Elon Musk Week – Page 8 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

GameStop: The Tip Of The Corruption Iceberg

“And pruned the hedges of many small villages.” – Three Amigos

Amazing what happens when you find the world is corrupt . . . .

GameStop®.

In a world filled with COVID-19 shutdowns and Internet sites where you can download nearly any game ever made for low prices, it seemed like a sure thing that GameStop™ would fail. Except . . . people liked going. The profits weren’t through the roof, and the business model was older. Heck, the last time I was in a GameStop™ was over eight years ago, and about half the shelf space was pop-culture memorabilia and nerd toys, not games.

Never mess with weaponized autism.

Seeing this, the Wizards of Wall Street® decided to “short” GameStop™. I’ll explain what that is, and I promise you my analogy will be far funnier than what CNN© does unintentionally – and that’s a high bar.

Let’s pretend that you and I are friends. You brought the latest Pac-Man© cartridge game. Since you trust me, you lend it to me.

Addled on Monster™ Energy Drink© and chicken tendies, I waddle down to the local GameStop©. Since there is a relative shortage of Pac-Man™, GameStop™ offers me $50 for the cartridge. I pocket it and go home.

Two months later, you sober up and remember I borrowed your vidya game, and ask for it back. I waddle my greasy fingers down to GameStop© and buy a used cartridge. It’s not the original one that you lent me, sure, but you’ll never know the difference, not with your hygiene.

Since Atari© has made a metric buttload of additional Pac-Man© cartridges, the price to buy a used version is now $30. I buy it. I give it back to you. I pocket the $20, and no one is the wiser.

Last week was like no other . . .

That’s a short sale. I borrowed a commodity – one Pac-Man© video game cartridge (minor wear and tear excluded) is functionally exactly the same as any other Pac-Man™ cartridge.

That’s (sort of) what the hedge funds were trying to do with the shares of GameStop©, but with one crucial difference: the price went up. And they sold more shares of GameStop™ than exist.

That can happen in two ways. The first is legal. If I owned 100 shares of GameStop©, my broker could loan them to someone going short. They’re selling legal, actual shares. I might really, really, like GameStop™, so maybe I buy 100 more.

My account says that I have 200 shares of GameStop© now. I think I have 200 shares of GameStop™, but in reality, my broker only has 100. The same thing happens in a fractional reserve bank (like your bank) in that if you put $100 in, the bank might loan it all out. You think you have $100, but that $100 was loaned to someone. Just like shorting a stock, it sounds illegal, but it’s not.

So how does that work with my previous analogy?

Ahh, in a perfect world.

It’s exactly the same. If the price of Pac-Man© goes from $50 to $30, then I make $20. But if there’s a fire at the Pac-Man© cartridge plant in Roswell, New Mexico (because they use alien slave-labor from Arcturus to make them), and the price goes up to $100?

I’m out $50. But how often do the Arcturans revolt? Not often.

So, we’ve seen how my little deal could go wrong. But how wrong could it get? Infinitely wrong. Let’s say that I do this with 1000 Pac-Man© games, since it’s a sure thing. So, GameStop© gives me $50,000. Now I just sit and wait.

Yup, the hedgies lost billions.

But the fire thing happens. And since everyone else sold all of their friend’s Pac-Man© games before the factory caught fire, the price goes up. Way up. Like up twenty times in price. Let’s see, 20 times $50 is . . . $1,000 a copy. So now, since I borrowed that $50,000 in hopes of making $20,000 when the price went down, I’m actually in really bad shape.

I owe 1000 games times $1,000 dollars. I owe my friends, collectively, $1,000,000.

Ooops.

Musk is no fan of short sellers since they tried to destroy Tesla® a few years ago.

This is what the hedge funds did. And since (I believe) some of them are what is known as a “market-maker” they have 21 days to come up with those games (shares). 21 days is forever, so don’t worry about those billionaires – most of them are still billionaires – they just will have to wait until next month to buy that second volcano island death lair.

This is the situation that the Reddit© group r/wallstreetbets found – GameStop© was horribly oversold by hedge funds, and just a few people buying could start pushing the price up.

At one point, one of the r/wallstreetbets early investors in the short squeeze was up $48,000,000. That’s not a typo.

With a short, there’s a lot of power as the price goes up. The Hedge Fund Leech that runs the hedge fund starts to get nervous, and adds to the buying pressure as he tries to buy stocks to “cover his short.” This actually increases the price, sometimes causing it to go upward. A lot upward.

If that was all that happened, it would have been an amusing story. Wall Street Leeches get one-upped by message-board posters. Ha ha!

Something wonderful about that, right?

But that’s not all that happened. Immediately, the news media, (some) trading houses (most notably Robinhood©) and the talking heads began talking about how this was bad. The people who normally distort the economy and screw over the middle class don’t really like it when the weapons that they use are used against them.

Google®? Not on your side.

Well, actually none of them are on your side.

Huh. And they invest big dollars for that privilege. How much money have they given Janet Yellen, Secretary of the Treasury? A lot.

Whose side is Joltin’ Janet on? Not yours.

Last week on Thursday and Friday the powers that be told the markets to “shut down” the Internet Freedom Party raid on the financial leaches. In fact, several articles extolled how the Hedge Fund Leeches were the real heroes.

I’m feeling so sorry for him!

It’s a big game, but you and I are not supposed to play. You’re supposed to buy shares in your 401K so the Hedge Fund Leeches can take your money and collude with each other to own the economy. The free market is, in principle, a great thing. People buy and sell. The market allows the prices to be shared by all.

Well, I used to be the guy in front.

But Monday? Someone spent a quarter billion dollars to depress GameStop©. It’s analyzed here (thanks to r/wallstreetbets):

Also, people forget this: there were Hedge Funds on the other side of the deal. Vampires don’t need prices to go down, they can also make money when prices are going up.

Who knew that Karen ran the SEC?

No. Big players distort prices, they sell and buy options to make money on stocks that they intend to dump for short term profits after manipulating the markets. That this financial vampirism actually destroys companies, jobs, and communities?

And they will call you anything to make a buck.

Who cares? Not the Wall Street Hedge Leeches. Here’s Tucker Carlson with a discussion about one Wall Street Hedge Leach destroying an entire town in Nebraska. For a few million bucks. They would do that to you, your family, and everyone you know for a 2% return.

If you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention.

None of this is financial advice, you hosers. So, take off, eh. All of the memes are “as found” on the Internet.

Time, Treasure, and Talent: Three Gifts To Be Thankful For

“We paid him in gratitude and life lessons.” – Psych

But it’s what we got.

The other day I went to McDonalds®. This is not a usual thing, because the McDonalds® in Modern Mayberry is run and staffed by people who (really) once gave me a bare McMuffin™ instead of the Sausage McMuffin™ with Egg© that I had asked for. Some of the folks who work there (not all of them) couldn’t spell dog if you spotted them a “d” and a “g”.

I ended up going there because The Mrs. asked if I wanted to have lunch with her and one of her relatives. I was intended to get the food. When I asked what she wanted, she said, “Surprise me.” Since I like spending time with The Mrs., I agreed. Since we never went to McDonalds™, I figured that would surprise her.

The Mrs. said to meet at noon. Immediately the calculations went off in my mind:

It will take me fifteen minutes to get to McDonalds®.
It will take 10 minutes in the drive-through at McDonalds™. In Modern Mayberry, McDonalds© isn’t fast food, it’s convenient food (at least when they get the order right).
It’s another 10 minutes to the relative’s house.

To be on time, I’d have to leave home 35 minutes before lunch. Simple. And, as it turned out, my timing was exactly (nearly to the minute) correct. But my biggest revelation of the trip was this: to feed three people a warm lunch from the drive-through cost $23.74and took 20 extra minutes from my life.

I bought lunch for the three of us (again, with me eating light) and I did the math – with the cost of my lunch deducted, each of them could have had a one pound ribeye steak and side dishes if we cooked it ourselves I and could have done that in 20 minutes or less.

Oh, sure, you say, who would want a one pound ribeye steak when one could have a box of ten lukewarm chicken McNuggets®?

Well, me.

Well, I guess McDonalds® has a pretty sophisticated social media group.

And that brought me to today’s thought. It’s the week of Thanksgiving and I already hit gratitude, but I’m going to drive that psych-out home with this post, too.

Gratitude is being grateful for the gifts that you are given. That implies that you use those gifts wisely. The biggest gift is the only one that we all get right out of the box when we are born:

Time.

Time. It’s been a subject that has fascinated me since I discovered that there are irreversible processes. You can’t unbreak a glass. You can’t uncrash a car. And you can’t undo intentionally leaking all the ink from 20 or so pens on an oak hardwood floor under your bed and drawing pictures of horses when you are three.

My parents were really chapped about that last one. Oh, they weren’t happy about the car, either.

Each of us only has so much time. It’s both a blessing and a curse that (most of us) don’t know how much time that is. It’s a blessing because we can face life unafraid without knowing our fate. It’s a curse because we might waste our Time.

Literally the first item in my search for the term “time”. I could have picked another term, but ain’t nobody got time for that.

Waste of anything we have is a failure to show gratitude. We are each given our measure of Time. To waste it? You are wasting everything that your life is made of, and what you could achieve. To be clear – your achievement isn’t for you, it’s for the future of mankind. What are you doing with those precious moments that you have to make the future of mankind better?

Or, at least you could use your time to get on the cover of The Rolling Stone.

Even if you aren’t religious (to be clear, I am), this duty is simple – what are you doing to make the world better?

Don’t waste your Time.

The second thing that you can waste is your Treasure. Good heavens – when I looked at the prices I paid for lukewarm McNuggets® compared to the cost of a home grilled steak dinner, it was embarrassing. Seriously – the cost of a Quarterpounder® with Cheese™ and a medium fries was the cost of a ribeye steak.

I’m not saying that I’m only going to eat ramen noodles warmed by the heat of my thighs rubbing against each other as I spend quality time on an elliptical trainer. Nope. Besides, that’s much messier than keeping the ramen duct-taped under my armpits.

You really don’t want to know where I warm the pâté.

But each one of the people reading this (I’m hoping that Bezos and Musk don’t read this) have a limited amount of money. What you do with it really matters. Ma Wilder (who was my adopted mother) didn’t deal well with waste – to her, a wasted drop of gravy was an affront against all that was good.

And Ma Wilder was right.

“What’s the most expensive food in the world? Food you buy and then don’t eat.” – John Wilder

But that’s also why we don’t make candles in summer – we have to pay for the heat to melt the wax and then to get the heat out of the house again. I love having candles in the basement, but most of the year I can’t have them – who lights a candle when the air conditioning is on?

That’s the most expensive light in the world.

I’m sure someone else has said that the most expensive food in the world is the food you buy and don’t eat, since it is the most basic idea in the world. But I haven’t seen it before, so I’ll take it until some bright commenter (Ricky?) notes that the Internet says that some French monk said it in 457 A.D.

(And, no, that won’t bother me a bit.)

But I guess that’s maybe why the French eat snails?

Well, he’s no Pinochet. He didn’t have helicopters.

But wasting your money is wasting your time, and wasting your life. I’m not sure about many of you, but my inheritance was the time and love I got from my parents and family. Oh, and a box of rocks (this is true, I’ll save it for a future post, maybe). But the Treasure you have represents potential.

There was a story I read once, I’m going from memory, and it went (more or less) like this:

A group of monks asked a Chinese Emperor for more robes. The Emperor asked:

“What will you do with the old robes?”
“We will turn them into sheets for our beds.”
“And your old sheets?”
“We will turn them into rags to clean the floor.”
“And your old rags?”
“We will incorporate them into the bricks that make up our monastery.”

Do not waste your Treasure: exhaust it.

The final thing you should have gratitude for?

Your Talent.

I am really grateful for each of the Talents that I have. But, like Time and Treasure, wasting Talent is, well, wrong. Just like Time (mostly) and Treasure (at least partially), most of the Talents you have weren’t earned, but given at birth.

What do you do with your Talents? That’s where it gets interesting.

I have used many of my Talents during the years, and only a few of them are on display in this blog. After all, you can’t see how shiny my scalp is over the Internet. NASA uses it as a beacon to guide spacecraft back from orbit.

Wasting Talent is probably the worst, even more than wasting Time and Treasure. Time is determined in many cases by forces beyond our control. Treasure? Treasure is fleeting. Elon Musk made $100 billion dollars this year. And it can evaporate as quickly as it rained.

But Talent is the most inborn of the traits, and in my opinion, the most tragic thing anyone can waste. I can’t gain the Talent of Eddie Van Halen even if I devoted my entire life to playing the guitar. If I spent the next decade studying the guitar, or trying to sing? People would pay me for those talents.

Pay me not to use them.

Well, I never bought any Princess Leia CDs.

I’ll explain: one time we went to church and I was too hoarse to sing. The Mrs. said after that service, “I never knew how beautiful that music could be.” This is a true story. I guess that if people can have Talents, I can have an anti-talent, too.

In the end, I have to be grateful for the Talents that I have, and grateful for the Talents I can use. Can I be filled with pride for them? Nope.

So, as I sit here typing – my goal is this:

To use every Talent I have, for every minute left in my life, as much as I can. Why?

Because a Talent is a gift. And if I use it well, for the benefit of me and those around me in a positive way?

That is Virtue. And that is a goal all of us can share in: living the most virtuous lives we can. Think of your Time, Treasure, and Talent as ways to become virtuous, because they are the greatest and, perhaps, only gifts you will ever have.

Also, don’t look up Rule 34.

So, to sum up: I’m grateful for the Time given me, the Treasure I have earned, and the Talent I was given at birth. These are three of the things in my life I’m most grateful for.

I’m also thankful for the Hot Mustard Sauce® from McDonalds™ on lukewarm McNuggets©. That still tastes pretty good.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Equity And Equality – Why Leftists Cheat At Elections

“Equal, but not even.” – Die Another Day

What did the Frenchman yell as he went down the slide? “YES!”

On Wednesday after the election, I consciously decided to sleep in – I had taken a vacation day from work. I slept in. It was luxurious. Like a Roman soldier, I really enjoy resting on my pila-case. At a time that was later than I’ll admit to, I rolled over in bed and picked up my phone.

Substantial leads for Trump from the night before had evaporated. For whatever reason, this reminded me of the story of the Fox and the Scorpion.

Fox and the Scorpion both wanted to cross a river. Why? Probably a decent discount on quality unpainted furniture on the other side. Scorpion wants to ride on the back of Fox. Fox, not being stupid, says, “Dude, you’re a scorpion, you’re going to sting and kill me!”

Scorpion, logically, responds, “C’mon, man! Let me tell you what my dead son Beau would say. You know the thing. But if I sting you while we’re crossing the river, I’ll die, too.” Scorpion paused, ”Just like I died when I fought Corn Pop.”

Fox, remembering his mandatory training on systematic speciesism, agrees and apologizes for his microagression and his foxist privilege. Fox says, “Hop on.”

Fox begins swimming through the river. Halfway to the other side, Scorpion stings Fox.

Fox, through the haze of pain and spreading paralysis as Scorpion’s neurotoxin spreads through his system says, “Scorpion! You’ve killed us both!”

Scorpion responds, “C’mon man! You knew I was a scorpion when I got on your back.”

I pushed the fable out of my mind as I slowly scrolled through all the data. I then turned off my phone. I went into the front room and sat down to read for a while. Pugsley and The Mrs. were off at school and work, respectively. It has been as rare as late-night TV show hosts with a sense of humor since 2016 that I’ve had the opportunity to just sit in silence without any work or a blog deadline hanging over my head. I decided to grab a burger and a beer.

How many vegans does it take to eat a Double Quarter Pounder® with cheese? One, if no one is watching.

In Modern Mayberry, we have five fast-food restaurants. The day was perfect in temperature, which means it was on the cold side for most people. I got to the speaker and ordered. I then drove home, grabbed a beer out of the fridge, and ate my burger. I tried to remember what my doctor said. I think it was “Don’t eat anything fatty.”

It was good – cheesy and greasy and just the right amount of pickles. I then remembered what my doctor had really said, “Don’t eat anything, fatty.”

For me, Wednesday was about balance. It’s easy enough to fall into the trap of getting so wound up about politics that you lose perspective. Honestly, one of the nicest things about living in Alaska was that Lower 48 politics was thousands of miles away. You could nearly ignore it. I’ve found that turning off my phone works almost as well.

On Thursday, it was back to work, and back to writing. Of course, I have thoughts about the election, and you can probably guess what many of them are. But the big thing that comes to mind with the 2020 election is fraud. It’s easy enough to look for fraud, heck, when that psychic told me she’d take my check I knew she was a fraud.

These ballots are from Seattle, so they definitely got mac n’ cheese.

Honestly, if you look at nearly any election, you can find things that look like fraud if you look hard enough. The exception, of course, is my election to LOCAL OFFICE, where I estimate I had 335.33% more votes than the nearest competitor.

Hmmm, that sounds suspicious. 33533 is the same backwards as forward. And it’s all 3’s with one five. Normal numbers never look that way . . . except . . . I was running unopposed for a job that no one else seemed to want.

You can confirm your bias that I stole the election – that 335.33% just looks too perfect.

From an ideological perspective, stealing an election is the last thing I’d do. What ideology says that? The ideology of the Right

The ideology of the Right is very different than that of the Left. The Right is focused on Equality. The Left is focused on Equity. It’s really the fight between Equality and Equity that best defines the split between thinking on the Right and thinking on the Left.

A Marine with a salt and pepper beard is likely a seasoned veteran.

Western Civilization has always been a civilization of Equality and the philosophy of the Right. You are born. If you make your peace with God? You can go to Heaven. It’s up to you. No one will drag you across the line. If you want to create a business? Be a glorious hero? Sure, class may have come into it, but there was always room for the barbarian to make it to king.

The Right is Equality.

Equality is a 100 yard (3450 meters) dash. I line up on the same line with my opponent. When the starter pistol goes off, we start running. If I’m running against a moderately athletic high school-aged boy who doesn’t have tularemia, tuberculosis, typhus, and tetanus, he’s going to make it to the finish line first. If it’s a fat kid? Okay, I might dust him.

As long as he has typhus.

Equality is about having the same opportunities. The opportunity, in this case, is the open track. It’s the same for both of us. The opportunity includes the starter pistol. We’ll hear it at the same time. Each of us have the same conditions.

I have had many of the same opportunities in my life as Elon Musk. I’m thrilled that he’s doing so well. We had an equal shot at the world, and he ended up with billions. I’m good with that. He ran the race very, very well. His running allows us to win, and in the end, makes us all wealthier.

If Musk flew his Tesla® through a black hole, because of tidal gravity forces, he’d be Elon-gated.

Equality is obsessed with fairness. One person, one vote. In Modern Mayberry, I think that getting the local officials to bend the rules during voting would have a penalty worse than speaking loudly in the local library.

The rules matter, and we follow them. When The Mrs. had to get her license when we moved to Modern Mayberry, you could see the gleam in the DMV clerk’s eye as she ticked off the things The Mrs. had to produce to get her license.

Birth certificate?
Proof of address?
Current electrocardiogram?
Head of John the Baptist?
Marriage certificate?

Yup. She was denied because she couldn’t prove that I’d married her. Ha! You can bet that The Mrs. wasn’t very happy when I drove her home singing, “Guess you are my property, doo-dah, doo-dah; my wife’s my chattel property all the doo-dah day.” Of course, as I said this I had a brand-new Upper-Lower-Midwestia license in my wallet.

The Mrs. was not amused.

But the DMV clerk was 100% being fair. The rules are the rules, no matter how stupid they might be. The rules are the rules, no matter who you are. And DMV clerks should follow them.

To the letter.

That’s Equality. No matter who you are, when you walk into the DMV office, you’re all equally dirt in their eyes. I think the DMV clerk even shed a tear when I had every single document she requested. Getting through on the first time was like cheating to her.

Never get behind the Devil at the DMV if you need to do paperwork – the Devil can take many forms.

Believing in Equality is why people on the Right don’t steal votes. They want to see the race run fairly. If you don’t have the right paperwork?

No license for you. I will say that when I got my license, the DMV clerk tried to get me to be an organ donor. That was a girl after my own heart.

The DMV, at least here, is Equal. Equity is different.

Equity is the belief that fairness isn’t measured on the starting conditions but on the outcome. If a 100 yard (.31 centimeter) race was run on Equity measures, I would only have to run, say, 50 yards if I was running against someone twice as fast as me. The goal of Equity isn’t to see who is fastest, it’s to structure the race so that people finish the way you want them to finish.

Given that Leftists are focused on Equity, or the outcome of the race, does it make sense that they’d try to steal an election?

Certainly.

Leftist focus only on the outcomes. If a process like the 100 yard (34 milliKelvins) dash produces results where someone is faster, it’s the process that’s wrong. If the process consistently produces a race where the fastest person wins?

To a Leftist, that’s unfair.

Not mine. Second time I’ve used this recently. The main problem is that the Equity in Reality panel is missing the pile of skulls that Leftism always, inevitably produces. And the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist, either.

Equity, in the mind of the Leftist, isn’t in the casting of ballots. Equity is in the counting of them. Your favored candidate is losing? What’s a few hundred thousand extra ballots? They can punch them with a hammer or a sickle.

Why do Leftists cheat?

C’mon man, it’s because they’re Leftists. What did you expect?

Killing The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg

“Don’t eat the eggs. We put LSD in the eggs.” – The Men Who Stare At Goats

I never trust a goose journalist – too much propa-gander.

Aesop (no, not our modern one who appears to have just emerged from his self-imposed technological monkdom by solving the riddle of Aesop’s Cables– LINK) was a storyteller who died in 564 B.C. This was long enough ago that the Greeks had yet to find the drug that stops the aging process: hemlock. To quote Socrates, “I drank what?”

But one of my favorite of Aesop’s stories is the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg.

The story is very simple, though when I was a kid they tarted it out so that it was fifteen minutes long and they could keep us shut up while the film ran so our teachers could take smoke breaks. The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg involves a farmer and his wife. They have a goose. Each day, the goose lays a golden egg. I know this sounds like the details found on page 347 of Joe Biden’s economic plan, but bear with me.

11 year old me thought that was amazing!

In Greek mythology, Chiron was a half-horse, half-human doctor. I guess he was the Centaur for Disease Control.

Current day me?

I’d sell the goose to a private equity fund for $3 billion dollars and buy myself an island and then start a podcast where I drink bourbon every week with Elon Musk and lie to our wives about when we were going to come home. We could call it Manhattans With Musk®. Elon and I would just sit back and laugh as the private equity fund clones the goose and then crashes the gold market with goose clone gold.

Or maybe the cloning process doesn’t work and the private equity fund then has 45,000 cloned geese that lay eggs made out of whatever fake metal the Chinese use (Chinesium®?) to make all those tiny metal statues of Bandersnatch Combersnoot. I mean Blandercrab Clambakehatch. Blendersnout Clumberbake? Oh, yeah, Benedict Cumberbatch, that I bought on Ebay® after too many Manhattans.

Okay, this is actually a chocolate statue of Bunderslam Camberthatch. We had a dog that weighed six pounds and ate a one pound bag of chocolate. Killed him. 14 years later.

But back to Aesop.

In Aesop’s story, the stupid farmers couldn’t cope with getting a single, solid gold goose egg each day. Nope.

An aside: How much would a golden goose egg be worth?

The answer, at $1900 per ounce gold, is $176,640. (For those of you playing our home game: remember to convert to troy ounces.)

So, yeah, these greedy Greek peasants couldn’t just wait and have $176,640 a day show up out of the goose’s butt. So?

They killed it.

What do the Irish call fool’s gold? Shamrock.

Yes. They killed it. And when they took their pudgy stupid fingers and looked for gold? They found nothing but Greek goose guts. Oops! Instead of having a creature that slowly made them immensely wealthy, they ended up with whatever it is you eat that’s made out of goose. Pâté de foie gras? It’s okay if you want your goose . . . de-livered.

I bring this up, because that’s what’s happening to Western Civilization. I mean, not being made into pâté, but having the goose that gave Western Civilization our prosperity is being killed.

And it really is happening.

Right now.

The wonderful and amazing thing about Western Civilization is that it has produced, by far, the greatest amount of prosperity and wealth ever seen in the history of mankind. Heck, North Korea loves western rock: Sweet Child In A Mine is one of their favorite songs. They love the Guns, but said we can keep the Roses. Regardless, there has never in the history of the world been a group as amazing as Western Civilization has been.

Ever.

Nearly every invention that’s worth mentioning has been invented by Western Civilization. Nearly all the wealth that’s been produced in the world, has been produced through ideas started in Western Civilization.

So, we all win, right?

Well, no.

I’ve heard (years ago) propaganda that claimed that every culture is equally valid. This is, of course, a Big Lie®. I’m not saying that people who live in mud huts who really know how to wok a dog must move to the suburbs and eat McDonalds®. Certainly not! If people wish to live in mud huts and eat cât-e de foie gras? That’s fine – I sincerely hope that they enjoy it. Nah, I don’t – just kitten.

But they have no right to move to the suburbs in Minnesota and have people pay for their every need.

Cannibals never eat entitled kids – they always taste spoiled.

But in 2020, the idea that everyone on Earth is, somehow, entitled to live in a society that they had exactly no part in creating? Sure! Let’s call it a right. They devastated their home country, so why not let them do that in Minneapolis, too?

As near as I can figure it out, the only answer as to why this happens is Leftism. Leftism is fixated on creating a world where equality of outcome is the biggest goal. That means that no person on Earth should have anything more than any other.

Except, of course, for actors like Leonardo DiCaprio and billionaires like Bill Gates and important people in Washington D.C. like the guy who writes the tax code. I sincerely hope that Leonardo DiCaprio never gets injured in a car accident on a Star Wars® movie – I would hate it if he were Han DiCaprio.

The answer is always famine.

But to a Leftist, a murderer in prison is due the same physical comforts and opportunities as an upstanding member of the community that has worked 2500 hour years for decades and saved their money for retirement. Of course, the irony is that when everyone has the right to move to the United States, it ends with no one having any rights at all. Except for Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates, and that guy who writes the tax code.

This is the reality of Leftism in the West: Leftists feel that prosperity comes from (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) luck. Except when they win, in which case it was completely deserved. Leftists believe that since prosperity is unequally distributed, they can just redistribute it at will because prosperity isn’t earned.

This is the same idea that led to walls around the communist countries in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s: People are the property of the state. Differences in outcomes aren’t the result of cultural differences. Differences in outcomes must be a mistake, right?

According to Leftists, yes.

As I write these words, the West is facing a crossroads in every single Western country. The idea corrupting it is simple and insidious: that Western achievement is based on nothing but theft and lies, and that all men on Earth should be able to move to Western countries because everyone on Earth is owed the same lifestyle as people in Western countries have.

Used with permission.

This, my friends, is killing the Goose that Laid the Golden Egg as Aesop described over 2,500 years ago. The major theme of Leftism in 2020 is that cultures that exists on a pre-technological level, and that the residents of said culture should have the right to not only live in, but live in and direct the cultures of Western culture.

For whatever reason, the cultures of many nations have failed to produce a society that is capable of producing Western Civilization levels of comfort and wealth. It’s beyond this post to describe why that is. I’m sure that a culture producing wealth and prosperity is all random. Speaking of random, what’s the difference between a Leftist and a random word generator? Sometimes the random word generator tells the truth.

But hey, at least we’ll still have hemlock.

Right?

Three Wednesday Thoughts, But They’re Hilarious. Like Your Mom (No Your Mom Jokes Included).

“There have been many theories which say that life has been deliberately sent to Earth from another planet. Some experts ridicule these ideas. And such theories might have remained unbelievable, except for disclosures such as these, which continue to be found year after year.” – In Search Of . . .

Did you know all of the web addresses are piled up in Russia? It’s called the URL Mountains. (Not my meme.)

I’ll start with the apology.

I had not one, but three topics for tonight. None of them (for various reasons) are cooked enough for my usual post. I blame, (spins excuse wheel) hamsters in the wiring of my secret volcano lair. Sure. That works. I mean, my secret volcano lair would work.

Except for the stupid hamsters.

So, instead of being focused, this one will start off with some bloggy news, have some actual real news in the middle, and end up with some silly commentary. In a just and verdant world, filled with love and free Campbell’s Chicken Noodle Soup®, Sprite™, and Trump Antibody Blood© for battling the ‘Rona, well, this would be a unified post.

Not tonight. Unless you can get me some Trump Antibody Blood©. No, I don’t have the ‘Rona. But, could Trump Antibody Blood™ hurt?

Trump just banned shredded cheese – he wants to Make America Grate Again. (Not my meme.)

But the good news? You’ll find we’re extra funny tonight.

First – bloggy news.

I try not to write too much about writing. I don’t want to feel like Stephen King, especially since The Mrs. has officially ruled him as “a hack.” That happened about 1991, so according to The Mrs., old Steve has been a hack longer than Russia has been Russia. See, kids? If you’re a writer, never quit cocaine*.

*Assuming you’ve started. I never did. I get by based on my disagreeable personality, questionable personal hygiene and those U.N. war crime charges I keep dodging. Who knew there was an international law governing nuns, orphans and free-range poodles?

Here’s the actual news:

I had so much fun liveblogging the first Presidential Debate©, that I’m planning on doing the second and third ones as well. I’ll put up a post the night before, and use the comments of that post for the liveblogging. I intend to start the show about fifteen minutes before the debate starts. I fully expect Trump will transform on television into a trans-dimensional entity clothed entirely in sold gold and wielding the power of a thousand Suns during the third debate. If he doesn’t, I expect that Trump will at least unleash a hammer wielding midget from the meth cage and sic the midget on Joe Biden. The Mrs. originally thought the midget would be in a penalty box, but we both agreed a meth cage was better.

Further “behind the scenes” commentary: The Mrs. and I started this joke even before we were married. When New York outlawed dwarf tossing, The Mrs. (then The Miss) suggested that we just let them fight. I suggested it would be more humane if we restricted it to midgets, but allowed them to have normal claw hammers. You know, for the sake of the children. Or something.

Midget machete fighting? That’s for tourists.

Regardless, if there’s a midget in a meth cage, you’re already on his bad side. (This had The Mrs. in stitches at Pugsley’s latest football game. If you’re wondering, Pugsley tackled the quarterback and the ball popped up and one of his much faster teammates ran it in for six. Since our team was 43 points up, that allowed them to add a 12^th player. You guessed it: I suggested the hammer wielding midget from the meth cage. So, now you know.)

I do not intend to liveblog the Vice Presidential Debate®. Pence will do his job of being calm and collected and aware. He’s like a potted plant: he’s alive, there, quiet, and will live forever if you keep him watered and in the appropriate amount of sunlight. That’s okay – it’s his job to be exactly those things. The only real potential for amusement is if Kamala goes shrill and nutsy or tries to have sex with the moderator to get bonus debate points. Regardless of whatever Kamala does, as long as Pence appears more like a fern or one of those hanging spider plants Ma Wilder fancied, he wins.

Second – real news.

Whoa.

The last time a Clinton clinched this hard involved an intern and . . . well, I’ll stop there.

This might be the first time you read this, which would give me a scoop. I’ve had several other scoops, but most of them showed up when I was 75% complete with a post. That means I got the news at 2:30AM. I said, no, no scoop. I may be a comedic genius who has nightmares about little people with claw hammers, but I have to get some sleep sometime.

This news should surprise no one, but yet it does.

Trump specifically told us back at some time I’m not going to look up because you have DuckDuckGo®, too that he’s saving the real fireworks for October, 2020.

The first of those firework shots is declassification of all documents, without redaction, related to the Russia Hoax. I expect this to not be the biggest revelation from Trump before the election, only the first. I expect the biggest one the week before the election.

National security and the Department of Justice. Hmm. Stay tuned.

My bet? That revelation the week before the election will be film of Joe Biden personally sabotaging the space shuttle Challenger or John Podesta caught on a double date with Osama Bin Laden. Their double date partners? George Soros and Whoopi Goldberg.

Oh, wait. Maybe the final revelation of 2020 is . . .

Bin Laden.

Biden.

Bin Biden?

Bin Laden and Bin Biden, brothers separated at birth?

Now that would be an October Surprise.

This is cruel. They should at least offer him some spirit cooking for his last meal. Also, (not my meme.)

Third – some commentary.

I don’t really expect that anyone of real power will ever be indicted on charges. Why? That would upset the system. Obama is safe to go from corporation to corporation looting tens of millions in delayed payoffs. The Real Rulers™ can do whatever they want and never face justice. Why?

They hired the people that prosecute the cases that they’re involved in. They know secrets that even more powerful people don’t want told, like who really killed JFK and where my remote control is.

I’ll take things that will never happen for $1000, Alex. Also? (Not my meme.)

Regardless of that, there is no way that you’ve heard the weirdest thing yet from 2020. I stand by that. Trump, in the hospital for the ‘Rona? Not even close. We have 86 days left in 2020. That’s nearly 25% of the year.

My bet? We get 80% of the drama of 2020 in the last 25% of 2020.

What does that leave on the table?

Aliens buying San Francisco and replacing it with decent parking.
Dogs and cats, living together.
Elon Musk disclosing his wife is really a robot cat girl, and thus she is not eligible for alimony.
Places like Europe, Australia and New Zealand finally adopting reasonable, common-sense recreational nuclear device policies of no more than ten megatons per recreational nuke.
Justin Trudeau vows to one day learn the alphabet.
Kim Kardashian discovers that she is pregnant, and wonders if it is her baby.
Joe Biden admits he can’t dial 911 on the telephone because he doesn’t have an eleven key.

Well, none of those things are likely.

But was 2020 likely 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.

Tesla: Overvalued, But Pays For The Best Space Program On Earth

“You guys taking it all in? Because this is what it looks like when Google acquires your company for over 200 million dollars. Look: Dustin Moskovitz. Elon Musk. Eric Schmidt. I mean, Kid Rock is the poorest person here.” – Silicon Valley

I hear Elon Musk’s car insurance premiums are astronomical.

I’m a fan of Elon Musk. Singlehandedly, he’s shown that even though getting to space is very, very hard, that he can do it. Beyond that, when working with NASA®, they noted that working with SpaceX™ they accomplished in a month what would normally take NASA™ a year. NASA® kept saying the work was too Falcon Heavy.

Musk has also proven that if you focus on getting things into space, you can do it. NASA® gave up on getting things into space right after Von Braun died and is now a jobs program that hires gender and grievance studies majors. I’m not kidding. Really.

Instead of, oh, going into space, NASA© chases imaginary offensive names of astronomical features (NASA© corroborates this here – LINK). From the press release: “The Agency will be working with diversity, inclusion, and equity experts in the astronomical and physical sciences to provide guidance and recommendations for other nicknames and terms for review.”

If Elon Musk’s wife breaks up with him while he’s on Mars, will that make her his Space X?

Because that’s the important thing, right? We don’t want people thinking of the Eskimo Nebula or Siamese Twins Nebula. Because . . . colonialism? I forget. Is there a scorecard I could download?

One thing I’ve been fairly consistent about, though, is that Elon Musk’s car company, Tesla® is a scam. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great scam. I’ve heard that the cars are wonderful. And from a speed standpoint, the Tesla™ can go from 0-60mph (that’s 27.39 parsec per eon) nearly as fast as any car on the planet.

But the price of Tesla®, even after losing 25% of its value in the last few days, is ludicrous. Tesla’s™ market cap is $307.7 billion dollars. Volkswagen® is worth $77.5 billion, Toyota™ is worth $210.8, and Ford™ is worth $27.5 billion. So, if Elon looked under his couch cushions for some spare change, he could trade Tesla™ for VW®, Toyota©, and Ford™.

But at least communism means always having enough to eat, right?

Is Tesla® a good company? Sure. But Tesla™ made 367,000 cars last year. Ford©, Toyota® and VW™ combined made 27,000,000 cars. That’s nearly 74 times the number of cars that Tesla® makes.

I think most people have invested in Tesla® because Elon Musk gets things done. And, it amuses me that Elon Musk takes the money he’s earned from Tesla™ to work on arguably the best space program since Apollo, back when NASA™ had real engineers working on real engineering problems and done it in his spare time.

Tesla® is a symptom.

I hear that Coronavirus symptoms start right off the bat.

When money is flooded into a market by bankers looking to prop the market up, it flows oddly. The faster the flow? The bigger the imbalances. When people are rushing to put money into the market, they look for the shiny objects. One of the shiny objects in this case is Tesla®. There are others. Dozens of them.

It is my theory that the entire market is filled with imbalances right now. The money that was flooding in to prop the market up is leaking everywhere. Reasons don’t matter. That’s the way that markets work over the short term. Silly things happen – you’ve seen it earlier this year with toilet paper. What I’m saying is that, yes, Tesla® is just like the toilet paper of the stock market.

The best way to steal a Tesla® is to put it on auto-pirate.

The Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020 was just that – markets working in a panic. The world is ending, so what do I do? Make sure that I can poop in comfort. Like getting into a war with Italy as one of your allies, it’s not a great strategy, but is a strategy. In mid-late 2020, the market is flooded with money, attempting to buy whatever looks best and prettiest.

Just like the TP 2020 Terror®, the Reinflation Bubble of 2020© isn’t at all rational. And, like Tesla™ lost 25% of market value in a few days? It’s my theory that will happen across the whole market. Note – I’m not a financial advisor, so use the advice of a random guy on the Internet as just that. I pulled my money from the market, mostly, in February. After that, I’ve been spending my time collecting the three precious metals: gold, silver, and lead.

As I get older, I’ve discovered a simple truth – I have no idea if my kids will enjoy getting shares of Tesla® when I die. But I do know that if they each got a suitcase of untrackable gold and silver, half a dozen rifles and a few thousand rounds of ammo at my funeral, they’d smile.

My buddy Ty won a gold medal at the Beijing Olympics®. China won’t give him the medal because they won’t recognize Ty won.

I know this column is short, but I stared at that last line for about an hour and wouldn’t change a word. Not a bad place to end. Let’s call it a day. I know that NASA already has . . . .

Investing? Invest In Yourself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deflationary depression.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’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.

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

So what to invest in?

Yourself.

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

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

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

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

At least Biden can hide his own Easter eggs.

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

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

But still, these things are possible.

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

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

Hmmm. Maybe I need some work, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Money, Power, Politics, and Soros

“What’s the point of having power if you don’t abuse it?” – Dilbert

My superpower is hindsight. But I can see that won’t help us now.

When I was a kid between the ages of 10 and 14, sometimes my dad would take me on his business trips. They were always to the same city – the capital city of our state. It was hours away, so it was quite an adventure. Where I grew up there was exactly one elevator (in a two story building at the college) and one escalator (at the JCPenny®) building within a 130 mile radius from town. We were so isolated that our Democrats were against communism all the way into the 1990s.

Did I mention I grew up in the sticks?

Pop Wilder was a small town banker, and sometimes the meetings in Capital City were at the Big Banks®, which were inevitably in huge skyscrapers. It was quite a thrill going up into those buildings. I’d sit in the lobby on the 20^th floor, reading science fiction while Pop did whatever it was he was there for in the meeting room. One bank in particular amazed me because the bathroom, on the 30^th floor, had a full length clear window – you could stand up and pee and stare out at the city below. There is probably a joke about Big Banks™ in there. I’ll let you fill in that particular blank – this is a family blog.

These trips were fun.

I kept getting checks from the banks during the COVID-19 social isolation – the kept leaving me a loan.

But one trip, we went to visit the majority owner of the bank that Pop Wilder ran. I recall this trip rather vividly, since we didn’t go to one of those gleaming towers. Pop pulled the car into a strip mall. Not a nice strip mall, but a dingy one in a sketchy area of town. Pop never talked about why he was having those meetings, so I wasn’t exactly sure why we were there. Perhaps he was going to sell me for a kid that didn’t keep his room in a condition that was specifically listed as containing elements of a war crime as defined by the United Nations?

Pop and I went up to one of those unmarked doors you see sometimes – just a steel door with a small diamond of glass about head high. You could tell it was a classy area, because the glass was the kind with the wire mesh inside. There was a buzzer next to the door, and Pop pressed it.

A voice answered, “Who is it?”

“Pop Wilder.” The lock on the door made an angry buzzing sound and Pop pulled the door open. We went up a flight of stairs – this particular strip mall doorway led to a second floor.

The Mafia chemist wanted the brake lines to rust – that way it would look like an oxidant.

I hadn’t seen any mob movies at the age of 12, but after watching them when I got older, the office had that feel. Run down. Dingy. Like the world had passed this neighborhood by on its way to making those gleaming towers that were miles away in the downtown area.

A secretary (they were called that, back then) didn’t say much more than, “He’s waiting.”

I walked into the office with Pop. The office had a feeling that I associate with movies from the 1940s or 1950s – dark, smoky paneling, a thin, worn carpet. Even the desk was ancient, but not in the “oh, cool antique” way, but in the “early prison work camp warden furniture” way.

The man Pop was planning to meet sat behind the desk. He didn’t get up as we entered. His only acknowledgement that we were there was a glance, like an annoyed man staring at what was on the bottom of his shoe. He looked, and I kid you not, exactly like Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life. So I’ll call him that. After reviewing information on the Internet, I’d estimate his age at that time as about 85.

Pop Wilder: “Hello, Mr. Potter. This is my son, John. I mean, my other son, John.”

Pop didn’t really say that, but it amuses me to write it, since my older brother’s name was John as well. I guess he was Juan one, and I was Juan two.

Mr. Potter’s gaze fell upon me. It wasn’t pleasant. Normally, when I met an adult, they at least pretended to be interested and would ask some questions and make small talk. Not Mr. Potter.

“Hi,” I said, more to break the silence than anything.

He never said a word to me. Pop Wilder handed me the keys to the car, and said, “You can go wait outside, son.” That was fine with me – I had a book.

Bad puns? That’s how eye roll.

Mr. Potter, as I mentioned, was the majority owner of the bank that Pop ran. Pop and his brother owned a fairly small amount of the shares, but Mr. Potter owned the vast majority of the bank. From snippets between my parents in those conversations that last the length of a childhood, it turns out that Mr. Potter was far more than an angry bank owner working from a shabby office. He was actually a kingmaker in state politics. He was a Democrat, and no one got “the nod” unless he approved. He had spent decades of his life building up connections with every important person in state politics.

In today’s terms, the big, shining gleaming banks had Money, billions of dollars. This was the sort of Money that Mr. Potter didn’t have. Sure, Mr. Potter had millions back when millions meant something, but Mr. Potter also had raw, naked Power. Want to be governor? He couldn’t guarantee it, but he could probably make sure it didn’t happen if you made him mad.

Money and Power are different things – most people equate them, but it’s not really so. Elon Musk has Money, but he certainly lacks Power. Yes, there’s another fill in the blank joke in there about Tesla™ and power. If Elon Musk had Power? They wouldn’t have closed his car factories due to WuFlu. Power is where the governor would have found some way that the factories were found to be “essential” businesses. Real power is when the governor does what you want before you even ask.

Elon Musk has Money, but as only one out of 157 or so billionaires in California, he doesn’t have Power. But he does have $46 billion dollars*, so don’t feel bad for him. *That’s because it’s mainly in stock – a big Tesla™ crash, and it could be discharged. See, I finally made that electrical joke.

Soros was going to organize a riot of amputees, but he was worried it would get out of hand.

George Soros, on the other hand, only has a listed net worth of a little over $8 billion dollars. But Soros has invested heavily in politics. He’s created and funded a vast network of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that drive politics globally. How many connections does Soros have? According to Discover the Networks (LINK), which looks to understand who funds all of the Leftist organizations, Soros is associated in one way or another with 210 organizations that are hard Left. How hard Left? How about “Catholics for Choice”? It’s like I created a group called “Muslims for Bacon”.

But $8 billion. That seems low. Can you plot a Leftist overthrow on the cheap? Not at all. Soros has spent a staggering $32 billion on his foundations since 1984, including a recent transfer of $18 billion to his Open Society Foundation®. Heck, it once took Jeff Bezos a whole month to make that kind of money.

George Soros is just like that Mr. Potter I met, but on a global scale. Just a single one of his initiatives is active in over 120 countries in the world.

I heard that George Soros is the Lucky Charms™ evil twin – he’s tragically malicious.

What drives that kind of raw lust for Power? I mean, it must mean something to Soros, since he’s given away tens of billions of dollars to get it. Soros gives us a clue in his own words in a book he wrote about his favorite subject, himself: “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood.” It’s no wonder that Soros looks like the evil Emperor from Star Wars™.

And what drove Mr. Potter? I have no idea. It wasn’t luxury – his office reminded me of the chief psychiatrist’s office at the asylum that all of those movie serial killers break out of. Notoriety? He had a very sparse Wikipedia page a decade ago – it’s gone. So not that. Philanthropy? Nope, none I know of.

I am always concerned about the motives of people who seek Power over others. Is it ego? Is it insecurity? Is it a genuine desire to help others?

Always remember what Mao said: “Power flows from the barrel of a gun.” You can have Money, but when Josef Stalin has the NKVD pick you up, you’ll learn quickly the difference between Money and Power.

Soros has evil lessons with Satan every week. I have no idea what Soros charges.

While mentioning Money and Power I’d be leaving out one very important part of the equation if I just kept in terms of those two material concepts.

There is at least one other type of Power – and that’s Personal Power. You can call it Spiritual, you can call it Virtue, or you can call it a dozen other names it goes by. It’s the Power that comes from standing up for what’s right despite the storms that will come. It’s telling your boss, “no” when he asks you to do what you know is unethical. It’s standing up when everyone else in the world seems to be against you, but you know that you’re right.

I’d take that Power over any Power that Mr. Potter ever had. And Soros? He may gain the whole world, but he’s already lost his soul.

Charles Peguy said, “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.” I think this was sometime before his last quote, “Germans, what Germans?” at the opening of the Battle of the Marne during World War I.

Tyranny seeks Money and Power. Yet?

Freedom keeps winning.

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

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

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

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.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

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

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

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

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

You Knew Where This Was Going

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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