Energy – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Maybe It’s . . . Evil?

“But I just changed my lifetime tune about thirty minutes ago, ‘cause I know that whatever is out there tryin’ to get in is pure Evil straight from Hell. And if there is a Hell, and those sons of bitches are from it, then there has go to be a heaven, Jacob, there’s gotta be.” – From Dusk ‘til Dawn

My friend gets offended when I tell her fat jokes. I told her, “Lighten up.” (Most memes are “as-found”)

I’ve been having a bit of question in my mind about what we’re seeing going on in the world today. I’ve written quite a bit about the physical trends in the world today, with energy being the number one roadblock I see into the physical future since the complexity of the world’s economy is based on cheap energy for manufacture, transport, and use of goods in our “modern” society. That might explain why people on unicycles are always so energetic compared to me on my regular bicycle. I’m two tired.

The second big challenge I see is the virtual world. By virtual, I include not only cyber-dependence, A.I., but also cash. Our current economic system uses an entirely made-up set of markers called “dollars” to buy and sell things. What’s a dollar? Once upon a time, it was some fraction of an ounce of gold. Now, a dollar is worth whatever someone will give you for it. As Biden has adopted the Binge Bucks Better strategy to try to get votes (I mean, besides the ones they print up) the deficit has reached a record.

Hmm, if Brandon is so awesome, why is no one wearing a “Build Back Better” hat?

All this spending? There’s no end in sight. So, this is a world that is having its own set of challenges in both the physical and virtual realm.

The third and (in my opinion) most important one is the spiritual realm.

Let me digress a bit – I think it will make sense in the end, but I haven’t written the end yet, so it could just end up with all of the coherence of Kamala Harris talking about quantum mechanics. Nah, nothing could be that bad.

I was half asleep recently (hypnogogic, to be technical). I often get a “clearing of the mind” when in that state, when issues that have been perplexing me sort themselves out. It’s like my mind is running a program in the background, but when I’m half asleep, all the pieces come together.

What was this puzzle?

Let’s talk about the pieces, first:

No one, literally even the GloboLeftists in the Deep Blue cities wants the massive hordes of illegals streaming across the borders. No one. It’s so bad that Biden is even attempting to blame the Republicans for not letting him close the border.

Yeah, pull the other one, Joe, and a bell will ring.

Biden 2024! 20 years for Joe, 24 for Hunter.

This is destroying the country. Quickly. Why are housing prices going up? Because we’re not building new houses because no one can afford them but yet we’ve brought in OVER 12 MILLION ILLEGALS in just three years. If Putin could have gotten that many Russians into the Ukraine, he could have taken it without a shot.

Hmmm.

I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon® today. I’ll let you know.

Ever wonder if Tyson® was a company designed to import illegal aliens so they could make cheap food so people would have heart problems requiring heroic intervention to keep the medical system going?

The second datapoint is the weird fixation of the GloboLeft on literally every freak sexuality that could possibly exist. Sexually aroused by toasters? Yeah, I know that naughty bagel-sized girl is a tease, but toaster fixation is . . . deranged. The current poster child for adding deranged sexuality to avoidance of reality is the transexual movement.

The public has, at every opportunity, rejected this. Yet, Joseph Robinette Biden decided to issue a proclamation that Easter should be known as Transexual Visibility Day. To be clear, most of the time that transexuals are visible is because they’ve snapped and tried to kill a dozen people or were engaged in really awful things with children or were parading their female penis inside a woman’s dressing room. I have seen zero positive things in the news about trans people. Ever. Each time it’s some new horror story that would have led all of our ancestors look for kindling so they could have a burning at the stake.

Yet, we have a presidential proclamation on the single holiest day of Christianity promoting this abomination.

This is the Cartoon Network®. Trust them with the minds of your kid?

I could keep going. In general, there appears to be a concerted effort put forth to break down and eliminate the impact of Christianity as the basic underlying moral virtue of the West in general, including the United States.

The fall of Christianity in the United States (and the West) will have several big, negative impacts. The concepts that there is centrality of the family, the idea that life has an ultimate purpose, and the belief that all humans can be one in Christ have shaped the world. Christianity has been the central, governing moral vision at the heart of the West.

As Christianity declines, there is a risk of losing the moral foundation it provided. The decline Christianity in society accompanied by various societal issues, including divorce, cohabitation, drug abuse, abortion, homosexuality, sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, and suicide. People are born to be religious because it gives them stability and direction.

Yet, there has been a concerted war on Christianity for years, even though it makes society observably better, and observably more stable.

San Francisco is so woke, that even the homeless vaccinate themselves!

If I were an oligarch, all of these changes would be negative for me. I’d be an oligarch over a less stable society, that produced less wealth for me to leach off of, and, in every measurable way, including the amount of power I could have, I would be worse off.

There is the first answer: because they’re just sick inside, and want to watch it all burn. Someone like George Soros may very well be like that – if you look into his eyes it’s not like you’re looking at something healthy and good. Maybe he just wants to burn it all down because he can. Because his heart is filled with hate.

That’s a simple answer. It might even be right.

This is a math teacher, so you can tell she’s plotting something.

The other answer is more profound: the GloboLeftistElite might just be . . . Evil. Capital E. It’s a solution that the modern mind wants to find an alternative to. It wants to look to cultural factors, or mental illness, or poor parenting.

Oddly, the idea that these people really are Evil is perhaps (to me) more comforting. Just like William Peter Blatty felt about his book, The Exorcist, that it was a profoundly Christian book, and uplifting, since the end showed that it wasn’t Evil that won, it was God.

Watch this, and tell me that Evil isn’t at work.

We face amazing challenges in the near future – physical, virtual, and spiritual. I’d prepare for all three.

But that’s just me.

Next up? Kamala Harris explains the General Theory of Relativity using a banana and two meatballs as props.

You Want Dark Ages? Well, That’s How You Get Dark Ages.

“In the world I see, you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.” – Fight Club

I had to stop working in the granite industry: it was counter productive.

Grug want break rock. Grug grab other rock, smash rock. Rock eventually breaks. Grug happy.

Another example: Grug want break rock. Grug create iron ore mine. Grug create coal mine. Grug find tree. Grug mix use coal and iron to make steel hammer. Grug smash rock. Grug happy, much faster.

Yet another example: Grug want to break rock. Grug create iron ore mine, coal mine, chemical factory. Grug find trees, sulfur. Grug make hammer, drill, and dynamite. Grug break rock real fast. Grug very happy because Grug like blow stuff up.

I stole this example from Grugwig von Mises, the Austrian economist who thought about these things a lot. The indirect way to do something is generally more efficient. It’s most direct to break a rock with a rock, but it’s much, much faster to blow the rock into gravel and you can do a lot at one time. And it’s really cool.

What sound does a piano make when it falls down an ore well? A-flat miner.

The catch, of course, is that to do things indirectly, there have to be multiple industries and infrastructure supporting the indirect method. And, if any of them fail, the method becomes more difficult, if not impossible.

One big example of indirect work in our economy is the impact of the computer and the Internet. Paul Krugman, (who is always wrong) said that the Internet would have no more economic impact than the fax machine. Of course, since Krugman is always wrong, he was wrong this time, too.

The Internet is a vast communication web, moving data about everything, everywhere, all at once. It is now pervasive, and has been for decades.

Decades?

Krugman? More like Grugman.

Yes. Back when I lived in Alaska, one of the two fiberoptic cables to Fairbanks was cut by a backhoe operator, thankfully mostly cutting Fairbanks off from Paul Krugman’s stupid ideas. What was the backhoe guy digging for?

I have no idea. Everyone in Alaska has a backhoe, a skidsteer, and a dump truck. And they were always digging. I think they might be part mole. Maybe they were digging for this:

Meme as-found.

The result of this one fiber being cut, though, was apparent very quickly: couldn’t buy gas. At all. Even with cash. Credit card usage? Nope. And I think prescriptions were similarly impacted.

Now, at work and home, I still had Internet – it was like nothing had happened since my employer must have gotten Internet from the other fiber. But it was unusual to see so much dependency – I hadn’t realized how much infrastructure was hooked up and required the Internet. In Alaska. In 2005.

The reason is that the Internet allows information to move freely. Information used to be hard to move. Now, information moves at near lightspeed in many places. It used to be the way to get information from one place to another was the most direct – mouth to ear. Then writing, probably to let someone know the sad facts about very fat their mother was, was invented, and is probably carved under half the pyramid blocks.

When I got arrested for graffiti, I tried to deny it, but the writing was on the wall.

Then, books preserved information about many fat mothers through centuries and made it much easier to share from Rome to ancient China. Finally, we have Internet pages and ebooks that share stories about maternal adiposity around the globe in an instant.

But, one funny thing – the more direct methods such as carving in stone and the ancient legends of huge hulking mothers whose buttocks block out the sky remain. But books burn. The ephemeral website? It may reach 90% of the planet yet be gone in an afternoon. Think of the deprivation of the future world of all those unsung stories of mothers whose gravitational pull could disrupt the very alignment of the planets.

What brought this to mind was that a big chunk of the Internet disappeared today. I think it’s back, but I don’t go on FaceGram™ or InstaTok©, but I think those are both back.

To be clear, those cannibal tribes in the Amazon (the river basin, not the company) didn’t even notice. Why would they? Their methods, their lives are the most direct. They don’t depend on getting ammunition for their bow from Cabela’s®, rather if they need a new arrow, they make one out of the stuff that’s lying around.

I hear Dwayne Johnson is going to star as a time traveler who has to go back to ancient Rome to steal a document from Augustus. It’s called Rock, Paper, Caesar.

The upside of this communication is that I can see first person video of drone attacks in the Ukraine within hours of a strike. The downside is that by knowing, people feel a philosophical burden – they have information about something yet are (mostly) powerless to do anything about it. Think about Michael Collins, orbiting above the Moon. He had a contingency plan if the landing had failed and Armstrong and Aldrin were lost.

“I’d go home.”

Why? There would have been nothing at all that Collins could have done. He knew that, and so did Neil and Buzz. Many things are like that, best not to obsess about them.

Our modern economy has created a great deal of leverage using cheap information combined with cheap information processing – efficient supply chains and people working in far-flung areas.

These systems, just like the chemical factories that Grug made to make his Grug dynamite to break his rock are inherently more fragile than the direct. How fragile? Back in 2017 or so, a congressional report came out that predicted that up to 90% of Americans would die in the event of an EMP taking out the power grid.

I have to remember that the rhythm is to “Staying Alive” when I do CPR, and not “For Whom The Bell Tolls”.

Knowing congress, they’ve done nothing to make the systems better, with the potential exception of trying to make EMP proof margarita machines.

I’m in hopes that the looming competency crisis, where complex systems become unreliable due to being put in the hands of the unqualified while the competent people are shuffled aside, won’t bring the take down those same systems, and with it, our society.

We’ll leave that to your mom. I hear that, though, she’s old enough that when she was a kid with Grug, there was no history class.

(Irony – I lost all Internet at my house while writing this one.)

Electric Vehicles: The Big Con

“You mean, drive in hybrids, but not act like we’re better than everyone else because of it?” – South Park

If you buy an EV from Dodge®, you also get a Dodge Charger™. (Memes mostly as found)

Based on the evidence I’ve seen so far in news stories, I’ve come to a conclusion about electric vehicles (EVs). It’s this: If you keep your EV parked in the garage at all times and never, ever drive in the winter, it works perfectly.

And, no, I don’t have one – I don’t need to have one to view the evidence that’s piling up. I would believe that even the manufacturers would tell you that it’s pretty hard to charge an EV when it’s zero outside, unless you warm up the battery first.

They also have lower winter range for two reasons: they have to electrically heat up the interior, which directly robs range, and in cold weather the battery cannot discharge as deeply – the rate of chemical reaction that the battery requires slows in cold conditions.

I wonder if all those people waiting to charge their cars are listening to AC/DC?

The range of most electric vehicles is incompatible with a Real American Road Trip. Modern Mayberry has one big advantage over most places – it’s 100 miles from anywhere. The downside for that on an electric car is obvious – a round trip to Mt. Pilot is simply not possible during the winter, unless I find and use a charging station. The one in Mt. Pilot (there is only one) is not exactly in the best part of town, and it’s dozens of miles out of the way on any trip – a 100 mile trip now has another half an hour of driving added, plus the time required for charging.

Or, I could just bring a gasoline powered generator . . .

You can tell it’s not an Apple® car – it has Windows®.

Yes, I suppose that it’s true that an EV could replace most of my car usage. Most days I drive less than 40 miles. But in order for the EV to work, I’d have to own a second car just for the (not at all rare) trips where I have to go over 100 miles from home. The range of an EV is simply incompatible with the size of the United States.

I suppose that would make sense if owning an EV provided cheaper transportation.

It doesn’t. Insurance is much more expensive for an EV than an internal combustion engine car of the same value because they’re much more expensive to work on, even when they don’t catch fire. Hertz™ Rent-A-Car© found this out – they’re now ditching the majority of the EVs that they bought. Too expensive to run, too expensive to fix, too expensive to insure.

What happens when a Tesla® hits someone at a given frequency? It Hertz®.

A dirty secret that’s causing the value of EVs to drop on the secondhand market is that the batteries will die. If you use an EV a lot, the batteries will cycle and die. If you don’t use it, the batteries will age and die. If I had twenty-year old vehicle (and I do) I know that the hoses will break, I’ll eventually need to replace the clutch pad and brake pads. Stuff will eventually need to be replaced.

But every time Pugsley turns the key, it cranks over and he drives it to school. If it depended on twenty-year-old batteries?

Not thinking it would be a pretty sight if he had to depend on batteries old enough to vote. On a zero degree day.

If a crackhead stole the copper lead, would he be guilty of mis-conduct?

The biggest drawback to EV adoption is battery tech. It sucks. But let’s pretend that we could store five times the energy in a typical EV battery pack – move from a 200 mile range to 1000 miles. That would be awesome! Let’s forget that’s nearly an order of magnitude increase in capacity for a second.

Now, instead of 200 miles worth of electricity stored in a battery that you’re sitting on, it’s 1000 miles worth of electricity – five times the density. Did I mention that when an EV battery fails, it fails spectacularly? Like in a crash?

Yeah, my car has a lot of stored energy in the gas tank, but we’ve figured out how to (mostly) keep it from blowing up all the time after over 100 years of experience, and most car explosions are in movies where the hero tosses a cigar to blow up the villain. Of course, he does this and doesn’t look back, because it’s way cooler that way.

My dog exploded – he was half Irish setter, and half meth lab.

I’ve come to the conclusion that EVs are nothing more than a niche car for people who live in nice climates that never get really cold and are rich enough to have a car for each day of the week.

The gamechanger, for EVs is, of course, battery technology. Triple the energy storage and halve the charging time at a lower cost with more safety? Excellent. Atomic powered batteries that are crash resistant that only need charging every fifty years? Winner.

But I won’t hold my breath waiting for that. There don’t appear to be any breakthroughs on the horizon that will make this work. And if there were, there are other problems.

Where does all that electricity come from? Right now, the Texas grid is shedding load. And California, who can’t seem to generate electricity without creating wildfires would need to consume at least 50% more electricity to electrify all their transport. Since California has gone from NIMBY (not in my backyard) to BANANA (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) it’s obvious that electric capacity would have to be built in Arizona or Nevada or in the orbiting Unicorn Fart Farm.

How do you get Canada to support their electric grid? Say it’s transgender.

No. California won’t be going electric anytime soon. Sensible places like Alberta and Switzerland discourage or prohibit EV charging in cold winter months, and they aren’t governed by Grabbin Nuisance.

It’s weird when a society makes detailed maps about how it’s going to destroy itself. Well, at least people will soon be able to walk like an Egyptian.

The irony is this: if the Left was really serious about reducing greenhouse gases by using less gasoline, the answer is really simple. 35 to 45 mile per gallon cars were made in the early 1980s, and had sufficient power to be useful on the highway.

What happened? Additional environmental controls that addressed problems than 90% of the country doesn’t have. Nitrogen oxides? Bad in places that have smog. Out in the rest of the Midwest? Zero issues. Yet, every car is designed based on the problems of Los Angeles. In Fairbanks, they had a pretty simple emissions test, and wouldn’t let you drive a car in winter (when Fairbanks has smog) if it didn’t pass.

That’s too simple. Let’s make every car suitable for L.A.

Then there are the CAFE standards – the Corporate Average Fuel Economy imposed on the automakers. But CAFE excludes trucks and SUVs, so now everyone makes trucks and SUVs. What about the mighty Toyota® Hilux, the car voted most likely to be driven by a Middle Eastern Faction? Can’t sell it here, because of California and CAFE – small trucks have to meet silly standards.

We could save millions of gallons of gasoline tomorrow if we allowed sensible cars to be sold.

But no. That would lower the cost of a reasonable car with great fuel economy to about $15,000, and nobody wants that. I mean, Big Auto and Big Environment are in bed and agree, so who cares about the people?

Who cares? Toyota, apparently.

I think EVs combined with silly-expensive cars is a meme trap for the mass demobilization of the American people. And why not? They can go to 15 minute cities, as the World Economic Forum keeps preaching. And since almost half the world’s electric cars are being produced in China, is this a plan to offshore what remains of automobile manufacturing in America? I imagine a rhyme of the phrase utterd by Barack Obama, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor” which will become “If you like your car, you can keep your car.”

If it was a good deal, and EVs were the solution, we’d see technological and price advances and not have to depend on silly government handouts to make them a reasonable purchase. EVs will stick around longer than they should, but, just like Joe Biden, they will never be the solution, no matter how the Left tries to force it.

But, hey, I hear that EVs work great in the garage!

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, Violence Is On The Menu

“I don’t like violence, Tom. I’m a businessman.” – The Godfather

People say violence is never an option, but when I’m in a room with a Kardashian, well, let’s just say it’s option number one.

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 6

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 – New Achievement Unlocked: Acceptable Violence – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Are We At War? Revisited – 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.

New Achievement Unlocked: Violence Acceptable

One of the hallmarks of the countdown to Civil War 2.0 has always been: Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology. We’ve debated about where to put it, but it’s been there since the very start of the countdown/index. This month a Constant Reader sent me a link to American Partisan where the article discussed exactly that (LINK).

When a high government official formerly in charge of extrajudicial executions calls for the extrajudicial execution of an elected official to a national body, you might live in a banana republic.

31% of Trump supporters and 24% of Biden supporters indicated that democracy is no longer viable.
41% of Biden supporters and 38% of Trump supporters thought it was acceptable to use violence to stop their opponents.

Yes, I know that technically we’re not a democracy anyway because the Founding Fathers felt that was little more than mob rule, but it looks like a huge chunk of people are flat done with the idea of voting with ballots and are ready to start voting with fists, clubs, and bullets.

Except against women. Or people who identify as women. Or Leftists. But I repeat myself.

This, sadly, is something that many have expected as the government loses the legitimacy that it enjoyed during most of the history of the country, with only 16% (according to Pew®) trusting the government to do way is right most of the time.

As I’ve mentioned before, some of the best advice I’ve ever heard about divorce was, “If you don’t want a divorce, don’t talk about one.” Here, large numbers of the population are currently contemplating divorce, and contemplating not using a lawyer to get what they want, since 41% of Trump supporters and 30% of Biden supporters are in favor of secession based on political lines.

Although there is a flaw in the Leftist strategy.

Even when I started this blog, that seemed unlikely. Although the maps show Red states and Blue states, the reality is that in 2016, many of them were purple – a roughly equal mixture of both.

Now we see that people really are moving from one state to another for purely political reasons. If you’re on the Right, why live in a state that will criminalize you because you own guns? If you’re on the Left, why live in a state that won’t let you kill all the babies you want to kill?

Violence and Censorship Update

Hillary Clinton, that bastion of common sense and moderation, noted this month that people who supported Donald Trump need to be “formally deprogrammed”. If you think the Left is up for a truce and to forgive, that would be a mistake.

Proving that a Leftist is as loyal as a scorpion, well, read the note below.

But, good news for her! She can update her Tinder® profile.

In a further example that we are at an 8. on the steps to Civil War 2.0 (list above, more story below) Portland has stopped trying to look good for a date, and is now at the stage that they’re eating frosting straight from the plastic container with a spoon. The cops have given up.

The EU wants Elon Musk to censor comments on X®. The only problem? Like taking a woman to a restaurant, the want Elon to figure what they want him to censor without telling him.

Regardless of how you feel about, well, anyone, the First Amendment exists. Except for certain subjects as the former governor of Mumbai points out below:

And Ron’s not far behind:

Lastly, Canadians seem to enjoy a few freedoms. At least today:

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. Looks like Biden is going for the record. Who says he never gets anything done? I hear he was even on hand to thank one of his financial supporters.

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 up again, again slightly – I was expecting more during a long, hot summer. I’m guessing that people don’t even notice it anymore. Think San Fran will be paying for cops anytime soon?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, up. I expect December to be a time when this starts to head upward, significantly, because, bears.

Economic:

Economic numbers are swinging back down again this month, and a bit more in October – I expected more. Well, we’ll see. Maybe there will be a miracle?

Illegal Aliens:

The biggest number, ever, in the history of the country, an unending flood. Read Enoch Powell’s speech.

Are We At War? Revisited

Last month’s Weather Report topic was a simple question: Are we at war? The reason for this is that a Constant Reader said I was obviously stoned, because the war was obviously already going.

Another Constant Reader responded to this response as noted above that I was stoned for thinking we were closer to war than they did, and I thought it was a more than fair assertion that deserved a response: “Not 8. Not anywhere close to that.”

Well, as to point 6., where people are avoiding the other side, this is an ongoing process I noted that began years ago. I have several friends that have specifically decided to move away from Leftist hotbeds for exactly that reason. My own brother, John Wilder, is currently behind enemy lines in the Reddest area of a very blue state. He’ll be moving before too long to a very, very Red State where he is no longer considered to be an extremist.

He does, however, have a great lawn.

Next, to point 7. If anyone doesn’t think that organized violence is occurring regularly, they need to revisit their news sources. Cities, even in Red States, are being run not by cops, not by commissions, and not by mayors. Those cities are being run by district attorneys that are not prosecuting criminals and are sanctioning the violence. It’s bad enough that it’s normalized – the group protests, riots, and mob thefts that are occurring with the tacit approval of the “justice” system takes us to an 8. Reminder, this Civil War won’t have masses of armed troops to inflict the damage, especially at the start.

To get from 8. to 10. could happen in as little as two weeks – imagine another blatantly stolen election in 2024 . . . that might be the spark. As shown in the first story, polls indicate that a growing number of people no longer want peace at all costs, and the peace that flows from the barrel of a gun would be quite acceptable.

It’s odd when the Muppet® doesn’t have the silliest hair.

Are we at an 8.? I think so. It doesn’t get to a 10. until the Right starts to fight back. I do appreciate the feedback, since this is a work in progress, and it also nudges me to explain what the heck my reasoning is. YMMV.

The fact that two readers with valid points make the opposite argument makes me think I’m close to the right answer. We are very, very near.

LINKS

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

BAD GUYS

https://twitter.com/i/status/1718365747414761547

https://twitter.com/i/status/1720452778508595253

https://twitter.com/i/status/1718594209450480043

https://twitter.com/i/status/1719551215858798957

https://twitter.com/i/status/1715239983911452861

https://twitter.com/i/status/1715236903853691077

https://twitter.com/i/status/1714199598871228535

GOOD GUY?

https://twitter.com/i/status/1716945256804200575

ONE GUY

https://twitter.com/UR_Ninja/status/1716227124275626374

BODY COUNT

https://citizenfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/biden-state-illegals.jpg

https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_9d841124-7449-11ee-af4a-af115ad29337.html

https://twitter.com/i/status/1707919466154082771

https://twitter.com/Jeanne2999432/status/1719039832633041054?t=Nd5Phexy5Xh6W1OcG6-yIw&s=19

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/axis.JPG?itok=tZ4zVVGS
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/texas/article-12663663/Venezuelas-worst-gangsters-criminals-cross-border-carrying-orders-dictator-Maduro.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12699675/US-border-China-migrants-caravan.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12666301/Migrants-NYC-costing-taxpayer-5BN.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-12484069/US-deaths-mortality-richest-countries.html

https://tnc.news/2023/10/26/assisted-suicide-in-canada-2022-1/

https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4289645-bring-back-the-draft-a-divisive-battle-may-loom-over-any-major-war/

VOTE COUNT

https://citizenfreepress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/emerald-fraud.jpeg

http://onlyinbridgeport.com/wordpress/watch-video-captures-gomes-supporters-absentee-ballot-dumping/

https://thefederalist.com/2023/10/05/10-ways-democrats-are-already-rigging-the-2024-election/

https://www.emerald.tv/p/georgias-election-officials-are-getting

https://1ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fthefederalist.com%2F2023%2F10%2F31%2Franked-choice-voting-is-the-monster-under-the-bed-of-american-elections%2F

https://thefga.org/research/ranked-choice-voting-partisan-plot-to-disrupt-elections/

CIVIL WAR

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12589871/mexico-cartel-texas-invasion-border-war-todd-bensman.html

https://www.newsweek.com/democrat-civil-war-reaching-boiling-point-1840367

https://news.yahoo.com/large-portion-americans-doubt-democracy-160659069.html

https://jonathanturley.org/2023/10/23/americas-crisis-of-faith-new-poll-reveals-more-americans-are-rejecting-the-constitution-and-embracing-violence/

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2023-10-12/civil-war-5-4-3-2

https://www.governing.com/context/what-would-a-national-divorce-look-like

Electric Cars and Rainbow Unicorns

“It’s logical to assume that something within this zone absorbs all forms of energy whether mechanically or biologically produced. Whatever it is, it would seem to be the same thing which drew all the energy out of an entire solar system and the Intrepid.” – Star Trek, TOS

Electric cars owners should never go down a dead end street – there’s no outlet.

As I have written time and time again, the future of energy is the future of humanity. Cheap, safe, limitless energy is the dream, and that energy is one component of a future that is not nasty, brutish, and short, like George Soros. Because the Leftists have tried to propagandize the subject, they’ve done a great job at muddling the thoughts on what in the end is actually the engineering question that drives the economic engines of the world.

Let’s remove the confusion on the term “energy source”. Electricity, for instance, isn’t an energy source, since it has to be created in some fashion, such as by windmill or coal-fired power plant, nuclear power plant, or tiny faeries hooked up to electrodes while being chained to beds in the basement of Disney® . . . oh, I’ve said too much.

I heard a fairy tale about politics once. It was Grimm.

Electric cars, then, are dependent upon getting their electricity from somewhere upstream. Electricity is an energy carrier, not a source.

On the other hand, crude oil is an energy source. The refining process doesn’t take up too much energy, and the sweet, sweet hydrocarbon molecules in a gallon of gasoline were there (mostly, some have been rearranged a tiny bit) in the refining process.

So, let’s define energy sources as energy, in crude, raw, or potential form that can be manipulated for use and that we get more energy out than we put into it. So, crude oil is definitely an energy source in most conventional and fracking situations, producing up to (depending on how you count it) sixteen times as much energy as used to get it out of the ground and turn it into 89 octane. I will say if we converted the entire economy to biofuels emissions would go down and we could starve at the same time!

Biofuels are entirely questionable, and most of them are poor when compared to gasoline as an alternative, returning just a little bit over break even for both biodiesel and corn ethanol. These products exist as fuels primarily because Lefties like ruining the economy and the RINOs know that farmers vote. Thus, there are tax incentives in place to force the use of biofuels.

“But we could make houses out of it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “But we could make furniture out of it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “But we could heat houses with it.” “No, you have to bury it.” “I’m beginning to think you don’t like people.”

The dream of the Left (at least this version, Arthur Sido has another one here: LINK), then is to get rid of all of the cars to replace them with “clean” electric vehicles. The International Energy Agency (IEA) wants to get electric cars and trucks (EVs) to 45% of the vehicles on the road by 2050 according to their Net Zero Scenario. 45%! The insanity doesn’t stop there – the IEA expects that alternative vehicles will reduce gas and diesel use by 30% by 2030 – seven years into the future.

That’s a stunning number, because the average age of a car in the United States is 12.2 years. I guess I’m pretty close to average, because the average Wilder fleet ages is 11.5 years. That means that the 30% of the car and stock in existence today needs to be replaced by 2030 with electric and hydrogen vehicles. I have no idea where the IEA is getting its dope, but they must get really good stuff.

>Be forest.
>Exist. Die. Kill mankind by raising temperature 0.0001°F.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 100,000,000 years ago.

That would mean, though, that conventional vehicles that run on sweet, sweet oil and diesel will have to be phased out starting very soon. Further, the remainder of the vehicles the IEA are hydrogen-powered. Now the Hindenburg wasn’t hydrogen powered . . . .

Now, checking back to energy sources versus energy carriers, hydrogen is just an energy carrier. It has to be generated somewhere.

One of the first problems is that EVs are wickedly expensive compared to actual cars since they require massive amounts of material to replace the empty gasoline tank of an internal combustion car. The question is, where do those materials come from? If, all of a sudden, millions of EVs need to be made, the prices for the materials that go into them will go up, too.

>Be forest.
>Burn. Kill mankind by melting 200 gallons of ice.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 200,000 years ago.

According to the IEA itself, demand for lithium alone will be 4,000% greater in 2050 than it is today. Cobalt increases would be 2,000%. The increase in availability alone is questionable. Resources show up in clumps – I can’t go in my front yard and look for gold, it is where it is. And when Leftists dream of this wonderful economy that they’re creating, they ignore the environmental costs waste of mining all this stuff – how much will that create in greenhouse gasses plant food?

It’s clear, once again, that these plans aren’t serious. China is producing a stunning 30% of greenhouse gasesCO₂, while the United States produces about 15% of human made CO₂. Why do we fixate on the United States?

First, Leftists have to pretend, really hard, that global warming climate change has replaced what real humans call weather.

Second? The Chinese are already communist, so let them do whatever. The people who have to have their economy ruined while they chase unicorns and rainbows rather than actual engineering solutions to actual engineering problems will have their economy destroyed.

Or maybe they’ll just buy beachfront property at a discount?

Or was that the plan all along?

At the beginning of this, I said the future of energy is the future of humanity. That’s just a bit inaccurate – the future of energy is the future of free humans and our economy. Me? I have my own plans.

Leftism Is A Death Cult That May Kill Us All

“This man has the gift of death.” – Zardoz

Whoops, sorry! Just a regular old death cult after all.

This is the second post about Leftist self-hatred this week. This particular Leftist self-hatred is one that uniquely hurts the economy and even the prospects of the survival of humanity, so it’s par for the course for the most malignant philosophy ever to exist, outside of Taco Tuesday.

What spurred this was a note from a friend that suggested a post. I knew where I wanted to go with it, since I had seen a graphic (from Nature Communications® which is a part of Nature™ the magazine, LINK) that surprised me. I mean, knowing what I know about Leftists, it really shouldn’t have, but what got my attention is how starkly it shows the divide in the philosophies of Right and Left. It’s presented pretty weirdly, so I’ll help out a bit on the interpretation since I’m a trained professional.

The graph is shown as a bullseye. Why? I think the researchers might have been drunk and had a bullseye graph generator, so they decided between shots of tequila that they’d use the damn thing since the University had paid for it anyway. They then got the grad students to enter the data for free, and, boom, paper complete.

I remember watching a PBS® show on how fish swim. They shocked a fish by putting an electrode up its behind so they could photograph it. Who put the electrodes up the fish butts? Grad students.

The concentric circles in the graph are pretty simple, though, and the innermost are the things closest to an individual. The rings get rather more distant as they go outwards until they get rather silly:

All of your immediate family.
All of your extended family.
All of your closest friends.
All of your friends (including distant).
All of your acquaintances.
All people you have ever met.
All people in your country.
All people on your continent.
All people on all continents (apparently, screw those guys on islands, they suck anyway).
All mammals (finally got the people on the islands and astronauts covered).
All amphibians, reptiles, mammals, fish, and birds.
All animals on earth including paramecia and amoebae.
All animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms.
All living things in the universe including plants and trees.
All natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.
All things in existence.

So, that’s the scale – what things are the most important to you? For me, this is an easy answer. I like the things that closer to me better, and I could see my feelings about this covered very well under the title listed for “Conservatives”.

Is it just me, or does this graph look very, umm, happy?

In general, I like the people that are close to me more. Yes, I care about Americans more than I care about people in Tannu Tuva, or people in Tanganyika, or even those pitiful island people. I generally care more about my kids than yours, and I generally like all people better than rocks, though there are some exceptions that I make for ex-spouses and members of Antifa®. Heck the entire meme below is encapsulated in the graph above:

Now if that isn’t what’s on his headstone, it sure should be.

Okay, that explains the Right, and how we generally feel according to statistics. What about the Left?

Why did they pick 45°?

Whoa, that’s amazingly different! Lefties are really focused over to the end, with only a minor preference for humans and a lesser preference for people closer to them. The perception of the granola-eating surrender chimp as the model for Leftism is once again validated. They like these things best:

All animals in the universe, including alien lifeforms.
All living things in the universe including plants and trees.
All natural things in the universe including inert entities such as rocks.

Rocks are more important to them than their parents. And if their parents are as disappointed in them as I’m guessing they are, I can see why. They hate themselves, so they hate the things that are closest to them. You can see it when they throw themselves in front of cars when they protest, they have never won anything in life, so the only way they can win, they feel, is to have transferred virtue from their death. “See, I told you I was a good person, but you never believed me!” Thus, the victim Olympics where they compete based on victim status. “Well, Bob, he stuck the victim status, but he wobbled on the virtue signal, and the blind gay judge with AIDs from Ethiopia gave him a 7.3.”

I wonder how many upvotes they got on Reddit®?

To be clear, I’m not sure I would like alien lifeforms at all unless they grilled well, and I think I would be just fine if an entire planet of intelligent, bloodthirsty cannibal lizard-people was wiped out, even in a slow and agonizing way, just to make sure that my family had slightly more comfortable air conditioning. But enough about the people who are related to George Soros.

I’m not kidding. I can come up with entire species that I’d love to see wiped from existence, and I’d start with mosquitos, gnats, wasps, and vegans. Vegans especially, because they eat what my food eats, and that’s just selfish.

To be clear, I love the environment. I love hiking, I love nature, I love hunting, I love trees. The reason I love them is simple: they exist to by enjoyed by Man. If Man doesn’t exist? None of these mean anything to me. There are millions of cows alive on Earth right now. Because we want to make cows happy? No, because cows make us happy, especially when done medium rare with a nice crust. To be clear, I think “nature” has no intrinsic value outside of what it can provide to Man. But I love nature, because it’s awesome to man.

The Moon? Just rock without people. And Soviet Russian ships that landed. A crash is a landing, right?

Oddly, because of these heat maps, people on the Right go out to work to care for the people they know and their country. Why was the Right the primary source of military recruits? Because we like our nation more than we like other nations, and since we are focused on those around us, we’re fiercely individualistic, and focused on family and friends. Why? We like our families and friends, and if they’re loyal to us, we’re more than loyal to them.

When the chips were down and you needed help, would you rather have a friend on the Right, or one on the Left?

Thought so.

People on the Left, though, end up in the traditional Leftist positions, in academia, or, in government. I’ll perhaps discuss in some future post a bit more on Leftism and academia if there’s interest. For today, let’s focus on government.

The idea of government, at least as outlined in the Constitution, is simple, “establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare and, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity”. Note, even in the Constitution it talks about “ourselves and our posterity” and doesn’t mention the slave-pirate amoebas from the planet Melkor-7 or trees.

Wait, tell me about the slave girls again?

The people who gravitated to government over time, however, like control. And that control includes enforcing their morals (which rate rocks above people). And in 2023, those are the folks in charge of policy. They like people who live elsewhere more than they like citizens of their own country, and the like clinging vines more than they like their second cousin. Depending on the second cousin, I might agree, but the point remains: they hate humanity.

Rather than environmental policy being about how to best work and preserve the environment for people, environmental policy is now viewed as either one of state control, or the idea that we’ll preserve a beetle that isn’t that much different than millions of other beetles rather than try to provide a future habitat for our grandchildren, or Keith Richards, whichever lives longer. None of these policies have humans in mind.

Right now, I drive a huge pickup truck. I might have bought a smaller pickup, but they can’t be sold because of fuel-efficiency standards – only my massive, hulking pickup with an interior bigger than my first apartment can be sold legally because huge pickups don’t have to meet car standards, but little ones do. That’s also why sedans and station wagons disappeared and massive “sport utility vehicles” replaced them – a consequence of bad environmental policy. I like using less gasoline, but .gov says I have to use more.

Hmmm.

Mussolini was lucky. On his last day he got to hang out with his friends.

Other examples of this are things like nuclear power. The Left has always hated nuclear power because it was something only First World societies could afford, and the thing the Left hates more than themselves is a winner. How can we drag them back down? Oh, yeah, we can make power so expensive and unreliable that no one can afford it.

The biggest question facing humanity in 2023 is energy. Is an energy crisis coming? It certainly is. Will the regulations that the Leftists who like rocks better than their parents put into place make sense for people? Unlikely, since the civilization of humans isn’t on their radar.

To be fair, since we’ve already demonstrated the self-hatred of humanity, it’s pretty simple to note that these consequences that put all of humanity at risk, might not be unintentional at all.

Is Leftism a death cult?

Not if you’re a rock. Otherwise, yeah.

Global Warming Is For Losers

“I’m a man, but I can change, if I have to, I guess.” – The Red Green Show

Remember to always ask yourself what you can do to make Leonardo DiCaprio’s life better.

I remember one Twitter® exchange I had way back in the past. It was with a Leftist, and I made the statement, “Don’t you see, the only ethical path is to be against illegal immigration, and immigration of any sort. Since Americans emit nine times the greenhouse gases of countries like Mexico or Guatemala, the only thing we can do to protect the climate is to keep them there or send them back.”

There was a pause on the response. “Not sure if you’re really concerned about the environment or just don’t like illegal immigrants.”

That was one of my favorite trolls, since they had to think about conflicting narratives in their programming. In many cases, the Left ignores this, but my major message is never to the Left, since they are not on a rational mission, but on a religious one since Leftism isn’t a political system at heart, it is a religious one. Look at it when a Leftist talks about Trump – it’s like someone on the Right being forced to think of Satan in the Oval Office – it’s religious, not ideological.

The Sun never went to college because it has thousands of degrees.

One of the sacraments of this religion is abortion. The other? Global Warming, er, Climate Change.

This summer has been hotter than the last few here in Upper Lower Midwestia. I’ve seen stories where it was hot in lots of other places, mostly places that you’d expect, like Phoenix. Some of the hottest places this year are the places where people are only there because there’s oil there, like Saudi Arabia, Iran, or the place they make French fries at McDonald’s®.

But that’s why we always see Global Warming, er, Climate Change stories trotted out in the summer and never when it’s -20°F (-273.16°C in metric units) in winter. How bad is it? The propaganda of the sacrament of Global Warming, er, Climate Change is trotted out on weather forecasts to nail down the idea that things are getting worse when in reality, they’re not a whole lot different. Want an example? Here’s Sweden:

Are illegals in Sweden known as “artificial Swedeners”?

Yup, 36 years later, the biggest change has been that they changed the color of the map to a scary color. Why? To celebrate the sacrament of Global Warming, er, Climate Change.

How bad is it? I’ve pointed out again and again how the people in charge of defending our country are fundamentally not serious people. They want, well, I’ll let them tell you:

If she succeeds, everyone will know how to stop an American tank: shoot the soldiers pushing it.

It has even become a death cult, of sorts. The doom that has hit country after country across the world has been staggering. The big part is propaganda – starting at the schools where teachers, predominantly taught Left-leaning curriculum by Left-leaning professors at Left-leaning colleges are the ones in charge of the indoctrination. What does that lead to? Students that don’t want to have children because they believe that they’re part of some sort of Original Sin just by breathing. Notice that China is utterly ignoring the nonsense.

Looks like the Germans and the French are finally equal at something.

The other part of this equation is that people are ignoring the elephant in the room: a volcano last year put an additional 13% water vapor into the Earth’s atmosphere. 13%. And water is a very, very potent greenhouse gas. That’s huge, but I don’t see Greta wanting to sacrifice virgins to the volcano god to stop those from going off, or Joe Biden wanting to make water illegal.

Soon enough the water will drop out of the atmosphere, but Joe Biden will still have to live with being Hunter Biden’s dad.

And I will say, again and again, that this has nothing to do with Global Warming, er, Climate Change. It has everything to do with Leftist ideology and nothing to do with the temperature or the weather or any sort of solution. Again, listen to them when they talk:

What’s the scariest word in nuclear physics? Oops.

The Left is adamantly against nuclear power, because, properly implemented it solves a whatever Global Warming, er, Climate Change problems there are. To be fair, the plants need to be idiot proof, because idiots have a really great track record of screwing everything up, and hiring anyone but actually competent people to design and run the things is an absolute must.

Never let a cat run your nuclear power plant.

Nuclear power is clearly a part of the plan, but keep in mind that the plan is created by people whose idea of nature is a strip of lawn in a park a half a mile from their house. The people crafting the plans to create the “new world” have no more real appreciation of nature than Mark Zuckerbot.

Remember, these are people that get scared when they’re more than 20’ from asphalt.

I think we need to move away from fossil fuels, and quickly. Not at all because I hate them, no, but because we need to save them for the really useful things they do. It will take decades and trillions of dollars of investment to move the world to a new power source. And we only have so much time to do it before that opportunity expires.

Leftists oppose it:

“Environmentalists” don’t understand it:

But true Chads know that’s where we’re going:

And if we ignore it, the actual aliens (not the illegal ones) will never stop giving us crap:

The Cause Of All Economic Problems Today? Denial Of Reality

“Reality is so unreal.” – Summer School

Imagine a candidate so cunning he chose Kamala as his Vice President and then choose her to be responsible for A.I. – I hear that’s because Joe figured A.I. meant Roomba™, and Kamala was good at sucking things when she was down on the carpet.

Part of the problem that we’re facing, the insanity that’s leading to the collapse that we’re seeing is a complete rejection of reality. This is fundamental to Leftism – the only things that can exist within Leftism are things that agree with Leftist ideology. If Leftist ideology says that every man is the same, well then, every man must be the same, regardless of reality. If being the same means that have the capacity to play basketball as well as LeBron James, and that LeBron James could get the same ACT® score that I got, well, I’ve got news for the world – I have doubts that LeBron could spell “cat” if I spotted him the “c” and the “t”. And I miss layups.

So, I guess we’re the same.

Except we’re not.

This is really screwing up all of the basic things that lead to a successful economy. The reaction to COVID is one that that really showed the full rejection of reality and subjugation to authority and programming. Yes, people died. And, although I only personally know one person who died (and he was 95+ in age) it was a substantially worse than the average flu, but the reaction to it was over the top. Oh, and it wrecked the economy. Want proof that was Leftist?

The nonsense continues. There’s no particular order to these, but there is a war on against . . . (spins wheel) natural gas appliances. Yes. In February, Chuckie Schumer (D-Beijing) noted that “No one is taking away your gas stove.” May 3? The state of New York bans gas appliances and furnaces in new buildings. Huh. Instead of burning clean natural gas in your home and getting most of the heat from the natural gas, folks in New York will lose, what, 40%? of the heating value of natural gas as it’s burned in electric generation plants, and then (with transmission losses) comes to their homes. I can’t see how this won’t add 40% to the bill.

But there’s more! This will stress out the electrical grid, and all those new electric cars people will be mandated to buy will be prohibited from charging in winter, just like they are in Switzerland today.

Reality? Doesn’t matter. Think of the lungs that will be saved!

And some people think Leftists are nuts.

Then there’s nationality. There is a difference between the words country and nation. A country is a group of people living under a government. A nation is a group of people with common heritage living under a government. Those two are different things. Japan is a nation. China is a nation. Denmark is a nation. That is clear. Yet if I moved to Japan and had children there, they’d never, ever be Japanese. Unless I was a Leftist.

How Leftists think.

And, of course there’s beer. Bud Light® decided that selling beer was only a secondary agenda, with results that have been, for me, encouraging. For InBev®? Less so. It turns out when you call your primary customers (men) out of touch and “fratty” then perhaps they’ll tell you to enjoy the customers you really want. Beer commercials and ads used to be cool. Now?

I guess now Bud Light® is the beer for people who haven’t decided if they’re a man or not.

Not to be topped, Miller® said, “Hold my beer,” and had a squat little woman with all of the sex appeal of a refrigerator tell people that they should send in old Miller™ advertising featuring actual women in bikinis so they can be turned into compost so hops can be grown so Miller™ can send them to women brewers to make beer. I’m not making this up. I guess Miller wasn’t content to let Bud™ irritate customers, they decided that they’d adopt the same marketing strategy so they could lose market share as well.

You’d think that being actively antagonist towards their customer base would be enough, right? What else do beer drinkers love? Hillary Clinton? Here’s the Miller™ Spokesfridge© with her idol:

And you wonder why the birthrate is falling.

This strategy denies reality, again. Just like the FedGov folks want to replace the heritage voters in the United States with voters that align with their views, it looks like beer companies want to replace the people that actually drink their beer with . . . people who don’t buy beer. You can’t make this up.

It’s like trying to mess with an Irishman’s Lucky Charms®:

Pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers, and blue diamonds. He knew they were always after them. Now the Irish will have to eat potatoes again.

Beer can lose market share, but don’t ever let the banks loose market share. I think that they might be a bit upset if they do. I mean, it’s not like it’s your money, right? That’s a reality that the Left doesn’t want anyone to think about.

But don’t worry, if you lose all of your money, potato man will come around.

It’s like the FBI®, but they pretend they have potato.

So, remember, Banana Republic® a clothing store, it’s also a state of mind.

One other last thought about reality:

PEZ® And The Fate Of Nations

“I don’t want another one of your sullen whores using my medicine cabinet as a PEZ® dispenser.” – Archer

I once had a dream I was an owl. It was a hoot. (all memes this post, as-found)

The dollar. Since the end of World War II, it’s been the world currency. The reasons are fairly simple – out of the World War II mess, the United States was ascendent. The reasons, in retrospect, were obvious. It was the strongest economy in the world. It sat on (at that point) nearly limitless oil reserves, and was the undisputed technical world leader in getting oil out of the ground.

While not the preeminent world land military power (that would likely have been the Soviets at that stage) it did have the best planes and the best navy along with a short monopoly on atomic weapons. I believe, and this cannot be emphasized enough, that the United States at this point was also the world’s largest producer of PEZ® not long after PEZ™ was introduced to the United States in 1952.

Great Britain was in the midst of involuntary decolonization – two world wars had robbed them of their vitality, except for their international leadership in the production of pop music. That left the United States standing alone, except for France, which always likes to pretend that it’s still important and the Soviets, who had an economic system that create a shortage of sand on a beach.

I once helped that Wolverine actor, the Jackman guy, find his laptop when he lost it in Switzerland while filming a movie about a professional yodeler. I said, “Your Dell® lay here, Hugh.”

As I’ve mentioned in the past, there are huge advantages to having the world currency. First, you can print dollars, ship them overseas, and people send you stuff. If that’s the first benefit, I’m not sure that you really need a second benefit. It’s the equivalent of a six-year-old scratching “one candy bar” on a piece of paper, walking into a Wal-Mart®, and Wal-Mart™ giving him a candy bar in exchange for the piece of paper. I think Wal-Mart© has a special program where they give kids in Chicago candy, all they have to do is show a pistol.

Sure, they pretended that the dollar was backed by gold for a few decades, but those fictions always end. Still, during that time frame the United States built something else – a payment framework. Using this payment network, Saudi Arabia could quickly trade a million dollars it had received from selling oil for something more useful, like hot bimbos. Saudi Arabia quickly jumped on board with this idea, especially after one of their Kings got lead poisoning after the oil embargo.

I hear the biggest show in Saudi Arabia is “How I Met Your Mothers”.

Then, Ukraine.

For whatever reason, the people who do the thinking while Biden drools, reads things in real big print, and says random crap, thought it was a good idea to take Russia’s money. How much? $1 trillion. That’s enough to buy cell phones, track suits (seriously, those are Russia’s biggest imports) for almost every Russian with enough left over for enough vodka to fuel another offensive, but not enough to pave a road.

It was a pretty serious breach of trust. In my own personal business I try to avoid giving my money to people who promise that they’re going to give it back to me and then decide, “You know, I’m just going to keep this money for myself because . . . it’s Tuesday.” Admittedly, invading another sovereign state is a little more than it being “Tuesday” but the idea is that this is a weapon that can be used once if there’s an alternative system.

Sure, the Russians have lost $1 trillion, which is half of what their entire economy produces in a year. The damage was done, though, when everybody else looked around and said, “Huh, if it can happen to Russia, it can happen to me. I’m not sure that I like the idea that someone can take away all my cash . . . and has proven that they will do so.”

Is a British bank robber a quid-napper?

How much longer can we trade the dollar for candy bars? I’m not sure. Other groups have already started trading back and forth on systems other than the ones the United States influences.

To add difficulty to this, the dollars we shipped offshore to buy candy bars and oil and Chinese clothes are headed back to the United States and there’s actually a dollar shortage overseas as the dollars flood back here. Why are they headed back? Because the interest rates are headed up, folks overseas are shipping the dollars back here to take advantage of the higher interest rates.

If we lower the interest rates? Inflation kicks higher. If we raise them, dollars (which will cause inflation) head home and make all those dollars we’re printing right now worth a little less. If only those pesky Chinese had burned all the dollars when they sent us radar detectors and fishing rods and forks and ceramic garden gnomes.

But they didn’t. And neither did anyone else, though a cat broke several of my ceramic garden gnomes, so those are a loss.

I hear China’s running a currency special – buy Yuan, get Yuan free.

Beyond that, we have either unserious, mentally damaged, or downright dangerous leadership at virtually every level of national government, and A.I. starting to take a toll on some of the higher paid jobs in society. Sure, losing all those buggy-whip makers was tough in society, but I’m not sure what we’re going to do with all of the awful plumbers that used to be programmers.

Maybe they could mine coal?

Did I mention that we just had the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history, so the indication is that, perhaps, the banking system is rotten to the core?

It’s all fun and games until everyone sees that the press is just running everything on a script in collusion with the government. Then everything will change. Oops, guess not.

And maybe Russia is a diversion, you know, to keep the whole thing together while it’s all falling apart?

Next you’re going to tell me that PEZ® entering the Chinese market in 2017 was . . . a coincidence.

Watch How Biden Uses This One Weird Trick To Turn The United States Into A Third World Country

“Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. He was an English Guy. He came to fight the Turkish.” – The Hollywood Knights

I asked for a book on oil, and the librarian suggested the non-friction section. (you’ll be able to figure out which are my memes in this post)

This has been a very consequential week in American history, and though I see the seeds of (hopefully peaceful) revolt that will eventually end in a restoration, the other seeds I see this week show that rough times are up ahead. I’ll discuss Trump in conjunction with Monday’s upcoming Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, but today I’ll focus on a much more momentous development: the Collapse of the Dollar Empire.

This week several major moves happened, all of which are negative for the United States. Heck, someone did a meme of this – I’d quote them, but I just found this info snippet without attribution:

If there was a children’s book of Joe Biden’s Very Bad Terrible No Good Week, well, this would be it, but knowing Joe it would have to be a scratch and sniff.

The United States has had several things going for it in the Post World War II era:

Lots of nuclear weapons,
A monopoly on PEZ® dispenser licensing in the world’s biggest PEZ™ market,
The premier military force in the world,
The premier economy in the world, and,
The reserve currency of the world.

The first one is self-explanatory. We even used that threat successfully several times, especially when Kissinger convinced the Soviets (with Nixon’s permission) that Nixon was unstable and often flew into rages and just might decide that he’d trade Moscow for the East Coast. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, the idea is to “act insane and have a massive nuclear arsenal”, or, as it is also known, “my ex-wife’s divorce strategy”.

The second one is just a reflection of the cultural dominance that the United States had. There were McDonald’s® restaurants calorie dispensing units around the world, but the most prominent foreign restaurant most Americans know is the International House of Pancakes®, which I assume is from Bulgaria or some place. Plus no one else could make Elmer Fudd™ PEZ™ dispensers.

They also don’t like tank tops.

The United States also had the premier military in the world. Period. We spent trillions of dollars emulating the successful bits of the Wehrmacht, so we were totally ready to fight World War II part II, if everyone agreed. Only one country wanted to play (Iraq) so we showed them what we could do if an enemy gave us six months to prepare along with the previously pre-staged equipment in Saudi Arabia. Not content with that L, they went for a rematch.

We also built the best economy in the world. Sure, it had ups and downs, and American cars manufacturers were stunned by Japanese quality in the 1970s, but we really did catch up, and by the 1990s were producing stuff that didn’t suck. We led in technological and information systems. By many measures, though, we peaked in 1973, and then the decline started. I might add that was around the time the Hart Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 started being felt.

Huh. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

They hated Trump, yet the lines didn’t form up to head south . . .

More potent than nuclear weapons was the economic policy of the United States – it was called dollar diplomacy. Since the Soviet Union’s idea of diplomacy was sending burly Russian women to show foreigners how to use diesel tractor made in Tractor Collective Factory 231 that had all the charm of a T-34 tank and all the reliability of something made by workers that considered a hammer a precision instrument, who were fueled on vodka and cabbage. Obviously, a foreign head of state could choose those cool tractors that weighed in at 34 tons (45 kiloliters). That presented a problem. In no country that I know (outside of the Soviet Union) could you trade a behemoth tractor that could double as a tank for hot chicks and booze.

Foreign leaders therefore adopted the “take the Yankee money” attitude, because mistresses need more than what the Soviet tractor lubrication manual could provide.

The really weird and cool side effect of this dollar dominance is we could just print as many of these things as we wanted, send them overseas, and people would send us stuff. Heck, that was too much work, so we invented a computer payment system so that we could pretend we printed dollars, send people a receipt, and they’d send us booze, cars, compact disc players, and, well, anything. I hear cocaine was popular in the 1980s.

I’m no rube. I saw Scarface.

I was disappointed the first time I saw Scarface – he didn’t really know anything about scarves.

But there was one little, tiny thing that made the dollar so prominent. Oil.

That brings us to Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal. He got along okay with the West, hated commies, and tried to modernize (somewhat) Saudi Arabia. Faisal also led the Oil Embargo of 1973 and 1974 (related to U.S. support of Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War). This generated a lot of money for the Saudis as well as economic chaos in the West.

Oddly, Saudi king Faisal was, um, ventilated by his American-educated nephew in 1975. And the new Saudi King agreed to buy and sell oil only in dollars.

Huh. Surely those things weren’t connected?

Likewise, through the 1980s, the Saudis sold lots and lots of oil cheaply at the request of Reagan to bankrupt the Soviet Union, make the dollar triumphant, and leave the United States as the sole superpower.

If Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg had a kid, would it be called Slush Puppy?

One major reason the dollar was the reserve currency of the world is that it was the only currency that oil was bought and sold in. It became the de facto settlement currency because of that and the highly developed financial systems that made the transfer of billions of dollars effortless and easy.

That’s the history lesson.

In 2017, one of Trump’s first official visits was to Saudi Arabia. They even had that weird moment where they put their hands on a glowing glow to power up some sort of Saudi CIA that would help fight terrorism. Relations were good.

In two years, Biden has conducted a stunning array of foreign policy missteps that has unwound all of the work done since 1973. One of the powers of the dollar as a weapon is that if you use it, maybe it isn’t so important, and if people feel really threatened?

I wonder if we’ll start calling our sanctions “Special Financial Operations”?

They’ll create a system where it won’t hurt them. Russia’s a case in point. Regardless of how their military is doing (I don’t trust either side to analyze this one) their economy really hasn’t been hurt in this conflict. It was hurt in 2014, but they planned for the disruption, and from the reports I’ve recently seen, they’re doing fine. For Russians, which wasn’t much to start with.

The point that Biden missed (and that your humble correspondent picked up on immediately) is that Russia doesn’t need dollars since they make their own stuff, with the exception of tracksuits, iPhones®, and porn. They can figure out how to make new Vodka-Pepsi® or Vodka-Starbucks™, but the world still needs their grain, fertilizer, oil, and natural gas.

Biden has done the near impossible in a little over two years as Resident of the White House.

He’s pushed China closer to Russia.
He’s pushed Saudi Arabia closer to Iran.
He’s created a situation where large-scale trades are going to be conducted in currency other than the dollar on a regular basis.
He’s drawn the Strategic Petroleum Reserve down levels not seen since 1984.
He’s working on maximizing inflation while spending everything possible.

In Saudi Arabia, all the bike thieves say, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

But Joe has shown that a previous statement by Barack Obama to be correct:

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

And he’s got 581 more days to the election. And we’ve got 656 days until the next inauguration.