around the coins after I put them there.  Then I told him to not let me see when he put the coins in each hand.  Why?  Because I didn’t want him to see what was really going on.

One of the biggest illusions that most people don’t recognize is that our money is entirely made up.  The $ and € and ¥ and £ only have meaning because we give them meaning.  The United States dollar has no backing other than . . . the promise to trade it for a dollar.  That’s it.  And people keep playing the game even though the Federal Reserve™ tells them the dollar will be worth less every year.  On purpose.

Oh, and the Federal Reserve©?  It’s not Federal, and it doesn’t have a Reserve.  Discuss.

Generally, people didn’t believe that the government had a super-secret plan to eavesdrop on all electronic communications from anyone.  Then Edward Snowden showed . . . they have a plan to monitor all electronic communications, everywhere.  When Snowden joined Twitter® he soon had more followers than the National Security Agency.  That’s okay, the NSA follows everyone.

I knew there was a reason my computer has a sticker that says “Intel Inside.”

Number Four – It’s super easy to suggest things to people.  This shocked me.  One time Scott Adams mentioned that in a line at a copier, if you have to make a copy, all you have to do is have a reason to jump the line.  He suggested, “Hey, can I cut in front of you?  I have to make a copy.”  Note that making a copy is exactly what everyone else was doing, but the request, coupled with a reason, seemed to work.  No matter how stupid the reason.

  • Yes, there’s a reason you want ice cream.
  • What, you thought that was impartial?
  • “The Arctic will be ice free by 2013,” – Al Gore.  Hmm.  Trust me.  Next time it really will be.
  • Asking them to do you a small favor. Oddly, this creates a pattern where people are much more likely to do a big favor for you later.  Oh, while you’re at it, hit the subscribe button.  Don’t cost nothin’.
  • Never trust a flatterer.  I had a boss that, one month after he joined the company, wrote a performance review that would have made me think that I needed to apply for the job of Messiah.  Except in my case it made me never trust him.  I was right.
  • Peer Pressure. People like to do what other people consider acceptable, since being socially acceptable is important.  If everyone is doing it, well, I should, too.  I went against the grain, and now Wal-Mart® insists that I wear pants from now on.

Number Five – The person proposing the bet may not have your best interest at heart.  In the example above, I ended up getting a few beverages.  The person involved got an equal exchange.  No one was ever mad – if they had been, I’d have told them to ignore the bet.

But.

I used the name “Mark” for a reason.  It’s what conmen (ever notice that the Politically Correct Police don’t object to that one?) call the object of their scam.  I’ve even been at carnivals where a guy running a game called out, “hey, Mark” to someone walking by to try to get them to break a balloon and win a poster of Gillian Anderson.  Only five dollars a dart!

I wonder if the aliens believed in her?

There are probably a few other examples that I could bring up, but it’s late, and I have to go practice not singing.  Bonus points if you can tell what two impersonations I did in third grade in the comments.

See, I told you this post would be awesome.

Investing? Invest In Yourself.

“If M.A.D starts making gold out of lead, it will undermine the world economy!” – Inspector Gadget

CAT

I invested in a series of walking trails for mental patients, but it failed.  I guess Psycho-Paths® was a bad name.

By the time the stock market crashed to signal the beginning of the Great Depression, the economy of the United States had already gone through an amazing decade of change.  Electrification was moving rapidly across the country, and prisons could finally retire the acoustic chair.  Radio was a miracle that was now bringing masses of people together as the radio waves propagated across the country at the speed of light.  Natural gas, long a nuisance in the oil patch, was being piped and compressed and shipped across larger areas of the country, bringing instant heat (and some explosions, since they hadn’t added the stuff that makes it smell bad yet) to millions.

Perhaps one of the biggest dislocations was that horses were rapidly being replaced by cars and trucks.  The economy was being motorized.  Some have even come to the conclusion that part of the dislocation in the economy was that the millions of horses required to plow, move freight, and move people weren’t required anymore, leading to an oversupply of horses.  That’s not a situation that lasts long – the oversupply of horses, can, um, be solved.  I mean, too many horses for the barns?  That’s un-stable.

But if once the oversupply of horses is solved what about the oversupply of food for the horses?

Well, what are they going to do with all of that farmland, now suddenly made even more productive through the addition of tractors and cheaply made nitrogen fertilizer?

Produce more.  Which drives prices down.  Which leads to . . .

Deflationary depression.

AMISH

It’s hard for the Amish to travel – their system is a little buggy.

I would say that “for the want of a horse, and economy was lost,” but in hindsight the real problem was the bankers.  The bankers during the 1920’s and 1930’s even developed the first birth control – their personality.  The Federal Reserve Bank® (which is neither part of the government nor really a bank) managed to destroy the economy through poor currency manipulation choices.

Part of the secret of the efficiency of market economies is that there is no controller telling people to start restaurants or PEZ® vineyards or bikini ranches.  The feedback from the economy is measured in customers buying the product, and if the product is good enough, profit encourages people to make it.

The flip side of that is business failure.  I originally wrote that was the down side.  It’s not.  Businesses, in a normal economy, that can’t produce a viable product should fail.  Note that I’m forced to write in a normal economy.  2020 has created the situation where tens of thousands (I’m not exaggerating) of businesses have failed due to the restrictions from the reactions to COVID-19.  It’s even been an international problem – Finland closed their border.  No one will cross the Finnish line.

COVID

The riots in Detroit don’t get many news stories, but I heard the rioters there have caused $20 million in improvements.

That’s not normal, of course.  Hair styling places are failing in the more restrictive states.  In Modern Mayberry?  Not so much.  But in San Francisco?  You can’t get your hair styled, unless you’re Nancy Pelosi.  I guess that the rules prohibiting business operation are only for common people.  St. Nancy can go in and get a cut and a blow dry when no one else can.  Sadly, Nancy wasn’t wearing a mask, which was the only positive thing about CoronaChan since the whole thing started.

In normal times, business thrive or fail, and both of those things lead to a stronger overall economy.  The services and goods that aren’t wanted anymore go away, like Beanie Babies®.  Thank Heavens.  But in these times of artificial economic crisis?  Good, strong businesses fail.

Regardless of the type of crisis we have now, it is upon us.  Whether or not the business would have failed is irrelevant.  The only real question is what happens next.

One thing that is sure, the economy after this crisis passes won’t look like it used to.

I’ve posted about possible good investments in the past – if I were betting, I’d bet that gold in ten years would be a better bet than Netflix® or Tesla™, even if Tesla© starts its own religion, and builds Elon Mosques.  But who knows what the economy will even look like after this crisis?  I can’t guarantee any of it.

TESLA

I hear that Space-X has designed electric grass for Mars.  They call it E-lawn.

So what to invest in?

Yourself.

Time is potentially quite short.  How should you invest your time?  In yourself.

There are so many skills that are required of a human.  PowerPoint® is probably not really high on them, so I wouldn’t spend much time there.

The first place I’d begin to prepare is mental.  In the United States, we have become very used to the most modern conveniences.  Air conditioning when it’s hot.  Central heat when it’s cold.  Even in Modern Mayberry, day or night I can go and get gasoline, a gallon of milk, and some beef jerky.  Fast Internet that allows me to stream a television show that’s been off the air for nearly 20 years.

What happens when you don’t have those things for a day?  A week?  A month?  When you’re used to being able to see what the temperature is in Moscow, Manila, Manhattan or Manchester, what happens when the weather becomes a mystery?

At least Biden can hide his own Easter eggs.

When you’re used to seeing real-time riots in Kenosha or Portland, what happens when you don’t know what’s happening in your own city?

I’m not saying that’s going to happen – the Internet is robust, and the systems we have built for delivering milk, gas, electricity and natural gas have redundancy.

But still, these things are possible.

Have you put your mind in a place where they have happened?  What would you do?  I mean, if your spouse convinces you to go to a psychiatrist, will your couch talk you out of it again?

After the mind, invest in your body.  If you’re out of shape, get in better shape.  Anything will help.  Get out and run.  If you can’t run, walk.  Being able to count on your body is always good – and if you’ve been neglecting it because of work, it’s time to pay back that debt, with interest.  I am fortunate enough to already have the body of an athlete already – a sumo wrestler.

Hmmm.  Maybe I need some work, too.

SUMO

I got a sumo wrestler for Christmas one year.  I had asked for a heavy sweater.

What other ways can you invest in yourself?  There are thousands of skills that are valuable, no matter what the future brings.  Can you do basic medical care?  I’m not asking if you can sew up a lung, but can you clean a flesh wound?  Do you have Band-Aids® and Neosporin™ for a year or two?  Iodine?  All of that is cheap and available now.  Will it be in six months?

The Mrs. bought a book on medicinal plants that showed up the other day.  I was surprised that it didn’t list thyme as a remedy – I heard that thyme cures all wounds.  What kind of books do you keep?

Can you garden?  Annually, The Mrs. spends about $117.53 to grow about seven tomatoes.  I would make fun of that, but I would also say that The Mrs. has learned lots of ways to not grow tomatoes, too.  Her gardening knowledge is better than mine.  It’s a little late to invest in gardening this year, but it wouldn’t hurt to start to understand what it takes.  There’s a whole Internet.  Heck, you could practice by killing some houseplants, like I used to do.

This isn’t a bad time for a hobby.  What kind of hobby?

  • Lots of farms have auctions and I’ve seen farmer forges there.
  • Carpentry, with and without electricity.
  • Small engine repair. Small engines can do a great deal beyond weed eating.
  • Always easier when ammo isn’t so dear, but we are where we are.
  • Making wine or whiskey – both are great for barter, and legal to make in most places.
  • Fixing things around the house. When’s the last time you patched a leaky roof?

I could probably come up with a dozen more in ten more minutes, and I imagine the comments will fill up with them.  Again, in some circumstances, these are nothing more than hobbies, and if you pursue them with a local club or group, you’ll build more community in addition to building yourself.

Regardless of the future we will see, investing in yourself pays dividends.  Plus?  It’s always better to try to grow tomatoes and fail when failure is just results in a humorous story.

Why Would Anyone Become A Leftist?

“Prime minister? I thought Italy used a king?” – Archer

ANTIFA

There’s a joke to be made about that cake, but just like food under communist rule, you wouldn’t get it.

Sometime earlier this year, I asked myself a simple question.  Why would anyone be attracted to communism?  It’s the one single system that has never succeeded.  It’s a system that, when implemented as designed, kills tens of thousands, and in the twentieth century, over 100 million of their own citizens.

For the life of me, I couldn’t understand what would drive so many people to communism in the year 2020.  In 1900 in Russia?  Well, maybe.  A typical Russian peasant wouldn’t have known much about the failings in Paris of the Leftist French Revolution.  Some bald guy says, “free loaves of bread for life,” and that might have done it.

But during the 2000-2020 time period in the West, it’s clear that communism shouldn’t take root, right?  Up until the COVID-19, the economy in the United States was going so well that some of Joe Biden’s kids could afford to quit their second jobs in the Ukraine.  But even with that economy, young people were being recruited to communism.

Why?

I had no idea how they could be recruited.  But in roving through the Internet, I found a book, Anatomy of the Red Brigades by Alessandro Orsini, which had exactly the information I was looking for.  The Red Brigades were a Leftist terrorist organization that was formed in 1970 and lasted until the 1980’s.  They were most famous for kidnapping and killing a former Italian prime minister named Aldo Moro.  They were also responsible for the later kidnapping of American Brigadier General James Dozier, who was rescued.

PENCIL

I have other pencil jokes, but most of them are pointless.

Post-war Italy was a difficult place.  It was rapidly transforming from an agricultural economy to an industrial one.  Like me, I’m sure some were tempted to steal industrial cooking implements.  But I didn’t – I’m not a big whisk taker.

As people moved from rural farms to slums in the cities to work in factories, they were uprooted from centuries of continuity in life.  That uprooting was the first step in creating a communist.  As a rule, the Red Brigades recruits were disaffected.  These people were already at the margins of society.  Orsini calls this process disintegration.  The group manipulating the new recruits would do everything possible to remove the new members from their previous outside relationships.

Once they were removed from those old relationships, reality was what the group said it was.   And what reality were they focused on creating?  The basic idea is one familiar to doomsday cults around the world.  One Red Brigadist described it as the “fanaticism of a new religion.”  Communist recruits are taught that:

. . . they are “children of the light, arriving in this world to punish and redeem, to destroy and purify.  The Red Brigades want to wash away the sins of capitalism with blood.

GRETA

They are taught that the world is corrupt, and in danger.  Remind you of anything, say, Greta Thunberg?  The idea that capitalism is sin is now taught nearly uniformly to children of the world.  Of course, it has to have a name, and Global Warming® is probably the most convenient:  it’s a sin brought on by capitalism and the old people, and will kill them if they don’t take rides on multi-million dollar yachts and speak before the United Nations.  Oh, and then be invited by CNN™ to talk about COVID-19.  Yes, they asked Greta for her expertise on that.  And for her expertise on Some Black Lives Matter©.  Each of these three has the same story being pumped into the head of the Marxist – there is a threat to the existence of all that is good in the world, and only Leftism can solve it.

Radical Leftism.  See how that works?

The process of radicalization was described by Jean Guitton (as related by Orsini):

  1. Segregation – They are kept apart from healthy past relationships – their new relationships only come through communist contacts. They are then immerse in Leftist thoughts and theory.
  2. Permanent Indignation – Inner purity is confirmed (and signaled) through outer indignation – the Left loves to despise any who think even slightly differently than they do.
  3. Desire to be Persecuted – When people in the “world” make fun of the Left, the Leftist love it – it shows how virtuous and pure the Leftist is, and confirms to them how horrible the rest of the world must be.
  4. Purification of Means through the End – Any violence is justified because it will lead to the promised land of no work and infinite goodies. Building it on a mountain of skulls is just a feature.
  5. Principle of Secrecy – Antifa’s© external goals that they advertise aren’t their real goals. They know that what they really want is the complete destruction of society, and to have it rebuilt just as they see fit.  But they don’t say that – so every member is essentially a member of a secret society.  That binds them together – they can only speak freely to each other.
  6. Preventative Internal Terror – The one thing Leftist cannot stand is anyone to the Right. Anyone collaborating with the Right in any way?  Betrayal?  Any member who strays from Leftism is certainly the biggest enemy of the Antifa©, even more so than actual fascists.

CLEAN

I got a puppy, but the ducks attack it.  Last time I get a pure bread dog.

The focus then becomes one of purity.

Purity, of course, can never be reached.  That’s why SBLM® and Antifa™ aren’t fighting for anything real or measurable.  The goal of SBLM® is “the end to systemic racism,” whatever that is.  The problem is it can’t really be defined.  It’s not a real goal – it’s a stand-in for purity, a purity that can never be reached.

The reality is that this impossible goal of for their purification must be unreachable.  It must be ludicrous.  Why?  The goal isn’t to end systemic racism.  The goal is to engender hatred in the members.

How bad is the hatred?  “Love and Strength will subdue and destroy the imperialist bourgeoisie; we shall build a society free from the slavery of salaried work,” is directly out of their literature.  To quote Orsini speaking about them, even when Marxists kill people, they see themselves as the real victims.  “They are desperate people who have no real alternative to murder.”

OJ

We all know that OJ was the real victim, right?

And that’s the difference.  The people who manipulate the communists want power.  That’s not the goal of the communists.  They want the power so that they can personally cleanse the world.  In one interview, Orsini quoted a communist who didn’t want any luxury himself after the communists won.  Nope.  All this particular commie wanted was to be allowed to personally execute capitalists after the revolution.

Capitalism is what they hate the most.  And fascism.  What’s fascism?  Anything that’s not communist.  Don’t be fooled – Antifa© isn’t against fascists.  They’re against Bernie Sanders because he’s too far right, and think he’s probably a fascist, too.  Antifa™ wants to kill everyone even slightly to the right of them.

In their current state, the concept of logic and argument isn’t something a Leftist in Antifa™ or SBLM© can even hear.  They will, due to their programming, ignore any logical argument, any evidence.  Point out that when Pol Pot takes over Cambodia in a bloody revolution that kills off nearly thirty percent of Cambodia’s population.  If they’re not too far gone, they just won’t hear you.

If they’re far gone, you’ll just hear silence, as they think, “They deserved it.”  Purity is the goal.  Their thought process that they cannot let the lives of people stand in the way of the future Earthly paradise.

CLEAN2

I had to use this picture.

How did Italy defeat the Red Brigades?  Massive numbers of arrests, and large amounts of jail time for those involved.  Hundreds of Leftists were forced to flee Italy to avoid prison.  I’m fairly sure this was fine with the Italians – as long as they never came back.

And our Leftists in the United States?  Getting rid of them won’t be easy.  They’re fully supported in most cities, even as they slowly destroy the cities – some district attorneys won’t charge Antifa© or BLM™ rioters with anything more than a misdemeanor.  Beyond that, they’re well-funded – SBLM™ alone has hundreds of millions of dollars available.

I wonder if they’ll make reparations to the business owners that were destroyed through their riots?

Nah.  The looters were the real victims of the riots, right?

Houses, Money, Stocks, and Bikini Girl Graphs

“Can the stock market survive a nuclear holocaust? Yes, says our next guest, and he’ll tell us what stocks to buy and what to sell in the event of a thermonuclear exchange right after these messages.” – Head Office

BIZ

Superman® won’t take Bitcoin as payment after dark.  He avoids crypto night.

“Housing prices only go up.”  I first heard that in the 1990’s when I was buying my first house.  The realtor was quite clear that a house wasn’t just a house, it was an investment in the future.  He had no idea what my kids could do with Sharpies®, hot sauce, and matches.  And that was just the living room carpet.

“The dollar is as good as gold.”  I haven’t heard that one used about the dollar in my lifetime, because the dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since August 15, 1971.

“The stock market is the place to put your money.”  That’s still what people are saying.

One thing that I’ve found throughout my life is that, generally speaking, if everyone believes in it, it’s wrong.  The major exception to this is physics, which explains gravity well enough that almost nobody can argue with it.  I read a book on anti-gravity once – couldn’t put it down.

gravy

I always fall for gravity jokes.

This is especially true in human systems.  If the entire crowd believes it?  It’s nearly certainly wrong.

As mentioned above, a perfect example of this is housing markets.  It was really common knowledge in the 1990’s that, barring a setback in a recession, housing prices always go up.  Buy a house, wait, and sell it 10 or 20 years later, and you’ll make a bundle.

In certain times and places, that’s true.  And during the 1990’s and the early 2000’s, the idea that “housing prices always go up” became firmly fixed in the minds of, well, most everyone.  That made it true, for a while.  As the banks noticed this, they decided that mortgages weren’t a risky investment at all, unlike when I broke COVID-19 lockdown to go play board games.  That was a lot of Risk.

On top of that, banks decided to make changes to the way that they had lent in the past.  Houses were a sure thing, right?  They could make them even safer by creating mortgage-backed securities.  Some of these were really unique.  You could buy the “best” performing loans out of a group of loans.  If there were 100 houses in the group, 90 would have to default on their mortgages before your security was impacted.

This mastery of risk was amazing!  Now all you need are more people to loan money to.  But not everyone qualifies, which is a problem.  They tried offering 0% loans, but there was no interest.

Solution?  Everyone qualifies.  No income?  No job?  No problem.  These were even called NINJA (no income, no job) loans.  The pool of borrowers expanded more rapidly than Joe Biden’s memory loss.  And if we add in refinancing of home equity?

That added even more borrowers!

What could go wrong?

HOUSE

And, hey, housing prices have reached new records.  Certainly they won’t fall?

Well, gravity kicked in on housing prices.  They dropped.  And when they dropped, the entire industry built up around building houses dropped.  And then the industries that supplied lumber, and pipe, and wire, and pavement, and concrete for driveways . . . dropped.

This mathematical fiction based on a delusion created a massive recession.  But, hey, housing prices always go up.

Except when they don’t.

Just like the dollar fell from its perch.  Originally, the dollar was backed by actual, physical gold.  That’s when the phrase, “as good as gold” was first used.  Why?  Because at any moment, you could go and change your dollars into gold.  Walk into the bank with a $20 bill, and walk out with $20 in gold.

This wasn’t always the case, there were periods in the history of the country where this wasn’t so (greenbacks issued during the Civil War backed by the credit of the country), but it was generally the case.  But after Franklin Roosevelt made gold possession by Americans illegal (yes, this happened) then you couldn’t go in and get gold for your dollar.  Once that link was broken, the government was free to print money more or less at will, creating inflation even in a “gold backed” currency.

PURCH2

You can plainly see that women are shorter now that the purchasing power of the dollar has dropped.

Now?  The dollar isn’t worth but a few percent of what it was in 1940.

And other countries realize it, too.  As the multiple trillions of dollars are printed this year to prop up everything from the airlines to the banks to the stock market, the value of the dollar has dropped.  Why?  The rest of the world can count.  There is only so much printing you can do before it starts to add up.

The dollar has dropped 10% in the last three months.

DOLLAR

The dollar’s fall is fast, but not as fast as when I fell into the coffee.  It was instant.

Good as gold?

No.

Which brings us to the stock market.  Money in the stock market is always safe, over a long enough term.  It took six years to recover from the Great Recession.  In real terms (inflation adjusted) it took from 1928 to 1955 for the Dow© to recover from the Great Depression.  It took until 1994 for the Dow™ to recover from the 1964 peak.  So, if you’re good waiting thirty years to break even, the stock market is a sure thing.

BOB

Speaking of up and down – I got a free yo-yo.  No strings attached!

While the economy is still stuck in lockdown in many parts of the country, massive unemployment, and a “riot-a-day” social structure, the Dow Jones Industrial Average® is only down 3%.

I wonder, just maybe, if everyone is wrong?