Category: Energy

Read This Post Because You Want To See Why Efficiency Can Suck

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!  Amongst our weaponry are such diverse elements as fear, surprise, ruthless efficiency, an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope, and nice red uniforms – oh damn!” – Python, Monty

I’m scared that German sausage might be dangerous – but I guess that’s a wurst-case scenario.

One particular afternoon (decades ago) my ex-wife (She Who Will Not Be Named – SWWNBN) moved out.  It was one of those things where we were both immediately happier, though the process of getting a divorce was rough – the judge finally had to sit me down and tell me I couldn’t get the engagement annulled, too.

I kid.  SWWNBN and I were awful for each other.  One of the major disagreements in our life was money.  I was cheap – when SWWNBN wanted to get out of the house for dinner and I fed her Hamburger Helper® in the garage, well, SWWNBN wasn’t pleased.

So on that particular afternoon, SWWNBN moved out she handed me a plastic grocery sack.  It was filled to the brim with papers.  “Here,” she grunted as the heavy sack thudded on the dinner table, causing the legs to audibly groan, “are the bills.  And here is the checkbook.  I have no idea how much money is in it.”

SWWNBN then turned and walked out the door.  For good.

There’s a dentist office in the Vatican – it’s in the Listerine Chapel.

Let me explain how I got into this situation:  stupidity.

I had the brilliant idea when SWWNBN and I argued about money to give her control of the bills.  I figured that if she was responsible for paying them, she’d make sure that they were paid, and help economize around the house, keep the thermostat lower, turn off the lights, and understand that our income versus our bills was a constant fight to avoid trying to find the choice real estate under the overpass – but you have to remember location is everything.

SWWNBN had managed the bills for a few years.  Surely she had been competent.  I picked up the bill on top.

It was a gasoline company credit card.  It hadn’t been paid in two months.  The balance was (from memory) $780.

For gasoline.

SWWNBN had been paying the minimum balance and juggling the payments so it looked like the Titanic was doing swell, thank you very much, until the alarm went up and the crew jumped ship.

The movies The Sixth Sense and Titanic are about the same thing:  icy dead people.

The show of horrors went on as I went through the stack and started sorting them into piles:

  • Paid and up to date (one account, the mortgage was in this stack).
  • Only one or two months late.
  • Late and building a ludicrous balance.
  • Company threatening to send people named Vito and Chico to break my legs.

I then went to my computer and opened Excel®.  I started making a spreadsheet.  The bills were enormous.  In order to not have to “donate” a kidney to someone from the United Arab Emirates, my one option was to take an immediate loan against my 401K.

The next 24 months of my life were an exercise in extreme budget management.  Every single expense was an exercise in nearly zero choices:  every cent had a home before my company direct-deposited it into my account.  How close was I budgeting things?  By the time I was through with a five-dollar bill, Abe was clean-shaven.

My pay had become exactly coupled to my expenses.

Did you hear about that movie role Nic Cage turned down?  Neither did he.

When people think of efficiency, they describe, for instance, a manufacturing facility where all of the equipment is used at maximum capacity, all the time.  Whatever is being made flows from one process to the next and there’s no lag.  All of the processes are coupled.  There is no slack in the system.

This is, of course, a recipe for disaster.

Just like my income being exactly tied to the seemingly endless stack of bills that I had to pay, that kind of factory would bring nothing but chaos.  Whenever any part of it had to slow down or stop unless there was a place to put the “in progress” work, the entire factory would have to shut down or Lucy would have to eat a lot more chocolates.

My life was just like that factory.  If the dollar didn’t come in, I couldn’t pay my bills.  If I had been out of work for even a few months, I would have been bankrupt.  At least if I was bankrupt in summer, I might get some prime real estate in the stormwater culvert.

The example factory isn’t something I’ve made up.  If you look at the outages of natural gas and electricity during the February storm, you’ll see a system where all of the excess capacity had been used.  In colder climates, the systems are built for the cold.  In Texas?

Not so much.  The excess capacity for electrical generation (in some cases) was down for maintenance as pointed out by Nick Flandrey (his website) in the comments section here.

And it would be difficult to convince a business executive to build a lot of excess capacity for the coldest winter storm to hit Texas in over 120 years.  If there’s excess capacity, that executive will try to figure out a way to use it.  His career and BMW® payments require it, although I still feel sorry for that poor German that installs turn signals on BMWs™.

Excess isn’t tolerated – it’s not efficient.  Not a lot of polar bears use sunblock.

But don’t worry about teddy bears.  They’re already stuffed.

But in resilient systems, the excess isn’t just tolerated – it’s required.  There is a conscious decoupling from one operation to the next.  These are systems that are built to be reliable.  Part of our jobs as adults is to scan the horizon as hard as Joe Biden works when he tries to form a complete sentence to see where those breakdowns might occur.

Decoupling is required for many things – the very idea of prepping, for instance, is a conscious act to decouple from a fragile, efficient system.  Building up excess capacity (food, ammo, water purification, heat, shelter) is that very act of creating slack.  It’s building up space between your car and the idiot in front of you in case they hit the brakes on a wet road and you rear-end them and realize you’re underinsured and then they complain about neck pains and then say just kidding and this just got far too specific.

So, back to me, decades ago, sitting in a chair at a dining room table staring at a pile of bills.  Knowing that a truck had pulled into my life and as the bed went up, it had covered me up so deep that only a farmer could pull me out, since he knew that I wouldn’t make the soil richer.

And I dug out of debt, bit by bit, bill by bill.  When I retired a bill was a time of great joy.  And, the first one I paid off was that gasoline credit card that had been at the top of the stack.  Each time I turned a balance to zero?

Why did Angela Merkel cross the road?  Because she wanted to go that way and the pedestrian crossing sign indicated it was safe to do so.

I smiled.  I had decoupled a bit from my debt.  It took six years to get out, and four of those I was married to The Mrs.  I still recall paying a final bill on my final credit card on a crisp January morning.  I had no debt, not even car debt at that point.  Heck, I even paid the exorcist so my house wouldn’t be repossessed.

In my case, decoupling my bills from my paycheck was one of the greatest days of my life – knowing that, regardless of what happened next week was safe.  Then that savings stretched out to a month.  Then six months.  Then a year.

Decoupling gives you time and space, often those things in an emergency that you can’t buy with any amount of money.  Remember the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020?  Sure it was rough, but that’s just how Americans roll.

But one of the biggest lessons is, according to Henny Youngman:

“Why are divorces expensive?  They’re worth it.”

Texas Power Outages, Global Warming, And At Least One Bikini

“You want a prediction about the weather?  You’re asking the wrong Phil. I’ll give you a winter prediction. It’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.” – Groundhog Day

Pugsley said it was so cold in the house that it was at absolute zero.  I said, “That’s 0K.”

It has been cold.  Really cold.  The good thing about that is that I like the cold.  It’s rarely cold enough for me – even now my fingers are nearly numb blocks of flesh mashing the keyboard and only occasionally hitting the right key.

Almost cold enough, but as I reach up I find that I still have feeling in my jaw and cheeks, so I’m not quite there.

But Texas is.  Today at lunch The Mrs. and I were discussing that it was colder in Anchorage, Alaska than in Houston, Texas.  That made me think.  And then I ended up wondering if it was too cold for Jeff Bezos to sleep in his undies, or if he needed his pajamazon?

Okay, back to Texas.

When we lived in Houston, I was shocked at the really poor design of the homes – sure they were fine for 95°F (2°C) and 95% humidity, but the house we lived in (and many I had seen when we were looking for a home to buy) had bare copper pipe running on the outside of the house.  The spigots outside were so poorly insulated that just walking by them with a decently cold beer would cause them to freeze and split.

If asbestos is bad, imagine if it were asworstos.

And that’s just one problem.

The bigger problem is that Texas is supposed to be an energy source.  Oil gets pumped there, sure.  But the pipelines for all of that natural gas that is produced in Texas?  All of those pipelines head out of state.  Texas is silly with natural gas, and produces far more than it uses.

Natural gas has historically been used to heat houses.  It’s relatively abundant, quick and simple to ignite, and generally relatively cheap*.  It’s great for hot water heaters.  It’s wonderful for forced air heaters, like we have here at Casa Wilder.  Heck, in the 1970’s (I read once) they passed a law that restricted the use of natural gas so that its convenient, safe heat could be used by homeowners voters to heat their houses.

And one oil company was going to make renewable crude from insect urine.  It think it was BP.

But somewhere that philosophy changed – mainly when natural gas became abundant with fracking, and when Global Warming® activists became obsessed with coal.  Natural gas puts a lot less carbon into the air than coal per Btu (kiloparsec).  So, it became common to build industrial plants that used natural gas for heat, as well as power plants that used natural gas instead of coal.

Natural gas is pretty nifty when you use it for a power plant.  That same property of nearly instant heat is there, so if you use natural gas to drive an engine, for example, you can pretty efficiently use that fuel to generate electricity quickly.  To start up a coal electrical generating plant takes a long time.  To start up a natural gas electrical generating plant?

Super fast and easy, at least by comparison.

When The Mrs. and I met, I felt quite a spark.  Who knew she had a Taser®?

But what happens when all of those Texas houses, not built for cold, crank up the natural gas heater?  What happens when the people who use electricity to heat their house crank that up at the same time?  And, what happens when all of those wind turbines that are supposed to be generating electricity become electricity sinks, since many of them have electric heaters to prevent the gears and bits from freezing up and breaking?  And the wind isn’t blowing?

The system fails.

An aside:

As I wrote this, I realized that my heater hadn’t gone on for, oh, seven degrees.  The internal temperature in the house had dropped to 57°F (2°C).  Not good.  As I went to my trusty heater, I found it flashing a series of codes over and over again like an autistic R2-D2™.

In the past, this was a failed part called a “flame roll out sensor” which appears to fail much more often than the penny I replace it with.  Just kidding!  I use stripped wire.  Also kidding.  I really don’t mess with the heater more than changing the filter every decade or so (Pugsley changes it twice yearly) and flipping the breaker on and off and then poking about the insides like an Albanian strip-mall lawyer trying to fix a copier. 

Which, oddly enough, works.  I know that there is some sort of computer logic that was finally satisfied – such as, “the gas is no longer explosive enough to launch Wilder into space in the most pathetic attempt to emulate Elon Musk since Wilder founded a company named Space Y.”

I make jokes about air conditioners, but not heaters.  That’s not cool.

My guess?  The gas pressure dropped a bit.  Which never happens, except in February, 2021.  I’ve never seen this particular error code, except the one time that I missed the exhaust portal near Yavin 4.

So, we have Texas, proud producer of natural gas, and now, neurotic consumer of natural gas.  And we have all of these Texas generating stations that need . . . natural gas.  And we have all of these Texas homes that need electricity to run the electric heaters (our house in Texas was one of those).

The system fails.  Power goes out.

But the Germans are going to build a car in Texas.  It will be called the Audi Neighbor™.

Thankfully the cold won’t last forever.  And this is a cold that, in some places, has broken records that were 122 years old, so it’s not the usual sort of winter storm in any respect.

But it does show us the limit of our systems.

Dang.  The heater is working again.  I can feel my fingers now.

*One source I saw showed spot prices up 24,000% (LINK), from $4.00 per million Btu last week to $999 yesterday.

America: Walking The Razor’s Edge

“The pathway to salvation is as narrow and as difficult to walk as a razor’s edge.” – The Razor’s Edge (1984)

What did the hobbits say as they rode the Ents into battle?  “Run, forest, run!”

It was on July 4.  I had convinced two of my friends to follow me on a bizarre quest – we were going to climb one of the tallest mountains in North America.  By one of them, it’s in the top 50.  So, in my book that counts.

The trip started using gasoline – we had a borrowed Jeep® that we took as far up the hill as we could, since it was a borrowed Jeep™.  My friend who had borrowed the Jeep© didn’t want to wreck it, since it was before YouTube® and we wouldn’t even get likes from a cool video if we wrecked it on the amazingly rough road.

We decided to make this hike a three-day event.  On the first day, we’d do nearly a mile gain in elevation while we camped out 1000’ below the summit of the mountain.  Then, we’d summit the mountain and spend the next night at our basecamp.  Then we’d hike out the next morning.

Of course, it rained.

At the elevation of our basecamp, trees can’t grow, so we boiled filtered water in the rain.  It worked, sort of.  At that elevation, water boils at less than 190°F.  It was enough to reheat a fifteen-year-old dehydrated Mountain House® Chili Mac, even though the beans couldn’t get hot enough to not be crunchy.

After climbing up a mountain, crunchy beans and all, it was the best dinner I’d had in years.  I think I ate two.

The chili mac wasn’t red hot, but there was no way I was going to give it away, give it away, give it away now.

The next day morning we were sore – but we could leave our packs at the camp so we’d just be carrying ourselves and our water.  It was nearly half of a mile to get to the summit – a half of a mile straight up.

The trip up was a true scramble – a broken field of boulders that we sometimes had to ascend on all fours.  It was steep – very steep.  As we intersected the ridge that led to the summit of the mountain, I looked forward to seeing what was on the other side of the ridge.  I was certain that it must be flatter than the steep boulder field we’d just climbed – there was no way it could be as steep.

I got to the edge of the ridge, and looked down.

Until that moment in time, I had never been afraid of heights.  But I was not expecting to see what I saw.

It was a cliff.  A sheer drop off – I was looking at a certified Wile E. Coyote precipice.

When I was stuck on that cliff, they told me not to “look down.”  So, I smiled.

I don’t know if you’ve ever looked straight down and seen a cliff that went nearly three-quarters of a mile straight down when you weren’t expecting it.  For the first time in my life I was experiencing vertigo – it felt like the mountain under me was going to slide off down that cliff.

I moved back down the ridge.  But I still had to climb a few hundred feet upward to reach the summit.  Up the side of the ridge I went.  I assure you, I stayed back from that knife-edge as we crawled up that hill.

Then, finally, tantalizingly close, there was the summit.  I was nearly to the top of one of the highest mountains in North America.

There was one little problem.

Between the ridge I was on, and the top of the mountain there was a path.  It was about six or eight feet long, and probably a foot wide, and it was flat, like it had been machined.

What’s the difference between Humpty Dumpty and 2020?  One of them had a great fall.

On one side of it was, you guessed it, a sheer cliff that bottomed out 3,000 feet or so below me.  On the other side of the path it was a lot better.  There was only about a 1,000 foot drop.

Wait, was 1,000 feet better?  I’d get more time to live if I fell down the 3,000 foot side.

Choices.

But when facing that last few steps, shaky with the first vertigo in my life, I’ll admit those were some of the toughest steps of my life.  But, hey, what was I going to tell the folks back home?  That I climbed to a spot nearly three miles into the air to stop two feet before I reached the top?

Nope.

But that ridge (to me) was a razor’s edge.  On either side was disaster.  I took a deep breath.  I put one foot in front of the other.  And I walked – one step, two steps, three steps – to the top, where my friends were waiting.

What brought this to mind was an email forwarded by frequent commenter, 173dVietVet, where he said (in part) this on discussing where our country is:

“(I’ve) Done a bit of mountain climbing in my Ranger days and I know full well the meaning of knife’s edge, where any wrong step throws you headlong forever into the abyss of death that lies on BOTH sides . . . .”

We are in that zone.  In climbing mountains, the knife edge is more than a metaphor – it’s real.  On either side is death, and it’s not metaphorical death, it’s mangled into a wadded pile of Wilder by the combined forces of gravity and the sudden stop on the rocky outcropping at the bottom.  Sure, Wile E. Coyote could survive, but not me.

Everything went downhill after gravity was invented.

But in life, the knife-edge is a metaphor.  We’ve created a financial situation where the economy is horribly broken, and for the last year we’ve survived mainly by printing money and not allowing people to be evicted from houses, despite the questionable legality of that.

A bigger component to our knife edge is that the rule of law has been progressively ignored in the country.  Where is the right of the Federal Government to stop evictions of tenants?

Oh, there isn’t one.  They just made it up.

That would be (at best) an action by a State, though even then it’s of questionable legality.  But then the Patriot Act made spying on American citizens “legal” so who cares about legal, anyway?  Then every agency with three letters of an alphabet decided to swallow up all of that online data, and all of the phone calls, despite laws to the contrary.

Of course, Federal employees were put in prison.

Hahahaha!

No.

The NSA:  a government agency that actually listens to you!

Despite obviously illegal orders, no one was put in prison, and the only one likely to be put into prison is the whistleblower (Edward Snowden) if he ever shows back up in the United States.  It used to be the Constitution that was ignored, but that’s so 1940s.

Now, the government can ignore any inconvenient law it wants to ignore.  Of course, the people that can ignore the law are those that are either leaders, government employees, or those favored (think Antifa™) by the government.

Destroy evidence?  A felony for most.  But when the government does it?  It’s “a regrettable incident.”

What people misunderstand is that Trump isn’t at all the cause of our problems today.  Trump is a symptom.  Without Trump, the answer would have been (yet another) Bush, this time Jeb, versus (yet another) Clinton, this time Hillary.  Oh, the excitement for electing ¡Jeb!

The difference between another Clinton and another Bush?  Nothing, really.  And America didn’t want that – so America elected Trump.  If anything, Trump cleared the fog, and made the knife edge we were walking clearer.

Jeb has a perfect place in government, as the Secretary of Low Energy.

And now, we are walking, and the knife-edge is sharper and narrower than the one that I walked to get to the top of that mountain on July 4th a couple of decades ago.

We have left the bounds of Constitutional governance some time ago – people think it’s quaint when I bring the entire idea of the Constitution up.  Is there a path back to an actual Constitutional government?

Sure.  It’s narrow – a knife-edge.  But so was getting that Constitutional government in the first place.  But getting that original Constitution depended upon men climbing a mighty steep mountain several hundred years ago.  Were they afraid when they saw the cliff’s edge, the price of failure?

I’m sure they were.  But yet they continued.  And when it was time to thread that final few steps to the summit?

They did, and damn the dangers on either side.

We face the same knife-edge.  Where are we going?

A Tree Fell On My House, But I Have A Chainsaw

“I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay.  I sleep all night and I work all day.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

What’s black and white and red all over?  Two mimes fighting with chainsaws.

I saw a quote this week that made me smile a lot.  I’ll share it with you:

“When God put a calling on your life He already factored in your stupidity.”

A few weeks ago, a tree fell down and hit our house during a storm.  And by a tree, I mean a huge one.  I had snapped off 15 feet (57 Joules) up the tree.  It was nearly horizontal, and resting on my favorite roof.

I’ll admit that I was sitting in the hot tub during the storm that brought down the tree.

It was glorious.  I don’t know if you’ve ever heard a tree fall.  It’s wonderful.  Approximately once every five minutes, I’d hear the tearing of wood and then, after a pause for the amount of time it took for the vertical tree to become horizontal, the crash.  The next day, one more tree fell.

It fell into my house.  The Mrs. sent me a picture.

I waited until Saturday when The Boy was down from Upper Lower Midwestia University to solve the problem, because the one thing a boy home from college wants to hear?  “Hey, son, glad you’re back from college for a weekend of rest.  I’m going to grab you and your brother and we’re going to work all day in one of your dad’s crazy adventures.  Oh, and it involves you getting up early and chainsaws.”

Honestly, he should be used to it by now.

Looking back, I realize that in a normal world, I would have called my insurance company.  They’d send out adjusters who would look at the tree.  They’d measure it, weigh it, and sensuously cup its fallen boughs, which still happens to be legal in my state.

I’ve heard you can save a lot of money on car insurance by switching.  Switching to reverse and leaving the scene.

They would look in the book of “Tree Falling On House Payments.”  They’d then tell me that elm trees falling on houses in Upper Lower Midwestia were excluded.  I would then correct them because I live in Lower Upper Midwestia and the tree was actually a son of a birch.

Then he says, “Oh, you’re that John Wilder.  Of course!  Insurance will cover it.”

Then, I would call a tree company to come and move the tree.  Since everyone in town had a tree fall on their house, it would take a month for them to show up for an estimate, and another month for them to remove the tree.  After the tree company charged me $2200 to move it, I’d toss the bill to the insurance company.

I’d pay the deductible (which is currently set at my left kidney for my homeowner’s policy, and my cornea for auto), and that’s it.

But would that be the Wilder Way?  Of course not.

I can sleep in on the weekends.  The Mrs., who is borderline insomniac, feels that this is my superpower.  Generally, I can get to sleep in less than five minutes, often in less than one.  The Mrs. can only sleep on Tuesdays after 9 P.M. if it’s not Daylight Savings Time.  The Mrs. has walked into the bathroom to brush her teeth and returned to find me sound asleep.  I can even do it when I’m driving, though my passengers don’t seem to care for it.

What’s green, fuzzy, and will kill you if it falls on you out of a tree?  A pool table.

The reason I can sleep is only when I don’t have a Mission.  When there’s a Mission?  I wake up and I’m ready to go.  I don’t even need an alarm clock.  The tree on my house represented a Mission.

As it was, I had Pugsley and The Boy available, and daylight was burning.  I knocked on each door as I went out to start work.

I started with the branch trimmer.  Alone.  The sleeping leviathans inside had yet to move.

Branch trimmers are like the scissors that Hannibal Lecter would use to, umm, prune a rose bush.  This was my third set.  The problem with the first two is that The Boy and then Pugsley pulled the handles too hard and bent the metal.  Sometimes, living with them is like living with five-year-olds that don’t understand that they can twist metal with their bare hands.

So, a paid for the expensive trimmers this time.

Trees don’t walk.  They lumber.

These trimmers were good enough to cut through about a 2” branch, which is pretty stout.  I took the trimmer and started hacking.  I was about 30 minutes into hacking when The Boy showed up.  Pugsley showed up slightly later.  It took us 10 years to convince him he had to shower, and now he has six of them a day.  I wouldn’t be surprised to find that he takes a cheese plate into the shower.

When Pugsley showed up, I had him get the chainsaw, mix gas, chain oil and chainsaw sharpener.  I showed him how to sharpen the chainsaw blade, which took all of 30 seconds, but then he knew how it worked.  I also showed him how to adjust the chain.  These may seem like small things, but they are rites of passage.  There are many tools in a cabinet, and some are mostly harmless, like a screwdriver.  But a chainsaw?

A fear of spiders is called arachnophobia.  A fear of chainsaws?  That’s called common sense.

For the next seven hours we were like ants, taking branch after branch off of the tree, first with the branch trimmer and then with the chainsaw.

I had a dentist who used to be a lumberjack.  He pulled a tooth by mistake.  I’ll never to Axedental again.

Finally, we were down to two major branches.  By the time we’d gotten there, I realized that what I had done was, slowly, cut off all of the minor support points.  It seemed like a good bet.  But it was also a nagging feeling that I might be making the problem worse.

I was.  While sitting down, I heard a sharp crack.

Like wood breaking.  The exact sound I had heard while having a beer in the hot tub during the storm.

One of the two branches left holding up the whole tree was cracking.  Looking at the tree, I saw that it was big.  I estimated that what remained was about 5,000 pounds (one metric “Your Momma”) and a quick check of my estimate that I did while writing this backed that number up, unless the tree was on a low carb diet.

That 5,000 pounds was going to fall on my deck, and if I wasn’t careful?  5,000 pounds dropping 15 feet is a lot of energy – enough energy to smash a deck, a Wilder, and maybe an insurance adjustor to boot.

I had The Boy and Pugsley run into the garage looking for whatever lumber they could find that was the right length to prop up this rapidly deteriorating situation.  After ten minutes, I had two 2×4’s and one mangy plank holding the tree up.  It wasn’t moving, but it wasn’t stable, and it was 10.5 feet (one metric Barron Trump) up in the air.

The Mrs. took a picture of my makeshift supports.  She sent it to her high school friend list.  One friend who is in city planning responded, “Oh, no!  This looks like all of the ladder safety videos that they make us watch.”

I thought about what I’d do, and sent The Boy and Pugsley off to buy a 10’ stepladder and some ratchet tie-offs.  When they got back, I propped the 10’ stepladder under the branch, shimmed it with lumber, and then got the chainsaw-on-a-stick.

The chainsaw-on-a-stick is just that – a tiny electric chainsaw mounted on a stick.  This one has an 8” blade, and is meant to cut things far away.  That’s good, because that’s exactly what I intended to do.  I would have liked to cut this particular tree from orbit, because it was lopsided – it looked like it wanted to twist, hard, clockwise.

I used to be a lumberjack in the Sahara Forest.  Well, it used to be the Sahara Forest.  I’m that good.

I tied off the branch to a convenient tree so when I cut it loose it couldn’t fall into the garden shed.  I further tied off one of the remaining branches so maybe that it wouldn’t twist as it fell.

Pugsley pulled out his camera to record the action.

“Nope.  Put it away.”  The situation that I had put myself into was less than optimal.  I realize that as men we are here not to live a life without risk, but to live a life.  And the Sun was now going down.  It was now or never.  One way or another that tree was coming down before the Sun went down.

Getting injured because you refused to let someone else clear the tree?  That seems like a stupid and futile gesture.

Well, if you’re looking for stupid and futile gestures, you’ve come to the right place.  I just didn’t want my particular stupid and futile gesture to result in YouTube® videos of my death.  I proceeded to take the chainsaw on a stick and started to cut into the branch.

As far as tense moments go, having the stored energy of a Ford Explorer® 15 feet up in the air, dependent upon your calculations and being right?

It’s tense.

When I was back in Alaska, I could regularly drop trees within a degree of where I wanted them to go.  Was I a lumberjack?  No.  But I had to lay in dozens of metric Your Momma’s worth of wood a year just to heat the house.  You get pretty comfortable with a chainsaw doing that.

When I cut wood in Alaska, I didn’t get overtime, even though I logged a lot of hours.

But that was 15 years (3 centimeters) ago.  I cut into the tree.  I first cut a relief cut in the top of the horizontal branch.  I didn’t want stress to build up there and hang the whole mess up.  Then I started to cut from the bottom up.

You have to cut a tree that’s acting like a beam from the bottom up.  If you cut it from the top down?  It will bind the saw, and you end up in a crazy place where you have a stuck saw and a Ford Explorer®’s amount of energy dependent upon you freeing it.

I cut into the tree.  A lot.  Then paused.  The opening the chainsaw had made grew larger as the stress pulled the tree apart.  I cut into the tree again.  By now, the entire 5,000 pounds was hanging by a 3” by 2” slab of wood.  Still no movement.

Finally, I cut deeper.  I hear the “crack” as the tree split.  Pugsley was watching from a safe distance.  He said the tree dropped perfectly down.  I wouldn’t know – I was headed the opposite direction.  Not only was there the 5,000 pound tree, there was also the bit still on the roof.  I could easily imagine that part whipping around as it was pulled by the main branch.

The final crack came.

The tree did come down.  Perfectly.  The bit left on the roof?  Didn’t move an inch.  Exactly as I wanted it to go.  I sat down as The Boy and Pugsley removed the rest of the debris.  Pugsley even got me a beer and said, “You’re done, Pop.  Have a rest.”

I trained my kids that if I ever choke on a beer, they should give me the Heineken® maneuver.

The damage to the house was minimal, actually.  A bit of gutter needs to be moved back into place.  One shingle lost its gravel in a small circle.  A solar light was broken.  I need to replace one deck board, one chair, and one plastic bench.  Oh, and we spent 27 hours of labor.  I was sore for the next three days.

If a tree falls on your house and that’s all you lose?  You’re as lucky as me.  Which is pretty lucky.

Or, more likely?  God has factored my stupidity into my life.

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.

No Mask? No Problem. We’ll Just Reeducate You.

“John Spartan, you are fined one credit for a violation of the Verbal Morality Statute.” – Demolition Man

LECH

2020 has me so confused.  Do I need a mask or a brick to enter a store?

The Chinese Flu has been devastating for our culture in many ways.  The biggest impact is certainly economic.  But it has also brought out divisions in our society that (primarily) people on the Left are set to exploit.  The riots have been awful, and in fact so bad that the early positive sentiments that Marxist Black Lives Matter® are eroding.  Thankfully, the cops have now found out the easiest way to break up a BLM©/PantiFa™ riot – pass out job applications.

One controversy that thankfully hasn’t come to Modern Mayberry is mask wearing.  I’ve decided firmly to not decide on wearing masks.  Do I wear one?  No, because it’s silly in a county where nobody has Shanghai Lung Rot.  Besides, masks make me sweat like an NFL® player asked to solve a quadratic equation.  Heck, one night during the pandemic I woke up with the sweats.  I worried until I changed out to jeans.

In Wal-Mart®, about one out of ten people wear a mask.  In the restaurants?  Zero.  I’ve seen fast food employees wearing them, but most of the time their noses aren’t covered, so the masks serve as, um, I guess spit deflectors and an excuse to not shave?

JOHO

The most Progressive thing about Joe Biden is his dementia.

I’ve seen horrible arguments on each side, and good arguments on each side, but pretty close to zero science on either side along with data corrupted enough to be Obama’s attorney general, so I say:

Whatever.  I don’t care.  Please don’t try to convince me in the comments.  I love you all, but the mask battle is just a distraction as our government prints more money than Joe Biden has active brain cells every week.

Sometimes, though, the Leftists tell you what they really want.  The biggest traitors in the Current Year have been our so-called intellectual elite.  On August 10, Johns Hopkins™ tweeted® the amazingly horrific tweet© shown below:

HOPKINS

But Joseph Stalin and the KGB both gave it two thumbs up.

At some point an adult at Johns Hopkins© became aware of the tweet™, and wisely deleted it.  The article it’s based on is here (LINK).  It’s actually more frightening than anything that PantiFa™ has done, since I think the average group of PantiFa© “warriors” could be taken down by the toddler soccer club here in Modern Mayberry.  I mean, those kids can hit hard if they don’t like their juice box flavor at half time.

The article is horrific.  Parker Crutchfield, Associate Professor Butthead of Medical Ethics(?), Humanities and Law at Western Michigan University (his contact information is here LINK) suggested that the best way of stopping WuhanFluhan is to secretly drug the population so they become willing sheep that will do anything authorities suggest.

I’m not making this up.  Not even a little.

Here’s the direct quote:

“Another challenge is that the defectors who need moral enhancement are also the least likely to sign up for it. As some have argued, a solution would be to make moral enhancement compulsory or administer it secretly, perhaps via the water supply.” (emphasis added)

PARKER

This guy advocates drugging the population – it’s so bad that mermaids are addicted to seaweed.

His final paragraph is the most chilling:

“The scenario in which the government forces an immunity booster upon everyone is plausible. And the military has been forcing enhancements like vaccines or “uppers” upon soldiers for a long time. The scenario in which the government forces a morality booster upon everyone is far-fetched. But a strategy like this one could be a way out of this pandemic, a future outbreak or the suffering associated with climate change. That’s why we should be thinking of it now.”  (emphasis added)

Again, this is a “professor” who is supposed to teach ethics.  I’m just wondering what ethical system allows drugging the population to make them do what you want?  I think Stalin would have nodded approvingly, especially since this is exactly what Huxley described in Brave New World.

The fact that an idiot born from a crazed mother in an insane asylum (I made that part up, but it fits) named Parker Crutchfield, who is being paid for by Michigan tax dollars to argue for the chemical mental enslavement of people he doesn’t agree with secretly via the water supply exists?  If anyone told me that, I’d call it a crazy conspiracy theory.  But I read the article.  It’s there.  You know, the article that Johns Hopkins© Tweeted™?

MICH

Umm, anyone notice she’s not wearing a facemask?  Heck, I’d buy her a whole paper bag so we didn’t have to see her face.

I was listening to Scott Adams’ podcast the other day, and he mentioned that it’s a psychological trait of people to use language that shows what they’re really thinking – when Obama talked about Biden’s selection of Kamala Harris, Obama said, “Joe nailed it.”

Adams made the point that “nail” in this case reminded him of a “coffin nail” which indicated that Joe would only serve for a short time before Kamala took over.  Parker Crutchfield’s imbecilic writing is far less subtle.  He is openly arguing for the government to secretly drug Americans by force to make them compliant.  Beyond that, the drug must meet Parker Crutchfield’s ideological specifications – he’d love to dose you with oxytocin.

Sadly for Parker Crutchfield, he notes that oxytocin increases compliance but it also increases ethnocentrism.  Ethnocentrism is a love of your own people.  I guess that’s a drawback for Parker Crutchfield, since an ethnocentristic United States would be cohesive and centered around our culture, rather than pretending that every culture that drifts in produces equal results.

How can you have PantiFa™ if you don’t think that murderous cannibal tribes are exactly the same as your local optometrist who belongs to the Chamber of Commerce®?

All it takes for Parker Crutchfield is a chemical that produces your submission and doesn’t make you love your country and other people like you.  He’d then not only be fine with injecting it into the water supply, he’d probably pour it in himself.

ETHNO

Parker Crutchfield did not approve of this image.

Corona-Chan has been bad, but not in deaths.  The death rate appears to be trending towards less than 1%, perhaps far less than 1% since millions may have had it that have never been tested.  But the median age of someone dying from COVID-19 seems to be nearly 80.  That means that catching the Chinese Virus increases your life expectancy by two years, since the average age of death in the United States is 78.

Reality?  Coronavirus is mainly killing old folks.  If you’re 80, stay home if you want to.  Take precautions.  Don’t lick doorknobs on public restrooms.  Don’t drink the toilet water no matter how cool and refreshing it looks.

I rarely hope that bad things happen to people.  Really.  It’s not my job.  I’m a happy guy.  But I’d love to see Parker Crutchfield’s only employment opportunity being sanitizing carts with his tongue at your local Wal-Mart™ after taking the massive doses of oxytocin to make him ethnocentric.  At least he won’t poison any young minds that way.

And Michigan, seriously?  What are you guys thinking?

Don’t Run Out The Clock On Life.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.” – Blade Runner

RIPLEY

Why haven’t aliens been here more frequently?  They saw the reviews – one star.

One of the benefits of living in Modern Mayberry is that there are no shortage of places where you can contribute.  After being assistant peewee coach for The Boy’s football (the one men play, not the game for socialist European women) I volunteered to be head coach for Pugsley’s team.  The first season, I was less than spectacular.  And saying I was less than spectacular is being generous.

Let me be clear – when you’re coaching third and fourth graders who can’t even calculate the orbital dynamics of the planet Mercury because they don’t know relativity and keep getting the wrong answer using Newtonian mechanics, it’s the coaching.  The kids are, more or less, equally inept and equally talented.  You put the big kids on the line and the fast kids as backs and receivers and wonder what to do with the small, slow kids.

As a first year coach?  I was like a small, slow kid.  I’m not sure we won a game my first year.  That wasn’t the kids; that season was on me – it was all my fault.  I’ll admit I have faults, and so will The Mrs.   The Mrs. says I have two main faults – that I don’t listen and some other one.

REFS

In Europe they call it 30.48cm ball.

I remember the first game of my second pee-wee football season as clearly as if it were yesterday.  The offense was on the field.  We had just made a first down.  There was a minute and twenty seconds (seventeen metric minutes) left on the clock.  I did the math – thirty seconds a play, four downs . . . and they were out of time outs.

Wait a minute, I thought.  We were up by five points.  If we just ran three plays and didn’t fumble the ball and let them score a touchdown – we would win!

All we had to do was run out the clock.  Our only enemy was time.

I told the quarterback to just kneel down when the center hiked the ball to him.  For a second, he looked confused – we had played the whole game being aggressive on offense, and we’d racked up 28 points.  Then it clicked in his head – he was a really smart 4th grader.  All he had to do was not fumble.

He had figured out what caught me almost by surprise:  we just had to run out the clock.  Spoiler alert:  we won.  Running out the clock in a football game is a valuable strategy.

EX

I was going to tell another football joke, but it had an offensive line.

How does this translate off the field?

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post – I use a planner.  Some of the things that are on my daily to-do list are straightforward.  Plan to take over the world.  Remember to feed the kraken.  But I recently added one:

Are You Running Out The Clock?

You might think that’s a weird thing to think about every day when you go into work, and maybe it is.  In the crazy, deflating and inflating economy of 2020, a job might be something that’s required for survival.  But a job also might be something you’re going through the motions on and running the clock, and your life out every day watching the seconds tick away until 5pm.

Now, don’t get me wrong – if it’s important to get money to live, fulfillment isn’t the goal – feeding the family is first.  In 2020 and 2021 jobs will be hard to find, so if you’re bored but have a family to feed – FEED YOUR FAMILY AND STAY UNTIL 5PM.

JOB

I quit my job at the helium plant – I will NOT be spoken to in that tone of voice.

But what happens when a job or your life becomes another exercise in running out the clock and you don’t have to worry about feeding the family?

That’s not a win.

Humans were made to be the most multi-purpose machine in the history of the planet.  We’re essentially the Swiss Army® animal.  Where other animals inhabit a specific niche or even several niches on the planet, humans alone have consciously gone from the bottom of the sea to the surface of the moon.  We can run, swim, climb, think and even make new elements while we try to figure out how to harness the power of a star.  We can then rip atoms apart just for fun, and watch C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.  And all of this before breakfast.

WILL

You know that in freshman English William at least got a B on the Romeo and Juliet section. 

Then we can write a sonnet, or, as Shakespeare observed in Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man.  How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.  In form and moving how express and admirable. In action how like an angel.  In apprehension how like a god!

The beauty of the world.

The paragon of animals.

Humans are amazing.  Shakespeare really got that.  If I live my entire life, I’m not sure I can string together six sentences that are so amazing and so understand just how amazing a creature humans are.

Then Will followed up with this:

And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

Four hundred years ago, the Bard was ahead of me.  It’s amazing to be human.  We have great capabilities.  But then?  Hamlet goes and decides he wants to run out the clock.

But we’re not made for running out the clock – that’s why Hamlet is a tragedy.  Hamlet was only thirty years old.  He had grown weary of life, and he didn’t even have the excuse of having met my ex-wife.

We don’t get a deposit back for bringing our bodies back in great condition after we’re done with them.  Let me be clear:  we have a one use rental on these things.  You need to use your body and your life like you stole it.  My left hip hurts at least once a month.  A lot.

SOA

My vacuum has Roomba®-tiod arthritis. 

Good.  I popped it out coaching those peewee football players.  If I get arthritis there?  It’s like a gray hair in my beard – I’ve earned it.  I want the coroner to look at my body at the end and say:  “I’m glad he’s not donating these organs.  He used all of them up.  How do you wear out a bellybutton?  This guy did.”

I’ve seen a “running out the clock” mentality in my own family.  When Pa Wilder started to get older, one thing I noticed is that his life seemed to revolve not around achieving, but around existing.  He walked.  He ate.  He watched TV.  He took his medications.

But he ceased doing anything of meaning.  He ceased fighting.  I’ll admit, people deserve a rest from time to time.  But even in old age, even if disabled, and even if depressed – you can do something.

There is no time in your life where you can’t matter.

Running out the clock isn’t a goal – unless it’s a peewee football game.

How will you make a difference today?

UFOs, Tiger King, Oil Prices, and Bulgarian Models

“But you have to tell her before the show is scheduled to be on.  There is this guy, and he is always requesting shows that are already played.  Yes . . . no.  You have to tell her before.  He couldn’t quite grasp the idea that the charge nurse couldn’t make it be yesterday.  She couldn’t turn back time, thank you Einstein!  Now he . . . he was nuts!  He was a fruitcake, Jim!” – 12 Monkeys

AOC

When I woke up from surgery the doctor came in, “John, you brain was thrown outside of your body.  Thankfully, I was able to put it back in.”  I said, “Doc, thanks for reminding me.” 

“World turned upside down” is probably an overused phrase – most times it’s used by people when there is a fairly normal surprise, like getting to work late because of a traffic jam in the hallway between the bedroom and the stairs to the basement.  On Tuesday, however, the world really did turn upside down if you owned any oil.  Not baby oil, my probation officer told me that baby oil really isn’t made from actual babies.  Crude oil, that is.  Black gold.  Texas tea.  The contract for crude oil turned sharply negative.  How negative?  Holders of some contracts would be paid $40 a barrel to take that bubbling crude.

Yes.  You read that right.  People were being paid to take crude oil.  How can the industry make up for a negative price?

Volume?

If you bought gasoline around the year 1999, you might have seen $0.79 per gallon of gasoline to fill up your Ford® Probe™.  The Probe© had the bad fortune of being named probe right before the X-Files© came on the air and gave probe a whole different meaning.  You UFO abductees know what I mean.

CARTM

Yup, politicians and aliens have one thing in common.

If you bought gasoline around July, 2008, you might have paid nearly $5 per gallon while you and Walter White were the only two people who ever actually bought a Pontiac© Aztek™.  But in no case did 7-11® ever pay you to fill your tank.  Buy you could drive over to Saul’s place.

That won’t happen today, either, so you can forget your dream of filling your swimming pool full of gasoline for fun and profit.  Although, come to think of it, it would be humorous to watch the Olympics® if the swimming was done in a pool of gasoline.  Since gasoline is so much less dense than water, Michael Phelps couldn’t float and would sink straight to the bottom.  Since my swimming looks more like drowning anyway, swimming in gasoline might be just the thing to even the odds so I can finally win that gold medal.

PHELPS

Well, I guess everybody won at least one swimming race.

Though, there is some part of me that would love to take barrel after barrel at $40 each and dump it in a metal aboveground pool and just burn it.  You’d be able to see the black cloud for miles.  I’d take pictures and send them to Greta Thunberg so that she would know I’m doing my part to put valuable CO2 back into the atmosphere.  After all, she did dare me to do it.

I think that some of my readers might have read back over the past dozen or so posts about economics and thought, “Oh, John Wilder, he’s gone full doomer.”  No, I really haven’t.  I still have a very positive outlook about the future.  But one think I don’t have is illusions.  For instance, I have no illusions that the future will look much like the past.  I’m not going to be 18 again, and the world won’t party like it’s 1999 again.  Besides, who would want to?  You’d have to actually remember phone numbers again and talk to people during dinner again.

The price of oil is a big deal to the economy of the world, and the economy of individual nations, too.  I read today that over 10,000,000 jobs in the United States are tied directly or indirectly to the oil industry.  Those are jobs that typically pay well, too.  At least those jobs used to exist before Tuesday.  Next week, I imagine many of those people will be home being introduced to the hypnotic train wreck that is Tiger King™ on Netflix©, and wondering if there is a hair-crime against humanity (crimes against hairmanity?) law in Oklahoma.

TIGERKING

When the most normal person in a documentary is the guy whose life might have been used as the basis for Tony Montana in Scarface?  It’s a cat-astrophe.

Your life changes.  It’s not a static thing.  A lot of the people being laid off will either blame themselves, or be bitter about losing their job.  That’s natural, but being mad about losing your job is like being mad at the wind, or mad at Joe Biden.  You can jump and yell, but it doesn’t matter because neither of them will remember what you’re saying, anyway.

When I was a kid, I remember being bothered by a particular idea.  Pugsley brought it to mind when he showed me a piece of Plexiglas® from his computer case, scratched from his handling it over several years.  “How do we fix it?”

“We don’t.  Learn to live with it,” was my answer.  I could see the disappointment in his face.

It was then I recalled breaking a glass in the kitchen when I was a kid.  Sure, Ma Wilder didn’t like it when that happened, but what bothered me the most is that I couldn’t make it better.  No amount of effort would reassemble that glass from the hundreds of shards on the linoleum floor back into the original.

That idea followed me through life:  seeing a scratch in a car door, watching the tread wear down on my shoes.  These were one-way events.  The future seemed to be a one way street.  People got older.  Paint on the house faded.  Keanu Reeves . . . well, I guess not everything ages.

Physicists have a description of this:  entropy.  Entropy means that things age and wear down.  It never happens in the opposite direction.

The reason that this bothered me is that my hobbies were based on the opposite – most things in my life I could fix.  When I built a model of an airplane, or a car, or a tank, in that moment it was new I felt that I had made a small piece of perfection.  For me, I could look at it and see that moment in time where it would never be better.  It was very satisfying to see that model take its final form because I had made the world just a little bit better.  I recall holding a finished model in my hands, not wanting to paint it because it looked so perfect.  Then after I’d painted it, being pleased because it looked even better.

BULG

I hate Bulgarians when they use profanity.  Bulgarity is something I just can’t stand.

As I grew older, woodworking as a hobby filled made me feel those same emotions:  the smooth feel of freshly sanded wood and then the sight of the grain soaking up the stain for the first time.  It would never be more perfect than that moment in time.  The second that I finished, it would start aging.  Dust and time would take their toll.  They’d be dropped.  Or things would drop on them.  Regardless, without effort, they’d never be the same as that moment.

But at that moment of creation, it was perfect, or at least as perfect as I could make it.  Yes, the physicists are right about entropy – everything becomes more disordered over time.  But the one thing they don’t mention is that entropy only increases when there’s no energy flowing into the system.

If you look outside, there’s a huge thermonuclear reactor that powers the Earth every day, sending in a really ludicrous number of watts of power.  But watts is a silly metric unit, so I changed it to horsepower.  It turns out, if you were to measure the Sun’s output hitting Earth in divisions of the Ford™ Shelby® 350’s 526 horsepower engine, it would take 18,377,411,500 (yes, I did the math) of them running for 24 hours straight at 7,500 RPM to equal the Sun’s output for a single day.  For those of you doing the math, that’s 2.42 Shelby© engines for each person on Earth.

I think we have figured out the real reason for Global Warming®.  The Sun.  Or 18.4 billion Shelby’s® running at the red line every day.

GRETA

If we have another ice age, we could heat the Earth with these babies.  In the process, we’d solve the oil glut crisis, and hit full employment just at the Ford® plants alone.  Plus I heard their exhaust kills Coronavirus.  That’s my green new deal!

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to accept change.  A lot of changes that have happened, I didn’t get to choose.  Like my back hair, they just happened.  That doesn’t make me a victim, though.  I get to choose how I feel, how I react to those changes.  Sometimes, changes just are.  I get to choose, each and every time, how I react to them.  For instance, braiding might be a solution.

Sometimes they are shattered glass type changes are like the first bra a young man runs into:  it can never be undone.  Sometimes, the changes are a block of wood to be smoothed, something that can be made into a temporary little bit of perfection that will enter my life.  But I’ll never know what kind of change that it is until I work at it, and see what it is.

Not long after I saw Pugsley’s face after telling him to live with his scratched computer case, I looked it up.  There are lots of ways to get at least some of the scratches out of the Plexiglas®.  We’ll give it a shot, to see if we can’t make it better.

Spoiler, it might not be perfect, but it will be better.  And it will be ours.  We’ll own it.

Change is coming.

Deal with it.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, #10: Economy on the Brink?

“The reason I’m going to Santa Corona, Steve, is the worst thing that can happen there is that I run out of suntan lotion.” – Wonder Woman (1978)

clock10

This year, International Woman’s Day was on Sunday, March 8, which is when we moved the clock to daylight savings time.  So now they’ll complain that they only get 23 hours for every day, while a man gets 24.

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

The clock didn’t move this month for the second month in a row.  Will Leftist state governments support Antifa violence this spring and summer?

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Virginia:  Imposing Costs – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona – Links

Welcome to Issue 10 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.  Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK), Issue Seven is here (LINK), Issue Eight is here (LINK), and Issue Nine is here (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

Generally, this section reports on either violence or censorship:  it’s one of the other.  This month, it’s both.  We’ll start with Violence.  Arthur (LINK) sent a link to a story that got some coverage – the attempted murder of people just because they supported the other side of the political spectrum.  To be clear – this man (LINK)was attempting to kill old people who were expressing support of President Trump.  Thankfully he was incompetent – driving wasn’t something they studied in Marxist theory class.

I’m amused when the Left talks about “Right Wing Extremist Violence®” because it’s generally either propaganda or a funding ploy by Lefty organizations to frack the pockets of liberal donors on the Coasts who want to be “doing something” to stop the Hate®.  At every level in the last four years, Leftist violence has greatly exceeded violence coming from the Right, and if you don’t believe me, I can point to a few congressman who were shot at (and shot) by a deranged Sanders supporter who might beg to differ.

antifa

The difference between a Leftist and a puppy is a puppy stops whining when it grows up.

As the country continues to unravel, I expect a significant uptick in violence from the Left.  If Bernie loses his shot at the presidency, I fully expect that the very first target will be the Democratic Party, with riots in Milwaukee at the Democratic National Convention.  Leftists hate the Right, but they hate mainstream Democrats even more (see links below).  And with enough practice, sadly, Leftists might become proficient at hurting people other than their parents.

Moving on to censorship, Leftists should be pleased that censorship is still in fashion.  Because there isn’t a comprehensive list of bans for YouTube®, I can only report what I’ve seen in the news or that were mentioned in passing by other sources.  Several Right-ish content producers were banned recently, and probably the most prominent one I know of is I, Hypocrite.

When I heard about the banning, I went to his Bitchute® site and watched the video he felt was responsible for his banning.  It was tame, mainly just him arguing that the Left-Right violence statistics as reported by another YouTuber™ in a debate were wrong.  He also spent a great deal of time criticizing his own debate performance and preparation.  It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary in a typical political debate except he admitted when he was wrong and his opponent had a strong point.

Now his voice is silenced.

YouTube© has also started demonetizing channels that feature content that’s favorable to the Right, like Sargon’s channel.  Sargon’s biggest offense?  Dunno, having a keen beard?  I can’t seem to find anything offensive.  But demonetization is generally just the first step before deplatforming.

On the Twitter™ front, they recently permanently banned the news website ZeroHedge© for a tweet popularizing a story that the Coronavirus may have been a result of genetic engineering.  The most recent mainstream stories I’ve heard seem to confirm that’s an opinion that’s not out of the question.  So, a news story that’s (admittedly) fringe?  Instaban.  That may be one reason a “conservative” buyer is looking to shake up leadership at Twitter®.  I’m not certain that would change a thing, since most “conservatives” seem to care more about the opinions of the Left than either the truth or honest dissenting opinions to the prevailing Leftist opinions.  Crazier parties, right?

Virginia:  Imposing Costs

Last Weather Report, I wrote about the concept of imposing costs, as in the Right wasn’t imposing costs on the Left.  Here’s what I said:

. . . no politician had to pay any price for their support of the votes, nor do they feel that they’ll have to pay a price.  And, no, to be very clear, I’m not suggesting violence on them or any illegal action.  But what I am suggesting is that if they pay no personal price, they’ll never change.  What are legal ways to influence them? 

  • First – make sure that they aren’t re-elected. That requires organization and planning.  Oh, and voters.
  • Second – go through their histories thoroughly. Don’t blackmail them – find (legally) all of their dirty laundry and air it – imagine what Ralph’s browser history looks like.  Isn’t that a public record? 
  • Third – make sure that that people are rude to their wives and shun them at social functions. How will Governor Northam’s wife, Pam, feel if people tell her what they think of Ralph when she stops in to get a Starbucks®?   What if her public meetings were peacefully protested?
  • Fourth – remove their privacy in every public space. Park vans outside of their houses with billboards that advertise what a horrible person lives within – they’ve done this with Susan Collins in Maine, so it’s a tactic that’s fair game.  But the Geneva Convention does categorize playing Twisted Sister® 24/7 at their house a crime against humanity.

I’m sure that there are people who are far better at this than I am who can come up with dozens of legal ways to make a vote against Constitutional rights pretty uncomfortable. 

Well, someone did come up with a legal and peaceful way to make Virginia State Delegate Mark Levine, Leftist, uncomfortable.  Levine is the author of the bill to confiscate semi-automatic guns from law-abiding citizens of Virginia.  Brandon Howard, American, showed up in front of Mark’s house.  With a protest sign.  And a rifle.  Here’s a link to the story (LINK).

In no way did he use his rifle in a threatening fashion, but Howard did protest.

Delegate Levine’s panties got very much in a twist.  He immediately called the police, but was quite upset to find out that Mr. Howard had done nothing to violate the law.  Levine was quoted by the article by saying that “. . . if they cannot prosecute him (Howard) because of the way our Virginia laws are, well then that’s the advantage of being a lawmaker.  I intend to come back to Richmond and introduce legislation to make sure that anyone who threatens a lawmaker at the point of a gun and says I’m coming to your home with a gun unless you change your mind on legislation.  I want to make sure that person can be prosecuted.”

Mr. Levine’s sense of irony must be broken to not see how his sense of having his rights violated would result in him writing a law to enable cops with guns to stop citizens from peacefully protesting in a way that he doesn’t approve of.  The research I saw indicates that Mr. Levine has a copy of the Constitution that he keeps in his pocket.  The only conclusion I can come up with is that Mr. Levine is illiterate?

This will not be the last time that costs are imposed on the Left as they try to restrict rights.  Assume as the Right gets as sophisticated and as active as the Left in this type of work, it will increase rapidly.

Hank Curmudgeon left a link (LINK) to this guide last month and suggested I print out this figure and include it.  I’ll just leave it here, since it seems to fit:

Insurg

Updated Civil War II Index

More graphs.  February was a kind month, but the seeds were set for turbulent months to follow.  In keeping with the journalistic standards of Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise, I’ll note that I did make sure that all pictures used resulted in no harm or mistreatment of any bikini, anywhere.

Violence:

violf

Up is more violent.  Violence remains steady.  My prediction?  Peaks in June-July-August as political violence coming from the Left peaks.  That may make a strange graph, but I’ll do my best to find a fitting match in a bikini if and when it happens.

Political Instability:

politf

Up is more unstable.  Instability skyrocketed with impeachment, and then got better before bouncing slightly this month.  Expect increased instability as we move to November, with August being secondary peak during and after the conventions, and bikini’s flash red.

Economic:

econf

Down indicates worse economic conditions.  The economic indicators began to turn in February.  Based on the way this index is calculated, it does not yet show the impact of the free-falling stock market, which (as of this writing) is limit-locked down on the early futures, with oil collapsing to the $30’s.  Expect March numbers to collapse, which is in keeping with the chaotic nature of the way her hair is displayed.

Illegal Aliens:

borderf

Down is good, in theory.  This is (thanks for the terminology correction, 1chota) a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.  One would assume we’re catching fewer because there are fewer to catch.  And those aren’t legs that last forever, since they obviously end in October.

Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona

It’s rare that a society devolves into civil war when everything is going along fine.  Part of the recipe for trouble is economic instability.  The second part is hating each other – and we already have that in place.  What keeps us from killing each other is the day job, and the fact that most of us have all of the Twinkies® and Ho-Hos™ and Strawberry Starburst Piña Coladas© that our sticky fingers and sugar addled brains can pay for with our nearly maxed out credit cards.

But then enters Coronavirus:

Ooh, my little viral crop, my viral crop
When you gonna give me quarantine, Corona
Ooh, you make my economy stop, my economy stop
Got stop the production line, Corona

Never gonna wash, cough it up, such a dirty hand
I always buy the TP, hoard the food that is canned
My, my, my, aye-aye, whoa!
M-m-m-my Corona

corona

The Boy did a fine job photoshopping this.  I guess he has the knack.

As I write this on Sunday evening, March 8, 2020, the stock market has already tripped a stop-loss trigger before opening.  Oil prices are collapsing.  The Everything Bubble is imploding.

What’s next?  If this economy follows every other collapse in recent economic history, job losses start soon.  Businesses collapse.  Banks?  They’re in the business of generating profits in good times, while having the government and taxpayers pay for the bad times.  This is, for some reason, referred to as the free market.

Economic recessions can happen when the economy has been growing too quickly, too long, or both.  Sometimes they end just because it was time.  Other times, an event occurs that causes the growth to stop.  Corona has the ability to be that event, and even if the economy was in peak condition, Corona could have started a recession.

Given a recession, the political landscape will be in turmoil.  On the Democrat side, I’m not sure that Bernie can get the nomination – that’s the conventional wisdom – and I dearly hope that’s right.  A hard Leftist leading a country in times of economic trouble always provides the worst solutions, and always prescribes more of the same solutions when they don’t work – it’s like a medieval doctor performing more bloodletting when the first bloodletting didn’t work.  It’s that we never did true bloodletting.

Joe Biden isn’t really certain what planet he’s on most days, and Donald Trump will go through him like a velociraptor in a room full of kittens.  President Trump’s recent tweet that “Biden will be tough to beat” was the 2020 version of “don’t throw me in that briar patch.”

joe

And that’s no malarkey, you frog faced bony soldier.

That’s my take – but the range of outcomes is so very wide with Corona, it’s nearly impossible to make a good prediction right now.  Give it two months.  Then we won’t have to predict, we’ll know.

Buckle your seatbelt – this definitely increases the odds of conflict happening sooner.

Links

link

Most are from Ricky this month . . .  enjoy!

NBC Misunderstands Boogaloo.  Probably intentionally.  But they can’t do math, so maybe not intentionally.

Clickbait on Boogaloo.  Strangely, no Antifa reports?

Salon admits that they feel their side is Leftist.

More Leftists Boogaloo afraid.

Progressive Magazine is worried that Ed Asner is worried about people on the Right having guns.  Or something.

Globalists want Trump out.

Daily Dot revisits Electric Boogaloo, adds even more stupid than NBC.

Doug Casey talks Fourth Turning.  Good read.

Vox Magazine thinks Identity Politicsis awesome.  But only for the Left, not for the Right.

Salon is ecstatic that Bernie is a symbol of people turning hard Left.

Must read:  Roots of the Divide.

The Left . . . looking for segregation.

What is an American?  Hint:  no one can agree.

The Week talks about Ross Douthat having a stupid opinion about the divide in America in a new book review.

Socialists hate the Democrats.  See, I told you.

Auntie Beeb writes about Sanctuary Counties in Virginia, still butthurt about 1776.

Michael Lind wants bigger government, more control.

 

The Coming Recession, Explained Using Six and a Half Bikinis.

“Well, just find yourself a man with a spotless genetic makeup and a really high tolerance for being second guessed and start pumping out the little uber Scullys.” – The X-Files

FIRST

After the next recession, most people will be on their feet in no time, after the bank repossesses the cars.

This wasn’t my originally planned topic. My originally planned topic was a discussion of PEZ® seed pricing mechanisms in 1850’s Great Britain, complete with discussion on how many orphans could be traded per bushel of finished PEZ™. Alas, I’ll have to return to that exciting topic some other time, since the world financial system seems to be imploding.

Okay, imploding isn’t the right word. And it really may not be as bad as it looks.

But today? It looks bad. Maybe not implosion bad, but I heard that some bankers had been discouraged. I guess they lost interest.

How bad could it be?

If it just stays at a financial level, the worst I would expect would be a W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 4 (Great Depression) in the United States, though it might hit a W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 5 (National Collapse) in China. You can read all about the W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Levels here (The Lighter Side of the Apocalypse) in an article praised by critics as “one of the best things ever written by a man with such questionable levels of personal hygiene, fashion sense, and grooming.”

In order to understand and guess at the future, let’s take a look at the past. The most recent past economic downturn was the Great Recession. What happened then?

sp500

As you can see from this chart, the S&P 500 experienced a big downturn right around the calf and knee area. Feel free to enlarge – just explain that the study of economics is really interesting.

Several things: first, lowered interest rates and the idea that anyone could and should get a mortgage led to a massive mis-investment in housing. Part of the cause were things called stealing and looting mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. I won’t go into technical details, but it was a way that Harvard® educated MBAs convinced themselves that a strawberry picker making $14,000 a year could afford a $720,000 mortgage (LINK). And, yes, this really happened.

Second, the world was awash in money after the Fed flooded the fields with money after the Dotcom Bubble. Where did that money go? Everywhere. Houses. And . . . oil. Oil prices skyrocketed during that time. Companies rented oil tankers and kept them full, sitting at sea, continually selling futures on the oil in the tanker. They made fortunes by pretending to sell oil. I know that sounds like I’m making an obscure joke, but no, that really happened.

The price of housing hit the financial system like a mousetrap on a cat’s tail. Or a cat with a mousetrap on its tail? Or . . . nevermind. People kept borrowing more on their houses as their houses appreciated. They spent that money on pickups and boats and child care and food and vacations. The people weren’t evil, but they thought that the value of their house could never go down, so the risk was small. Rational people, like bankers, were telling them this. Heck, some even invested in more houses so they could double or triple their magic ATM.

30year

This view of 30 year mortgage rates explains that there have been mortgage rates. Look closely, and you can see them.

Finally, one day the music stopped on the housing prices. Was there a cause in particular? Not really. But the market lost the one thing required to keep it afloat – belief. Every market rises as the beliefs of the participants overcomes the worry of loss. Wow, that sounded poetic and cool. But it’s also true.

In many ways, the stock market is a barometer not only of the actual underlying economic performance, but how people feel about the future. It keeps going up as long as people keep being optimistic and has proven to be a much better barometer of economic activity than the amount of leg hair I grow before each winter and then form into a nice, soft nest to sleep in when it gets cold.

crude

Crude oil prices had Exxon® jumping for joy in 2008!

One thing that brought the mood of people down in 2008 was the price of oil. In the midst of the recession that came from the housing bubble, the secondary oil bubble inflated. Prices increased more than double in a single year – from $70 per barrel to over $140 per barrel at the peak. Oil acts as a tax on everything to do with physical goods. To move a Tom Brady’s booty dinghy from where it’s made in by incontinent baboons in Romania to his rump mechanic in Massachusetts requires energy – energy from oil.

So that’s the “why” for 2008. How does that relate to today?

The Great Recession was brought about by an actual recession – things slowed down in the country because there were only so many houses that could be made. That’s different than today’s trouble. The stock market is tanking not because of a recession, but because the worry about Corona-Chan locking up the flow of physical goods from China. I wrote about that last week (Corona Virus, with a Slice of Recession?).

What have we seen so far?

stand

This was a pretty good miniseries documentary.

The stock market has decreased in value. In general, a stock price has two components – the first is the value of the factories and land and machinery that the company owns. This is boring, it’s like saying a Stradivarius violin worth less than a piece of firewood because the firewood weighs more – in the hands of a genius, the violin can make masterful music, though in the hands of my kids it just made me contemplate the positives of being deaf.

The second and often biggest component of value to a stock is the assumed growth of that stock. This is why older, boring stocks like Ford® are priced closer to the value of the assets they own – no one thinks that Ford™ will end up tripling in size in the next three years. There’s an ex-wife “tripling size in three years” joke, but I’m bigger than that.

But people do think that Tesla© can triple in size in three years. Therefore, people value Tesla™ more than Ford® even though it sells about six million cars a year and Tesla© sold only 370,000 cars in the last year. You’d think that Ford™ would be worth about 10 times what Tesla® is. But in reality, Ford© is valued at $28 billion, while Tesla™ is valued at $147 billion. Is Tesla™ really worth that much? That’s up to Tesla®. But give me $147 billion and I bet I could sell 380,000 cars a year, too. And they would be pretty neat ones and they wouldn’t look like they were designed by a third grader with limited imagination.

cyber

Elon took a lot of heat for the Cyber Truck design, primarily because it looks like something that no human would buy. Thankfully, Elon’s next advance will be robotic customers.

Tesla© has convinced people it is almost six times more valuable than Ford©. That’s what I call optimism. Or a con, but at least a con for a good cause (Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars).

Since the stock market is based on optimism, this latest decline in February of 2020 shows that investors are shaken. The world hasn’t (yet) changed but the implications are now becoming concerning enough to cause the market to drop. Is this going to be a big drop, like in 2008, or another head fake?

I can’t be sure. But I do know that this seems like a good time to trot out what I learned the last time the economy went south.

Lesson One:

Market bubbles aren’t rational. Companies rise faster and farther in a bubble without regard to, well, anything. Uber®, which is basically “Taxi App” is worth $61 billion dollars, which is more than Elon Musk spends in a typical year on hair plugs. Uber© lost $8.5 billion dollars last year while generating tons of bad publicity because its founder is a douche and it treats drivers worse than Mongolian bull milkers. There are tons of companies just like Uber™, and all with an idea that they’ll “disrupt” segments of society. Essentially, disrupting involves an app, a smart phone, and booting someone out of a job. Some are, I assume, legitimate ideas that will be profitable in the future. Others are like GoPro™, which is (in Karl Denninger’s words) just “camera on a stick.”

I heard someone call this the Disruption Bubble, and it’s as good a name as any to describe the distortions and irrational money flows as everyone tries to find the next Amazon™, Facebook© or Google®. In a real panic, stupidly valued things like Uber® deflate, and deflate quickly. But companies that are really worth something will fall in value, too.

The best time to buy a company is when it is cheap. It will never be cheaper than when people are panicking like Godzilla® is hungry for Japanese take-out and orders Tokyo. Finding quality companies that are selling at a 90% discount is possible during a real panic.

Lesson Two:

When the market falls, investors have less money. But they still have bills. So what will they do? If this is like 2008, they’ll sell other things. What kinds of things? Cool cars will be cheap, but not everyone is in the market for a Lambo. But gold dropped, too. During 2008, gold went from $1000 per ounce to as low as $720.

gold

You can see the price of gold really drop around the shoulder area, and take off afterwards.

I can’t guarantee that gold will drop, but I’d be watching if you want to buy some – there might be a great opportunity to buy gold at a lower price than the current $1655 per ounce.

Lesson Three:

In past recessions, the interest rate that is charged for the 10 Year T-Bill generally dropped. Why? People wanted to get to a safer asset. That asset has generally been the dollar. The most likely candidates to replace the dollar were the Chinese whatever-they-call-it and the Euro. As China is now in the grip of Corona, it’s not a flight to safety. Every European country with a beach is thinking about dumping the Euro and exiting the EU so they can print wrapping paper and call it money, the Euro isn’t a great one, either. The Swiss Franc is kinda awesome, but they only make so many of those.

10year

Look closely and you can see that the Fed doesn’t have a lot of room to lower rates.

Nope. It’s the dollar. In times of economic uncertainty, the dollar will increase in value relative to other currencies. Does it make sense? Maybe? It seems that the world notices the Navy, Army, Marines, and all of those nuclear weapons and those make the banks in New York seem a bit more secure.

Expect that if this goes like 2008 for a while you can buy foreign stuff like a king. For grins I track the New Zealand dollar – it’s right now at its lowest value in five years. I bet it goes even lower soon, so sheep should be quite a bargain. Remember New Zealand’s national motto: “We’re not Australia.”

Don’t expect to find a great place to get a good yield anytime soon if Uncle Sam is paying less than a 1%, you’re not going to get even that good of a deal. Negative interest rates have already hit Europe, and there’s no reason they won’t hit the rest of the world. Investing in cash in mason jars buried in the backyard might be a good idea. Send me your map, and I’ll keep it safe.

Lesson Four:

No financial collapse looks the same. Each one of them is unique, and this one has been a long time in coming so, if it’s hitting right now, it could be really bad. Each of the above lessons might be wrong, so look for opportunities where you see them, not where an Internet humorist thinks they might be, no matter how charming and freshly showered he might be. Oh, if you have cash, it does no good if it’s in a bank that collapses. Just sayin’.

A friend of mine made the joke in 2008 that “when the tide goes out, you see who isn’t wearing a swimsuit.” There are vulnerabilities that very few people know about right now that will (in hindsight) become obvious in the days or years ahead. Just nod sagely and pretend like you expected it would happen all along. That’s what I’ll be doing.

Wildcards:

Desperate people sometimes do desperate things. As the Soviet Union collapsed, there was some small risk that an official decided he was better dead than not red, and pushed the button. That didn’t happen – in large part because by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, nobody believed in it anymore: it was as tired as Joe Biden’s campaign.

mankini

Okay, I’m sorry.

sorry

If China were to teeter near collapse, would they decide to launch a regional war to keep the people together so the nation didn’t collapse or fall into civil war? Hopefully not, but the chances of it happening are greater than zero. As you prepare for a world where there is a financial dislocation, don’t forget to prepare for a cultural dislocation as well. Buying food now when it’s cheap and easy to get doesn’t make you a hoarder – it makes you one less person who is drawing on system resources if things go bad. Preparing for bad times when times are good is a profoundly moral thing to do. But don’t forget to complain like everyone else.

Nobody likes a smug prepper.

Disclaimer:

Keep in mind, this is NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. I make fun of Johnny Depp and PEZ® and post pictures of girls in bikinis over economic graphs and am even writing this sober. Consult someone who has those credentials and maybe drinks martinis at lunch since that seems pretty swanky. Also, I don’t own any direct positions in any of the stocks discussed, and don’t plan on taking any positions in them (maybe ever), though I do own a Ford™ truck. I’m betting that maybe some of my 401k money is investing in, well, something and might include these stocks, but I don’t know. Maybe it’s just invested in magic beans?