Category: Energy

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?

Sleep? That’s for the weak.

“All persons who die during this crisis from whatever cause will come back to life to seek human victims, unless their bodies are first disposed of by cremation.” – Night of the Living Dead

sleepgi.jpg

Also, remember that sleep is no substitute for caffeine.

Sleep and I have always had a rocky relationship.  If I were married to Sleep, Sleep would have filed for divorce on grounds of abandonment.  For most people, this starts at an early age, but for me it started when I was a very young John Wilder, at around the age of five.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m adopted, but it’s the kind of adoption that involves family members.  The ones that were closest to me before the adoption were Grandma and Grandpa McWilder.  To me they seemed astonishingly old, even though they were in their late sixties when I toddled into their lives at the age of five.

All five year old children are difficult.  I think I was more difficult than most – I found where the electricity entered their house, above a window.  How difficult was I?  I grabbed the bare wires coming in with one hand.   After I got shocked, what did I do?  Grabbed it again.  I was a high maintenance.

But the benefit of being with a grandparent is the word “no” is generally a foreign word to their vocabulary.  I recall discovering that Star Trek® would be on after the news on Saturday.  So, I stayed up to watch it.  Grandma and Grandpa McWilder had already gone to bed, having watched the weather.

Now, I have no idea why they were so concerned about the weather.  They didn’t farm, they didn’t really do anything that would require them to be concerned about the weather, but they watched it every night.  Me?  For the most part (there are exceptions) I don’t worry much about the weather – you can’t change it after all, unless you’re a sixteen year old girl from Sweden.

After Captain Kirk® had finished gallivanting around the galaxy at 11:30pm, I still wasn’t tired.  What was next?  Creepy Creature Feature.  As soon as I discovered Creepy Creature Feature, I was hooked.

What was Creepy Creature Feature?  It was a pair of science fiction and/or horror movies, most of which were black and white.  These were generally not what anyone today would call good movies – the special effects in most of them involved foam rubber, chocolate syrup, and someone imagining what George Soros’ face would look like in 2020.

creature.jpg

This wasn’t the logo my local station used, but you get the idea.

Okay, why on Earth would such wonderful people have such poor judgement as to allow a five-year-old to watch horror movies deep into the night?

Let me explain how I was treated when I visited Grandma and Grandpa:

Grandma McWilder would cook me my favorite dinner, and give me money to buy comic books.  You’re thinking Archie® and Superman© and X-Men™, right?  Sure, I bought plenty of those.  But Grandma didn’t seem to care what a five-year-old bought, and the store didn’t seem to care, either.

This was a far different time and place than today.  If I went to the local drugstore and wanted to buy a carton of cigarettes they would have sold them to me.  Five year old me.  And they would have asked if I needed matches.  While at the drugstore I bought issues of National Lampoon® that had mostly naked women in them.  And while you may have thought that all people were fully clothed all the time before the Internet, I can assure you that it was not so.

They wouldn’t have sold me liquor, though.  You had to at least be in sixth grade for hard alcohol.  Beer?  Heck, that’s practically water.

So I bought magazines like this:

creepy2.jpg

Creepy® and Eerie™ Magazines – the best in 1970’s black and white cartoon gore.  Nothing unusual here, just a woman holding a disembodied hand close to her chest.  Happens every day, most normal thing in the world.

And the drugstore even sold off-brand magazines like Weird™.  These didn’t tell stories as polished as Creepy©, but made up for it with artwork that looked like it was done by crack addicted chihuahuas with an unlimited supply of crayons:

weird.jpg

No, that’s not “Wired©” it’s “Weird™.”  I’m pretty sure I had this issue, but sadly can’t remember a thing that went on in the comic – I’m sure there must be a reason purple-skull man and the werewolf are killing vampires.  Probably California zoning enforcement officers?

Anyway, given that I had Creepy® and Weird© magazines around the house, Grandma didn’t mind if I was up until 1:30 AM when the test pattern came on after the television station finished watching invisible atomic brain monsters in 1958’s Fiend Without a Face© get shot by a .45ACP and then dissolve.  When I was five, I thought it was really, really good.  When I reviewed it, I seem to recall that I gave it five blankets over the head.

Thankfully, most of those movies were 1950’s B-movies that were so absurd that even my five-year-old brain wasn’t scared because there was no way that these monsters were real.  Mostly, I’d just watch the giant radiation-enhanced spider fight the giant radiation-enhanced cow and then go to bed.

fiendposter.jpg

Not a radiation enhanced cow.

But then one night they showed Night of the Living Dead.  Uncut.  Totally uncut – bare butts and all.  More importantly, all of the zombies eating uncooked (and cooked) humans was in the movie, too.  This was certainly the scariest movie I’d ever seen, and only one or two in the future would ever capture the utter dread that this movie brought, along with the certainty that Grandma’s house simply had too many windows to board up in the event of a Zombie apocalypse.  Plus, being five, the entire concept of zombies was new to me.  Dead people craving the first take-out food:  people.

grandma.jpg

Zombies don’t eat brains with their fingers.  They eat fingers as an appetizer.

After the movie is over, it’s 1:30AM.  Time to go to bed, but I don’t want to walk on the floor because it creaks.  That would certainly draw the zombies my direction.  I finally get up, and go to the spare bed that’s in Grandma’s bedroom where I normally sleep.

After watching zombies eat living humans my five-year-old brain processed certain facts:

  • Dead people might become zombies.
  • Zombies develop an insatiable desire to eat human flesh.
  • Grandma was very old.
  • Old people sometimes die.
  • Therefore, Grandma might become a zombie in the middle of the night.

And:

  • I was made of human flesh.

So, if you’ve ever had difficulty sleeping because you thought your wonderful, kindly Grandma might become a zombie and eat you while you were still alive, raise your hand.

Only me?

I’m not sure that I slept at all that night.

Sleep and I have continued a dubious relationship, and during my life, whenever I could stay up late I certainly did.  But when I was younger, I would never sleep more than eight or so hours at a stretch and  I always avoided naps.  When I was in head start, I would throw blocks at the other kids who were actually good and attempting to sleep like I was supposed to do.  Heck, even before they kicked me out of head start I knew that naps weren’t for closers.

Eventually I got older and I discovered that I really liked naps.  What fun!  My sleep schedule became even more chaotic and drifted even farther from normal, first a little, then finally my sophomore year of college I had no classes that started before noon.  But after graduating from college, work happened. Work started at 7:00AM, and I had to see early morning sunlight.

The break of dawn.  Beautiful, you say?  Not to me – if I want to see a beautiful sunrise, I can look one up on the Internet.

At times my sleep pattern has provided four hours of sleep a day during the week, followed by 12 hour weekend crashes.  And, WebMD© says that weird sleep patterns are not really good for me unless you call heart disease, heart attack, heart failure, irregular heartbeat, high blood pressure, stroke and diabetes good things.  The Internet further states that not enough sleep can lower my testosterone, make my skin wrinkle, make me gain weight, and make me die earlier.

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I slept great last night!  I got a full 73 minutes!

That sounds negative, which makes me wonder how did Edison get by on a steady schedule of only four hours of sleep a night?  Well, apparently he did a lot of napping, which must not have counted.  But he really did get by on less sleep than 8 a night.  A lot less.  And a host of famous people have gotten by with less, even though WebMD™ says they’re all going to die next week.

So, if you’re up too late and can’t sleep, here’s a copy of Fiend Without a Face, courtesy of YouTube® – I hear a remake is coming, but you can enjoy the 1950’s era effects, especially about one hour and seven minutes into the movie.

Just make sure that you have a contingency plan in place to take care of Granny if she goes zombie on you . . .

This is a revamp of an earlier post from when the blog was just starting.  I like this newer version better.

The Global Warming Memo They Don’t Want You To See (Okay, I wrote it.)

“Yes, it keeps me up at night. That and the Loch Ness Monster, global warming, evolution, other fictional concepts.” – House, M.D.

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Looks like she uses Coppertone® for her sunscreen.

I intercepted a note from the Global Warming Community(C) to the media using the extremely old technique of making it up.  Here it is in it’s entirety, with no further commercial interruptions.

It’s the end of summer, so the Global Warming Community™ would like to take a moment to remind you that hot summer weather is a sure sign of Global Warming®.  Cold winter weather is just weather.  And if there are more hurricanes, you can bet that it’s a sign of Global Warming©.  If there are fewer hurricanes, you can also bet that is a sign of Global Warming™, too.

Firstly, please ignore that our models aren’t even close to accurate:

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Please ignore previous climate predictions that had the 97% Consensus© like the one by “42 top American and European investigators,” which stated . . . “The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon.”  Please ignore these other predictions, too:

  • Worldwide famines by 1975. You remember those, right?  On August 10, 1969, Paul Ehrlich stated that “The trouble with almost all environmental problems is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead.”  Ehrlich is still alive.
  • On April 16, 1970, it was announced that there would be an ice age starting in the first third of the new century because there would be enough air pollution to “obliterate the Sun.”
  • Ehrlich wasn’t happy to have just one spot on the list. In 1970, he stated that there would be water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980.  And the oceans would be as dead as Lake Erie.  Please ignore the tilapia your wife had for dinner last month.
  • In 1974, it was noted that sea ice had increased 12% between 1967 and 1972. It was also noted in the article that “This appears to be in keeping with other long-term climatic changes, all of which suggest that after reaching a climax of warmth between 1935 and 1955, world average temperatures are now falling.”
  • Time® magazine noted in June, 1974, that, “Telltale signs are everywhere – from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7°”
  • From the New York Times Book Review, July, 1976: “The Cooling, so writes Stephen Schneider, a young climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., reflecting the consensus of the climatological community in his new book, “The Genesis Strategy.”
  • From the New York Times, January, 1978 headline: “No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend.”
  • 1980: Reports were that acid rain will kill us.  Please ignore that in 1990 the report came in:  acid rain is not really a thing.
  • June 24, 1988, Dr. James Hansen said, “Our climate model simulations for the late 1980s and the 1990s indicate a tendency for an increase in heatwave drought situations in the Southeast and Midwest United States.” Please ignore that 1988 was the driest year in the upper Midwest in the last 31 years.
  • In September of 1988, it was noted that “A gradual rise in sea level is threatening to completely cover this Indian Ocean nation [The Maldives] of 1196 small islands in the next 30 years.” Please ignore that the Maldives are still there.
  • Hansen also noted that “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water (by 2018).” Please ignore that it’s not.
  • In 2004, one prediction was that Great Britain would be “Siberian” by 2020. Four months to go!
  • In June of 2008, Dr. Hansen said that the Arctic would be ice free by 2013 to 2018. Please ignore that it’s not even close.
  • In December of 2008, Nobel Prize Winner® Al Gore noted that the Arctic “polarized (sic) cap will disappear in 5 years.” Please ignore the 14,000,000 square kilometers of ice that was in the “polarized” area.  And please ignore all of the other people who said the same thing.
  • Please don’t go to the CEI blog where all of the above (and more) is documented (LINK).

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I wonder if she can say “indeed” as deeply as Brian Blessed?

Please remember how charming the clinically depressed, autistic child suffering from whatever “selective mutism” is and obsessive compulsive disorder.  Realize that this is certainly the best leader the Global Warming Community® can offer for climate change because if you make fun of her you’re making fun of clinically depressed autistic that suffer from “selective mutism” and OCD, and to dispute anything she says is hate filled.  Please note that the Global Warming Community™ did nothing manipulative or unethical in having a child with mental issues be our spokesperson.  Thankfully, the Global Warming Community© has managed to get the Global Warming Agenda® into schools so impressionable children with mental issues can become so upset that they lose 22 pounds due to worry.

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Luisa-Marie Neubauer is a “Green” (read communist) who is the handler for Greta Thunberg.  The Internet says she works for Soros, but I find that connection a bit tenuous – I think being communist is probably enough.

Please ignore how the primary discussion during climate conferences has been how much money developed countries would have to pay to undeveloped countries.  Thankfully, the media has ignored projections that the Paris Treaty™ might cost the United States as much as $2.5 Trillion a year, and only make the climate slightly cooler, as low as 0.17°C cooler in the year 2100 than without the agreement.

Please ignore how many Global Warming™ temperature graphs start in 1978, one of the coolest years on record.  This is like picking that day you drank fifty beers and saying you’ve made progress because you’ve cut down consumption by 50%.  Please ignore Dr. Roy Spencer’s (LINK) graph, even though it also starts at the cool period in the 1970’s:

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Also, please ignore that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s advisor stated about her Green New Deal™:  “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Saikat Chakrabarti asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”  Please ignore that the primary driver for many Global Warming Agenda™ items are about control of people and economies, and if we really wanted to eliminate carbon emissions the Global Warming Community™ would have embraced nuclear power thirty years ago.

Also, Please ignore these Greenland Ice Cores from Joanne Nova’s site (LINK):

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Also, please make sure you don’t publish “stop having babies because a person in the United States has a bigger Carbon Footprint™ and adds more to Global Warming© than the wonderful citizens of the third world” articles right next to “we need more immigrants to replace all the babies we’re not having.”  It’s okay in the same issue, but not right next to each other.

And whatever you do, please don’t let anyone know that we’re at the characteristic end (more or less) of a typical interglacial warm period (LINK) and that our demise is much more likely to come by ice than fire, unless you read George R.R. Martin (and I must note it takes him about 415,000 years per novel nowadays:

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Lastly, please, please, please ignore the fact that the International Panel on Climate Change® came up with the conclusion that variance in the Sun’s output doesn’t impact climate.  Yes, even though there is ample evidence that the gigantic thermonuclear reactor in the sky just might have something to do with climate (Climate Change, Solar Output, Ice Ages, The Planet Vulcan, And Old Guys With Beards).

We’ll be back next spring to remind you that if we don’t act in the next (checks watch) five minutes . . . WE ARE ALL DOOMED!

The Impending End of The Age of Oil. But Not This Week.

“You have raw emotion deep under your surface.  Frack it!” – The Simpsons

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From the movie Sad Max®:  Beyond Soy Latte™.

Energy rules our world.  Advanced civilization depends entirely on the availability of inexpensive energy, and wars have been fought for energy, and lost because of the lack of energy.  Every task you or I do during a day is made easier by the availability of that energy.  Every task.  Even something as simple as a hike in the woods is made easier due the hiking shoes I wear that incorporate polymers and plastics and artificial fabrics made possible through cheap energy and more specifically:  cheap fossil fuels.  Cheap energy gives us fresh strawberries in winter, and baby oil for sunbathers in summer.

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Even though the oil changes are more fun, I imagine the upkeep is more expensive than a Buick®.

I’d even make the case that when energy is cheap, freedom flourishes.  Why have a slave?  It’s much cheaper to have a gas powered weed trimmer.  Slavery is immoral, but cheap energy removes that pesky incentive.  Why have serfs?  You have to feed them, which is a big drawback.  If the Russian Emperor had used tractors instead, he might have lived long enough to be on Dancing with the Czars®.

Cheap energy is freedom.

One of the biggest recurring questions that has popped up (again and again) during my lifetime has been the impending end of the Age of Oil.  If you say “impending end of the Age of Oil” in a really deep, booming baritone like Brian Blessed it sounds even cooler.  The first time the impending end of the Age of Oil reached mass public consciousness was in the 1970’s, and for good reason.  Texas had passed its peak in oil production in 1973, it was thought that every year after would see the production decline.

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True Life Snippet From Stately Wilder Manor:  Whenever I agree with The Mrs. by saying, “Indeed” she says, “Now say it like Brian Blessed.”  And she’s serious.  She won’t let me say the word “Indeed” without impersonating Brian Blessed.

How crazy were we for oil in the 1970s?  When oil was found in Alaska on the North Slope, several major oil companies put together a four-foot wide (16 meters) pipeline that brought oil 800 miles (6 kilometers) from the Arctic sea down to the Gulf of Alaska.  At the time, the project was one of the most ambitious construction projects in United States history, and cost the equivalent of $34 billion 2019 dollars, or about what Elon Musk spends on weed and hair implants in a year.  It was expensive, and even in the 1970’s the lawyers and environmental groups had their knives out.  In 1970, they were all NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard.  In 2020?  They’ve gone BANANA:  Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

Nothing as grand or great as the Alaska Pipeline will ever be built again in the United States.

After the Alaska Pipeline oil started flowing and the United States sweet-talked the Saudis into making oil cheaper than a date with Miley Cyrus, oil concerns continued – with oil companies looking for oil in ever more remote locations, including the a mile under the sea, couch cushions, and the faces of teenage boys.  Billions were invested in both conventional oil (think about a Texas oil derrick) or unconventional (think about the oil platform used by a James Bond villain as a secret hideout).  Exxon© even spent millions trying to learn how to mine shale, crush it, and cook it so that it could be turned into Happy Motoring™ gasoline, but gave up.

These concerns disappeared in 1999 when it became obvious that if you wanted a barrel of oil, in the future all you would have to do is order one on the Internet via Hotmail® after you looked it up on AltaVista™.  At that point The Economist© had a woefully stupid cover proclaiming that oil would be cheap from here on out since it was trading as low as $15 a barrel at that point, even though oil doubled in cost over the year.  In 2008, crude oil would hit its (so far) all-time high in 2019 dollars of $173.

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On a positive note, with her skin Meg Ryan could now do commercials for Jack Links® beef jerky.

The thought in 2008 was that we were certain to have hit impending end of the Age of Oil (indeed!).  How certain?  George W. Bush, an oilman president from Texas, was in favor of creating incentives to add ethanol to gasoline, despite the anguished cries of people who would rather have consumed the alcohol directly.  Ethanol plants appeared throughout the corn belt of the United States, turning seed, sunlight, fertilizer, and diesel fuel into food.  Which was turned into fuel.  Farmers loved this.

This led to yet more investment in energy alternatives – schemes to turn natural gas into ammonia for fuel, yet deeper wells into the ocean, fracking, turning coal into liquid fuels, turning “switch grass” into fuel, and any other silly idea that would could come up.  People even touted the coming “hydrogen economy” because they forgot that hydrogen had to be made using some other form of energy.  The world was needing an energy savior.

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Or, could he be the foretold Anti-Cat?

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Apocalypse

Of course in 2008, the trend was clear:  impending end of the Age of Oil (indeed!) was upon us.  But one of the unlikely saviors had turned out to be real.

In 2012 if you would have asked me, I would have told you that fracking was just a great way to turn money into wasted fuel – it took almost as much fuel to make fracked oil as you got out of it – not a good investment.  In 2015, I would have told you the same thing – the fracking companies were losing money like there was no tomorrow – if you had to invest more energy (think Btu or kilowatts) into getting oil out of the ground than it was worth in energy terms, you were just sinking yourself faster by using that kind of energy – it’s like burning your blankets to keep your bedroom warm in winter.

I was putting together my notes for a Big Energy Post in October of 2018, and had even written the first few paragraphs (okay, 500 words or so) when my research was showing something different.  I skipped the Big Energy Post and moved on to another topic, since it was clear to me that my preconceived notion that fracking was a waste of energy might be wrong.  My research was showing something other than fracking was a waste of energy.  It was showing that fracked oil might actually be  . . . worth it?

It turns out that when anyone first starts doing anything, they suck at it.  And unless it’s me practicing singing, I have learned that if I practice, I’ll get better.  There’s even a curve that describes this – it’s called an “S-Curve” or logistics curve or learning curve.  When you first start walking, you suck.  When you first start driving, you suck.  When you first start, well, anything you’re awful at it.  Over time you get better, and the more you practice, the more competition there is?  The better you get.

If you have hundreds of people practicing something with billions of dollars on the line?  They get better.  Quickly.

And that’s the story of fracking oil in the United States.  Water usage in fracking is down.  Chemical usage in fracking is down.  Drilling costs, energy expended, and labor per barrel are down.  After practicing thousands of times on thousands of wells, companies have figured out how to frack a well to maximize crude oil production and minimize cost (and energy) put into it.  One metric I saw showed that fracked oil was now competitive (with a profit) compared with the cheapest oil on the planet – oil from Saudi Arabia.  Companies have gotten so good at fracking that natural gas in the United States is essentially free.

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I guess I’m not a fan.

Fracked oil is on a trajectory to be competitive with the lowest cost oil produced conventionally any place in the world.  And fracked oil has some other advantages – it’s “lighter” than conventional crude – that means it contains more gasoline and diesel, and less of the “heavier” stuff that is harder to turn into gasoline and diesel – think asphalt.

The United States is the largest crude oil producer in the world.  I never thought I’d type that sentence and it represent a real fact, but in 2019, it does.  The United States is, as promised by every president starting with Nixon, actually, really and for trues, energy independent.

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[Edit – Chart added after Lathechuck’s comment]

Was it alternative energy, like windmills?  No.  Was it the communist fever dreams of The Teen Girl Congress Squad®?  No.

Is it “sustainable”?  Kinda.  It is for a while.  There are an estimated (as of 2019) 1.7 trillion barrels of recoverable shale oil in the world, 293,000,000,000 of them are in the United States.  At 20,000,000 barrels a day in just the United States, using just United States resources, that’s forty years that we have from 2020 – until 2060 – to find an alternative, like, oh, nuclear.  And don’t believe me – here’s an actual clean energy evangelist who finally did that math and discovered . . . windmills are worse than natural gas as far as carbon emissions.

We still face headwinds – economic, exponential growth, two billion people that would love to hop the border to the United States, and communists that want to tear the place down.  But oil?  Oil isn’t the place to look for an apocalypse, at least this week.

And, trust me, if I hear a whiff that any of the above is wrong, I’ll pop it right back up on this blog as soon as I can confirm.

So, at least for today, Happy Motoring©.  We have maybe forty years to fix this, so let’s not waste it.  This has obvious foreign policy implications we’ll discuss in future posts.  Upside?  Why do we care about the Middle East anymore?

Economic Bubbles, Knife Juggling Toddlers, and Sewer Clowns

“Well, I don’t think it’s officially called bubble bath if the bubbles happen accidentally, but whatever, Shawn.” – Psyche

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The Four Horsemen of the Wilderpocalypse®, now in living color!

The world is in a weird place.  Very weird.  And that’s just what it says on my performance review.

What’s really weird is money.  Money, capital, whatever you call it, is in a vast oversupply.  How much of an oversupply?

Interest rates on about $15 trillion (not that brightly colored wrapping paper some countries naively use for money, but real dollars) is negative.  Negative.  In my bank account, I loan the bank my money.  In turn, the bank gives me a little extra back each month.  Not much at all, in comparison to historical standards, but a little.

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Alas, there will be no Christmas Goat in Zimbabwe this year.

In Germany, if you loan the government €100 (which is like a metric dollar for feminists) you pay 0.593%, or €0.59 a year for the privilege.  If you think this is a really good deal, come on down to John Wilder’s Toddler Knife Juggling School and Bank®.  I’ll only charge you €0.25 a year.  Plus you get to see videos of all the toddlers learning to juggle knives.  I’ll maintain that I’m giving you the much better deal.  Well, it’s a better deal depending upon what your insurance deductible is and how coordinated your toddler is.

Heck, keeping the cash in a box under your bed is a better deal than paying the Germans to watch it for you.  Why on Earth would you give someone piles of your hard-earned cash and be happy that you got less back,?  Well, some pension firms are required to invest in government securities, and some (probably German funds) are required to invest in German bonds.  In terms of deals, this is the functional equivalent of a Mafia bargain:  “It’s an offer you can’t refuse,” but in this case spoken with an accent like Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes®.

But the shear sum is mindboggling – I could come up with lots of really meaningless descriptions of what a trillion dollars is worth – a football field full of pallets of $100 bills stacked 8 feet high, enough to fill 1.8 miles worth of semi-trucks, almost enough space to hold Charlie Sheen’s spare virus load.   So, we as humans can’t really understand a trillion dollars in any meaningful way – and $15 trillion is how much money that’s parked in government bonds earning negative interest.  This is a travesty while my toddler juggling students are in desperate need of a prosthetics and eyepatch fund.

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Also 50% off vision, but that’s no charge.

When I was just dating The Mrs. (The Mrs. was just The Miss then), we visited her house so her parents could thump me like a melon to make sure I was ripe.  In her bedroom I noticed a box of toys.  On top was a plastic plane that I assume belonged to her older brother.  The plane didn’t look like the one below, but it was of a similar quality – very cheap plastic.  If I were buying that toy today, I’d expect it would be $1 or $2.  Not much, since it couldn’t be more than five pieces of cheap molded plastic.

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I still miss lawn darts.  If you’re going to make a hazardous toy, go all out and make it really hazardous.

As I recall, this particular toy plane still had the sticker on it from when cashiers used to manually punch in the prices – not a bar code in sight.  The sticker had a price of (I seem to recall) about $7.95.  A silly price for a cheap toy today, but in 1978 or so, maybe it was a good deal.

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This is what stickers used to look like before iPhones.  Or before I was old.

Inflation and Led Zepplin® ravaged the 1970’s, but nobody drank a pony keg and toked up to get psyched up for inflation.  A big part of the inflation was the oil shocks as the United States hit (then) peak oil production and OPEC® found they could dictate energy prices.  Another big part of inflation was because Nixon pulled the United States off of the gold standard.  I know people blame Nixon (and I have done so myself) for taking us off of the gold standard, but the alternative was giving all of our gold to the French.  The French.  They would have just spent it all on baguettes, berets, cigarettes, and mime school, so it was for their own good that Nixon said, “nope, no gold for you.”

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Also, he’s missing track shoes to run from ze panzers.

But as the dollar went from being nominally backed by gold to being backed by governmental promises, there was a messy, messy decade as prices adjusted.  I believe this led to many economic horrors.  And disco.  Eventually the dollar became the currency everyone used to trade with – if you wanted to buy Brazilian waxes and ship them to Japan, the Japanese would have to first trade yen for dollars, and then pay the Brazilians in dollars.  The Brazilians would then trade the dollars for more wax, or maybe matches to keep that pesky rainforest burning so it wouldn’t grow back.

The dollar became the required currency for world trade, especially in oil.  In the meantime, we had too many dollars chasing everything in the United States, and prices of everything went up.  So did interest rates.  Pop Wilder once told me that he was going to try to buy a $100,000 Treasury bond when the interest rates peaked back in 1981.  He said that it would have paid him $17,000 a year for twenty years, and then would have paid the $100,000 back to him.  But, his boss wouldn’t loan him the money while he sold some stock and moved some money around – Pop had the money, but he couldn’t get it that week.  That one bugged him for years.  He certainly wasn’t planning on paying the Treasury to take his loan.

After the Great Recession, the central bankers at the Federal Reserve® flew around dropping money by buying up mortgage-backed securities.  How much?  $1.8 trillion at last count – they discontinued the data.  And then the Fed went started buying US treasuries so the interest rates would stay low – peaking at $2.4 trillion from a starting point of less than $0.5 trillion.

This was called “Quantitative Easing” since that sounds much more sober than “panicking and throwing money on the fire to try to put it out.”  The Fed© pumped through just these two mechanisms over $3.7 trillion into the economy from 2008 to 2015.  It’s not like they wanted to keep the party going for a specific president, is it?  Nah.

Anyway, the Fed® pumped money, manipulated interest rates, and what happened?

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See, it’s topical, it’s current, and it’s a scary sewer clown.  Ma Wilder told me these were the three basic elements of humor.  Oh, and toddlers juggling knives.

This time, the world currency reacted entirely different – the money was in the hands of the already rich.  So what did the rich do?  Invested it.  Prices went up, but in this case, it was the price not of cheap plastic airplanes, but of investments.  Money began chasing profits.  As such, the stock market increased a wee amount, going from about 10,000 to over 28,000 today.  For those that didn’t major in math, that was an increase of 2.8x.  During the same time, the economy grew about 33%, or, 1.3x.  Bond interest rates plummeted – that means that bonds were in demand, since it takes a lower interest rate to get someone to buy a bond.

And now you have to pay to buy a bond.

Money has been chasing assets that can be invested in.  The stock market.  Bonds.  Farmland.  San Francisco condos.  Because of the investor money looking for profits, these have all grown much faster than the price of a Big Mac®, though that seems to be heading up now, too.  College and medical costs have gone up as well, but that’s mainly because government gets involved and “helps out” with student loans and generally screws up medical care entirely.

Most of the other things needed for day-to-day living in the heartland haven’t gone up that much – cheaper energy has certainly helped the entire economy.  And housing prices in Modern Mayberry have stayed as flat as your sister for the last decade, if not declining a bit.

But the stock market can’t outpace real growth in the economy forever, and the Fed™ has stopped injecting money into mortgage-backed securities, and investors seem to want to by Treasury notes, so the Fed© can stop buying those for a while.

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I’m thinking she may do better at math than the Fed®.

To me it seems clear that our economy is in a bubble where investors are willing to spend a lot of money to buy a little bit of profit, or a little bit of interest return.  We are in a bubble – a bubble where the assets are those things that can produce income, or at least a return on investment.  In this particular bubble, capitalism itself is the commodity that is over inflated, aided and abetted by bankers that seem to want to keep the economic party going forever.

Hey, it’s still working for Zimbabwe, right?