Energy – Page 6 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Wherein I Discuss Home Mechanical Systems, The Economy, Otters Running A Nuclear Plant, and Pelosi Alcohol Consumption

“Iced tea. . . air conditioning . . . water.” – Stargate SG-1

I went to an air conditioning conference once. It was pretty cool.

Let’s begin our tour of the economics world with the lowly thermostat. When The Mrs. and I were first married, The Mrs. would turn the thermostat on our air conditioner way down in the summer, say, to 62°F (45km). This led to the house gradually beginning to cool down, but the air conditioner would labor on like a Billy Barty attempting to oil a “modern” Sports Illustrated, um, model with a stepladder and a 55 gallon bucket.

This electrical effort by our air conditioner would continue until the outside of the house would resemble Joe Biden after he’s seen his latest approval ratings: a cold sweat on the exterior of the house as the moisture outside condensed on the meat-locker temperature windows.

I asked The Mrs., “Why do you turn it down so low?”

“So it gets colder, faster.”

The Mrs. says I’m an absolute 10 – on the Kelvin scale.

Now, on the surface, that sort of logic makes sense. If I spin the dial on the stove farther, it heats up my Dinty Moore Beef Stew® and Orange Jell-O© mix faster (goes great with corn and doughnuts). Twisting the dial puts more energy onto the stovetop. But (at least in every house I’ve lived at) the air conditioning doesn’t work like that – at all.

The air conditioner at our house is either on or it’s off. There is no “kinda on” or “working as hard as a Supreme Court Clerk deleting his phone texts” setting. Nope.

On.

Off.

Two choices. So, if you want it to be 68°F, and you put it to 68°F it will get to 68°F exactly as fast as if you put it down to 40°F. But not everything works that way, and The Mrs. can certainly be forgiven for not knowing that when we met. Plus, in our case, the air conditioner dries the air, so when I woke up in our 40°F house in the summertime, the air was making fun of Hillary Clinton since it was as dry as Norm Macdonald’s wit.

I hear that when Norm got to Heaven, St. Peter told him, “Norm, you have to have an eye test. Cover one eye.” Norm covers one eye and reads the chart: “E-I-E-I . . . Oh, come on! I wasn’t that old!”

The economy is certainly more complicated than a household HVAC unit, but I’m not sure the incompetent participation trophy award winners at the White House have any sort of clue. At all. They’re like putting playful river otters in charge of running a nuclear reactor. Sure, it’s all fun and games watching them be all nimbly-pimbly with the control rods. But sooner or later (mainly sooner) the control rods will be pulled and the uranium will eventually melt into a radioactive mess that’s slightly more destructive than the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp trial after the core melts down.

I believe this is actually from the trial – Lawyer: “Did you see what happened after you left?” Depp: “I wasn’t there after I left.”

The point is that our economy is complicated, and we’re dealing with a current Resident of the Oval Office that would find running a YouTube® video complicated. “What do you mean, I press the button and the sheep start to talk? How does that happen? Who puts them in there?”

It would be hilarious if we weren’t actually living through this, like when Caligula named his horse a Senator of Rome. My sides are still in stitches about that one! But when it’s us, it’s scary. I mean, Kamala’s not exactly a horse, but, still, the analogy holds, even in this case if it rhymes.

The air conditioner analogy (as a very simple one) actually does have some meaning in this case. When an economy is stalled, there is a case (not the best one, but at least a case) for using money to restart it. Sure, it’s dangerous. And I can make the argument that we’ve done it so many times that it’s really messed up the entire system.

I hear she’s auditioned to be a Batman® villain – The Giggler™.

But after the system is going, by continually forcing more money into the system, well, as Joe said, “I did that.”

If that were the only issue, it might be solvable. It’s just one variable. Have Kamala and AOC eat all the spare money and then it might be as okay as Buddy Holly in a parachute. Might.

Joe, however, has other ideas. When you put sanctions on a nation, the idea is to hurt that nation. Really, that was their plan. But the sanctions against Russia (along with the war, which I also blame Biden for – he could have stopped it with ONE PHONE CALL) have resulted in soaring fertilizer and food prices. That’s bad enough, but it has also popped fuel prices to record highs – The Mrs. wanted to give me something rare and valuable for Father’s Day, so I just asked for five gallons of gasoline.

Fuel impacts everything.

Roses are red, violets are blue, Janet Yellen doesn’t care about you.

The combination of these sanctions and war have effects that haven’t been felt yet – not remotely. An example: a farmer normally fertilizes his alfalfa to increase yield. Not this year – the cost increase for fertilizer far outstrips what he expects to make in revenue. So, he deals with the “natural” yields. Due to high diesel costs, he also gets less money after the cost for harvesting is deducted.

What eats alfalfa?

Well, for one, cattle. So, less alfalfa, more expensive food for cattle. More expensive food for cattle? Well, if the rancher can’t make a profit, he’ll sell the herd. Those aren’t magic, and cattle don’t regenerate immediately like Wolverine®, so if you think we have high beef prices now . . . . just wait.

That’s the second idea: every action has a reaction. Some are immediate, like lower amounts of oil leading to higher prices. Others are longer-term. There’s a delay between taking the action and the result.

Going back to houses, this is like water hammer. That’s what happens when a valve closes too fast in a poorly designed plumbing system. The closing of the valve sends a pressure wave back and forth through the system, rattling the pipes as the pressure goes (at the speed of sound!) through the piping system. If you’ve ever lived in a house with water hammer, you know the sound. It’s loud.

But a simple act, closing a valve, can send waves of pressure moving back and forth through the system.

If you find a bomb that explodes when it’s stepped on, let me know. It’s mine.

We haven’t seen the end of those pressure waves from the magical sanctions that were supposed to have weakened the Russians but have instead raised the value of the ruble and thrown the food and fuel systems of the world into turmoil. Again, my analogy of otters running a nuclear reactor doesn’t appear to be far off as these secondary impacts reverberate through the system.

Eventually, these systems come back into equilibrium. However, unlike the consequences of a 40°F house, in this case we end up with the possibility of an economy more wrecked than the Pelosi family after about 11 AM.

As Nancy would say, “Cheers!”

The Funniest Post About Jevons’ Paradox You’ll Ever Read.

“But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless: it squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely, that’s about it. Tell me, though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” – Planet of the Apes

I heard she prefers to be called “aoc” because she doesn’t like capitalism.

In 1865, when Joe Biden was barely sniffing at his first hair, English economist William Jevons noticed something: that Biden’s behavior was really inappropriate. Besides that, Jevons also noticed that innovations that made coal more efficient to use led not to lower uses of coal, but to the use of more coal. This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.

When you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense. If electricity cost 10 times as much as it does today, we’d use less of it, and The Mrs. would probably (reluctantly) turn the air conditioning up from 62°F to 64°F (23 to 52 megaparsecs/joule-furlong) in summer. To make it clear: The Mrs. likes it colder in the house than a college faculty lounge when someone mentions personal responsibility.

The more expensive or more inefficient something is, the less it is used, which probably explains why they keep Kamala Harris in a Tupperware® container when they’re not trotting her out to somehow make even less sense than Hunter Biden after a three-week coke, hooker, and greasy cheeseburger binge.

That’s weird, because I was always under the impression Kamala was the cheap resource. Who knew?

Hunter Biden on drugs: “Cocaine use? I have to draw a line somewhere.”

I was conversing back and forth about various and sundry things with Eaton Rapids Joe (you can find him HERE) on email since he decided to experiment on the tensile strength of his bones (they rarely break in compression) in a kinetic environment and is as mobile as a Ford Pinto™. That made him bored enough to drop yours truly a line. As the conversation progressed, I thought of good old Jevons.

The truth is that we swim in a pool of Jevons. You might want to soap up when you get out. Seriously, though, we normally adapt our work to use cheap (the non-Kamala kind of cheap) resources.

Here’s an example: back when I went to college, computing processor and memory time was expensive. The CPU was the pivot point. In my programming class, students were actually given an account that charged them per Pelosi-second of processing time.

Last night Pelosi was so drunk she took the train home, which was weird, because it was the first time she ever drove a train.

A Pelosi-second is the amount of time required for Nancy’s liver to absorb a bottle of vodka given to her by a Ukrainian lobbyist, so it’s pretty fast. Just like in Joe Biden’s brain, memory was rare and expensive, too. But when the cost of memory went down, we ended up using more of it.

Nowadays, because of Jevons’ Paradox, we find that computing processor power and memory are cheap. There are two pictures, three Polaroids® and six daguerreotypes of me growing up. I have more pictures of Pugsley’s first birthday cake.

One result of this is that computer code is no longer (really) optimized. Because CPU and memory is cheap, industry has decided that they can be sloppy programmers. If we have overflow in the 32GB of RAM, well, we can reboot once a month. Unless you’re in a Boeing®. Oops.

Sorry if those jokes were boeing.

That’s computer stuff. What other things have Jevons’ Paradox impacted?

Energy.

Food.

Money.

“Holy cow, John Wilder,” you’re saying, “that’s nearly as important as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial!” Let’s start with . . .

Energy.

Yup. And in energy, especially, the Paradox has been our friend. What energy does is, essentially, provide us with amazing amounts of prosperity. It moves important stuff like fidget spinners from China to Stately Wilder Mansion for pennies. It moves less important stuff like life-saving medicine and PEZ® for unimaginably small amounts of cash.

Ubiquitous energy has made the world small. It has made huge efforts, like moving Bill Gates’ ego from place to place, inexpensive. But as we see Russian energy cut off, and Biden doing his best to make the United States energy inefficient, perhaps so the only source of energy would be AOC’s thighs rubbing together.

Is the Hooters® home delivery service called Knockers™?

Regardless, we face a future where all the inefficiency that we’ve allowed into the system due to cheap energy will have to unwind.

Next on the tour is . . .

Food.

In my early life, food has always been worth a commercial or two showing starving kids covered in flies from some hellhole where they use sharp sticks for money as well as kitchen appliances. I think it was Baltimore. Regardless, in the last decade, world hunger was solved. We had enough food so we could pave roads with Pizza Rolls® and stripe them with Hidden Valley Ranch™ dressing.

Yup. Totally solved. More than enough calories for everyone on the planet to use Oreos™ for deodorant and bathe in Coca-Cola©. Sure, sometimes people starved, but not very many, and mainly in communist hellholes where the local warlord still hasn’t gotten over his devotion to U2® and Bono comes by to make public appearances to show how much he cares. Or Baltimore.

Were people hungry?

Certainly, but they were generally fat while they were hungry. But the problem was solved.

Broccoli is a great thing to eat when you’re hungry and want to stay hungry.

In a world where Ukraine and Russia aren’t exporting grain and fertilizer, however, this changes. Sure, in the United States we can probably count on food for everyone, just expensive food. But that world hunger thing? Yeah, it’s back in play.

What’s left?

Money.

Huh? I thought we were awash in money, so much so that gasoline was more expensive than supporting the Ukraine for an afternoon? Well, no. Money is the one thing that is getting more expensive.

The reason is simple – we’ve had nearly zero percent interest since 2008. The Fed® has been shoving it down the throat of banks. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have been printing it as fast as they can, since it didn’t seem to matter.

They also make cameras, the Go-Provolone®.

Until it did. And now interest rates are higher. But who needs money? The same people paying record-high prices to try to extract Energy. The same people who need to borrow cash to fertilize fields and plant seeds and harvest them.

Yup. Expensive money means less energy and less food.

Oops.

Well, there must be a bright side?

Yes, thankfully there is.

Faculty lounges all over the continent will heat on up. And maybe personal responsibility will make a reappearance. Or maybe AOC will see her shadow, but that’s scary.

That means six more weeks of communism.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek

“Comrade Stalin, a fortune-teller came to see you!” “Execute him. If he was any good, he would have known not to come.”

Most people like to be told what to do. They want to be led. That makes sense, given the history of humanity. We work best when we work together, and the worst group is a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader. Because of this, hierarchy is a built-in feature to our operating system. Get a group of lumberjacks together, and one of them will want to be named the branch manager.

The downside of this “working together” is that the vast mass of people are willing to behave like lemmings and all jump off the cliff, as long as that’s what everyone else in the group is doing. Heck, lemmings would even jump off a dock, if they felt pier pressure. For me, the last few years has been the biggest revelation in human behavior and how easily people (especially NPCs) can be reprogrammed.

The three biggest reprogramming efforts in the last few years have been Trump, COVID, and Ukraine. I’ll skip Trump for the moment, and jump into COVID. Was the ‘Rona a real disease? Certainly. The reaction to it was overblown at every level. The average age of people who died from Corona-chan was (through my rough calculations) 73 in the United States.

In two years, a total of 921 deaths below the age of 17 were recorded. By my calcs, this was less than 1% of the deaths from all causes for kids of that age. In other words, it was uncommon. For that, though, we shut down schools, shut down the economy, and tossed trillions in cash out everywhere. That led to pent-up demand – when the local Lego® store reopened, people lined up for blocks.

If you step on a rusty Lego™, you might need to get a Tetris© shot.

You’re aware of all of that, of course. This isn’t ancient history. But the number of Americans who became Corona believers overnight was in the tens of millions. The reactions of panic were amazing. It became the reason for the existence of the news media and Big Tech® to actively put a blanket of censorship on all views that didn’t agree with whatever the blessed St. Anthony Fauci, PBUH, didn’t believe that afternoon.

The ‘Rona continued to be a means of control, as well as amazing profitability for the vaxx makers. Biden even tried to up the ante with controls that would have made Brezhnev blush that were (in some cases) later defeated, which made him stop before he went full Trudeau. Never go full Trudeau.

Eventually, the vaxx requirements and silly Corona restrictions got so politically muddled and unpopular that the subject had to be changed. A desperate politician with low approval ratings decided that the best thing that could have happened to him is . . . Russia.

Cowboys don’t have to worry either, they have herd immunity.

Leftists have been head over heels hating Russia for quite a long time, even more than they hate having to switch cars after the Amber Alert comes over the radio. I started to write a paragraph as to why – but why doesn’t matter.

It would have been elementary statecraft for Biden to get Ukraine and Russia to have a peaceful settlement, or at least one short of war. Instead, every public statement was a variant of “let’s you and him fight.”

Biden actively egged on the conflict that no one believed would actually happen.

Why? This why is important.

It was to swap out the chips. COVID-19 Fear Enabler™ was replaced with 2022 Russia Hate®. Joe saw his shot to again become nearly as popular as “that dance the kids are doing, the twist” and someone decided to make the chip swap.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to be on the side of Ukraine – there are. Me? I’m not on either side – I don’t need to choose between various them. But the real loser of this war won’t only be Ukraine and Russia. In the long run, I think the biggest loser will be the economy of the United States, especially with unemployment after Ukraine has to lay off the Biden, Pelosi, and Romney families.

Pictured: Will Smith not hitting someone for making a joke.

I see that there is a very, very significant portion of the populace that is highly susceptible to this reprogramming – again – no every Russia hater is an NPC, but many are. The technology for this reprogramming has been honed very well over time. People who couldn’t spell Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map want to intervene with a no-fly zone and troops. One wonders if they know that “no-fly” has nothing to do with zipperless pants.

Whether planned or not, this will very likely result in the final crisis that the United States will face in its current form. The difficulty is that we are a population that is already divided. I feel that the recent sanctions against Russia are an own goal that will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the reserve currency and wrote about that here: (https://wilderwealthywise.com/russia-and-the-end-of-the-dollar/).

Ultimately, this leads to that final crisis that we’ll face as a nation.

How will we deal with an economic crisis? Certainly there is the possibility of Civil War 2.0, which is what I had previously had as my number one risk. It’s still there, but a new risk is becoming more and more probable as we head towards Biden’s Depression. What kind of crisis? That one is simple. Economic disruption in the United States of Weimar proportions, as I’ll outline below.

A move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency (which is happening right now) will create poverty. Yes, we make food in the United States. But we don’t make the microchips required to run the John Deere® harvesters. We also make most of the energy that we consume. But we don’t make the steel to produce the pipe to drill it or move it. We’ve simply lost much of the technological and experience base required to make the things we need, except for Doritos®.

As noted above, I can see other probabilities, but Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the unipolar world we had since 1992. This creates the conditions necessary to crush a United States built on a FIRE economy.

What’s a FIRE economy? Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Yup, that’s the United States. Regardless of how it has been used, it is an economy that’s built around sloshing money around. No matter what the condo sells for in New York, it won’t put a single more hamburger into a McDonald’s® in Manhattan.

Russia can make and harvest the food, because they can make tractors or import them from China. Russia can make excess energy, as well as the pipe to move it. They don’t even need China for that. The United States used to be indispensable. Now?

The United States imports $90 billion a month more than it exports. $90 billion. Why do people sent us $90 billion in stuff every month more than we send out? Because we pay with dollars.

If only he could have gotten another 150,000 votes at 3am, I’m sure he could have won Saudi Arabia.

These dollars exist because we just print them, or, more likely, create electronic bits that we call dollars. It was a good gig, but Biden’s sanctions against Russia have shown the Russians that they don’t need the Western financial system. They can sell oil and fertilizer and grain for . . . rubles. Or gold. Or microchips. They don’t need the dollar.

This sort of crisis facing the United States has happened before. Most of the time, it rhymes.

A decadent people
Weakened through a fixation only on pleasure and power
Because they live in abundance
Are confronted with a crisis – typically ending the pleasure

What, then, do the people want?

Well, of course, they want the pleasure back. They want the abundance back. What are they willing to do? Anything. As I said, people like to be led. So, when the Strong Man shows up with the Plan, they’re ready to accept it.

What does the Strong Man require to return the pleasure and abundance back? Simple, said the spider to the no-fly zone: Control.

Who is ready to give control? People who can swap programming nearly immediately, to swap out COVID Fear Pack™ to Save Ukraine 2022 Upgrade© without skipping a beat.

And that’s how you get a Dictator

Wednesday: The Road to Dictatorship, Past, Present, and Future.

Russia And The End Of The Dollar

“I’m no expert, but I’m pretty sure you can inflate construction costs and launder money through it.” – Ozark

I wonder if everyone can figure out why China built their own Internet now?

Biden has miscalculated. Again. As he has his entire life. He has moved from one miscalculation in his life to the next. So, it’s not surprising that perhaps the greatest failure in the history of the United States has shown up on his watch. Let’s go, Brandon, indeed.

To be fair, it’s not entirely Brandon’s fault. The United States economy, as I’ve gone to great pains to show over my posts, has been hollowed out over the years. We have gone from one that manufactures things and exports goods to one that mainly manufactures movies (we’re very good at that) and consulting and intellectual property and Starbucks™.

The thing that we’ve been best at is printing and then exporting dollars. For decades now, we have been exporting dollars that we printed and then importing stuff like fidget spinners and PEZ®. It was a great deal for us. People used those dollars and we got stuff, but it was essentially a global tax on the rest of the world.

That ability to tax, however, only works as long as people believe that the dollar is worth something, and that the holder of that economic power won’t bend the rules. Just like the bank runs up in Canada started when Trudeau broke the promise that the banks won’t steal people’s money, so the same principle applies to international affairs.

What could go wrong, stealing cash from random people?

When Russia attacked Ukraine, Biden declared sanctions. Sure that’s a fine idea when dealing with a tiny random country, but Russia isn’t tiny. And Russia isn’t any random country.

See, one silver lining!

Russia is of huge importance to world commerce. Russia exports the stuff that makes modern economies go:

Food
Steel
Fertilizer
Titanium
Nickel
Oil
Refined Fuels
Natural Gas
Coal
Gold

In almost every commodity listed above, Russia is in the top five exporting nations. In several commodities, it is the world’s largest exporter. Check out the graphs on energy and wheat when the market gets disrupted:

What does Russia import?

Telephones
Car Parts
Computers
Medicine

Russia also exports nearly double what it imports. If there is a country that is nearly self-sufficient in this world, it’s Russia. There is an economic concept called “autarky” – or a nationwide independence from imports. Looking at the list of companies that are leaving Russia, well, could it be that Russia is better off without them?

Yes, Pornhub® and OnlyFans™ are on the list. I wonder what the effects will be? 21-year-old girls will have to find jobs that involve wearing clothes?

Russia isn’t independent. But it’s close enough. Most things that it is missing can be bought from either India or China. No iPhones®? China has a bunch of other kinds of phones. And all those businesses that left? It’s not like the Russians don’t know how to make hamburger and buns, so McPutins™ could open up tomorrow, though I’d skip the polonium sauce.

Russians are talking about nationalizing all of the assets of companies that have abandoned them. Why wouldn’t a country do that? Well, other countries could seize the overseas Russian assets.

Oops. Too late. So what’s stopping the Russians?

What is the threat from the West? That Russian audiences won’t have Netflix®? The things that Russia has been denied are, frankly, not very scary. They won’t get to see the next Marvel© movie? Oh, yeah, they also went after Russia’s money and tried to cut it off from the dollar-based economic system and . . . entertainment.

The Babylon Bee has the real impact figured out.

What happens when that bluff is called, when Russia and China decide that they don’t need dollars? What happens when Russia will sell natural gas to Europe only in yuan? Or for gold? Or that they won’t trade their commodities for anything at all?

The tent collapses, and by that tent I mean the dollar.

I actually think that Joe’s head is so far up . . . well, I’ll be kind and guess that he has Alzheimer’s rather than being this stupid. Oddly, this is viewed as an ideological opportunity by the Leftist henchxirs in Washington. They hate fossil fuels to the point of not caring about the relative plight of the American consumer. Don’t believe me? Listen to them:

Why would we want to solve problems?

Let them eat electric cars?

And Joe’s responsible for the invasion, too.

Leaked pictures from Joe’s energy briefing.

The goal. No matter what it costs.

There are even well-meaning Lefties starting to write articles to cope with the failure:

But here’s a sign: Joe tried to get meetings with the Saudis and the very friendly folks over at the United Arab Emirates. They wouldn’t return his calls. Imagine: a foreign leader refusing to even talk with the President* of the United States. It’s almost like he’s a fraud?

I wonder if he’s going to drunk-text the Emir tonight?

One person sums it up . . . .

Beyond that, the price of wheat is getting ready to go even higher. Together, Russia and Ukraine produce over 25% of the wheat exported in the world. A quarter. Ukraine’s planting season has been slightly impacted by current events, and Russian exports might be diverted to feed Ukraine.

The United States is certainly self-sufficient in wheat, but the prices of wheat are like oil: they’re tied to the international price. What happens when a loaf of bread is six dollars? Nothing good. But if there are price controls? Bread will be priced at two dollars. There just won’t be any in stores.

Domestic inflation is bad enough, but what happens when the Saudis start taking gold for oil from the Chinese? Or start paying for Russian wheat with the gold they got from the Chinese? The dollar, once indispensable, is done as the international currency.

The message is loud and clear – the end of the dollar is near. Why is gold up over $2,000? My question is why is gold only up to $2,000? I fully expect that, should Russia succeed, 90% of the dollar’s purchasing power will be gone in the next 14 months.

That will lead to massive changes in our economy, political unrest, and, potentially, the dissolution of the United States as we know it.

Thanks, Joe! Where is ¡Jeb! when we need him?

Civil War 2.0 On Hold: Russia, Russia, Russia

“If Russia mobilizes, there will be a war.” – Nicholas and Alexandria

I saw a billboard advertising clocks the other day – I guess it’s a sign of the times.

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

The Clock O’Doom has dropped back. For now. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – The Clock Retreats – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Hungry Days – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, subscribe because you’ll join nearly 650 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

https://wilderwealthywise.com/civil-war-weather-report-previous-posts/

The Clock Retreats

February was on a pace to at least keep the pressure up.

COVID was causing Canada to rip apart.
The Department of Homeland Security decided that (see below) that anyone who put forward “misleading narratives which sow discord or undermine public trust in U.S. government institutions” was a threat.
Truckers in the United States were getting ready to replicate the Canadian example in D.C.
Biden was less popular than syphilis.

Then? Ukraine. It’s completely stopped the concern about COVID. Corona is . . . gone. All hail Putin – the man who cured COVID. The truckers are still on the side of freedom in the United States, but the press isn’t covering them at all.

From the Civil War 2.0 standpoint, though, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has completely sucked all the oxygen out of the room. It is the only thing being discussed. And public perception is moving quickly. When the invasion was first launched, only 26% of people (mainly Leftists) wanted to have any American action taken.

Last week, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution 426-3 supporting Ukraine, up to and including troops. It’s a resolution, so it’s not a declaration of war. But the Congressmen think their voters support intervention. They’re right – 74% of people in the United States support a “no-fly” zone over Ukraine.

The only way to do that, of course, is for Americans to directly shoot down Russian planes. I don’t think the Russians would take that well at all. I don’t expect a no-fly zone because even Biden isn’t foolish enough to consider that. I hope.

Regardless, the focus of the American public has been distracted. They’ve stopped fighting each other (sort of) and for the moment, Civil War 2.0 is off the menu. This is only a short-term event. As we’ll cover down below (and in much more detail on Wednesday), this reprieve is only short term. The invasion carries the seeds of stress that will ultimately make Civil War 2.0, much more likely.

For now, though, I’m moving the clock back to 10 minutes to midnight.

Violence And Censorship Update

As mentioned above, at the beginning of February, stress was actively added to the system. First, the DHS decided that differing options counted as terrorism. I’m hoping that they don’t see me calling their little note a blatant violation of the First Amendment as being in violation. I mean, who wouldn’t trust a government that doesn’t want alternative views published?

See for yourself:

Certified Genius Adam Kinzinger (just kidding, I’m not sure he’s smart enough to spell his own name) said that “targeted assassinations” were coming if civil war breaks out. I’m just hoping someone finds a room where he can have his coloring books in peace.

TD Bank, in Canada, gave funds for the Canadian truckers to the courts. Why? Having a different opinion means you’re a target. The Emergencies Act gave them the right to do that. As well as cut anyone who supported them, even verbally, out of the modern economic system.

And never forget – the Left wants people who love freedom bankrupt so they can never have a voice again.

Updated Civil War II Index

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

Violence:

Violence is flat. February isn’t (usually) a big month for violence, so that’s to be expected. I would expect the next few months to remain calm as well, perhaps turning back up in April.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, but instability fell in February. Short month, and the focus is now more outward.

Economic:

The drop in economic confidence turned around this month, mainly on lower unemployment. This is short term.

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels for this time of year. All-time record levels. Again.

The Hungry Days

I’ve tried to model the way that people feel about the economy, politics, and violence above. One thing those models don’t do is predict. Here’s where a prediction is coming in, but it’s easier to predict what’s going to happen than predicting what will happen to a chocolate Easter bunny if you leave it alone in a room with a fat kid:

Ukraine is a tremendous producer of food for the world.
So is Russia.
Ukraine produces a lot of fertilizer and exports it.
So does Russia.

In the very best case, Ukrainian harvests will be far below normal. If the war continues, the harvests may be nearly zero. Ukraine may export no food – zero. Their industry for producing fertilizer might be wrecked beyond use, or the docks might be destroyed. Or the docks might be in Russian hands.

Russia, even if allowed to export, may choose to export food only to countries that don’t have sanctions against it. Would you choose to export to people that have cut you off, and might not even have a mechanism to pay you, to people who cut off your Netflix®?

What happens if wheat producers comprising nearly 26% of wheat exports in the world . . . stop selling to most people either because they can’t or don’t want to?

The world gets hungry. And if the millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of natural gas is off the market, the world gets poor.

So, we can end up in a world that is cold, hungry and poor. Quickly. And those are ideal conditions for Civil War 2.0.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1490379402005393413

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1487927709456031749

https://twitter.com/i/status/1484612953672347648

https://twitter.com/i/status/1490144736732188677

https://twitter.com/The_Real_Fly/status/1489137527659319298

https://twitter.com/i/status/1491418120086454278

https://twitter.com/Networkinvegas/status/1489654175570874368

https://gab.com/DrPaulGosar/posts/107814488157277312

https://twitter.com/NY_Scoop/status/1493116710173429761

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10483307/Shocking-video-shows-man-beaten-gang-Harlem-run-passing-car.html

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/how-bad-is-crime-in-l-a/

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/BettyKPIX/status/1494117970221547521

https://youtu.be/R4Y-6zg6rL8

https://youtu.be/Z0qSqtKcUtQ

https://twitter.com/i/status/1494460147246067720

https://twitter.com/i/status/1494431313452941323

https://twitter.com/i/status/1490900444494712834

https://twitter.com/Orwells_Ghost_/status/1491944537299771400

https://roycewhite.substack.com/p/an-open-letter-to-the-black-bourgeoisie

One Guy

https://youtu.be/WOZI59tSv_4

Body Counts

https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/

https://sf.gov/sites/default/files/2021-01/2021%2001_OCME%20Overdose%20Report.pdf

https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/current_events/gun_control/gun_violence_most_americans_want_stricter_enforcement_not_new_laws

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10542549/More-Americans-killed-GUNS-car-crashes.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10500759/Police-shot-dead-record-1-055-people-2021-young-black-men-disproportionate-majority.html

https://nypost.com/2022/02/06/bidens-first-year-in-office-saw-73-police-officers-killed-most-deaths-since-1995/

https://www.thedailybeast.com/these-cartel-terror-schools-in-mexico-give-cannibalism-exams-failure-is-not-an-option

Vote Counts

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1486032341210480645.html

https://apnews.com/article/elections-wisconsin-local-elections-election-2020-general-elections-6f786ced357f2d89f61a6bd32afcdd08

https://thefederalist.com/2022/03/01/breaking-special-counsel-finds-mark-zuckerbergs-election-money-violated-wisconsin-bribery-laws/

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/feb/12/texas-voting-requirements-ballot-rejections

https://www.newsweek.com/film-claims-it-has-video-mules-stuffing-ballot-boxes-2020-election-1679583

https://heritageaction.com/toolkit/election-integrity-toolkit

Civil War…

https://rollcall.com/2022/02/03/civility-downhill-biden-poll/

https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/bridgewater-s-ray-dalio-sees-u-s-on-path-to-civil-war-as-political-polarization-rises-1.1718043

https://www.conwaydailysun.com/opinion/columns/ross-douthat-let-s-not-invent-a-civil-war/article_921df052-74a0-11ec-a4e5-b37129c65643.html

https://thetriad.thebulwark.com/p/ross-douthats-civil-war-blame-game

https://www.oleantimesherald.com/opinion/is-america-bound-for-a-second-civil-war/article_280c209d-0480-5284-9421-95d71b83eb9b.html

https://bobschaffer-53068.medium.com/how-does-one-grasp-a-civil-war-5101af781ba2

https://greensboro.com/community/rockingham_now/opinion/are-we-bound-for-a-second-civil-war/article_9caf04b4-a6f0-5687-b55d-040a1271fddc.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/13/opinion/january-6-civil-war.html

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-close-to-violent-conflict-book-how-civil-wars-start-2022-1

https://slate.com/culture/2022/01/stephen-marche-next-civil-war-review.html

https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1071082955/imagine-another-american-civil-war-but-this-time-in-every-state

https://www.newsweek.com/our-second-civil-war-opinion-1670408

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/targeted-assassinations-coming-if-civil-war-breaks-out-adam-kinzinger/ar-AATKbqK

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/politics/story/2022-02-12/ucsd-prof-walter-civil-war

https://www.newsandtribune.com/news/worries-valid-troubling-but-civil-war-unlikely-experts-say/article_5a61c30c-7d40-11ec-ba25-67f07cf005fb.html

https://jacobinmag.com/2022/02/new-civil-war-apocalyptic-rhetoric-news-media-far-right-liberals

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/adam-kinzinger-civil-war-warning_n_62022630e4b0725faacec344

https://www.businessinsider.com/billionaire-investor-says-us-seemingly-on-path-civil-war-2022-2

https://observer-reporter.com/opinion/op-eds/op-ed-vigilantism-and-a-new-civil-war-a-warning/article_01df8b3e-853c-11ec-a851-cfae67c239f1.html

…Is Not The Worst That Can Happen…

http://assets.realclear.com/files/2022/03/1969_NEWSCHELLINGMEMO.pdf

Gold, Silver, And The End Of The World

“What do you know about gold, Moneypenny?” – Goldfinger

Why don’t pirates travel on mountain roads? S’curvy.

A reader writes: “. . . if you could explain to me the rationale behind buying gold or silver as a hedge against economic collapse, I would appreciate it.” I answered by sending him bikini graph after bikini graph, but yet he persisted in wanting to know an actual answer.

I don’t think anyone will complain that this one is a repeat . . . .

He had me cornered. I wrote to him (embellished for this post and clarified for readability):

Thank you for the question. I promise to answer, just as long as you give my dog bag safely. He may be old and one-eyed and have diabetes and alopecia . . . we call him, “Lucky.”

It’s good that he’s not a dinosaur – he’d probably be called an eyesaur.

I thought that I had already answered this question and looked for the post.

As I’ve got over 1,000 up, I couldn’t find it after I looked for about 22 seconds. Maybe I developed notes on it and never posted? Maybe I’m just lazy at searching. In the worst-case scenario, a previous version exists, and everyone just has to deal with this new, superior post.

The question is a subtle one. The first part of the answer is the degree of collapse. I’ll start out with this idea: how bad does it get?

Another Boring Wednesday: Would I rather have a ton of gold on a Wednesday morning than not? Of course. But I’d probably worry about George Clooney and his wisecracking band of thieves breaking into Stately Wilder Mansion.
Personal Economic Problems: Again, in a sequel, having that ton of gold is still great, but I still have that pesky George Clooney problem. In reality, gold is somewhat less liquid than cash, but having a bunch of it is still nice. Also, if you bought gold in 1990, you would have had zero profit on it until 2006. This was mainly due to sane economic policy and high-interest rates that tamed inflation.

Or is this why they were always after his Lucky Charms®?

Recession: What’s going on in the economy? If you look closely, silver and gold actually dropped in value at the start of the Great Recession in the 2000s. As people liquidated their “stuff” so they could still buy the G.I. Joe® with the Kung Fu™ grip for their kid at Christmas, the price actually dropped. For a while. Then the price jumped up when it became clear that the Fed® would print as much money as required to choke every person on the planet. In the fiat world, gold and silver are something I’d look to have.
Depression – 1930s Style: This is a hard analogy – back in the 1930s, the dollar was backed in gold, until FDR (press S to spit) stole the gold from the American people. Now? The dollar is nothing more than, to quote Aerosmith, “a lick and a promise.” (See below)
Weimar-Style Hyperinflation: I don’t think we’ll get here, until there’s a lack of faith in the dollar. Brandon is doing his best to make Jimmy Carter look like a master of economics, so, if hyperinflation hits? Gold is awesome, and you might be able to repay your mortgage with five or six pre-1965 silver quarters. So, yes, gold and silver make sense. A lot of sense.

In a Leftist world, everyone is a Billionaire. And also starving.

Country Collapse: What happens if the country ceases to be? It has happened again and again through history, especially with large “empire-like” countries that don’t have any sort of ethnic commonality. Japan will always be Japan because there are Japanese and it’s a nation, not a country. China, likewise. Without a functioning country, there is no nation to fall back on. This is where we add another precious metal: So, yes, gold and silver, but understand that it might be some time before it’s useful again.
International Collapse: Rome provides a powerful example here. In Great Britain, they’re constantly finding hordes of money – including silver money, and gold. Why? Because people stopped using it, and you can’t eat it. Did that last forever? Of course not, but 100 years is nearly long enough. Lead is nice here, too.

Who sang “Can’t Touch This” for Caesar? 1100 Hammer.

Civilizational Collapse: What happens if there’s no oil for the cars – anywhere? What happens if we don’t have phosphorus for fertilizer? Bad things. Gold and silver might be helpful, but lead is much better here. If the warlord wants your stuff and you can’t keep it from him, welcome to no longer having that stuff.
A Kamala Harris presidency: Looks pretty much like number 8, but with more makeup.
A Neutron Star Eating The Earth: I suggest investing in SpaceX®.

I think that we underestimate the likelihood of things getting really, really bad. To give an example, I once worked at the headquarters of a big company. They asked me to look at disaster recovery. I looked at all of the natural hazards that might hit the company. The most likely disaster would hit the headquarters once every three hundred years.

“Huh,” I said to my boss, foreshadowing future writing endeavors, “a new civil war is far more likely than that . . . I mean if the company lasts that long. Companies go out of business all the time.”

He was not amused. Corporations tend to not like actual reality to interfere in their projections. But, I maintain I was right. How many companies have ceased to exist – big companies – since 2000? I’ll leave that work to the reader. Enron®, anyone?

Country music and calculators are both produced by Texas instruments.

Listen, I don’t mean to sound paranoid, but banks are giving mortgages out at 3.3% and inflation is at 6%, which means that banks will lose money every year as long as inflation is a thing. How can they do this? Volume!

No, I’m kidding. The Fed® is giving them tons of money to lend cheaply to keep housing prices up. When mortgage rates go up? Then the housing bubble bursts. So, we could end up in Scenario 3., 5., or 6. very, very quickly.

Gold and silver (in my NON FINANCIAL ADVISOR) opinion are awesome in most scenarios. If it devolves past the point where order matters at all, then it comes down to weapons, political connections, preps, and sheer dumb luck. If nothing happens, then my kids will get to enjoy some shiny metals after I pass away.

What’s the best way to tune a bagpipe? A pitchfork.

I would, however, not want to put all of my eggs in any one basket. I will personally limit the amount of gold and silver I own to about 10% of my net worth. Why? Random number – not bad if things go well in the rest of the world and gold and silver don’t go up in value. If things go really south, it’s a decent enough hedge to act as a parachute as the plane goes down in flames.

So, that’s my answer: it depends. What do you think? What Scenario above is the most likely? What’s missing?

Ohhh, Lucky, come here, boy . . . oh, wait, he’s deaf, too . . . .

(Appended Graph)

Energy in 2022? I Hope So . . .

“No, Jonny. It consumes them. It eats energy – sunlight, electricity, the energy in a living body – anything it can get.” – Jonny Quest

I went into a room with a negative person in it, and then there were no people in it.

Energy is freedom.

Energy allows one person to do the work of hundreds or thousands. I sit here typing this in Stately Wilder Mansion, it’s near freezing outside, yet a nice and toasty 61°F (43 and 2/3°kiloPEZ®) inside due to natural gas piped directly to my heater. I like it cold in the house, just like my heart.

My computer is running, the television is running, and because I am apparently the only person in the house who knows how to use a light switch, at least 32 lights are on in the house are on. It’s winter, so a light left on is (at worst) a little inefficient heater, so all is not lost. I will tell you that when I die, though, I will walk to the light. And turn it off.

Our energy costs aren’t all that high in winter, especially since I can keep warm by rubbing my thighs together like a cricket. I go and fill my gas tank about every two months, so gasoline isn’t even that much of an issue. When your commute is four miles a day (two miles each way) and takes four minutes (if I get caught at the one traffic light), well, it’s hard to use a lot of gas unless I pour it all over the truck and ignite it to look like a cool meteor while I’m driving. Again.

But energy is freedom.

I started bench pressing again. That’s a huge weight off my chest.

When energy prices are low around the globe, freedom increases. As I’ve discussed in previous posts, high energy costs act like a tax on nearly all physical goods. Sure, it won’t make the cost of a Kindle® e-book go up much, but it will increase the cost of a physical book – that has to be manufactured using energy, moved using energy, and delivered using energy.

So, what’s up? Why are prices where they are? Where are prices going?

I’ll start with “what’s up?”

We can’t create additional energy just by turning a knob: the process is a bit more complicated than one of Joe Biden’s coloring books.

Let’s take oil. In the 1930s, oil in Texas was so plentiful that it crashed the price. Pools of the stuff would show up if you stuck a McDonalds straw too deep into the ground in East Texas. Oil was so plentiful that people could barely tell the difference between water and gasoline. Of course, in Flint, Michigan, you can get the gasoline unleaded.

I hear their swimmers are always in the lead.

What happened then is the Texas Railroad Commission decided it was in charge, and it limited the amount of oil that could be produced. It was OPEC® before OPEC™ was even thought of – their idea was to stabilize the price of a seemingly limitless resource.

It worked.

But the era of oil abundance in the United States ended in 1973, and the Texas Railroad Commission (which still exists but no longer regulates railroads, seriously) ended allocations. Texas could no longer control the price of oil in the United States by restricting sales. The hunt for the next big oilfield was on.

We had then to hunt for oil in more and more distant places.

Alaska.
The Middle East.
Deepwater offshore.
Johnny Depp’s hair.

Also? When exposed to pollen, bees develop hives.

Then we hit the jackpot – fracking. Fracked oil is different than conventional crude. It’s hidden in tight rocks that aren’t as porous. That’s where the fracking comes in – the rock has to be fractured to let the oil out. To keep the cracks open, high-pressure water and sand (and chemicals) are forced into the cracks. The grains of sand remain and keep the cracks open. There are so many jokes I’m not going to do here.

When this process started, it was inefficient. But smart people spending billions of dollars will tend to make progress over time. Dumb people with billions of dollars? We call that the opposite of progress: Congress.

There are three problems with fracking:

One – fracked wells are most productive in their first year of production. Oil companies often run a rejuvenation process that increases flow after a few years, but mostly the later years are just a trickle in comparison to the initial years of production. So, to have a continuous supply, you have to keep drilling, which is not boring.

Two – you have to keep drilling. If the price drops and drilling stops, then the quantity of oil available drops quickly. Then the price goes up. Then everyone drills. Because everyone is drilling, then the prices drops again. And everyone stops drilling. This acts like a “crack the whip” on the economy, since, as mentioned above, high oil prices act as a tax.

Why fracking? Because I hear drilling is rigged.

Three – there’s more than profitability at stake. Let me give an example: if I have to walk to the grocery store to get food, and then I walk back home, that sounds healthy, right? Sure. I’m burning energy to go to the store.

But what happens if I burn more energy to go to the store than is contained in the food that I buy at the store?

I lose weight. I’m actually spending more energy to get food than the energy in the food I’m consuming. Plus, I’m rubbing my thighs together so I can stay warm.

What might be good for me is devastating as an economy. At some point, it will be so difficult to get energy from oil, that, just like my trip to the store, we’ll be spending more energy to get the oil than the oil will provide us. The energy return on energy invested will actually deplete the amount of energy available for us to use.

The more energy we use? The faster we run out of energy.

I spent an hour on the treadmill yesterday. Tomorrow? I might turn it on.

Our primary energy source is that thermonuclear reactor that shows up every morning. Our secondary source is tens of millions of years of stored sunlight from that same reactor, which just happens to show up in the form of oil, natural gas, and coal. But the sunlight striking us every day has a problem: it’s so diffuse that it’s difficult to make profitable use of it. Sure, it warms us, it tans us, it makes the wind for our turbines, the photosynthesis for our corn, and the rain for our hydroelectric. Energy is only useful when it becomes concentrated in some way.

You can’t generate energy with a tan. Unless it’s a really, really good tan.

Are we at the point where it takes more energy than it’s worth to get energy? A wind turbine in a good location will return 10 to 20 times the energy it took to make it, though that’s over the course of 20 years. In a bad location? A wind turbine will never return that energy, though I hear they love music: they’re huge metal fans.

So, are we there yet, where the production of energy costs more than the energy we get?

I don’t think so. Not quite yet. When we do get there, it will become a cascading failure – every bit of energy we produce will actually dig us deeper into a hole. Just like the Red Queen I mentioned last week:

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Never take a racing snail’s shell. That makes it sluggish.

To keep a world of 8 billion people alive and with enough energy to consume Doritos® and Disney™ and Facebook© takes an ever increasing amount of energy. 2020 was an aberration – people stopped driving and energy prices (temporarily) went down faster than Kamala Harris’ . . . approval rating.

The last question was “what happens next?”

Currently (today) oil is about $70 per barrel. The analysts that JPMorgan® have chained up in the basement of their skyscraper say that oil will jump to an average price of $125 per barrel in 2022, and then pop up further to $150 per barrel in 2023.

Double today’s prices. Yikes!

What about the Energy Information Agency (EIA, a .gov that seems to be actually interested in energy)? They say that in 2022, oil will average about . . . $72 per barrel – nearly the same as today.

It’s funny, because to know the price of oil, you have to know what is happening with economic growth, oil demand, and inflation. If any of us know any of those things with certainty, we could make bets and double our money or better in six months.

Why did Biden win the golf tournament? Because he finished it with one big stroke.

If JPMorgan™ has that genie in a bottle, they certainly wouldn’t be sharing it with mere mortals like you and I on the Internet – they’d make private trades and be zillionaires. The fine folks at the EIA probably don’t make nearly as much as the analysts at JPMorgan©, but they do have the abject despair of working at a government job every single day.

My prediction?

If the economy crashes and the stock market implodes, oil will follow. People who aren’t working don’t need to go to jobs. Will oil hit $40? Depends on how low the stock market goes.
But! If inflation spikes and the government keeps shoveling cash like coal into a train firebox, well, $150 per barrel oil might seem like a bargain that would be cheap enough to take a shower in.

Crappy prediction, right?

It is. Because with all of the difficult issues we simply don’t know. The easiest bet is that oil will be more expensive because once inflation is unleashed, it’s hard to put back into the bottle. The 1970s looked like this, so that would be my best bet.

Regardless, expensive energy has almost always been the enemy of freedom.

Prepare accordingly.

The Funniest Tax Post You’ll Read Today

“Hey, I gotta uncle that lives in Taxes.” – Duck Soup

They just put in a new speed bump at Pugsley’s school. I mean, I hope it was a speed bump.

What is a tax?

Most people think about taxes are money siphoned off from people and businesses. Admittedly, the best kind of a tax would serve the public good, and also be in proportion to use of that public good. A gasoline tax that’s used to fund the construction of roads certainly passes that muster. The more a person drives, the more gas they use, and the more they pay. Of course, it’s not perfect, but it’s hard to find a perfect tax. However, from their perspective, the Taliban have created the perfect tax: Americans pay, the Taliban get all the stuff. We even deliver.

There are plenty of other things that function as a tax.

Unions function as a tax. They take a market commodity, labor, and make it artificially scarce. This increases the price. In theory, unions can provide an assured level of labor quality, in stereotype they provide lowered profitability. In practice, I’ve seen both. Jeff Bezos is so against them that he got rid of his wife because someone told him marriage was a union.

Gameshows Jeff Bezos avoids: Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

Child labor laws were instituted for the same reason – to lower labor competition. Oh, sure, in 2021 we tell ourselves that it’s for the benefit of the children. Keep in mind that when these laws originally went into effect, 10-year-olds were working 12 hour days in mills. And those were the good jobs. “Nippers” as they called them, were young boys handling explosives and getting into situations that were too dangerous for adult male miners. So, you need a minor miner for major danger.

Child labor laws act like a tax.

The body of regulations that businesses face likewise act like taxes. Some of them are pretty reasonable, but when OSHA named that new regulation after me? That was tough – it was for wearing too much aftershave. They called it a “fragrant breach of regulations.”

If you hold a hardhat up your ear, you can hear the OSHA.

Other regulations are just meant to bring prices up, like the 42 page standard that the USDA has for lemons, which specify that they all are within 6/16ths of an inch in diameter in any given box. There are thousands of pages of regulations on fruits that cause many to be discarded. I’m raisin awareness. But regardless, it lowers the amount of fruit that farmers can sell and people can eat.

It’s a tax.

Bad taxes take money from one person and just give it to another.

There are certainly plenty of those schemes. Based on its current productivity, NASA is just a wealth redistribution scheme. It used to have a mission of getting people into space, but now apparently has the mission of (I kid you not) making braille books for blind kids about eclipses. At least they’re better at making books than launching humans into space, since putting people into space is something they haven’t done in over a decade, and I’m willing to bet they won’t do for years. But, hey, books for blind kids, right? It’s a bad tax, but it’s just dysfunctional.

With NASA, the sky is the limit! Because they can’t go higher than however high Southwest® 737s fly.

NASA isn’t alone, but if they’re dysfunctional, stuff just doesn’t happen and we have to wait for Elon Musk to rescue us. What happens if people listen to government idiots and take them seriously?

Up until the ‘Rona hit, the CDC was pretty good about doing next to nothing – sending out silly warnings at Christmas about “don’t eat cookie dough” that absolutely every human worth talking to ignored. The precursor to the CDC got rid of malaria. Since then? Everything they focus on gets worse. So, the cookie dough thing was something they could do and not screw stuff up too badly.

Yes. People are losing their jobs because liberals are taking the word of a government agency that would make eating raw cookie dough illegal if it could . . . seriously. It’s the ultimate in government incompetence turning into a pure evil tax.

High energy prices are a tax as well. They touch every physical item in the economy. If it has to be moved, energy is what moves it. It’s a tax on people who have to commute. It’s a tax on people who have to eat.

Don’t ask for whom the Toll House tolls. The Toll House tolls for you!

Shortages are a tax, too. A shortage increases the cost by limiting supply. But let’s look at the shortage of pickup trucks. Why are they in short supply? Because of a shortage of computer chips there are a limited number of trucks that can be made. Does that make Ford® happy? No. The shortage tax doesn’t help them. About the only people that the tax makes happy?

People who have extra cars to sell.

Finally, the ultimate tax: inflation. It’s a tax on every dollar you’ve ever saved, making it smaller, day by day. The early effects of inflation make people happy (ish), if they have something to sell. Inflation, though, always ends in tears.

High taxes result in lowered freedom. In (almost) every case, the taxes don’t produce anything but envy. As an example, historically low energy prices equate to higher freedom, and higher energy prices equate to lower freedom. I’d extrapolate that to most of the other taxes I’ve mentioned above.

To make the opposite argument, the interstate highway system was made with taxes, but it is an anti-tax. It lowered the cost of goods and services across the country and paid for itself many times over. Let’s compare to the “war on poverty” where we’ve spent trillions, and taken exactly zero people out of poverty since the poverty rate was dropping before the “war on poverty” started.

I beat The Mrs. at Scrabble®. Now she is sending me threatening letters.

You know, when the interstate highway system was just getting going? Huh, I wonder why we didn’t build the Taliban one of those? Well, Biden still has three more years.

Masque Of The Red Death, 2021 Version

“A red sun rises, blood has been spilled this night.” – The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

I knew my kid was creepy when she asked for an Edgar Allen Poe-ny.

Today we were at the local diner having a brulinner. It wasn’t just brunch, because it also included dinner. Regardless of what we call it, it was in the back room of the diner because we had a larger party, and still wanted a table rather than a booth. The Mrs. never lets me pick a booth because I always ask the waitress if it’s the John Wilkes Booth.

It makes me cry inside when the waitress cannot get the joke.

Pugsley noted that the room was in some disrepair, having last been remodeled about a decade ago. Of course, it would be easier to shut that room up and remodel it. Or, better yet, leave it for posterity 100 years ago, complete with packets of Sweet ‘n’ Low® from 1999 that I may or may not have managed to throw into the diner’s light fixture to amuse The Mrs. (It’s amazingly easy to throw a packet of Sweet ‘n’ Low™ into a low hanging fixture, even in a room filled with people. It just takes timing. You should try it.)

But faced with the idea of being walled up inside the room?

When your parents ask where your third-grade teacher went . . .

The Mrs. and I both thought of the same thing, that they would probably wall us in just like in Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado.

We discovered early in our relationship that we both have Amontillado as our go-to Poe reference. There’s nothing more fun than the idea of a person being walled up in a dungeon forever. How to make that better? Being walled up in the back room of a diner forever.

As much as we both enjoy The Cask of Amontillado, I think that there’s a more appropriate Poe piece for today: The Masque of the Red Death. Whereas Amontillado has all of the great humor of a man chained to a wall being walled up inside another wall, The Masque of the Red Death (I read the comic book version when I was seven) has a different setting:

Partying while the end of the world is taking place outside. Spoiler alert: it’s Poe, and the mystery guest at the party? Death.

The Masque of the Blue Screen of Death.

Right now it feels more than a little bit like Poe’s party.

What are some of the data points on what’s going on outside the party?

Many “vaxx” deadlines are coming up. Police are not taking it, firefighters are not taking it. Nurses and doctors? Not taking it.

The result? Emergency services are operating at an even lower level in big cities. Sure, that’s exactly what New York City or Chicago needs, since the residents there are already so perfectly behaved and rarely injure other people or incinerate themselves.

Oops.

I never made it past the interview stage in my firefighter interview. “Fight fire with fire” is apparently not the answer they were looking for.

In Modern Mayberry (so far) there are no mandates. If you need an ambulance ride, you get one. It’s hard to get pulled over here, because (for the most part) cops don’t spend a lot of time sitting in the 25 MPH zone to give you a ticket for doing 28 MPH.

Plane flights? These are being canceled by the thousands. Why? Pilots don’t want “the jab” either. Companies are dropping Federal contracts so they don’t have to comply.

Illegal aliens temporarily separated from family at the border? Biden wants to give them more money (up to $450,000 per person, tax-free) than is given to a soldier killed in the line of duty who has paid-up insurance.

The Secretary of Transportation says . . . that disruptions in supplies won’t end until everyone is “vaccinated”. Strangely, no one said, “falsely claimed” or “claimed without evidence” since both of those would apply.
Inflation? Happening everywhere, and with everything.
Political collapse? FJB and the phrase that everyone can say, “Let’s Go Brandon” are showing a direct rejection by over half of the populace against a deeply unpopular president with no real support – i.e., there were exactly zero votes for Biden, only votes against Trump.

Poe only had seven rooms at the party, so I’ll end with six bullet points.

As much as Poe’s work was fiction when he wrote it, if I were to have suggested any of these a decade ago (with the exception of inflation) in a fiction novel, people would have called it unrealistic. This isn’t the script for a happy ending. This is the script for a collapse.

I’ve long predicted (you can check) that COVID would provide a script where the ripples of the ‘Rona would reverberate through the economy and political world for years, if not decades. Those ripples are here and now. Energy prices have whipsawed from historically low to high.

Energy? More on that in a future post, since energy alone has a special place in the fate of humanity. But high energy costs in the short term are devastating.

He must be fun at parties.

I keep looking for happy things, but reality seems to keep intruding. While we haven’t seen the darkest moment of this cycle, most of the things out there seem to be tracking downward. This reminds me of the seventh room in Poe’s story. That’s where Death joined the party. To me? That sounds creepy.

I’d prefer to skip The Masque of the Red Death. I’d much rather be walled into the back dining room at the diner in The Cask of Wilder’s Brulinner. At least they have infinite refills on iced tea and coffee.

I’m Back. Also? The Economy Is A Mess.

“Good. Then climb up, get inside, and make it spin.” – Cobra Kai

Oh, wait, then she couldn’t circle back?

JW Note: Monday was the third day (I think) that I had to skip a scheduled post since 2017. It’s nice to be back. Thanks for waiting.

I was driving down the road. It was Christmas Day, back a zillion years ago. There had been a fresh few inches of snow on the paved road. I was going to see my parents. The day was overcast, and cold, with temperatures hovering around 0°F (101.325 kPa).

My car was going around 70 miles per hour. There wasn’t another car on the road, and I could see for miles. Little did I know that I would soon have an auto-body experience.

Instead of snowplows, the county had used road graders to scrape the snow off the asphalt. One result of that was that there was a continuous tiny hill of snow in the center of the road where the yellow line would be.

As I drove along, I reached to change the cassette tape. Perhaps a switch to AC/DC® from the Crüe? I wandered off just a little bit toward the center onto that little hill as I reached into the tape box. It slowed my car. On one side. Just a little.

The result wasn’t little. A force applied to one side of the car led to the other side going forward faster, a result most people call . . . spinning.

Or in this case, Tyrannosaurus Rexth.

The car went into a very fast spin as the car’s forward energy was transferred into angular momentum. I could probably describe the amount of energy in math, but I was concentrating right then and there on not being reduced to my personal lowest common denominator. But you can think about it this way: how fast would a car going 70 miles per hour spin if all the forward energy went into spin?

Fast.

This spin forced the weight of the car onto the driver’s side wheels as the car bled linear energy into rotational. As the car spun, out of control, there was no real way to do anything. Everything was happening far too fast.

The spinning car spun up a small tornado cloud of snow from the road. Finally, the car tilted up on the driver’s side tires, and tilted up, 30 degrees from horizontal. It stopped rotating.

The car then slammed down, at a complete stop, engine stalled, and every light on the dashboard on. The defroster was blowing snowflakes into the car, and every window was covered with white flakes of snow, outside and inside.

There is only one thing I could do. I got out of the car and stared down the asphalt at the path I had been on. It all happened so fast that had little time to feel any fear. Besides, who can be afraid when Bonn Scott was busy telling me all about Rosie?

How does he like his eggs in the morning? Ohhhhhmmmmlette.

I had been going due east, facing right into the ditch. I was now pointing due south. The entire time, not a tire had left the narrow two lane asphalt road. I looked back on the track the wheels had made, and it looked like the path of a figure skater doing a pirouette. I got wiped off the car windows, got back in, backed up, and headed east again.

Much more slowly.

Back when the ‘Rona first started, the long-term implications (to me) were clear. The immediate shutdown of large segments of the global economy would be disastrous. It was certain to leave a mark.

The toilet paper binge was signal one. When people panic, they feel that they have to do . . . something. Buying toilet paper wasn’t rational.

Here at Casa Wilder we actually had a relatively ludicrous amount on hand before the whole mess hit. It was (sort of) a prepping situation. We kept buying more than we needed, and it kept adding up. And up. Before too awful long, we had the basement bathroom stacked pretty high with the stuff.

I hear that two guys stole a calendar from Capitol Hill. Each of them got six months.

When the storm hit? Well, let’s say that we were squeaky clean. And we didn’t buy a single sheet. We weren’t part of the problem, but part of the solution.

But the economy wasn’t. Every bit of initial distortion from the economic dislocation was amplified. It echoed down the system. What kinds of shocks?

Initial runs on supplies.
Federal stimulus.
Initial lowered consumption of fuels.
More Federal stimulus.
Lower demand for office space.
More Federal stimulus, which increased unemployment benefits, distorting labor incentives.
Eviction moratoriums, distorting housing costs and lowering profits of building owners.
More Federal stimulus.
Spiking stock markets with contracting GDP.

I’m thinking that, in retrospect, Federal “aid” was probably the worst thing we could have done. It provided the greatest expansion of government powers since FDR nearly destroyed the economy with the New Deal. If the Federal government could tell a landlord in Podunk, Iowa that he couldn’t kick out people that refused to pay, it’s only a tiny step to saying that the landlord should let people move into his guest bedroom and feed them pancakes when they demand them.

French pancakes give me the crepes.

That might be the worst. But the economic situation has all the charm of a pitbull that just quit smoking, and it will be the spark.

Wilder’s Law (might as well grab one when I can) says that Federal debt doubles every eight years. The debt is right now at $29 trillion. That means that (on average) the debt will rise by $3.5 trillion each year. That’s a lot of money. Some people work a whole year and don’t make that much!

I think we’re on track to more than double it in the next eight years, regardless of who is in the White House. The end state of any exponential curve is, well, exponential. The headwinds we are now facing are strong.

Medical costs, which are growing faster than Germany between 1939 and 1941.
Infinite Leftist “free” programs to see who will be trained to be the poet in Collective Farm #8675309 (I bet it will be Jenny).
Whipsawing energy availability. I promised Lord Bison I’d do an energy post again sometime soon, and we need to review where we’re at. Is energy expensive because of political reasons, or because of physical reasons? We need to have a great documentary about oil. We can save it under non-friction.
Political division that mirrors only a few times in our history. Hint: all of those ended in historic levels of bloodshed. I’m sure this time will be different.
The man is a potato.
Lashing waves of inflation and shortage, as I predicted back in July. Heck, I priced cheap electric outlets the other day. They were shocking!
China and Russia seeing their moment. Why didn’t anyone Xi that coming?
Joe Biden’s America? Borders are open, no jab required. Oh, wait, have a job? Jab required.

I wish that I could tell you that things will get better soon in the economy. It is certain that they won’t. The economy is shifting in unpredictable ways. When you have a system that is working at its limits every single day and then subject it to amazing levels of stress?

It will fail. No chips for new cars. No drivers for trucks. Chicago getting ready to lose a big chunk of cops. The worst dislocations are yet to arrive.

The government solution will certainly make things worse. How can I tell that? It already has. The dreams of those who assume that prosperity can be bought at the price of new law or regulation or printing more cash has always failed.

Second place winner, Collective Farm BR-549 poet competition.

Prosperity is hard. Really hard. The natural state of humanity has been one where starvation was always a possibility, where actually consequential diseases (see: The Black Death or The Justinian Plague) was inevitable from time to time. It was so bad that episodes of that show you love were on the streaming service that you don’t have and you’re not going to buy another one.

We live in a world that has become just like my car on that Christmas Day so many years ago. It was moving down the road at full speed. One tiny two-inch hill of snow caused it to spin.

I assure you we haven’t been anywhere close to the worst that this downturn will bring. Prepare. Stay away from crowds. And if you and all you love all still there when all four wheels drop back on the ground?

Say a prayer.

Of thanks.

We can’t have too many of those.