COVID – Page 3 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Jenga Economy

“Out of these windows, we will view the collapse of financial history. One step closer to economic equilibrium.” – Fight Club

What do you call a man in debt? Owen.

After 9-11, sales of the Jenga® game really dropped.

I’m not sure why, but in 2002 people had to play Jenga® the old-fashioned way – by stacking dishes in the sink.

But the game of Jenga™ is a pretty good analogy for our economy right now. Jenga© is based on taking one piece from the lower part of the structure and putting it on top. As the game progresses, everyone can see that the structure becomes weaker and more unstable. The game always (at our house) ends the same way: the tower, which now seems ridiculously tall, sways a little bit, becomes unbalanced, and topples.

The pieces then go everywhere, and we leave them on the floor for the herds of stray free-range toddlers in our neighborhood to eat. We’re givers that way.

The economy (to me) looks exactly like a game of Jenga™, seemingly impossibly stretched out and tall.

Pro-tip on how to pick-up women: lift with your legs, not your back.

Examples?

Well, let’s talk about when we turned money into cash. The dollar used to be bound to actual, physical commodities – gold and silver. I guess you could call it an either-ore situation. Gold was always the preferred, but people who wanted looser money (i.e., inflation) fought to get silver in there, too. In fact, silver was actually part of the money supply, making up a portion of many coins up until the 1960s when one Jenga© block was pulled and set on top.

Nixon pulled another when he ended the ability of foreign nations to bring piles of dollars and walk away with piles of gold. He made the tower even shakier as he threw gold out, entirely as a standard. The good news was that Americans could once again own gold. The bad news was that dollars were no longer money – they were cash – not backed by anything.

And could be printed at will. Another Jenga™ piece on top. The tower becomes a bit wobblier. And wobblier still as Nixon and Ford and Carter start printing. I mainly blame Nixon, since he got the ball going, and it took the hand of Reagan reaching out to steady the tower, though that created the very deep 1982 recession.

What was Bob the Builder© called during a recession? Bob.

Reagan, though, added his bit as well. Sure, it made sense to try to spend the Russians into the ground – after the 1982 recession the economy came roaring back as The Wealth Pump started in earnest and the stock market soared. But during this time, the market cheered as jobs left the United States. In many cases, the jobs were subsidized by the country taking them. They wanted to build up the industrial expertise so that they could make world-class products and were willing to pay for their economy and workers to learn how to do it.

Remember George H. W. Bush’s advisors saying they didn’t care if the economy made computer chips or potato chips?

Pepperidge Farms© remembers™.

Because it does matter. Potato chips or computer chips don’t matter if you’re a banker making a loan, but if you’re trying to create the greatest value with the economy? It sure as hell does matter.

One step closer to living in the Prime® Pod™.

On the government side, fiscal responsibility seemed to come back for a bit with Bill Clinton. Now, don’t thank Bill – it was entirely based on Newt Gingrich stopping all the nonsense for a few years that primed the pump of the economy. While Hillary is an ideologue, Bill was always in it for the hot chicks. Sure, there were shenanigans, but the Jenga™ players were mostly playing it safe during that time period.

But when the recession hit in 2000? George W. Bush really wanted to open the floodgates, so he started stacking as high and as fast as he could. War helped him move a few Jenga™ pieces, and low interest rates in his “everyone who breathes should own a McMansion” policy fueled an amazing set of bubbles that ended up including housing, natural gas, crude oil, and what was left of my hair.

The path out of the Great Recession was a simple one. Print more money. People aren’t buying United States Bonds? Heck, the Fed® can buy them now. We can also pay Wall Street to launder all the bad debt and make sure that irresponsible bank vaults get filled to the top with cash.

Is it just me, or does Janet Yellin look exactly like Benny Hill?

Because, why not?

Obama took some Jenga™ pieces from the very bottom and put them up top because he wanted to get health care into the system.

Trump didn’t add too many blocks to the top of the board, at first. Trump was mainly because he was focused on deals – immigration, trade, covfefe. But he couldn’t make a deal with COVID. His instincts were bad and his solution was just to stack more blocks up top by printing money and cramming it down people’s throats as fast as he could.

Biden doubled down on that strategy: importing illegals by the truckload to paper over the economy that no longer serves its citizens, spending billions to “reduce inflation” and now nobody wants to buy the bonds. Thankfully, the banks are scrambling to create weird new structures so they can pretend that the loan that they made at 4% isn’t costing them when they’re giving 5.5% on CDs.

Anyone else feel comforted that the banks have a really complicated strategy to avoid reality?

The tower is now, really, really tall. And really, really shaky.

And these things never end slowly – they end either with mass social unrest, a big war, or both when the tower finally collapses. And others have just given up.

When 4Chan is smarter than the Fed®.

For clarity’s sake, Hasbro™ (the owner of the Jenga® trademark) had nothing to do with this post. I’m sure they’d rather people look at Jenga® and think about the 9-11 than have them look at Jenga® and think about our economy.

The Wealth Pump In America – Two Examples

“We wounded this place, it’s our duty to close her wounds, it’s the least we can do to show our gratitude for all the wealth she’s given us.” – Treasure of the Sierra Madres

Time is wealth – I found out that a fresher kidney costs more than one that’s a week old. Also, never try to donate more than three at a time – they ask a lot of questions.

I read this week that the UN Climate summit (LINK) is offering food that included smoke wagyu burgers, Philly cheesesteaks, and BBQ at the summit. This same summit is expected to tell people that they can’t have meat anymore because, you know, climate. It’s almost like there’s a double standard . . .

The nice thing about spending the time reading books like Turchin’s End Times is that it gives a new filter to view the events that we’re seeing around us. This filter, or model, is useful because it allows the events of the world to be reviewed in relation to the model.

Peter Turchin’s End Times: There Be Dragons Here

Turchin actually presented two major models: Elite Overproduction, and The Wealth Pump. While both are important to a civilization beginning to dissolve, the one I’d like to focus on today is The Wealth Pump. Part of the wonderful part of a model, is that it can predict what’s going to happen, and explain the otherwise unexplainable.

Never get married on Mt. Everest – it’s all downhill from there.

Let’s take a look at the first strategy: feminism. This came on board starting as far back as the 1800s. Why? It was good business. More women making financial decisions meant more customers. To this day, that’s the case – women make more purchasing decisions than men.

Mission accomplished.

The next idea was to mobilize women into the workforce. It took two world wars where women went from making babies to making welds on Liberty Ships to test the theory. In the 1950s, though, those darn women went back to homes, and were making babies in the biggest baby making event the world ever saw.

That wasn’t good for business, and, thus feminism.

Chuck Norris had COVID. For breakfast.

Feminism has had a long, horrible past. In modern-ish times, the biggest example was the Spanish Civil War. The first things the commies did was make abortion legal and to abolish marriage. Oh, sure, they killed a lot of priests and nuns, but the focus was on splitting apart the family.

Why?

So women could be more productive in the economy. This is the weird place where The Wealth Pump and commies are in complete agreement: women shouldn’t be at home making babies, women should be at work making PowerPoints® and tractors in Glorious Tractor Collective Number 171. Women aren’t loving members of a family, who have the job of creating compassion in their families while the men instill duty and honor.

Nope. There are decades of propaganda convincing women that being a mother just wasn’t enough – it was beneath them. The latchkey generation (mine) was based on the thought that Moms should do whatever and find themselves because . . . reasons. Although my parents didn’t divorce, millions of other families were ripped apart by that abomination.

When stoners divorce, do they get joint custody?

Yes. Divorce is bad. Sometimes it is justified, and that requires fault. But no-fault divorce made it a game show based around fun and prizes for women – they still initiate 80-90% of divorces. Combined with the government welfare for women using a uterus as a clown car, this creates a society of children who have no real family. Also? They have no real sense of duty or honor.

But, hey, we have tons of women who are making wonderful PowerPoints® on how to exclude white guys from jobs without looking like they’re excluding white guys from jobs. And those women weren’t making babies. Certainly, The Wealth Pump requires cheap labor, so that brings us to:

Immigration.

The hordes of immigrants that have been coming to this country, both legal and illegal have been in unprecedented numbers. The American public overwhelmingly is done with this level of immigration – they don’t want it. Why was Trump’s three-word slogan – “Build the wall” so effective?

Because people want a damn wall. In many places, they look around at their country and see it doesn’t resemble at all the country they were born in, and they’re tired of it.

The wall might work. China built one, and they have nearly zero illegal immigrants.

Yet, it continues. The Democrats crave it like a junkie craves whatever junkies crave after heroin. I think they crave drooling, which would explain why they like Joe Biden.

The Republicans have and continue to be the “sure, but not so much” party since, well, forever. Reagan signed in the first big amnesty in the 1980s. Why? Because the wealthy folks demanded it.

Why?

Because all the women were making PowerPoints® doing whatever it was that women did in business in the 1980s, The Wealth Pump demanded this: cheap labor. Women had been cheap labor, since they could run typewriters while the men did the real stuff. But when women wanted to move up the corporate ladder and computers allowed people other than women born with the typing-gene to type, The Wealth Pump demanded that we have cheaper labor.

Thus?

Rather than pay a slightly higher wage to people picking strawberries, it was way easier to have illegal people pick lettuce and tomatoes and strawberries. They couldn’t complain, or they’d get booted out of the country. Rather than pay actual Americans to pick (or invent picking machines) it’s much easier to have a labor class in this country with no ties to this country and work for less.

Gardening is complicated – someone suggested I try manure on my strawberries, but, ugh, I’m sticking with whipped cream.

Except these Wealth Pump-encouraged people also get free health care for their children, free schooling for their children, and career paths that receive priority over the people born here. When you add it all up, these actually end up sucking much more money out of the system than they provide in economic benefits to the country. This analysis doesn’t even come close to adding in the societal costs in lower trust and increased crime.

Here we have the ultimate irony of The Wealth Pump – it creates more wealth for the operators, while it sucks the money out of the entire country.

But, hey, Bezos has a new tramp with lips so inflated that he could use her to transport Amazon™ packages if he inflated them with helium and a yacht that can land his helicopter. And eat all the beef he wants, even though it’s time for you to get in the pod and eat the bugs.

I mean, it’s your duty to those that benefit from The Wealth Pump.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – 11 Months Until Election 2024

“I gave you the chance of aiding me willingly, but you have elected the way of pain.” – The Fellowship of the Ring

The 2024 election results are in. I mean, the Democrats already have them written down . . .

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

Volume V, Issue 7

All memes except for the clock and graphs are “as found”.

This is a moving situation, and things are changing quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Countdown To 2024 – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Alien Army – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 820 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Civil War Weather Report Previous Posts

Countdown to 2024

Oh, that shirt is just so very last year!

Elections are busy things. The one thing that both parties do is that they try to heighten the sense of importance of each election. I’m certain that, for every presidential election during my conscious lifetime I’ve heard the following statement:

“This is the most important election in history.” Some are more important than others. But would much have changed if Bush I would have defeated Clinton? Probably not much at all. Would things have been different if Al Gore had been elected in 2000? No. Would things have been much different if the other candidate had won in 2004, or 2008, or 2012?

No, not really. In most of those cases the differences between the candidates were so small that there really wasn’t a difference. How different would Romney’s first term be than Obama’s second term? Not a mitten’s worth of difference.

But then we get to 2016. Trump as a candidate would never have been electable before 2016. But by 2016, it was enough – the majority of the American Right was done with the system, and candidates like ¡Jeb! were seen as what they really were: jokes.

In the most shocking part of his presidency: Trump actually tried to keep his campaign promises, even the ones official Washington didn’t like. The result? Absolutely everything possible was done so he could not be re-elected. The silly thing is that had they left him in office, people would have been tired of Trump by 2024 and be ready (my guess) for a sharp turn Left.

It would have been perfect for them. But, no. It is clear and undisputed (and even bragged about) that the Left changed the laws in the country to make ballot harvesting and voter fraud easy. When that wasn’t enough, they had to hide the counting and count ballots that the laws of several swing states indicated were illegal ballots.

Expect a replay in 2024.

There are more allegations, and more than enough smoke to know that there were fires in places that were crucial to Biden. This created an outpouring of emotion far greater than any normal election would have – it made people feel that, indeed, this was the last stop.

It might have been. However, we can see (as we’ve seen around the world in places like Great Britain and Ireland) that the draconian laws that are passed explicitly against the interests of the actual citizens shows that voting harder isn’t changing anything.

So, 2024 is eleven months out. Is this the most important election of our lives? Probably not. Does it have the likelihood of being the most divisive election since 1860?

Yes.

Not even Kennedy can knock him down at this point.

Violence and Censorship Update

Back during the pandemic, ivermectin was ridiculed as “horse paste”. I’m not suggesting it has anti-cancer properties, but this oncologist is. Why isn’t that news?

A deranged trans person shot up a bunch of kids, waking people up and, in my opinion, set up the disgust that has led to the brand destruction of Bud Light™. The manifesto of the killer was secret. Why? Was it because it showed a deep hatred for white people? Regardless, it’s a “safety” concern of a Leftist mayor who wants to track down those that may have leaked it. Why did they have to leak it, when there will be no trial, and there are no co-conspirators? Oh, yes, censorship of dangerous information.

Her Accidency, the barely verbal Governor of New York, announces that New York no longer agrees with free speech. At least against certain groups.

Neil the no longer Young is boycotting X®. In other news, Neil the no longer Young is still alive.

Musk’s X® platform is the subject of an advertiser boycott, but advertisers are okay with Insta© serving up much more objectionable content.

In the “I’m leaving and I’m going to yell at you why” and no one cares file, there’s this:

Not in the United States, but, it’s weird with all the hate speech laws in Euroland, that Azad Talukder (a fine Irish name!) is not indicted for one wishing death on people speaking out against being stabbed.

Related, from Ireland, showing why the Second Amendment is important if you like the First Amendment:

I’ve got a lot more, really, but this is enough. Violence is up (record numbers of murders in many US cities), and censorship is hitting a feeding frenzy.

Biden’s Misery Index

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again. But not as bad as last month, thanks to winter and lower gas prices (one of the factors).

Here’s what building back better looks like:

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence is down slightly. Winter is in, and riots aren’t as fun in galoshes.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it is up. I expected more by December, but, hey, it’s shopping season.

Economic:

Economic numbers are swinging back up again this month. I expected more of a downturn in November, and was wrong, instead seeing it whipsaw back up. Lower gas prices and giving up in Ukraine are (probably) partial drivers.

Illegal Aliens:

Another one of the biggest numbers, ever, in the history of the country, record for November. For all time. Why not tax them like El Salvador? Oh, wait, those illegals are headed to the United States.

Alien Army

I had this down as a topic several weeks ago, so the recent date on the picture below just shows how fast this one is moving:

The aptly named Dick Durban has said the quiet part out loud: since the Biden has made the primary source of the volunteer armed forces dry up by, well, hating the white people who have turned out in droves for it throughout history, the numbers have gone down. How far down? Far enough that instead of a brave Latina with two lesbian mothers in Air Force HR, they now are showing white guys doing macho things like jumping out of helicopters.

But they really don’t want white guys back. They want a different group: illegal aliens. Why? Think a kid from Conroe, Texas is going to shoot on a crowd of civilians at a bread line?

Nope. But if it’s an ex MS-13 guy from Mexico who only knows the United States as a source of revenue, I think the answer is then drastically different. When the head of the Department of Homeland Security wants to ignore his job since he probably can’t define the word “Homeland” and just give up and let anyone here stay, you know you have a problem.

Ireland has recently shown it has the same problem, but worse with politicians actively saying things that would be hate speech in Ireland unless spoken about the actual Irish.

This is another step towards open warfare on the legacy Americans. And another step towards Civil War 2.0.

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1730672536071938087

https://twitter.com/i/status/1730528857172619399

https://twitter.com/i/status/1728511136117543187

https://twitter.com/i/status/1726830295515877729

https://twitter.com/i/status/1724668651838767519

https://twitter.com/i/status/1730536906998313465

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12797119/NC-southeast-raleigh-high-school-stabbing-dead.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12797245/Chicago-robbery-rifle-woman-video-police-suspects.html

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1721541510523437338

One Guy

https://twitter.com/EndWokeness/status/1722729642262433947

https://nypost.com/2023/11/10/metro/woman-threatened-by-homeless-mugger-wishes-vigilante-didnt-use-gun/

Body Count

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/us-beef-prices-hit-record-high-nations-cattle-herd-expected-shrink-through-2025

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12628299/birth-rate-america-fertility-fallen-disaster.html

https://www.npr.org/2023/11/24/1215152734/after-the-dobbs-decision-birth-rates-are-up-in-states-with-abortion-ban-states

https://fortune.com/2023/11/18/students-missing-school-attendance-chronic-absenteeism-teacher-shortage/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12776889/Oregon-overdoses-skyrocket-decriminalize-drugs-heroin-meth-cocaine.html

https://www.statista.com/chart/19920/us-veterans-from-another-country/

https://nypost.com/2023/11/25/metro/2516-nypd-cops-head-for-exits-so-far-in-2023-pension-data/

https://ammo.com/articles/gun-ownership-by-state

https://twitter.com/Risemelbourne/status/1729337006914990526

https://www.aussie17.com/p/new-zealand-government-data-administrator

https://vigilantnews.com/post/turbo-death-from-turbo-cancers-were-in-trouble-says-dr-ryan-cole

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/surge-young-people-deaths-insurance-industry/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12754341/nuclear-war-attack-silos-deaths.html

Vote Count

https://forwardmajority.org/battlegroundvoterproject/

https://uncoverdc.com/2023/10/31/georgia

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1723057416873681020.html

https://twitter.com/KanekoaTheGreat/status/1723057416873681020

https://twitter.com/KevinKelton2?t=msfw1gf0DGhmKR7YTiILIw&s=03

https://uncoverdc.com/2023/11/09/elector-challenges-in-georgia-voter-intimidation-or-civic-duty

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/going-expose-everything-mike-lindell-says-georgia-voting-machine-ruling-opened-door-no

https://www.newsmax.com/newsfront/voting-machines-georgia-lawsuit/2023/11/12/id/1141994/

https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.breitbart.com%2Fpolitics%2F2023%2F11%2F16%2Fnebraska-gov-jim-pillen-warns-vague-deceptive-abortion-ballot-initiative%2F

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/abortion-rights-groups-seek-ballot-measures-9-states-2024-rcna125177

Civil War

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/15/texas-secession-texit/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/texit-progress-secession-question-expected-appear-2024-texas-primary-ballot

https://www.davisenterprise.com/news/bob-dunning-secession-fever-hits-el-dorado-county/article_2c1c6894-8fe5-11ee-878b-734d7888a050.html

https://time.com/6222633/second-civil-war-us-how-to-avoid/

https://unherd.com/2023/11/inside-the-american-redoubt/

https://www.realclearpennsylvania.com/articles/2023/11/15/the_parties_have_irreconcilably_different_visions_for_america_992964.html

https://thewire.in/world/us-fascistic-violence-civil-war-election-2024

https://www.thefp.com/p/black-humor-in-venezuela-communist-fat-camp

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-magic-moment/

End Times Review, Part 2 – Defining the Dragon

“Right. We are consumers. We are byproducts 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.” – Fight Club

Why is it so hard to start a relationship with a Social Justice Warrior? They have such high double standards.

A general note: The Civil War 2.0 Weather Report would normally be on Monday. Due to getting this post finished, it will likely be next Wednesday before the CWWR comes out. It will still be wonderful and fresh as daises on a fresh daisy ranch. I will also (likely Tuesday?) post a combined version of this book review stitched together, so we’ll have a very rare Tuesday post. I’m doing that so that if someone wants to read it from start to finish, well, there it is. It will be slightly different for continuity and error correction.

When last we left the impending disaster of the 21^st Century, we were talking about Turchin’s theory that Elite overproduction was a primary driver in causing societies to disintegrate like records of voter irregularities in swing states in 2020.

The pool of people attempting to be elite has increased – ludicrously. As I’ve mentioned before, it used to be that only 15% of people tried to go to college. That’s probably the right number. Now? According to Turchin’s figures, over 65% of kids are trying to grasp that gold ring.

Again, the normal distribution matters, and that means at least 15% of people going to college have an IQ of less than 100. This explains all of those Grievance Studies degrees, and Leftists pretending that education is a substitute for intellect while working behind the makeup counter at the department store.

Every time you smoke a cigarette, it takes seven minutes off your student loans.

Now, the number of doctorate degrees have tripled since 1970 (again, a Turchin number) and there’s no real sign that this is stopping, even though it’s clear that this is producing only frustrated people who have useless degrees. Even useful degrees in STEM fields are, at this point, being overproduced in the United States compared to the number of available jobs. Yet, the companies keep wanting the bring in foreigners on H1-B visas to take jobs that could be filled by actual Americans.

But the Americans would want a higher wage, and there would be less competition. This would lower Google’s® profits. This is, again, Turchin’s Wealth Pump in action. Google© wants H1-B workers because they’re virtual slaves that they can bring in that would be happy to live four to a pod because it’s better than the monsoon-drenched mud hut in India that is consistently destroyed by volcanoes or communists or bird flu or whatever they have in India.

During COVID, gatherings of more than 260 million were banned in India.

As I talked about stability a few posts back, ideology was one of the pillars of a stable society. Turchin pegs the 1950’s as the time of greatest ideological stability in the United States. People felt that (again, following Turchin’s list, which is similar to previous content here, so I don’t disagree much, though I add commentary to his list from p. 100):

Family was a man and a woman and kids. As I’ve discussed before, this is the atom of civilization, and has been since forever – other arrangements (polyandry, polygamy) tend to be unstable in large societies. Men want a mate. However, in 2023, the push is on to have “anything goes” as the basis for society. Out of wedlock babies? A scandal.
Men were men, women were women and men had men jobs and women had women jobs. Now we can’t even define what a woman is.
Natural bodies are better. Tats were for sailors and .mil folks, and weird piercings were borderline trashy and foreign.
Belonging to a religion was normal, divorce and being an atheist meant you weren’t going to be elected unless . . . no, no unless. Atheists were simply not trusted in positions of public power.

But look what progress has brought us! (Meme as found)

Turchin then talks about some of the things that kept the Wealth Pump in check – labor unions, minimum wages, progressive taxation, welfare, low immigration. I’d disagree on the impact and general consensus on, say, welfare, but in general. Many of those, however, coupled with a healthy export-focused economy with targeted tariffs created a situation where the middle class flourished and grew at the expense of the Elite. The Left and the Right were more or less together on the goal. It was Ike who warned us about the Wealth Pump, though Eisenhower described it this way:

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” He was a Republican wanting to make sure that the military remained sane, and that the most invulnerable weapon system wasn’t one where parts were made in every congressional district.

Now? Turchin notes, “The ideological center today resembles a country road in Texas, almost deserted save for the yellow stripe and dead armadillos.”

I wonder if they deserved to get hit by a car, if they’re karmadillos?

From the book: “In order for stability to return, elite overproduction somehow needs to be taken care of – historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.” Whoa! That’s radical, and I’m glad that Turchin is saying the quiet part out loud: something wicked this way comes. We all feel the tension, that’s why he sold thousands of copies of his book.

We know it’s coming. And why.

It’s the Wealth Pump. It’s not new, and it’s been the goal for a long, long time. Turchin quotes a 1901 edition of The Bankers’ Magazine:

“When business men were single units, each working out his own success regardless of others in desperate competition, the men who controlled the political organization were supreme . . . . But as the business of the country has learned the secret of combination, it is gradually subverting the power of the politician and rendering him subservient to its purposes . . . . Every form of business is capable of similar consolidation, and if other industries imitate the example of that concerned with iron and steel, it is easy to see that eventually the government of a country where the productive forces are all mustered and drilled under the control of a few leaders, must become the mere tool of these forces.”

This is the goal, not a meme, but this meme is as-found.

Again, wow. I’ve said before I have a strong distrust of big government, and the groups that really benefit from regulations are big businesses since those regulations form a barrier to entry to smaller groups. Who runs Bartertown? Big businesses do – who do you think hires the regulators after they “retire” from the government? If history is a guide, businesses are attempting to run government for their benefit – hence, the Wealth Pump.

Don’t believe me? You’re soaking in it. A longer quote from Turchin, (p. 129):

“The political scientist Martin Gilens . . . gathered a large data set – nearly 2000 policy issues between 1981 and 2002. Each case matched a proposed policy change to a nation opinion survey asking a favor/oppose question about the initiative. . . .

“Statistical analysis . . . showed that the preferences of the poor had no effect on policy changes.. . . . What is surprising is that there was no – zilch, nada – effect of the average voter. The main effect on the direction of change was due to the policy preferences of the affluent. There was also an additional effect of interest groups, the most influential ones being business-oriented lobbies. Once you include in the statistical model the preferences of the top 10 percent and the interest groups, the effect of the commoners is statistically indistinguishable from zero.”

Proof in a graph that voters don’t matter, since Brexit was about immigration.

Yup. They’re not listening. They don’t care that the majority has always wanted to deport, and deport promptly the unending stream of illegals invading our country. That’s not good for business, so the Left has (oddly?) picked this up as a Social Justice Warrior© mantra: “no human is illegal” meaning that they’re working to make actual workers, especially black workers, poorer.

SJW™? It’s just another term for the intellectual elite in the pocket of big business. Who would have thought that the SJW© would be on the same side as the military-industrial complex?

Stonetoss©, that’s who. (All Stonetoss™ comics are used with permission.)

Why do Social Justice Warriors hate dentists? They make teeth straight and white.

Part three of this review hits on Monday. And it’s a doozy – you won’t want to miss it.

Think Movies Suck Now? You’re Right.

“Freedom costs a buck-oh-five.” – Team America: World Police

I’ve lost to a computer at chess, but never at kickboxing.

I write about movies (and books) sometimes because they are important – very important. They are a part of the myths and backstory that defines a people and a country. Part of this entertainment is (often) a reflection of who we think we are, or who we aspire to be – those are the characters and stories that endure and grow over time.

Comedies certainly have their place, as well. Comedies can be rooted to universal truths that are (more or less) unchanging with time, think greed, yappy women, and farting. Yes. The oldest recorded joke in history that we have yet discovered is a (not very good) fart joke.

Why can’t you make fun of Steve Jobs dying? It’s not PC.

Part of comedy, especially movie comedy, is the unexpected. For that to happen, most of the time someone is the object of the joke – the person who is being made fun of. In comedy in the 1970s, that person was almost always a white male, and almost always was the father and was almost always on the Right.

Why?

Feminism. Comedy of the 1970s and onward was almost always written from the Leftist perspective. Think Archie Bunker, who ended up being popular in spite of them trying to make him a buffoon. Who had the first flush of the terlit on television? Archie. To make fun of white men who were on the Right.

Another tip: don’t use the toilet brush as a microphone when you sing in the shower.

Heck, when I was in junior high and wondering why the only funny things were Leftist (I was on the Right, even then). Then I read P.J. O’Rourke, and understood that it was more than possible, it was far, far funnier than Leftist humor ever imagined it could be.

The Right is funnier because the Right has Truth on its side.

For a long time, movies have been propaganda of one type or another. Top Gun? There’s a reason that the Navy spent millions to help make the movie – they approved the script.

There have been wild cards – people who make fun of everyone and everything – think Airplane. One that really pushed the boundaries was Team America: World Police. South Park used to be funny, back when the stories were about the kids. When the stories started to be about the adults? Less funny.

But Team America: World Police was something else. It made fun of jingoistic movies while at the same time gutting hard-Left, virtue signaling idiot actors like Sean Penn, Janeane Garofalo, Alec Baldwin, Michael Moore, Danny Glover, and Tim Robbins. They were all part of the Film Actors Guild, or F.A.G.

Yes. They went there. They also made fun of AIDS and homosexuals. And Moslems. And movies like Top Gun. The rumors are that the studio approved it because it was so politically incorrect, and might be cheap because it was made with puppets instead of actors.

I’m glad COVID didn’t come from a Chinese bear. Then we’d have had a pandademic.

Needless to say, making a movie that makes fun of any protected group is no longer allowed. Why are comedies dead? Because it gets really old, really fast, when the only person you can make fun of is the same person who buys all the movie tickets: heterosexual white Christian men who have XY chromosomes. You know, “literally Hitler”.

Comedy is now unfunny, mostly. Please feel free to leave exceptions in the comments. And movies as a whole are borderline unwatchable. Part of the collapse of the box office (and small theaters) was COVID. The other part is that movies suck.

The reason that movies suck is that they’re now just blatant propaganda, start to finish. The latest Marvel® movie, The Marvels™ is a commercial failure, and a box office flop. The studio is blaming the usual suspects: the actor’s strike, superhero fatigue, white supremacy, anti-feminism.

That’s easy.

Harder to face is that their stupid movie sucks.

This was even in his speeches . . . remember him saying, “Let me be clear”?

Why does it suck? It’s about women that don’t need no man. Oh, and couples who have kids don’t want to spend money to have their kids watch Gay Buzz Lightyear™ and ask questions about why Buzz© has two mommies. That’s it.

Who is the primary consumer of superhero movies? White men. Who is the primary consumer of movies for children? People capable of making children, which, for every year in the history of mankind before 2020, were known as “men” and “women”.

Yes, white men like to look at attractive women in skintight costumes, but only the most Leftist is willing to sit and watch a movie that makes fun of them and marginalizes them.

Why does Marvel© (and Disney™) lose money? Because they forgot who buys the tickets.

Men.

I’ve gotten to the point that, unless I’ve heard about a movie, if it was made in the last four years, it’s a hard pass, even if it looks interesting. The movies started going south in, say, 2018. My take is that was a reaction to Trump. It so triggered nearly everyone who writes or acts in a movie that all they wanted to do was attack a relatively Centrist guy who just happened to be President.

What do your get if you take an entire human digestive tract and lay it out on a football field? Arrested.

The reaction led to . . . crap. Every Leftist simply had to get their message out that trans was the new normal and white men were awful and stupid and that NASA stuff on the Moon was a fluke. Oh, they tried to take credit for that, too. Because white guys, you know, can’t do math.

I also noticed it with books. I was a lifelong reader of science fiction – I loved the ideas. Then, around 2010, I started to notice that the books in Barnes and Noble® mainly . . . sucked. I thought it was me. I thought I was old and jaded. But, nope, I read some of the old stuff and it was still great.

Science fiction was destroyed by The Narrative, too. The people who picked the books that made it to the shelves only picked Leftist crap filled with weak people who hated themselves and hated everything True, Beautiful, and Good. In this breakup, it wasn’t me, it was them.

They came for comics and killed them. They came for books and killed them. Lastly, they came for movies, and killed them. Every book and every movie has a message, and most are propaganda of some sort or another, for good or bad. Propaganda to get kids to brush their teeth? That’s good.

But propaganda to turn them into self-loathing transexuals? That’s 100% against the True, the Beautiful, and the Good.

This was the 2022 “woman” of the year. Guess guys do everything better.

Watch what goes into your mind. Watch what goes into the minds of your children. Help them to aspire to be noble and virtuous and strong. Help them to understand that jokes about yappy, farting women have been funny for 4,000 years, and will be funny for as long as women fart.

There are still good books out there. There are still good movies, though they are uncommon, since the rot is very, very deep. But freedom?

It still costs a buck-o-five.

How The Left Is Changing Society, And How To Fight: Part II

“You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords.” – Serenity

What do you call a two dead parrots? Pollygons.

This is part two of the series on social structures and control.

Most (stress on “most”) Western Nations adopted a modified version of a new social order between 1776 and 1920. It looked like this:

Absent or Figurehead Monarch: The idea of absolute rule by King melted away, and was essentially done in the first world by 1920. I mean, we dudes all still dream about it, but it’s gone.
Government Bureaucrats: The core of government power now flowed into an unelected bureaucracy that was, more or less, immune to election. When governed by a Constitution, this was good. When governed by avarice, not so much. Thankfully, most of the bureaucrats in the twentieth century were governed by bad eyesight and a to close the window for lunch, if the DMV is any clue.
Elected Leadership: The idea that elected leaders subject to the will of the people would be the ones to run the government was a noble one. Sadly, we started electing at least some dirtbags from the start.
Military Leaders: A professional military, generally subservient to the civilian leaders but still with cool uniforms.
Clergy: A strong church presence, though unofficial, was still the backbone of the country’s morality. Some priests even became lawyers, or what we would call a father-in-law.
Constitution: At least in the United States, the Constitution was the basis of civic religion for the majority of the people. In other countries, there were other things, like Great Britain and the King or Queen or Meghan Markle. It was a basis for the foundation of the nation (or, country).
Big Business: In the twentieth century, big business (including big banking) finally grew to the point that it was able to be a primary force in society, providing products and jobs for the voters, donations for the leadership class, and, apparently, lots of fedoras.
Middle Class: This was the engine of prosperity – working to build the economy. For a large part of the twentieth century government policy was focused on increasing this segment, since they were the spark plugs that both worked the line for GM® as well as ran the plants.
Lower Class: The big goal of most first world nations was to shrink this class, through education and sometimes direct payments. Making them productive, it was felt, would be a win for civilization as a whole.

Although not optimum, this version of civilization was built on a solid structure that focused on the atom: the family. It tried to take feedback from voters, protect their rights, and create wealth and happiness for most. It was an example of what happens when the people and the economy and the government more or less agree on virtue as the basis of society.

If honesty is a virtue, why doesn’t anyone want to hear the truth?

Yes, there were flaws. But compared to today?

The flaws were miniscule. It actually worked very, very well. For a while. But what was happening when the Left was in charge? Well, you got a very, very different structure.

That’s not the power structure of most modern-day dictatorships. That power structure assumes a Dear Leader, secret police, no church, a frightened military, and everyone else shoved into the frightened peasant class. The culture there has nothing to do with any traditions, has nothing to do with religion, has nothing to do with trust (trust no one is the motto in lands with a secret police) and has nothing to do with Truth, Virtue or Beauty, since those are viciously stamped down if they conflict with the will of Dear Leader.

Dear Leader: The top was an individual. Certainly, there were committees, but the basis was an individual. Lenin. Mao. Kim. The government didn’t revolve around them: they were the government.
Secret Police: Dear Leader can’t be everywhere, all the time, so the next best thing was a hated and feared secret police. Is it better to be hated or feared? If you are Dear Leader, you want both. You want the people to fear the secret police, but you also want the people to hate the secret police so that they could never govern.
Scared, Weak Military: Dear Leader needs a military, but they need to be scared of being replaced or killed.
Scared, Weak Bureaucrats: If the guys with tanks are scared, what hope do they have?
Scared, Weak Everyone Else: If the guys who assign Boris his Commieflat are scared, what hope does Boris have?

What size soda does Kim order? A supreme liter.

The atom of a dictatorship isn’t a family, it’s an individual. The goal of a dictatorship is weak families and no middle class. The goal is to create distrust and to have parents not trust their children, nor spouses trust each other. One of the first actions of the commie Spanish Republic was to make abortion legal, and eliminate marriages because they wanted to “make women equal”.

The reality was the Spanish commies wanted to destroy family ties so that the state was the unquestioned leader. This creates a different kind of stability – one based on constant fear and no trust. I wonder if that sounds familiar to anyone?

We are watching most of the Western World morphing from their old structure into the structures that Dear Leader would love.

Uniparty: Most of the Democrat mainstream and Republican mainstream have the same “values”, with only a variation or two. The Republicans acted like the neighborhood dog that finally caught the car when the Supreme Court revoked the absolute right of women to kill babies “because it’s Tuesday” and had no real plans. Abortion was a fundraiser, not a real issue to them.
Converged Bureaucrats: Bureaucrats in the FedGov are now out only for themselves and the bureaucracy they serve. The ATF doesn’t care if you have guns, really. The ATF just wants to have funding and to be able to shoot the family dog on Tuesdays.
Incipient Police State: Don’t think we have a police state that hands out unfair punishments? Type “January 6” into a search engine sometime . . .
A Vanishing Clergy: Church used to be an important touchstone – in the 1950s some banks wouldn’t give a mortgage if the pastor of your church didn’t speak favorably about your character. Extreme? Probably not – it kept a place in the community for virtue. The goal of the Left is that they have the monopoly on defining virtue. Hey, Live, Laugh, Love, right?
A Captive Press: When was the last time anyone in the Mainstream Media actually tried to challenge The Narrative? Oh, yeah, Tucker Carlson.
Twisted Constitution: The Constitution of the United States was written on plain language so the common citizen could understand it. Now? Emanations and penumbras and twisting of “thou shalt not” into “thou shalt” has made Constitutional law like a game of limbo – how low can you go? That the Civil Rights Act is now more important than actual Constitutional protections is all you need to know.
Subservient Military: Obama spent a lot of time and effort clearing out high-level officers in the military that weren’t on the Left. Notice that none of the top brass pushed back against the vaxx mandate?
Big Business: Big business has always had inordinate power due to their size and the amount of money they control (this includes big banks). During the last 40 years big business has dominated and destroyed most profitable small business niches. This results in a . . .
Much Smaller Middle Class: The middle class is smaller and poorer than at any time in my life. This is getting ready (over the next two years) to get much worse.
Everyone else: This is the goal – that 80% plus of the population are stuck, working paycheck to paycheck, unable to accumulate wealth, and having their saved money inflated away.

The values of this brave new world aren’t anchored by any sort of church. Values in 2023 move around every day at the whim of the Left. It’s all coordinated, too. Whatever value that they want is pushed through channels to the public, often with movies and television shows backing it up using emotionally laden content to transmit the message. Remember those “very special episodes”? Yup, all of them were propaganda.

But he was such a good boy. Never hurt anyone.

They had left the Internet and alternative media alone. Probably, it was left for a safety valve and because most Normies get their news and opinions from Mainstream sources. In reality, especially in the aftermath of Trump being meme’d into office in 2016, the hammer has started to come down. Information wants to be free, but the Left has taken the Dear Leader approach to information.

Ever notice that comment segments on news stories went from “nearly every news story has one” to “Comment section? What’s that?” in a span of just a few years? The problem was that people in the comment section were making too much sense. The people in the comment section were exposing the lies in the news stories. They had to be dealt with.

Websites like mine have been “detuned” from the search algorithms. This makes it harder for normies to find places that have unapproved ideas. YouTube® has veered into censorship, having kicked podcasts off the air for simply arguing against the vaxx or agreeing with the very real possibility that the 2020 elections were hijacked.

My computer started to cuss after the processor got too hot. I had to install a heat censor.

But not all is lost. Elon Musk has made “Community Notes” a thing. They’re a way to point out the Lies of the Left and those that hate Truth, Beauty, Steak, Families, and Nations.

This is how they’re targeting us, and how they have targeted us over decades. The wonderful part is that we have Truth, Beauty, Steak, Families and the power of Nations on our side. And people are waking up – 30% to 40% of all voters (not just those on the Right) believe the 2020 election was illegitimate. This is despite widespread censorship of this idea.

Keep spreading the Truth. Practice virtue and push your church (if you have one) to be more virtuous, rather than another Leftist conquest. Starve Big Business, when you can. Buying from local farmers gives them more money and keeps the money away from people who hate you.

If your misery is caused by paranoia, I can tell you you’re not alone.

We can’t wait until plate tectonics splits California off into an island, and the good news is that we won’t have to. As I’ve said before, we will win.

We are inevitable.

Bikinis, Garbage Loans, And Fishy Finance

“A 30-year mortgage at Michael’s age essentially means that he’s buying a coffin. Now, if I were buying my coffin, I would get one with thicker walls.” – The Office

Most garbage workers don’t get official training. They pick it up as they go along.

The Big Solution to the Great Recession was printing lots of money. I would have (back then) thought that it would have hit the economy all at once. In reality, what the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury did was send all that money they printed off to the banks.

The banks didn’t lend it. They kept it on the books, and in fact many of them redeposited their free money with the Fed™. In reality, the Fed© was scared about was the entire system locking up. It was pretty bad in 2009 – basic chemicals that were necessary (say, sulfuric acid) for a basic, functioning economy just stopped production.

No one knew who had money, or who would have money. As one friend of mine noted at the time, “When the tide goes out, you finally see who isn’t wearing swimming trunks.”

My office above a bank, my assets over tens of millions of dollars.

The inflation stayed “within target” for the Fed™, flipping up and down around 2% during the decade following. Again, with all of the money printed, I expected it to be more, and I still don’t trust the official government figures on inflation since that would be like trusting a used-car salesman on that gently used 1995 Ford Taurus© with only 350,000 miles on it.

COVID was the final straw, though. People produced less stuff, so there was a lower supply. The government printed a lot more money and then gave it to everyone, who most definitely didn’t save it, and in fact bid prices up on everything. Making nothing and buying everything?

Inflation. Or my ex-wife.

Inflation finally triggered interest rates to go up. That posed a problem for the banks. Let’s take me: I have a small mortgage left on Stately Wilder Manor. I’m in no hurry to pay it off because I can get a CD for 5.5%, but my mortgage is only 4%.

How did Metallica stop people from pirating their music? They started releasing garbage.

My mortgage is worth less to the banks now than I owe on it – if I were another bank, they’d sell it to me for less than I owe. That’s a problem for banks that have exposure to mortgages and didn’t sell them off or hedge them.

It’s not just mortgages – Silicon Valley Bank® decided to invest in lots of long-term bonds and such because inflation had been so low. Buy a corporate bond yielding 4%, pay depositors 1%, and profit!

But when interest rates started heading upward, the same sort of math as with the bank that owns my mortgage applies – what used to be worth $100 is now only worth, say, $80. Oops. When the people who put hundreds of millions of dollars into the bank, money that wasn’t insured, find out?

Bank funs. Er, bank runs.

And it’s gone . . .

How bad was it? Of the $172 billion deposited at the bank, only 11% was covered by deposit insurance. I imagine that there were quite a few tense billionaires like Oprah worried that she’d have to get a job at the McDonald’s® drive through, and how could she resist those perfectly salty fries?

Since billionaires were in danger, the FDIC immediately said, “Rules? Who needs those. All money is safe in Bartertown!”

My initial expectation is that we’d see more bank failures right around now as interest rates increased and the piles of garbage on the balance sheets of the banks started to rot. Instead? Banks are still (I believe) happily lending money borrowed by the Fed™.

How do they do it? They manage to do it by having the Fed© allow them to mark their assets to what they paid for them, not what they’re worth. So, they’re lying. I’m fairly certain the Fed™ is buying this stuff to get it off the balance sheets of the banks and lending them more money whenever they don’t have enough caviar.

Does the Sturgeon General recommend caviar?

The rot, though, is still there – it’s only a matter of who pays for the rot. Debt always gets paid, the old saying goes, either by the borrower or by the lender. I do know of two local businesses that are going bankrupt. Their debt is what drove the bankruptcy. My guess is that, combined, they have a debt of a million and a half dollars (or so). Who will pay it? In the end, the lender will.

I think that might be at least part of the big jump in debt that the United States owes. As interest rates go up, Uncle Sam is acting like a raccoon and jumping straight into the trash can to eat the garbage loans and bonds that the banks had to throw out because they were stinking up the fridge. Here’s proof:

England doesn’t have a kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.

Eventually, printing lots and lots of money is like a magic trick the magician does one too many times and everyone sees how it works. Will it work this time?

Unrelated, frequent commenter Ray notes this Give Send Go. I’ll let him explain more. GiveSendGo – Loco Needs Divorce from Prostate: The Leader in Freedom Fundraising.

Globalism, Computer Chips, And Breast Implants

“Bart, the Internet is more than a global pornography network.” – The Simpsons

Biden shooting the Chinese Spy Balloon® is the only thing he’s done to fight inflation so far.

It’s all about the chain.

A global supply chain has some attributes. Just like money is freely (in most cases) able to cross borders, in a global system labor can cross borders as well, without ever having to leave home. People in (spins wheel) Bangladesh work for $0.0010 an hour sewing soccer balls? If they’re as productive (per dollar) as having a machine and skilled operator in the United States do it, the work went to Bangladesh.

This is (if you’re in Bangladesh) probably a good thing since your alternative was farming spider webs or whatever it is that people in Bangladesh eat. In theory, it’s good for the company that sells soccer balls, since they can (not saying they will, but they can) price them lower, and still produce a profit. It also would appeal to the women who play soccer while their husbands are in the kitchen doing the dishes in Europe.

Why did the Italian join Tinder®? He was provalonely.

But what it doesn’t do is help the highly-skilled guy who used to make them in a non-spider web eating country. In fact, over time the knowledge of all the little tricks that are necessary to make soccer balls cheaply and effectively are lost as they’re transported to Bangladesh.

This might not be such a big deal when it comes to soccer balls, because you can (in a pinch) use the heads of your enemies for one, which would make soccer my favorite sport, ever. But when it comes to things like computer chips, well, that’s a different story. I believe it was the head of the Economic Advisors of George H.W. Bush’s White House who made the comment that he didn’t care if Americans were making potato chips or computer chips as long as they had a job. Oddly, G.H.W. Bush hadn’t had had a job for decades, so, why not?

The question even I don’t know the answer to: is this my last inflation joke?

Bush’s advisor was wrong. While Americans were making potato chips, places like Taiwan Semiconductor were making computer chips. Likewise, they were learning how to make them. Knowing what’s on a computer chip is nice, but it doesn’t tell me about all the of the steps required to make structures that are so very small that we’re near the limit of shrinking chips because the of the size of the silicon atom itself. Yeah. It’s that complicated. But, hey, we have Ruffles® instead of knowing how to do that.

Making chips of such precision took literally decades of investment, billions of dollars in research, and replicating it is very, very hard, unless you’re China and steal the secrets while putting “your people” in sensitive positions in corporations that do the work. Oh, did I just describe every industry?

No, there’s an absolute advantage to making computer chips over potato chips. Building computer chips takes knowledge but it also builds knowledge, some of which can result in additional, new businesses that make use of the technologies developed in building computer chips. Imagine, a PEZ® dispenser a billionth of an inch (40 Newtons) tall! This was what the Soviets dreamed of!

Speaking of names, because of inflation, Dollar Tree® will soon be calling itself Tree Dollar®.

It’s not just the high technology parts that go into nearly every appliance, car, and weapons system that is used in the United States, it also applies to commodities like sweet, sweet oil. It also applies to rare-earth minerals, which China (currently) leads the world in production.

But rare-earth minerals aren’t all that rare – we have them in the United States, but don’t have active mines and refining processes. Why? It’s expensive to mine here (labor costs) and it’s expensive to mine here (environmental compliance costs). So, it’s cheaper to ship the mining off to China and just let them do the dirty work since they (at least in the past) don’t seem to care about losing a few million people to escalators, building collapse, explosions, or whatever other dystopian nightmare you can imagine.

How does a mollusk hide from predators? Clamoflage.

The downside of this global civilization is that it’s pretty tightly wound. In most cases, companies don’t like to stockpile “stuff” so they have it delivered just when it’s needed and don’t have a big supply sitting in a warehouse. When writing for a post a few years ago, I wanted to know how much grain was sitting in the silos near Modern Mayberry (which is near the silos that produced the grain).

The answer surprised me – the silos were nearly always one-half to two-thirds full. Whoever is making the bread doesn’t want the wheat until they’re ready for it – they certainly don’t store it on site until it’s much closer to becoming a loaf.

COVID exposed the supply chain, and the panic response of the public. Toilet paper was in short supply not because there wasn’t enough toilet paper, but rather because there wasn’t enough toilet paper capacity to produce 1,000 roles for every person today.

If I had a $0.05 for every bread joke I’ve told, I’d have a pun per nickel.

As warfare hits Ukraine and Israel (and maybe the wider Middle East) and as tensions rachet with China over the status of Taiwan, which just happens to lead the world in computer chip manufacturing, we’ll soon see if the globalism that we’ve faced is as fatal to the fate of nations as it was to so many million middle-class jobs in the United States. When we (by default) import Bangladeshi labor along with the millions of illegal aliens that we destroy, we (by default, eventually) import the Bangladeshi lifestyle.

Pardon me, I need to research how to cook spider webs.

Maybe The Kids Are Alright?

“We’re a generation of men raised by women. I’m wondering if another woman is really the answer we need.” – Fight Club

The French love my generation. They say it has a certain Gen X sais quoi.

I can see what’s going on, I really can. To be fair, there are dozens of things, each day that I see that are signs of The Change. In many ways, The Change has been coming for decades, and has hit us harder than old age has hit Madonna.

Many of the changes we’ve seen are negative. I generally write about them on Mondays and Wednesdays. But Fridays? No. Because despite of all of the negatives that I see, I am as certain as the outcome of a vote if a Leftist is counting it that we will win.

What does winning mean? Well, it doesn’t mean that things will go back to “the way they were” – whatever that was. We won’t see that because those times are gone. The new good times will be different in many ways. Some I can guess because they’re inevitable, and some I can’t even fathom.

No, winning means a place for freedom and families and the things we associate with virtue. It doesn’t mean endless wealth, and it doesn’t mean endless amusement.

Why is Michael Jackson bad at bowling? He’s dead.

The big reason that this cannot last is because the current trend is the most unnatural and unstable in the history of humanity, with a few potential exceptions here and there that only lasted for a few decades.

This instability is in our favor. We can already see that the current boys in high school are fed up with Leftism and everything Woke. They’re done with it. They see that Leftism is poison. They’re rejecting it.

One reason is simple – it’s in the nature of youth to rebel. And, the Leftists having won so many battles are now The Man. They’re the ones the boys are rebelling against, and it’s glorious. The Leftists thought that when they took over and had the ability to control what went in the minds, that was the end of the story.

Yet, the Leftists still think they’re rebels working against the system when they manifestly are the system. The boys in school can see that, and they react accordingly, completely making those Leftists spitting out the propaganda go crazy. The Leftists are like like that guy who is in his forties and still is wearing his letter jacket because he wants the kids to think he’s cool. Now, based on every picture I’ve seen of every Leftist, the word “cool” isn’t remotely the first word I’d use to describe them. It’s not in the top 100. In reality, they fall somewhere lower than “turd stooge”.

The Three Stooges can do anything. They have Moementum.

This turns off the boys. Now, the girls are another subject altogether because the feminist imperative to teach the gospel of avoiding consequences of actions at all costs seems to resonate with them. In the turmoil to come, it’s the views of the boys that will matter the most.

The youth has also seen the fruits of Peak Leftism and are disgusted by it. Just like Gen X was shaped by the time they grew up in, being latchkey kids that learned from an early age to be independent, Gen Z is learning lessons about not trusting the government.

Their pivotal moment (so far) was the insane combination of COVID plus the Fentanyl Floyd riots. They see that their concept of “equal justice for all” has been tainted by racial politics to twist a system where punishment is based not on the crimes committed, but rather by the victim status of the alleged criminal.

Over three years, drug free!

How will that manifest? I think it will manifest in a deep distrust of the justice system, and I think that it will lead to, ahem, extrajudicial endings to criminal cases.

They’re also viewing the world and seeing it fall apart with cops that are prevented from arresting mobs looting stores week after week. As I believe white Gen Xers were propagandized to be the least racist generation in the history of humanity, I believe that white Gen Z kids will view race the same way black Gen Z kids will, with huge distrust.

The next thing in the mix is what hasn’t happened yet – the economic changes that are due. Just as there is a distrust being built up in the justice and governmental systems, there will be a distrust of money being created out of nothing. The system is going to, very soon, fail them in a spectacular way.

The economic changes will change them. We’ll still be able to send billions to the Ukraine, but it won’t matter because a billion won’t buy a Happy Meal®.

In the Ukraine it’s called corruption. In the United States we don’t talk about it.

Gen X was cynical. Gen Z will likely be a force of nature. If they aren’t the hard men, Gen Alpha will be. We’re that close, folks.

The pendulum is swinging back, and will swing back with a vengeance. We really have reached Peak Woke or Peak Clown World (honk honk!) and it’s here. I’ll see the start of The Change, but likely won’t live to see the next Golden Age.

That’s okay. I know it will be back, and I know this – there will be free men living on this world as long as there are men living on this world. There are ups and downs, but nothing is finished, this isn’t over.

We will win because we are strong. And we will win because for thousands of years we’ve been winning, and that won’t stop anytime soon, no matter how dark it looks outside right now.

Enjoy your day. It’s dark out, but the ending to this story will be glorious.

The Invisible Recession

“1000 points of light . . . recession bad, recovery good . . . I think I’ve got that.” – The Naked Gun 2 ½: The Smell of Fear

Inflation has really started to bite here in Modern Mayberry. I’m not sure about the Big Cities, but I’ve begun to notice it around here. Today at lunch I made a trip to McDonald’s®. It’s rare, most of the time (if I eat lunch at all) I eat at home. It’s more convenient, and I really, really hate lines, but this was a late lunch and I could drive straight to the window. But hey, for me, it’s the McChicken®.

The prices at McDonald’s® have gotten silly. Whereas there used to be enough value in a Big Mac™ to make one of them (occasionally) worth it, it’s just not the case nowadays. I didn’t spend too much time pondering the price on any of the burgers, since I could get nearly a pound of steak for the price of the average burger-fries-drink combos. But again, for me, it’s the McChicken™.

What a fun, cool, happening place, if you can get 3-for-free!

Why are people not going out?

The prices are silly.

I think (and I might be wrong) that our local McDonald’s™ just has to match the prices that are (more or less) nationally set by some sweaty accountant in Chicago wearing a Grimace™ costume and questioning the life choices that led him to have to report every day to Stacy, who is forced to wear a Hamburgler© costume. I can’t see the labor around Modern Mayberry costing nearly as much as in a bigger city. The food, I would imagine, costs exactly the same as in the bigger cities.

The result? I’ve noticed that the lines are much shorter at the local fast-food restaurants, even at peak hours. One of the regional chains hasn’t raised their prices, since all of their restaurants are just scattered around Upper Lower Midwestia and they don’t have to worry about the price of a Quarter Pounder™ in Manhattan. Their lines are the longest in town, so I follow Yogi Berra’s advice, “Nobody goes there anymore, that place is too crowded.”

Since COVID, my favorite local restaurant has closed. It was a bona fide restaurant, great service, great food. Supply chain issues coupled with labor oddities and lower business slowly torpedoed them. They liquidated before they lost a lot of money – they saw what was coming and wanted to go out on their terms.

I’ve been told that McDonald’s™ was sued once for bugs in their food. They won the case – no one on the jury believed they used any natural ingredients.

And our world got a little bit smaller, so we now have dinner somewhere else. It’s cheaper, but I notice that both of the places that we normally go aren’t very busy anymore. And the waitresses that work there aren’t changing jobs anymore – the good ones are keeping their jobs now. Something tells me they’re a little harder to get now.

So, if you’re counting restaurants and the people who work there (and those that used to own them) Modern Mayberry definitely has fewer restaurants. The revenue in the town might be the same, but there are (my guess) 20% fewer customers.

This is the invisible recession.

I always carry some McDonald’s® fries when I walk the dogs in winter. Fries go great with chilly dogs.

It’s invisible because I’d imagine that, even though McDonald’s® is (visually) selling less McFood©, they’re charging more. So, higher prices times lower volume is probably about even. But the value created to the consumer is far, far less even though revenues might be neutral. Unless you count eating healthier food than McDonald’s™ makes as value. Heck, Ronald has killed more people than Pennywise.

I suspect this is going on everywhere. Wages are certainly not keeping up with daily expenses, and those who are less fortunate haven’t had raises that have kept up with inflation. And why should employers pay more? In a recent month, a net 1.2 million jobs were “created” but 600,000 Americans lost their jobs. They were replaced by immigrants (illegal or legal).

Thankfully, corporate profits were saved!

It’s better than when he ran the farm using Artificial Intelligence and had to reboot it all before the power outage – AI, AI, Oh.

Interest rates are up, and I expect they will continue to go up because there is no semblance of any fiscal adulthood in Washington, D.C. on either side of the ball. The Democrat mantra of “spend more” is always followed by the Republican response of, “Well, okay, but not quite that much” as the dance of the destruction of the currency continues.

I hope I’m wrong, but this is based on the bet that politicians will continue to be weak and craven, and that 2024 is an election year. What do politicians like during an election year? A good economy with low inflation. Failing that, politicians like distractions and spreading money out like AOC on a Saturday night. If you can’t make a good economy, fake one.

More money floating around means . . . more inflation. But if wages aren’t going up because there’s a massive influx of illegals?

Just more misery, especially for those at the lower end of the pay scale. All of the typical Leftist voting blocks will be rewarded, of course. The standard Leftie professor at the average Leftie college (but I mostly repeat myself) will get raises because the Left takes care of itself and funds itself. The Left believes in the state and uses it as a propaganda and funding arm. Why do drama programs get special federal funds?

Because they vote Left.

I guess the finale was shot before a live audience.

But real Americans that aren’t tied into the ecosystem of government gimmes are seeing their difficulties multiply. Me? I’ll still mainly skip McDonald’s© and save a few bucks and have more steaks and fewer fries. But the invisible recession is already here, at least in Modern Mayberry.

But, hey, for me? It’s the McChicken™.