Category: Inflation Nation

Greedflation And Burgers And Girls Drinking Beer

“And in Paris, you can buy a beer at McDonald’s®.” – Pulp Fiction

Interesting fact:  women in Arabic cities like Paris don’t need car insurance.  They’re already covered.

Greedflation.

It’s an ugly word for several reasons.  The first reason it’s ugly is because I generally support the free market as the best tool for setting prices.  You see that at gasoline stations regularly – no station that charges a quarter more for a gallon of gasoline will be able to sell much gasoline.  The price for a commodity like gasoline, in a relatively free market, sets itself.

That’s nice, because the very price mechanism that sets the price also allows the gasoline to flow to the consumers that value it the most, which according to my research are groups of post-nuclear war barbarians who hang out in Australia.

I hear they’re filming the sequel on location in Los Angeles.

Some people don’t get this.  I recall having extended conversations when I was in my twenties with an elderly gentleman about gasoline prices.  He was upset because after some price shock, the gasoline prices all jumped $0.50 the next day.

“They didn’t pay that much for the gasoline!”

Well, no, they didn’t.  But because the supply was thought to be limited, the gasoline was worth more.  Besides, the merchant was going to have to refill that storage tank at a higher price, and nobody was going to buy his high-priced gas if he charged more than the market when the price invariably went down.

“Besides,” I asked, “If you had an ounce of gold that you bought for $50, would you sell it for that, or would you want the (then) current price of $500 an ounce?”

Of course he said he’d want the $500.  But he still couldn’t understand why gas prices went up.

And I only got to take him on one walk.

I wanted to establish that, because I’m going to tear into the larger corporations for lying about prices.  That’s greedflation.

An example of this would be McDonald’s®.  I’ll pick on them because, like illegal aliens, they’re everywhere and more numerous than they should be at this stage in the economy.  McDonald’s™ built its reputation on food that was fast, tasty, and inexpensive – a place a dad could take the kids for a quick treat on the way back from the zoo on a Saturday afternoon.

At least in Modern Mayberry, McDonald’s© has ceased to be fast, and inexpensive.  McDonald’s® prices are so high that a “meal deal” costs the better part of the price of a pound of ribeye.  To me, that’s not a deal, or at least not a good one.

The stripper said she was stripping in order to feed her kids, so why did she get mad when I tipped her in Cinnamon Toast Crunch™ coupons?

And these prices have pushed people away – McDonald’s™ insinuated that these price hikes were due mainly to inflation and blamed the franchise owners for the ultimate pricing.

The result?

McDonald’s® ended up with declining burger sales, but with record profits.  In fact, between 2014 and 2024, their prices doubled.  Most of the increase was before the pandemic and inflation.  Everyone’s doing it, right?  No, mainly McDonald’s® was McLovin’™ it.

The average increase in prices for other fast-food restaurants during that same time period was more in the 55%-ish percent, and more or less in a straight line.  They were raising their prices much faster than inflation, but McDonald’s™ was leading the pack.

The result:  A lot of “inflation” is just corporations adjusting prices to the point of maximizing their profits.  Sell fewer burgers and yet make more money?

Why not!  Especially if we can insinuate that it’s really all beyond our control.  Perfect!

I actually don’t mind that they’re increasing prices to increase profits.  I get that.  I mean, if they could sell just one burger and make sixteen billion dollars in profit, they’d be all in.  Oh, wait, Lockheed-Martin™ is already doing that with jet fighters.

Don’t worry if the F-35 gets rained on.  That only costs about $50 million to fix.

What I mind is the insinuation this is due to outside forces instead of a planned extraction of the greatest amount of profit that can be generated per sale.  It’s a lie.

One of the components of the monthly “Misery Index” that I put together is tied to inflation.  Inflation destroys the value of currency, and makes people feel, day by day, shabbier and poorer.  However, to blame outside forces for your increased prices instead of saying, “Hey, we think this burger is worth it,” is execrable.

The Wilder household has responded by purchasing prepared foods outside of the house only rarely.  Once a week – at most.  Instead, we’re cooking at home.  It’s likely healthier, and I can get exactly the right amount of chocolate sauce on my bacon cheeseburger.

I think many Americans have reacted the same way.  And for us, it’s made us less miserable, rather than more miserable, plus the food is better.

The problem, though, is that when big business reaches a size that it can extract all the wealth it wants on a whim and keep posting record profits year after year.  That’s not competition, that’s a Wealth Pump as defined by Peter Turchin, and it is a prime factor in the creation of misery and the road to Civil War.

The initial example that I gave of gas stations all competing to get my dollar is the way the markets work best.  There are a number of different sellers all trying to get me to come to their station, though they haven’t figured out that if they had hot girls in bikinis they could probably double their business.

And they don’t look like they speak Arabic.

And no, McDonald’s™ rarely forces people to eat there, so there still is competition from substitutes, like a ribeye.  I have the choice of whether or not to go to McDonald’s™.  Please, Golden Arches, raise your prices to your heart’s content!

Just don’t lie about it, and just don’t expect consumers to hang around, though it seems to be working for you right now.  And McDonald’s™ innovates, since I heard that they had a failed beef version of their McRib©.

Who says they don’t learn from their McSteaks®?

The Three Horsemen and One Bikini of the Apocalypse

“Apocalypse cow? Apocalypse wow!” – The Tick (2001)

I love this joke like there’s no tomorrow.

  • I. Job Replacement.
  • The Multicultural West.
  • The Fiat Financial House of Cards.
  • Sydney Sweeny’s bikini.

Each of these, if dealt with on its own, presents a danger as great as being between Gavin Newsom and a camera. But it is likely something we could work through as a country peacefully. Heck, maybe even two of the three, though that’s difficult, and history has the receipts:

For example, when the United States was a nation, we worked through the Great Depression. The Great Depression was likely brought about at the fundamental level from the transformation of the nation from an agrarian society driven by horsepower to a manufacturing colossus driven by iron, steam, and electricity. Sort of if A.I. were cars and assembly line production, but covered in tasty Radium®.

If a radioactive spider makes Spiderman®, would a radioactive dog create Doberman®?

Of course there was a finance side of the Great Depression. It was egged on by a stock market mania, margin credit, and the optimism brought about by new technology. Stocks never go down, right? That creates a bumpy road for a bit. But, as we were a singular people, we got through it.

I mean, the single bloodiest war in human history counted as a bit of a bumpy road, right?

We also dealt with multi-cultural forces in America in our history.

  • First, the founders only allowed in Western Europeans,
  • Second by fighting, defeating, and corralling Indians (some of them are still sore about this),
  • And, finally, by blocking out many non-Western Europeans with the Immigration Act of 1924 since we already had the recipes for all their good food.

1924 was when we as a nation realized that we were getting too much “diversity” too quickly and saw that certain groups of foreigners couldn’t or wouldn’t assimilate and never be Americans. We dealt with that in a calm manner and got picky and sorted diversity like a bouncer at a cartel nightclub. We maintained (for a time) the basic ethnic makeup of the United States – we didn’t throw them out, but we made sure we’d outnumber them.

I wonder if he and his siblings were born apart?

We dealt with fiat currency in the wake of the Revolutionary War victory when the phrase “isn’t worth a Continental” referred to the money printing excesses that led to the Constitutional Convention and the Constitutional clause of “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make any thing but cold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts.” The nation survived, though it did end up changing our form of government entirely.

Lincoln floated fake cash during the Civil War to pay for it, and that could arguably be said to have started “The Long Depression” – a hangover period from 1873-1896 as we vomited out all of that fiat money. The Long Depression was also exacerbated by the transition of the American manufacturing from craftsmen to big factories.

The establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank™ followed by Nixon ignoring the clear intent of that clause in 1971 led to the crack-up we see today. Money, gold and silver, has been replaced by cash which is too expensive to print – we can just use ones and zeroes.

I’ve written about all of these three separately, and for the most part, we as a nation were able to make it through, but it’s important that we realize that we’re dealing with all three of these leading to a crisis right now when we are observably no longer a nation.

The ICE agent in Los Angeles needs National Guard and Marine protection for their anxiety, I heard on the news. Something about his panic attacks.

The first is A.I. It has already been a steamroller that has eliminated tens of thousands of jobs. I would expect that soon enough it will be hundreds of thousands. Recently, I called up my bank to do some banking. The transaction wasn’t unique, it probably happens thousands of times a day. The person I was talking to, “Mitch” had a perfect Midwestern accent. What tipped me off was that “Mitch” didn’t connect the reason for the error to the resolution. “Mitch” transferred me to “Anna” because he wasn’t authorized to grant a request.

“Anna” had, of course, the thickest Indian accent – the kind that is so poorly pronounced that it is nearly unintelligible if fast. Her actual name was probably something like Ananneedanothasylabble-Ganish-Prajeeta. At that moment that the smart Midwestern dude transfers the call to a barely verbal woman in Ramamamadingpoopabad, I realized that Mitch was an A.I.

As an anon mentioned on my last post on A.I., “Think about all of the Indian scammers out there today . . . Now think about what happens if AI wipes out most of the call center and coding jobs causing most of India’s 1.3 billion people to be out of work. It’s going to get ugly.” He had a point. A.I. is going to make it too expensive to pay Indians pennies a day just to steal money from old ladies. This is India’s worst nightmare.

I always wondered how you got down from an elephant, then Pa Wilder told me that you get down from a goose.

This scenario requires no Artificial Superintelligence. This requires only the application of existing capabilities. Said differently: ChatGPT 4.0® already has an I.Q. greater than three-quarters of the Subcontinent.

This has implications, but match it with the house of cards that is the world financial system. That thing was already strained tighter than Syndey Sweeney’s bikini holding in the all the printed money flooding in from the United States and the world. A country like India, unable to feed all the Indians, will collapse. No jobs. No prospects of jobs.

Though the research for tonight was fun.

But it will be, perhaps, worst in the West. On top of the economic dislocation of the A.I. Revolution, on top of the piles of fake money, we are not even a people.

The latest riots in L.A. have proven that out. Most of the “immigrants” that have come to “enrich” us have actually come to replace us. That’s their goal. You can watch on the news the Pakistanis fighting the Indians over which of them has the best claim to London. You can watch young men of military age strutting in Los Angeles with the flags of foreign countries like a U.N. parade, but somehow worse. You can read posts on X® or even Reddit©: they are not here to assimilate – they are here to conquer and take over.

This adds the final layer of instability required to ensure that the United States and the whole of the West is facing the direst crisis since the threats to Europe that were ended at the Battle of Tours in 732, or the Battle of Vienna in 1683.

This level of crisis is graver than any the West has faced in over 340 years, if not greater. Whatever comes out of this will be different.

Thankfully, we still have all the tasty Radium™ you can eat!

Watch The Economy Stagflate, Complete With Unrelated Bikini Picture

“We, the people, suffered.  We still suffer from unemployment, inflation, crime and corruption.” – Taxi Driver

When I buy groceries for prepping, The Mrs. says I have stock home syndrome.

Back in the bad (economically) old days of the 1970s, a word came into existence that described the economic policy of the Carter Administration:  Stagflation.

Now, if this would have been about massive helium-filled deer antlers, it would have been great.  Surreal, but great.  But it wasn’t.  Instead, it was surreal but bad –the economy was stagnant, but the price of everything kept going up.  It was like going to the dentist because of a toothache and finding out that instead of anesthetic you just got pepper spray in your eyes to take your mind off the dental surgery.

But back to surreal.  The impacts of stagflation were likewise as surreal as the giraffe clock currently melting in my light socket.   Here’s an example:  I remember when I was first married to The Mrs., we would go and visit her parents and spend the weekend in her old bedroom.  In one part of the closet was a dust-covered box filled with toys from when The Mrs. was a very young The Miss.

Is a prog rock band that plays Spanish guitar on your front lawn called Pink Flamenco?

One toy in particular stood out – it was a cheap plastic injection-molded car.  It still had the grocery store price sticker on it – and it was something like $8.99.

Whoa!  Back in the late 1990s, $8.99 would have bought something like a dozen similar cheap plastic injection-molded cars.  Inflation had been out of control in the late 1970s when The Mrs. had been given that toy.

Everything sucked economically – crappy quality at inflated prices.

Two major factors led to that situation – Nixon pulling the United States off the gold standard was the most critical one.  If we had to prove-up our spending with gold, well, we’d have to have some sort of discipline or we wouldn’t have any gold.

Discipline sounds like it’s boring, and the 1970s was made for disco parties, drugs, and infidelity, so why have discipline with our money?  That’s just not cool, man.  Besides, who needs rules when you have bitchin’ bell bottoms?

I guess weightlifters in the 1970s wore barbell bottoms.

The other situation is that the United States had reached a (then) peak in oil production, and was now dependent upon oil supplies from foreign nations (they were nations instead of countries back then – now, not so much).  Since one group of foreigners (Arabs) didn’t like another group of foreigners (Israelis) the group that had all the oil (Arabs) decided to stop selling so much oil.

Oil is a big deal, because the price of oil is hidden almost everywhere in our economy.  It’s required for planes to move bikini models, for trucks to move PEZ™, and in some places heats homes.  So, increasing the price of oil was just like tossing a big tax on everything, so moms everywhere went to work to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and then wear crappy perfume and nylon pantsuits.

I think I just gave the origin story of Hamburger Helper™, but I digress.

Not everyone makes great meatloaf, but two out of three ain’t bad.

What does this mean to today’s problem?  Are we in the same place?

Partially.

We’ve been partying, mostly, since the 1970s, and have gotten away with it through various shenanigans.  As Ayn Rand said, “You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality.”  I’ll just shrug and Ayn was talking about her polyamorous relationships, but I can’t be sure.

Regardless, 2025 is a big year for dealing with consequences.  Our current national debt is something like $33 trillion.  I know, it’s like Whoopi Goldberg’s butt, it’s so big it’s meaningless.  But we have to refinance $9 trillion of that $33 trillion plus another $3 trillion that we’re spending that we don’t have, this year.

I mean, who is going to buy all that debt?

Don’t know.  Probably not China.  Or Canada.  Or Mexico.

Let’s think about where that debt is now.  The Federal Reserve® already owns about $5 trillion, and it’s not like they have a choice, so they’re probably in for several trillion.  But the biggest holder of the national debt is . . . the government.  It owes itself $7 trillion dollars.

The rocks are still worth more.

Yes, you read that right.  Big chunks of that are Social Security “trust fund” that’s stuck in Al Gore’s “lock box”.  I mean, seriously, what do people not understand about a lock box?  But it also includes things like DOD retirement, and civil service retirement (which is over a trillion dollars).  And you know we’re spending down that Social Security trust fund right now, so that just means more debt that someone else will have to buy.

It’ll be the Fed©, snapping up debt like it’s at a Black Friday sale on silicon oven-mitts on TEMU™.

A trillion here, a trillion there, and soon enough we’re talking about real money.

The way debt bonds are sold is that people bid on ‘em at an auction.  What are people bidding?  The interest rate.  So if there’s a huge supply and lower demand, what goes up?

The interest rate.

Since we’re not paying the bills out of cash, but out of borrowed money, that means the interest paid will just go onto the debt as it’s paid, which means that even more bonds will need to be sold.  That means that there will be more supply and . . . higher interest rates.

It’s a vicious circle, but one that works as long as the economy keeps growing.

But the economy likely didn’t grow last quarter, so we’re (at least right now) stagnant.

Oddly, the tariffs and deportations seem to have broken something and right now we have the lowest inflation in the last four years.  I don’t think that will last.  Higher interest rates will bleed into businesses, and money for expansion or even day-to-day operational expenses.

How odd that people whine and complain when you make them go live in a country they made, surrounded by people who speak the same language that they do.

These higher interest rates will also make trillions of bank assets (my mortgage, for instance) worth less.  My mortgage is at an interest rate lower than I can get with a deposit a savings account.  I assure you my bank is aware of that and loves it when I toss them my monthly check.  This is what led to the Silicon Valley Bank® implosion – it had too many dollars tied up in low interest loans and securities, and then rates went up.

Thankfully, the Fed® made the decision that the banks can ignore the fact that their assets are worth less, or else all of them would have self-extinguished.  And you wonder why gold is selling at $3,300 an ounce?

Why do I predict the high likelihood of Civil War 2.0 by 2032?  Because by then, if you do the math, you’ll see that just interest on the debt will be at least half of the total tax hauled in, but I think it will be worse, because the numbers always are worse.

The solution to this won’t be a business-as-usual solution, and there will be extreme economic dislocations.  There is no evidence of anyone wanting to increase our economy at the China-like rates we’d need to outrun this mess, and no appetite to cut the cost of government.  At some point the consequences of ignoring reality will become so manifest that they aren’t something we can ignore.

And it runs on beetle juice.

Well, the good news is that we probably won’t see $8.99 injection molded plastic toy cars.  The bad news is that they’re already selling the one in the picture above for $10.00.

How The Great Society Doomed The United States

“Mention modern art, civil rights, or folk music, and you’re in like Flynn.” – Animal House

I didn’t go see Malcolm X in the theater because I hadn’t seen Malcolm I through IX.

Perhaps the worst seven years in the post-war history of the United States started in 1964.  I’d love to blame just one political party, but it’s clear that both are to blame.  This six-year period was devastating in the changes it caused in the United States, and we’re seeing the full and very negative effect of those GloboLeftElite initiatives as they blossom today.

Let’s start off with the worst one first.  That is, of course, the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  Passed (like all of the laws in this post) over the still cooling corpse of John F. Kennedy, Johnson used that pity and sympathy to completely ride roughshod over the Constitution, people and economy of the nation.

The Civil Rights Act started as a governmental solution to a problem that was created by fundamental rights of individuals – the right to associate with whoever we wanted to – the old “We Refuse The Right To Serve Anyone”.  Would the worst of the reasons leading to the Act’s passage have been handled by lesser measures or public pressure?

Certainly, that would have happened.  But that’s not what happened.

I hear that quack was tearing apart the duck community.

To give a taste of the hypocrisy, surrounding the bill, talking about forced bussing of children because of race, ArchCommie Hubert Humphrey said, “ . . . if the bill were to compel it (bussing) it would be a violation of the Constitution, because it would handling the matter on the basis of race and we would be transporting children because of race.”

How did that work out for us?

I guess it was worth it to ignore the Constitution and the rights of citizens because the relations between blacks and everyone else has been healed and there were no riots in the late 1960s or 1990s or 2010s or 2020s due to race.  And there is no anger and lingering resentment by the black community.

Oh, wait . . .

But, again, Humphrey was on to something – the Civil Rights Act of 1964 began to act as second Constitution.  And it has evolved to cover absolutely anything and everything, leading to lawsuits that noted that the bans on euthanasia violate the civil rights of patients who wanted to die.  Courts have ruled that companies have to hire people who can’t speak English, and the safety of employees who can’t understand instructions is no reason to not hire them.

I don’t know what the intent was of this Act, but that doesn’t matter.  The result of it even existing has been horrific beyond measure.  And it causes really stupid lawsuits because absolutely anything can be litigated:  black managers sued Walgreens™ because it they were placed in predominantly black neighborhoods under the theory that black customers might like black managers better.  Apparently black managers are traumatized by being forced to be around black customers?

I think Snoop was upset because his arthritis was acting up – he said, “My joints are on fire!”

This was a dream win for the GloboLeftElite – it gives them an infinite amount rules that they can make that don’t have to be consistent with themselves or even be logical.  Lewis Carroll nailed it in a phrase from Through the Looking Glass:  “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”  The law evolves and means whatever the moment requires, protecting boys pretending to be girls, and not protecting the girls because that’s what’s important in the current moment.

The law, in the end, does not provide for civil rights:  It simply strips Americans of the freedoms that the country was founded to create and creates a playground where the GloboLeftElite can change rules at a whim.

One example of particular note of how this made the world worse is the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Griggs v. Duke Power Co. case.  In this case, the Supreme Court ruled that having to have job applicants possess a high school diploma (of which Duke would pay 2/3 the cost if the person didn’t have a degree) and have an acceptable I.Q. score was somehow wrong.

None of that is based on race.  Yet, Duke lost the case because it had a “disparate impact” on hiring – fewer blacks had a high school diploma and could pass an I.Q. test to get certain jobs.  Keep in mind that the same rules applied to everyone, not just black people.

From the objective standpoint of an employer, having an employee who had sufficient tenacity to complete a high school degree and enough intelligence to accomplish complicated tasks just might be required to run a power plant, regardless of what color the person is.

But no, even back in 1971, the rot was in.  And the downstream consequences of this have been huge – since employers could no longer hire by intelligence, they had to have a proxy.  That proxy?  A college degree.

But she did take the test three times and added up her scores.

Now, they could ask for that because GloboLeftists are the people that run colleges, and, *poof* the Griggs degree led to a nearly immediate increase in demand for college degrees as a requirement for a job.  On top of that, it has led to the mind-numbing numbers of certifications and certificates required for any job, when a simple high school degree and an I.Q. test could have solved it all.

How many billions of dollars has that cost the American people?

But it’s racist to even ask that question, right?

The next thing on the list for Johnson was the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.  Here’s what Teddy Kennedy said, “It will not upset the ethnic mix of our society.  It will not relax the standards of admission.  It will not cause American workers to lose their jobs.”

Whew, that’s a lot of lies in a row, even for a Kennedy.  This was one JFK actually was all on board for, as JFK’s staff wrote A Nation of Immigrants, at the request of the Anti-Defamation League™.  Hey, don’t blame me for bringing it up, it’s literally in the same sentence in the Wikipedia© entry.

I’d spend more describing the impact of this law, but, you’re soaking in it.

But there’s more.

In 1965 Johnson decided again to screw Americans, this time by removing silver from U.S. coins.  Here’s what Johnson said at the time:  “Our present silver coins won’t ever disappear and they won’t even become rarities… If anybody has any idea of hoarding our silver coins, let me say this. Treasury has a lot of silver on hand, and it can be, and it will be used to keep the price of silver in line with its value in our present silver coin. There will be no profit in holding them out of circulation for the value of their silver content.”

The Fed™ disagreed – whenever coins made their way, they were sorted by weight and they retained all the silver coins.  They even bought a special machine to do that.  Which is exactly the opposite of what you’d do if there was no profit in keeping silver coins.

Well, you know what happened:  $1 in silver coins from that time are now worth over $24.

It’s funny that humor and Schumer rhyme.  That’s the closest the Democrats will ever get to being funny.

Not content with only destroying race relations and sound money, the ethnic makeup of the country, and Johnson launched his Great Society program between 1964-1968.  Coming off of Johnson’s post-Kennedy Democrats holding two thirds of both houses, he had a GloboLeftist paradise.  Let’s have the government take control and regulate vast amounts of the economy.

This led to

  • Food Stamps to encourage poor people to not work,
  • The Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965 to further encourage poor people not to work,
  • The Elementary and Secondary Amendments which pushed federal funding, and thus control, into schools that were supposed to be locally controlled, and
  • The Civil Rights Act of 1968 which put federal tentacles into housing.

The Great Society had spent over $22 trillion dollars by 2014, so you can be certain that total is closer to $32 trillion today, and that doesn’t include the need to hire HR departments and compliance costs and wasted college degrees.

The national debt is $37 trillion.  If we hadn’t spent all that money on Johnson’s programs?

We’d be on Mars.  Or the income tax would be like $6 a year.  And a dollar wouldn’t have inflated away infinity times.  It’s a certainty that everyone in the United States would be wealthier.

I have heard that the restaurant on Mars has great food but not much atmosphere.

We are in a unique period – people are finally willing to look at these consequences, and have seen what is going on.  Thank police body cams, thank the George Floyd riots.  Thank the Internet, so people can see what’s going on without it being spun by GloboLeftElite media.

The impacts of just these rules, cumulatively has set up the place where collapse is the most likely outcome of the American Experiment.  As I’ve said, there is a small window to stop it, but that window is closing rapidly, and will certainly be shut by 2028, if not by 2027.

The situation cannot stand, and that’ okay – because what will come after, in time, will be better.

Let us hope we have learned sufficient lessons when we rebuild.

Tariffs: How’s That Going For You?

“One watch, gold.  One cigarette lighter, gold.” – The Usual Suspects

I’d like to thank France for the help giving the United States independence.  If it weren’t for them, we’d still be speaking English right now.

Tariffs are now in place, and in various stages of implementation.  They are a very big change from the previous game, which was a seemingly sweet deal:  Americans send cash that was just “printed”.  Foreigners send stuff that they made.  Since 1973, they have been super polite:  they didn’t even ask us for gold.

They trusted us!

Essentially, this was an “Americans have nukes and are the unipower” tax.  As I’ve written before, this had a negative impact on the composition of the American economy, moving from manufacturing to making accounting anomalies.

The rise of China as a manufacturing and economic powerhouse was the biggest challenge to the “unipower” concept, which was born out of the “sweet” deal – they sent us plastic junk while developing world-class manufacturing skills.

China is now number one in manufacturing, with 30% of the global output, as well as being the largest producer of wheat, rice, vegetables, fruits, and pork.  This is despite the continuous headline of the last thirty years about “Now China Will Really Face The Music”.

No, not really.

To be clear, it wasn’t just Joe.  Meme as found.

So, China has grown, but the United States overplayed its hand to make problems accelerate, and I’m not talking about Trump’s tariffs.  No, I’m talking about when Biden embargoed Russia from the international payment system while taking Russia’s money and buying Ukraine something nice with it.

When Biden chose that action, the whole world took notes.  Cutting Russia off from the SWIFT payment system seemed like a good idea.  Except China thought, “Hey, they still owe me for all those iPhones™ they promised to pay me for.”  Immediately this bought the BRICS closer together, and they’re working on ways that they can more seamlessly work together – around the United States if need be.

The reason gold prices are up is that the dollar is worth less, not that gold is suddenly even more scarce.  Trust in dollars tanked:  people are looking for a hedge so that they won’t lose their wealth through exposure to meme dollars.  The proof?

They don’t trust the dollar, or graphs.  They think the graphs are plotting something.  (graph via Dollarcollapse)

Gold didn’t take off in 2025.  Or 2024.  Or 2023.  Gold took off exactly when Biden sanctioned Russia in 2022 after the Russians invaded Ukraine.  Part of the game for the world using the dollar is that we wouldn’t weaponize it.

Oops.

That’s a card you get to play exactly once.

And it backfired.  Bigly.

Tariffs are about changing that game, yet again.  And it is possibly a pretty long shot, but when it’s the bottom of the ninth and you’ve got a man on first, the temptation is to swing away.

Tariffs have already changed the game.  Imports in April are already down 40% year over year, and although a string of ships are still headed our way from China, rumors are that the numbers are down even more.

I first threw a boomerang when I was seven.  I live in constant fear.

To give an example of an individual’s complaint about the tariffs, one father was buying his daughter a dress.  To be clear, they didn’t specify it was a girl, but it’s 2025, so who can say.  Anyway, the daughter had found the perfect dress to wear to a wedding on TEMU™.  It was $19.  But when the father went to check out, the price had gone up to $59 with tariff.

Now, since TEMU’s© slogan is “Shop Like A Billionaire™” it shouldn’t have mattered, though I can’t see Elon spending time on TEMU™ buying himself sundresses.  But was the price reasonable?

Probably.  TEMU® has been accused of copying and stealing designs from fashion designers and artists, so I’m sure that there’s no karma in this.  Beyond that, though, if we want to be a nation that has consumed itself to death, we should avoid tariffs so TEMU© can grow stronger.  So that’s in import.

TEMU® is for people who can’t afford Goodwill™.

Let’s switch to exports.

In one of the weirder stories, pork imports by China from the United States are down.  That’s not weird because they slapped a tariff on pork, but the weird part is that this will probably hit the largest US pork producer the hardest.  That’s Smithfield Foods©, which is owned by  . . . Chy-Na.  So, they’re not importing pigs they already own because they put a tariff on those pigs.

That they own.

Which means cheaper bacon in the United States at the expense of the profit margin for multinational corporations.  I can deal with that.

Back to the big picture.  The imports being lowered by 40% will have a knock-on effect.

  • Truckers will have fewer loads to transport across the country,
  • Which means that there will be less demand for diesel fuel,
  • Which means lower diesel prices.

Overall, the economy has been projected to have shrunk by 2.5% in the first quarter, and with a big hit to imports, chances are nearly 100% that the economy will shrink in the second quarter as well.  That means a recession.

I don’t give money to homeless people because I know that they’ll spend it on alcohol when I could spend it on alcohol instead.

But don’t just take my word for it:  when I mentioned that the economy would be hitting a recession, The Mrs. scoffed:  “We’ve been in one for over a year.  Maybe two years.”

She’s right.  On a regional basis, and in the places where GloboLeftists don’t strap on the taxpayer money feedbag, the economy likely has been in a stagflation-recession for the last two years.  Nobody at USAID noticed it, because they just got continual increases in salary like clockwork and a pension plan better than anything in the private sector.

Going forward, Biden’s sanctioning of Russia made it so we couldn’t print cash anymore:  he killed the golden goose.  To be fair, it was already sick.  Trump (or somebody he knows that says nice things about him) realized it, and, boom, tariffs.

The game is afoot.  Can we become net producers again before people don’t want dollars?  It’s a race.

But there’s always gold.

Notice:  This is not financial advice, since I’m an unpaid humor blogger that writes for my own personal amusement and if you do the things that I’ve done that might make you part of the punchline, and not in the good way.  I am not an attorney, accountant, financial advisor, mime, or clairvoyant nor do I pretend to be and I have not stayed at a Holiday Inn™ Express© recently.  This website is not a substitute for consultation with an investment professional that is saner and more stable than I am and who is actually, you know, an investment professional who hasn’t tossed back a few shots of bourbon.  I expressly suggest you seek advice from a competent professional and accept no liability for any loss or damage that you incur.  Gold has gone up in the past.  It has also gone down.  Not my job to make your decisions:  it’s on you, bub. 

2024 In Review. Enjoy It Warm Or Over Ice.

“The Year in Review, as Told by Ted Baxter.” – Mary Tyler Moore

Or should I have said it was a waist of space?

Most memes are “as found”.

Every year, I try to do a “year in review” post, so, here it is!  What struck me this year is that so very much happened that was entirely unprecedented in the history of our country, and that’s not a good thing.  So, I thought I’d at least try to make it amusing.

January:

  • 5 – An emergency exit door on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 blew out. Boeing?    Boeing.
  • 11 – The New England Patriots® fired coach Bill Belichick after he failed to give owner Robert Kraft a happy ending.
  • 26 – The jury in Carroll v. Trump awards the ugly harpy Carroll $83.3 million for defamation. Because?

February:

  • 4 – El Salvador’s President Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” claimed victory before anyone even counted the votes, and continued to toss criminals in jail, even though El Salvador is now officially less violent than the United States.
  • 8 – The Special Counsel looking into the documents that Biden had stuffed in his garage recommended that no charges be brought, since Biden had, “the memory of a goldfish, and I feel sorry for him because he has to live with Jill, who often withholds ice cream from him without reason.”
  • 20 – Three passengers of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 sue Boeing for $1 billion dollars for “doing the stuff Boeing normally does.” Their attorney, Dr. Evil, is unavailable for comment.
  • 23 – A Chinese spy balloon is detected over Utah, obviously tasked with infiltrating the Mormon Temple.

Barron is planning on starting a business.  He’s going into partnership with Godzilla and they plan to flip houses.

March:

  • 6 – Nimarata Randhawa Haley drops out of the presidential race, citing concerns that “there is no U in team, and there’s no U in my name, either. So, it’s not about me, it’s about U.
  • 26 – The ocean cargo carrier MV Dali, named after the painter, turned the Francis Scott Key bridge in Baltimore into a surrealist sculpture.
  • 28 – Samuel Bankman-Fraud was sentenced to 25 years on prison after defrauding (how did they not see this coming?) of over $8 billion. Bankman-Fraud was a champion of what he called “effective altruism”, which turned out to be “effectively screwing his investors to support GloboLeft causes.”

April:

  • 20 – Another $20 billion to Ukraine. Nothing to see here, Zelensky’s Visa® bill was due.
  • 23 – Voyager 1 finally starts sending usable data after a five-month gap. Voyager 1 explained, “Sorry, absolutely nothing to look at, so I didn’t call in.  Seriously, I’ve seen more action in a church parking lot on Sunday morning.”

May:

  • 1 – The United Methodist Church™ votes to allow LGBTQ clergy and requires same-sex weddings be allowed. “We’ve run out of other sins to encourage, so we’re embracing these.  Also, we’re planning on turning the churches into rainbow discos for June.”
  • 7 – The Boy Scouts of America™ announces they have changed their name to Scouting America, effective February 8, 2025 since they, “No longer understand what a boy is.”
  • 30 – Trump is convicted of 34 felonies for paying a tramp money. His own money.  Luckily, Trump was never seen going to a strip club.

June:

  • 5 – Boeing’s© Starliner® is launched. Immediately it begins acting like a Boeing™ product, and the crew it sent to the ISS® is still marooned.
  • 10 – Chiquita Brands™ is found guilty of financing far-right paramilitary death squads by a federal jury. Hey, who says a banana company can’t be perfect?
  • 18 – Nvidia™ becomes the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world, because who needs a social life if you’ve got a fast graphics card?
  • 22 – The Biden/Trump debate proved that when Joe looked for his train of thought, he found it had derailed years ago.

July:

  • 13 – Trump survives an assassination attempt by the Left as effective as their ability to implement socialism.
  • 15 – Trump’s classified document case is dismissed, proving the GloboLeft can’t even win their own witch hunt.
  • 21 – Biden announces on X® that he’s dropping out of the presidential race to spend more time with his cognitive decline.

August:

  • 19 – Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are nominated by the Democratic National Convention to be “Designated Losers” in the race against Donald Trump.
  • 20 – Harris wakes up and says, “I did what?”

September:

  • 10 – Trump and Harris debated, primarily notable for Kamala appearing to be somewhat sober.
  • 12 – Elon Musk launches the first commercial spacewalk mission, Polaris Dawn, which proved that keg stands can be done in space.
  • 18 – The Tupperware™ company files for bankruptcy, hermetically sealing their fate.

Are they Putin on the Ritz?

October:

  • 1 – Jimmy Carter celebrated his 100th birthday by planning reminisce about the good old days when presidents only had to deal with nuclear-armed Soviets, Iranian revolutionaries, and a failing economy.
  • 13 – Elon Musk celebrates as the 233-foot-long Starship™ booster is caught and put into a rocket shelter, where it hopes to be adopted by a good family.
  • 17 – North Korean troops head to Russia to fight alongside Russian troops. This is apparently the premise for a sitcom with live ammunition.
  • 27 – Donald Trump holds a rally at Madison Square Garden, causing global warming concerns as all of the GloboLeft snowflakes melted down outside.

Kamala Harris is reduced to stealing Chiquita® bananas because she doesn’t want to support right-wing death squads.

November:

  • 5 – Election day, and Trump won. The ghost of Don Rickles said, “Donald, you’re back!  What, did you miss the attention or the free meals at the state dinners?
  • 5 – The Senate and House flipped to the Right, giving Republicans control so that they can disappoint us that much more.
  • 25 – Continuing Trumptember, Jack Smith dismisses the 2020 election interference case against Trump.

December:

  • 1 – In a move that should surprise no one, Joe Biden pardoned his crack-smoking son, Hunter.
  • 8 – Syria falls and Bashar al-Assad heads to Moscow to be an ophthalmologist. I’m not making this up.
  • 9 – Daniel Penny is acquitted of criminally negligent homicide in New York City, proving once again that it’s really expensive to ride the subway.
  • 24 – Drones will be set up by the Department of Defense to create an impenetrable barrier around the country to prevent the scourge of Santa from his annual crime spree of break-ins.

What did I miss?

New Jersey Drones, Aliens, and Angels

“Look!  A baby wolf!” – 1941

Shooting down that Chinese balloon was the only thing Biden ever did to fight inflation. (All memes as found)

On the 24th of February, 1942, the battle of Los Angeles occurred.  The sound of air raid sirens, a new sound for Los Angeles, pierced the night.  Air defense cannon were engaged, and over 1,400 shells were fired that night.  The most likely explanation is that the “attack” was likely a weather balloon.  Or angels.

Okay, I’ve heard that one before.  Or is that where that started?  Regardless, no aliens or Japanese were downed that night, though a slightly humorous movie was made about the whole incident that managed to rake in about $95 million dollars in 1979.

Lately, there have been large numbers of reports of drones around several places in England and, well, New Jersey.  I did get an email from a reader about what my thoughts were.  I sent an answer off the cuff, and, after reflection, I’ve thought a bit more and have some revisions, none of which involve John Belushi as a fighter pilot.

What could the drones be?

Here are my thoughts of what these things are, in the order I originally thought of them.  Feel free to opine on what I missed in the comments, since this analysis is as shallow as Greta Thunberg’s understanding of physics.  Okay, maybe not that shallow.

First thought:  It is not aliens.  I can be certain because observers have heard rotors and heard various drone sounds.  There’s simply too much evidence that everything observed is entirely terrestrial technology, easily achievable with known technology.  If aliens are able to conquer interstellar space, time travel, or move through dimensions, they’re probably not bringing things that could be mistaken for DJI® drones.

Second thought:  It’s not an individual or individuals.  One thing I’ve noted is the government would in no way allow this level of fun at this scale.  I think there’s a law against it, or if not, there’s always Gitmo.  Overall, the phenomenon seems too coordinated and at too many places, even for a club.  Additionally, the government would be taking this far more seriously in the press, and you would have seen or heard of an arrest by now.

Third thought:  It’s not a private company, since they’ve got too much to lose, and yet not much to gain.  The only one that I could see doing this would be Elon, and it would just be for giggles.  But there is no evidence that Elon would ever visit New Jersey, since he’s too busy making cars that drive into lakes.

Hopefully Elon didn’t bring bearer bonds.

Fourth thought:  It’s unlikely to be a foreign government, because if it were Iranian, it would have a two-stroke engine and a pull start, the North Koreans can’t pedal fast enough to get lift, the Russians would have sent five million of them with the expectation that all but one would be shot down, and the Chinese already know all our secrets.  One New Jersey state senator claimed it was from an Iranian naval vessel, but at last count all of their inflatable rafts navy is accounted for.

Fifth thought:  It’s us testing our stuff, unlikely, because why would we do so in New Jersey?

Sixth thought:  It’s a distraction for the American public.  You know, a shiny object.  “Look!  A baby wolf!”  So, a psyop.

Seventh thought:  It’s an actual, operational system.  The military says it’s not theirs but, I have no confidence the military has any idea what it’s doing on a daily basis.  Everyone who talks about it is pretty calm.  “Oh, no, we don’t have any idea what it is, though it’s perfectly safe and there’s no indication that any laws have been broken.  It might have been Mexicans.  We won the war.  Go back to sleep.”

Evidence for the seventh point actually goes back a few years.  I recall reading a news story about drones seen at night in eastern Colorado/western Kansas.  Not one or two, but swarms.  Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever driven through that part of the world, but you can drive about 120 miles without seeing a tree, let alone another car.  It’s not as sparsely populated as Wyoming, but it would probably be a violation of safe working conditions to send employees to Wyoming.  If I were guessing, that was the actual test.  Heck, they might even have ignored that documentary, The Terminator, and have these things being run by A.I.

Are creepy metal wind chimes Stranger Tings?

What are the drones doing?

My guess is they’re only in New Jersey if they’re active, as either part of some new defensive system meant to intercept other drones or some other remote sensing.  As we see from Ukraine, even low-tech drones are better than artillery at taking out armor or even squad-level groups of soldiers.  New drones showing up in Russia aren’t radio controlled and susceptible to jamming – now they spool miles (3.1milliCoulombs) of fiber-optic cable behind them.  I’d be surprised if we weren’t fielding active area denial systems against drones.

So, to summarize:

  1. Aliens: 0%
  2. Individuals: 5%
  3. Elon: 5%
  4. Iranians!: 2%
  5. Testing: 11%
  6. Psyop: 10%
  7. Active Defense System: 75%
  8. The ghost of John Belushi in a P-40 Warhawk: Infinity%

Heck, it could be angels?

The Health System Sucks

“Life insurance pays off triple, if you die on a business trip.” – Fight Club

Now these are the results that a functioning health care system should provide.  Including the hat.

The health industry in the United States is a mess, probably worse than a woke vampire movie where vampires use pronouns like undead/cursed and make their victims go to DEI training (Death, Exsanguination and Immortality) before selecting them based on their social privilege score.  Talk about sucking!

But back to the point:  the system is a mess.  Case in point, the insurance companies are for-profit institutions.  As, um, you might have noticed from recent events this leads to almost inevitable conflict between the patient and “their” insurance company.

This has created some really perverse incentives, especially for the company.  If they can successfully deny enough claims, their profit goes up, so their best bet to make the most money is to not allow claims, just like the best way for some specialists and hospitals to make the most money is to do the most testing.  “Hey, this is the machine that goes ‘ping’, and it’s useful to see if you have the Hong Pong flu.”

For no reason at all.

Oh, and lawyers?  We didn’t even mention them.  Lawyers just love to find that doctors missed giving the right test so that they can sue them.  So, we have the groups all competing for an economic slice of the pie.  How big is the pie?  In 1960, it was a manageable 5% of the economy of the United States.  The average life expectancy then was somewhere around 70 years old.

In 2019, healthcare costs were over three times as much, at 17.6% of the economy.  Lifespan had gone up to almost (not quite) 79 years.

So, 12.6% of the economy for an extra 8 point something years?  Is that a good deal?

Well, not exactly.  Lifespan is certainly extended by modern medical care to some extent, but a huge amount of that uplift is due to factors that have nothing to do with the increased costs of health care.  But some of it is better health care:  much better trauma care has also made events like gunshot wounds and car accidents more survivable, so the average is going to go up because people aren’t dying young in car crashes as often.

What did the CEO know about the Clintons?

But people aren’t smoking as much, either.  Also, cars and roads are objectively safer than in 1960 by an order of magnitude, and since car deaths are skewed to young men, that really helps the average life expectancy.  And all of these things have increased life expectancy:

  • Nutrition
  • Clean Water
  • Sanitation
  • Neonatal Healthcare
  • Antibiotics
  • Vaccines

As you can see, many of these things aren’t healthcare, and with the exception of neonatal healthcare, they’re all stupidly cheap.  So, a big part of why health care costs so much more is that people are living longer and consuming more health care.  If a smoker didn’t die of a heart attack from smoking at age 45 at nearly zero medical cost, now they’re living longer and using medical care at age 80.

This is not a bad problem.

Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up dad jokes.

The other part, though, is that there are so many more vampires surrounding the money trough than there were back in the day.

  • Insurance Companies (as noted earlier, insurance companies actually make more “shareholder return” by denying claims and treatments, so if they spend $1 to deny $2 in claims, they’re still up $1)
  • Ambulance Chasers (attorneys produce great benefits against those who practice irresponsible care, but the lottery attitude of many juries giving ludicrous awards raises costs for everyone)
  • Big Pharma® (Goldman-Sachs actually asked the question if curing diseases is a sustainable business model, versus forever dispensing medicine to be people who are just sick enough to not die, so the model is to sell more drugs)
  • Hospital Administration (which has to be doubled to account for insurance claims, government required paperwork, Ambulance Chasers and managing television doctors)
  • The AMA (who has artificially limited the number of doctors produced by American schools to keep doctor salaries up and hide the stethoscope shortage)
  • The Government (who builds entire bureaucracies to regulate medical care and administer payments and . . . to hire more bureaucrats)
  • Illegals and Deadbeats (the system must treat them, by law, in an emergency setting, and guess who pays the bills?)

The current medical system is like a vampire-hydra:  cut off one group sucking money out of the system, and another two will emerge.

In the 1980s, healthcare went from a still-manageable 6.9% (1970) to 12.1% (1990) – nearly doubling in size.  This was largely driven by a 1986 law (EMTALA) that made emergency treatment a right at any hospital that receives Medicare, whether or not the patient had any ability to pay.  It’s like saying that if I’m really thirsty, that McDonald’s™ has to give me an iced tea.

What do you call a talkative Columbian?  Hablo Escobar.

And, like usual, everyone points to cheap strawberries as the benefit, but skips the $19.75 Tylenol™ pill in the hospital.  Healthcare in the United States is so expensive (at least in part) because to so many it’s free.  This increases the recordkeeping, and hospitals have to spread their bills on decent hardworking non-deadbeats.

So, it’s broken.  How do we fix it?

On insurance, The Mrs. has a simple idea:  make it illegal.

All of it.  Medical services are cash on the barrelhead.  You pay for the services you get.  That sounds drastic, but when I really thought about it, this would eliminate the entire medical billing bureaucracy.  We talk about a capitalism, but health care tied to insurance is anything but capitalist, especially with all the mandates and cost shifting from programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

The Mrs.’ solution has some real-world evidence to show she might be on to something – real prices for services insurance doesn’t pay for like breast, um, augmentation and laser eye surgery have gone down in real terms.  Force doctors to post prices, and for emergency services, well, I’m sure we can figure out ways that hospitals can’t create “pay $90,000 for this shot of anti-venom that cost us $125 or you die” scenarios.

They know a thing or two, because in hundreds of lifetimes they’ve seen a thing or two.

Cap malpractice awards to reasonable levels.

Pharmaceuticals are a bit stickier since we want to foster innovation, but how many of them take public institute research to make their drugs?  And we can certainly streamline the FDA, especially for sketchy drugs that might help people that are otherwise terminal.

Get the federal government mostly out of health care, except to prosecute people for fraud.  Like the people responsible for the Vaxx®.  And make the penalties criminal.

Eliminate free care.  If it’s so important to you that people who can’t afford to get treatment, get treatment, don’t use my wallet to assuage your feelings.  Pay for it yourself, Sally Strothers.

A Christian cross might make a fictional vampire recoil in horror, but the lack of a money trough will make the health-care-hydra vampire wander away to try something else, hopefully by finding a real job, or, failing that, being paid to suck something else.

Doctor got his degree from Columbia.  I told him I wanted one from America.

More War Economics

“I had no idea that a study of nature could advance the art of naval warfare.” – Master and Commander:  The Far Side of the World

France has, however, done more executions than the United States, but they had a head start.

Earlier this month I had a post about the Economics of War.  This is not exactly a follow up, more of an additional exploration on the topic from a slightly different perspective.  And at one time I used to worry that one of my hairs are out of place, but now, with greater perspective, I don’t care if all six are out of place.  So, perspective matters.

War is about stuff.  In order to fight a war, there needs to be stuff to fight with and the stuff (and men) need to be in the right place at the right time, and General Nathan B. Forrest described his winning strategy for one battle, “I just got there first with the most men.”

Of course, that wins a battle, but not a war.  Unless you’re fighting against France, in which case all you have to win is the one battle if you have sufficient supplies of cigarettes, baguettes, suffragettes, and raclettes.  And a recent Rand® analysis says that’s probably all the United States can win, is a battle.  To quote the study, “U.S. industrial production is grossly inadequate to provide the equipment, technology, and munitions needed today, let alone given the demands of a great power conflict.”

Great power conflict means Russia, and it means China, and if we continue on this path, might even include France and Tahiti.

Why does the river Thames run through London?  If it walked, it would get stabbed.

Let’s talk first about industrial production.  At the beginning of World War II, the United States had a massive untapped labor market thanks to Democratic policies.  We also had the knowhow to build factories capable of mass producing, well, anything, thanks to Henry Ford.  We also had amazing resources, including more oil than Geraldo Rivera’s hair.  Although car production isn’t tank production, you can see it from there.  And airplanes?  They’re just cars with wings, like racoons are pandas that eat trash, right?

Yeah, we can make those.  And with that, the American weapons manufacturing industry was ramped up in 1939 and 1940 or so in order to sell (first) lots of stuff to the British.  It worked.  By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the war started, the industrial machine of the United States was just warming up, and soon enough farm girls from the Midwest would be welding on Liberty Ships in Alameda.  In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, the United States had 9 aircraft carriers of all types.  At the end of 1945, the United States had 99 aircraft carriers.  That’s not a misprint.

99.

(Hint:  It’s been in overhaul since 2017 and the crew was reassigned to the Russian army)

(CC 4.0, RU.MIL)

In 2024, however, the United States, as far as I can see, is primarily engaged in the production of accounting irregularities, debt, corn syrup, and pizza rolls.  Oh, and worthless university degrees.  Can’t have enough of those.

But is it really important in the time of missiles and drones to have aircraft carriers?  Perhaps not, perhaps they’re as antiquated as bombers and useful mainly against adversaries that can’t “reach out and touch someone” like the Taliban or Iraq?  Perhaps not.  Maybe we should look at other components of weapons.

Let’s take just one technology that’s in everything now:  LED displays.  They’re in phones, but also in jet fighters, tanks, headsets, and any technology meant to share information across a battlespace.  A cursory examination shows that no significant production of LED displays takes place in the United States, and the two companies that I could find that were listed as “American” that produce LEDs have been bought by China.

I guess LED Zepplin was really technologically ahead of Incandescent Zepplin.

Sure, the Taiwanese and Japanese and Koreans make this tech, but those countries are (checks map) nowhere near the United States.  If there was a protracted war, I’ll leave it as a class exercise to estimate the chances that shipping between those locations and the United States might be impacted.  The extended supply chains required to make our most sophisticated weapons systems are long, complex, and vulnerable.

The F-35, for instance, requires parts manufactured all around the world, and even then, there have only been 1,000 made.  Is 1,000 a lot?  In billions of dollars, yes.  In fighter planes, no.  Yet, China claims to have created an automated factory that can make 1,000 cruise missiles a day.  Is that a lot?  Well, every day, yes, since the last data I have says that the United States has an inventory of 4,000 cruise missiles.  If correct, China can produce the entire inventory of United States cruise missiles in less than a week.

Are they crappier than ours?  Probably.  But we’d still have to shoot down every single one if we didn’t want to get hit.  How many days until we ran out of SAMs to take them down?

If our production of SAMs is like our production of artillery, not long, and then it would be slingshots.

Thankfully, we have never had to deploy the Tom Cruise missile.

Okay, those are technologically complex systems.  Surely on the old-style weapons we’re doing great, right?

No.  Russia is, by itself, producing three times the artillery munitions that can be produced by the United States.  And by Europe.  Combined.  And that’s today after we’ve been attempting to ramp up production for three years.

So, there’s economic warfare, right?

Many have argued in the past that China needs the markets of the United States, or they would collapse.  That was a good argument, in the past.  China now sells more to developing markets than to the West.  When people keeping talking about China being a paper economic tiger that will soon collapse, I just have to point to that same phrase being trotted out every year for the last 30 years.  China’s economy isn’t like that of the United States, and they’ve taken full advantage of the willingness of the United States to self-immolate its own manufacturing capacity.

China’s ship military ship production capacity exceeds that of the United States.  Oh, strike that.  Just a single Chinese shipyard exceeds the military ship production capacity of the United States.  When we shipped the factories overseas, we not only lost the know-how to make many things.  This is the stuff that the instruction manual doesn’t cover, the figuring out how to make the production line work, the solving of the myriad of glitches that come with a start-up.

It’s almost like this unilateral deindustrialization was encouraged.  Hmmm.

At least the robot will be charged with something.

This isn’t to say that we’ve been defeated – far from it.  But this is no longer 1990 when the United States could, with impunity, exercise military might anywhere around the world and be essentially as unchallenged as Kamala at a vodka-chugging contest.  I like to think (and hope) that at least some military planners have realized the amazing hole that we’re in, and understand that the era of unilateral American military dominance somewhere between “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the formation of the 183rd Transexual Human Resources Division.

This, however, is not the end.  It just means that the Russia/Ukraine war is a foreshadowing of what’s to come as Pax Americana fades into memory.  We will see many more regional wars, and most of those wars will be wars we can’t impact in any meaningful way.  This, of course, assumes that we don’t have a stockpile of wunderwaffe sitting around that can allow immediate battlefield dominance and intelligence.  Hmmm.  Not seeing that, but, again, I’m not on the list of folks that get those memos.

Would Peter Sellers drive a pink panzer?

We can also use this time to ask ourselves what, exactly, we get out of having military bases all around the world when the single biggest threat is the open border at the south.  Abraham Lincoln, more than 25 years before he was a theater enjoyer, said this at the age of 28:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow?  Never!  All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth, our own excepted, in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

Yes.  Neither the Russians nor the Chinese could ever take this country by force, but yet we’re bringing in millions of military age men into the country so they can eat all the ducks that swim in the Ohio.

I wonder if we’ll regret letting the illegals get there first, with the most men?

The Government: Killing You With Their Compassion

“I warned you about compassion, Bruce.” – Batman Begins

The people who were pro-vaxx say that our jokes about being right are getting old.  Unlike their kids.

It has long been a theme here at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise that compassion and charity are wonderful things.  For me as an individual, there is something fundamentally uplifting about giving of my time, talent, or treasures to those that I can help.  If done properly, this compassion and charity are amazing at lifting people up when they need it.

But the dark side is when someone is compassionate for you, with none of your involvement.  This is a hallmark of the GloboLeftElite:  they want to take your resources to give to other people.  They then call that compassionate, and tell me I’m evil if I don’t buy into the concept.

In fact, if you look at people on the TradRight, we are far, far more compassionate with our actual time, talent and treasure than people on the GloboLeft.  Donation statistics show it, and if you look at the people involved in actual charities and volunteer organizations (that don’t depend on other people’s money) they are overwhelmingly on the TradRight.

They don’t have blook banks in England, but they do have a liver pool.

But let’s talk about the Leech Class, a faction of the GloboLeftElite, who suck the cash and resources from all of us to support their “charitable” goals.

FEMA comes to mind due to the recent incident where DHS spokes-scrotum Alejandro Mayorkas.  Only in the corrupt stages of a failing nation could a paperwork American (Majerkas) who was born of a Turkish father and a Romanian mother and who was born in Cuba be put in charge of immigration.  Oh, and an anchor baby running for president.

But here we are.

This week, Madorkas said there wasn’t any money to help hurricane refugees.  It turns out that under border-Czar Harris, the Biden/Harris Junta declared, proudly, that they were diverting FEMA funding to give to American “Blue” cities to support the teeming hordes of illegal aliens that they had invited and, in some cases, had flown into the United States (this is true, by the hundreds of thousands).

Is a short dog from New Mexico an Albu-corgi?

Yes.  Biden/Harris created the crisis.  Then, they pulled the cash from FEMA to give to their cronies to pay for these illegals.  Where did the money go?  In New York, shiftless illegals are living in four-star hotels with turndown service.  They’re being provided with food at no cost.

And veterans have to fight for surgery.  And the people of North Carolina are told that there’s no money for them.

But illegals, many criminal, and many not even remotely vetted, are living in luxury hotels.

This causes the prices of hotels to go up – FEMA is even paying for empty beds in these hotels.  This causes the price of food to go up, you can’t add 10% population to a system and not expect inflation as more people fight for the same resources.

My urine is crystal clear.  It’s 1080 pee.

But it’s compassionate.  Compassionate to bring 20,000 Haitians into Springfield, Ohio.  The Haitians have zero experience living in a civilized society, having been brought up in a country (that they created) where a good day is there’s enough mud to eat.

Springfield didn’t add 5,000 houses, so where are these aliens living?

One rumor has it that a local politician/landlord booted out his American tenants who were paying $1,000 or $1,500 a month in a house, and replaced them with 20 Haitians who pay $250 a month for a cot.

Hey, profit, right?

And housing costs go up in Springfield.  I guess they can make it up since the dogcatcher no longer is needed to round up stray pets.

But I’m probably not considered compassionate when I bring this up.

Why have one man, when you can have 80 cats?

Today, I saw some brain-dead GloboLeftist X® (formerly known as a Tweet®) that we should be happy, because illegals keep the prices of vegetables down.

First, no, they eat them, too.  Second, if the base value of your philosophy is to bring in cheap labor to pick strawberries, you might have the morals of a slaveholder, but just with other hands holding the whip.

The final insidious nature of what we’re seeing is that this is the year that our national deficit is equal to the size of our economy in the United States.  The last time this happened was in World War II, and at least we got lots of tanks, fighters, bombers, aircraft carriers, nuclear bombs, and other cool stuff that I can’t buy on E-Bay®.  Again, ATF should be a convenience store, not a place for LGBTQ people to scheme to take away guns owned by honest people.

No, we’re spending all this cash on . . . the acceptable compassion and charity based on the values of the GloboLeft.  I saw part of a presentation today (on YouTube®) that FEMA put together so that the needs of people with non-standard sexual preferences were prioritized in the event of a disaster.

Prioritized.  “Hey, that 10-year-old boy is hungry, but he’s white and was born male, so let’s focus on the thirty-year-old dude who thinks he’s a girl and wants to have sex with cats.”  Yes.  Emergencies don’t know skin color or sexual fetish, but FEMA sure does.

I stopped drinking, but then I bought a motivational poster and decided Wayne Gretzky was right:  “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

That’s bad enough, but they’re spending so much money on the groups that the GloboLeftElite want to shower with charity that it’s turning whatever capitalism that was left in the United States into a joke.  Yes, people are still using cash to buy things, but the government is now buying more than the economy creates.

Mainly on charity.  For people who are not me, and not you.

The final piece is that studies have shown that people who get this unearned charity often resent those who have more, and want the charity to give them the life of a Bill Gates, rather than just guaranteed food, housing, education, and medical care.

It’s so unfair!  I still remember one woman who was a part of the first The Caravan of 10,000 people (what a dream, only 10,000!) was filmed after getting food aid consisting of refried beans, tortillas, vegetables, and a drink.

“This food isn’t fit for my dog!”

She was overweight.

Yup, that’s what governmental charity and compassion to the undeserving creates.  Oh, and as a bonus it wrecks the currency and makes you and I poorer.

Wonder how that’ll turn out?