Inflation Nation – Page 7 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

PEZ® And The Fate Of Nations

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then, Ukraine.

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

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

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

Is a British bank robber a quid-napper?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe they could mine coal?

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

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

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

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

Some Signposts On The Way To Collapse

“It’s a growth economy, Gus. We’ve already made like, 500 rupee.” – Psych

What’s worse than rushing to the liquor store five minutes before it closes? Getting there thirty minutes before it opens.

For the most part, I like to have my posts be about a bigger, underlying principle. In my life, I have found the first thing I enjoy is making people think about life in a different way and examine new possibilities. The second thing is a never-ending stream of jokes. To be clear, I never tell jokes to amuse others; I tell jokes because they amuse me. They maybe Dad jokes, that’s why I save them in a Dadabase.

Tonight, however, I’m going to just enjoy our current economy, and just give some milestones on the current descent into whatever economic future that we’re creating in a relatively short post.

First up, is the idea that $100,000 isn’t a lot of money anymore:

How many Zoomers does it take to change a lightbulb? 100,000. One to change it, and 99,999 to throw the parade.

I kid, a bit. Zoomers certainly are the most fragile generation that we’ve ever produced, since when I was growing up trigger warnings was what Pa Wilder gave me if he saw my finger head towards one when I wasn’t planning on shooting. A safe space? That was the place that Pa had a safe.

As much as I’d like to bag on the Zoomers, it really is a rough world that they’re coming into, economically and otherwise. Most of the jobs are in the cities, and the housing costs there are ludicrous. I’d rent in the cities for longer than two months, but I only can afford to give up one kidney.

A policy of unpoliced and encouraged illegal immigration for decades has consequences? Perish the thought!

It’s not just housing which has become more unaffordable than at any time in history (at least in the cities). Cars have recently gone to silly levels – the latest average monthly payment for a new car is $716 for an average of 69 (hehe) months. The average loan amount is $41,445. The last three cars I bought (all used) totaled $45,000 or so.

To be clear, people don’t have to buy a new car. I haven’t bought a new car since 1997, all of mine have been used. The average used car goes for nearly $28,000, with a monthly payment of $526 at an interest rate of over 10%. Ouch!

I wonder if this app is the biggest cause of suicide for Tesla® owners?

While the next two items are from Canada, I wonder how far behind the United States is.

For those who aren’t used to metric, a kilogram is roughly two pounds, and a Canadian dollar is roughly a handful of rounded pebbles that you might collect at the bottom of a stream – I think it’s called a metric dollar.

It’s pretty bad in Canada. They could have had it all: America’s sense of freedom, British literature, and French cuisine. Instead? They got French immigration policy, Britain’s love of pointless bureaucracy, and American economic policy. And they’re paying for it, literally.

Thankfully, some folks are doing well in the economy. I heard a rumor that one person was taking dollars to buy diesel fuel from a European source, but instead bought it from a Russian source. Amazingly, when you make smart decisions like that, you can save a lot of money.

Me? I’ve seen corruption, bribery, blackmail, jealousy, theft, fraud, and deception firsthand. I’m never playing Monopoly with The Mrs. again.

To be fair, I will share that Russia has a new technological innovation that I can share, to at least partially offset all those leaked documents. The Russians have apparently developed a new technology that allows them to see with the vision of one of the most ruthless killers on Earth:

Remember when Putin said he didn’t have any plans to invade the Ukraine? I think he was telling the truth.

Again, this post is just is a different one, just a signpost on road that we’re on. I’d offer $100,000 for your thoughts, but it would be that Canadian metric money. What’s it called? A rupee?

Decline or Collapse? Collapse.

“You didn’t find me, you collapsed a building on me.” – Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

How do you get a philosophy student off the front porch? Tip him for the pizza.

Finished my taxes. All went well – I’m actually getting some of my money back. In truth, I was pretty close to posting some memes. This weekend at the Wilder house was just one filled with, “meh, let’s order pizza and relax because we don’t feel like doing much” across the board. So, we relaxed, at least until it was time to do my annual tango with TurboTax®.

I almost decided to post some of the more amusing memes I’d found across the Internet, but had so far not found a time or place to use. But, just as the clock headed reached 10 ‘til midnight, the muse struck me like a bag of wet sushi fish in a net stocking owned by a stripper named Destiny who is missing two fingers on her left hand.

How does civilization end?

Lots of people talk about an eternal decline. That’s a wishful thought, I guess. It’s the Bladerunner dystopia where everything is cheaper and coarser, ever more crowded, and ever less human. I guess the bright side of the Bladerunner fate is an endless supply of robot clones of Sean Young back before she went crazy and decided to live on a diet of Twinkies® and gin.

Be glad I didn’t make you look at Old Cat Lady Sean Young.

To be clear, that’s mainly what we’re seeing.

Gangs of “youths” in Chicago rioted this weekend because it’s Chicago, they outnumber the police, and they can do anything and their chances of getting arrested are about the same as Kamala Harris having an idea that didn’t die of loneliness.
Power grids that went from reliable to “maybe” because people decided investing in infrastructure was homophobic or something.
A shrinking middle class, and less clear ways for most people to join it, especially the kids. My generation, Gen X, has a significantly smaller share of the national wealth than the Boomers did at my age. And the Zoomers and Millennials?
Economic disruption – inflation and shortages jumped up when the papering-over of the economic problems of a made-up currency that was spent as fast as possible by both Left and Right could no longer be papered over. Even today, there is no thought to try to fix things, because that would stop the party and we know politicians love to party.
Moral decay and the loss of civic virtues that would make Caligula look like a prude. When late-stage Rome would have said, “Whoa, dude, you’re going too far,” it’s time to think about where we are.

There are more things, but making longer lists makes me better at making longer lists but doesn’t really tell the story, and you have a search engine. The idea is that all of these things that are happening right now are going to lead us down a trail where each day, things get a bit duller, a bit uglier, and bit more unreliable, and a bit shabbier. The United States (and other Western countries) exhibit a long, slow decline into the eventual status where everything is not only expensive, but it also sucks.

I congratulated someone for a great exit sign once. “Nice going!”

Again, that’s an optimistic case. It assumes that we’re making progress, and we’ll keep making progress, but a that progress will be spread over more and more people, like trying to make 300,000,000 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches out of a single jar of jelly. That is the way that most civilizations have ended, with a whimper and not a crash.

But 2023 is a different story, and faces different problems. The first, and biggest is energy and “peak” minerals. I’ve written about this dozens of times, but our current civilization is one of the first built entirely around single-use materials, the most important of which is energy. Each barrel of oil pumped and used cannot be reused later – it’s gone. And, I assure everyone reading this, that biotic or abiotic, there is a finite amount of oil that can be extracted that makes economic and thermodynamic (provides more energy than it takes to extract).

I did sit on a block of ice too long once, got polaroids.

We go after the easy resources first, oil that seeps up under its own pressure – drill down 20 feet and Jed’s a millionaire. In 2023 we’re using high tech and energy intensive methods to frack oil and drilling miles down in miles of water.

There are other materials that this applies to, as well. The Romans could build wooden warships, and the trees could grow back. Sure, we can reuse the steel from our ships, and do. But when it comes to minerals like phosphorus, lithium, copper, and PEZ™, there are absolute limits to the quality deposits required. And with something like phosphorous, there is no replacement, since it is an element vital to life and we can’t replace it with soybeans or turkey bacon. Once these inputs stop, like my first marriage, it’s over.

The second idea is that our current civilization isn’t regional like Rome or China or Dave’s Tribe of Wandering Dudes. The civilization of the world today is just that. Outside of parts of Africa, South America, and Detroit, what we have is truly a single world civilization. It’s all interconnected. Russia declares war on the Ukraine? Wheat prices go up. If there’s an attack on Taiwan? Large swaths of semiconductors are off the menu.

I hear that’s a robot’s favorite dish – silicon carne.

When Rome collapsed, only Rome collapsed, and people in China or South America didn’t have a clue. If any part of the world collapses today? The rest of the world will be degraded as well – perhaps enough to take everything down with it, since we work in a world without substitutes.

The final idea (for now) is that nobody really agrees with anybody. This is not a new development. But in 1940, the war in Europe really didn’t hurt the United States – we could make almost everything we needed (except pesky things like rubber and bananas) and were doing fine. The world is at war? No one cares.

Now, the economy is tightly coupled – one nation to another, these wars matter. Since 1945, the (general) peace has been kept, and what conflicts were allowed were just large enough to make profits for Boeing® or General Dynamics™ but not large enough to mess with anything that mattered. But if China takes Taiwan? A huge number of semiconductors are no longer available on the international market, and those are used in everything from washing machines to cars to tanks to watches to . . . you get the picture. And the reason you get the picture is because of thousands of semiconductors transporting the data directly to you.

A cop pulled Chuck Norris over once. The cop got away with a warning.

One break? Poof.

I think it’s much more likely that, instead of a gradual slide down into poverty, that one morning we wake up and find a huge chunk of the economy doesn’t work at all anymore, because the inputs are gone. COVID was a stress test for this, and we failed. Our just-in-time economy may bump profits, but it removes the idea of a resilient economy.

Oops!

The good news, though, is if the world experiences a prolonged and significant collapse? No more taxes! Well, at least no more taxes until Warlord Lance the First, of Modern Mayberry, wants his share.

Dependence: The Worst Drug Of All?

“I hate being dependable, man.” – Black Hawk Down

If I had a dream about a nocturnal horse, would that be a night mare?

“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition.” This is from Thomas Jefferson’s book, Notes on Virginia, which I assume referred to some girl Jefferson was dating. Maybe it was Virginia Madsen, I mean, she was kinda hot in the 1984 version of Dune, so maybe that’s when they met?

One of the ideas that has been carefully cultivated here by the Left in late-stage Weimerica is the idea that individuals are weak. It has long been my observation that people who live in large cities are more dependent due to the facts of living in a large city, and this is reflected in the vote totals. This is part of the reason that Leftists love big cities, that and owning a penthouse on the Upper West Side.

In a big apartment, residents are slaves to elevators, sidewalks, and trash removal services whereas in Modern Mayberry I haven’t used an elevator in months, sidewalks are okay but not required, and if the trash truck doesn’t show up because the raccoons sabotaged it, I can burn mine (legally!) in the backyard.

Often, larger cities have restrictive laws that restrict the ability of individual citizens to protect themselves, leading to a complete dependence on the state for the most basic of human rights – the right to protect their own life. Powerful Leftists, of course, are surrounded by people that they hired that have guns, even when the normal folks can’t have them. This is what they call “equity”.

Surely, those two things above aren’t related.

Cities are thus an actual breeding ground for dependence, and here are just a few examples, since this isn’t the whole point of the post:

Control – This is always and forever the goal of the Left. In large cities, it’s often impossible to contact actual decision makers, since it’s actually George Soros, and he doesn’t take visitors.
Concentrates Economic Gains – When control is granted, the winners often cease to be those that produce, and then gravitate to those that run the systems, since it’s actually George Soros, and he gets all the cash.
Sole-Source Education – I’ve seen some parents just leave education and discussion on important topics entirely to the schools, and be utterly ignorant about the discussions on values that take place there, which is what George Soros likes. (Education problems aren’t limited to big cities.)
Splits Social Cohesion – Individuals become atomized, and the chance of seeing a random person on the street even more than once is minimal. There are millions of people, always in motion, so no one has the opportunity to think much about George Soros.

Obviously, this isn’t all places, everywhere, and some cities (those with 100% less Soros) are better than others, and the ‘burbs are almost always less dehumanizing than the ultra-dense cities that the modern world seems to favor.

Why did Elon move to the suburbs? He wanted more space.

This is not how people were made to live. We’ve spent the vast majority of our existence as a species living in smallish groups, and being responsible for each other and our own actions. Even as far back as 1500 Anno Domini (3405 metric years) the largest city in Europe was Paris. The population? A staggering 200,000 to 250,000 people.

Yeah, that’s bigger than Modern Mayberry, but the population density was only about 2000 to 2500 people per square mile, which I assumed still left them room for their snail ranches, and if you walked for a couple of hours, you could be in the countryside.

Regardless of where it happens, though, dependence can have a horrible toll, especially in someone who is was born and raised to be independent:

Feelings of Helplessness and Hopelessness – I like to have as much control over my own destiny as possible. I realize that meteorites to strike, earthquakes happen, and PEZ® factories are bought out by Bulgarians. Regardless, people who feel that they control their lives are happier, more confident, and have better body odor.
Anxiety and Fear – When there is a lack of control, people get afraid – I see that in people are dependent on others, I mean, you should have seen The Boy when he was a baby and I’d play “steal the bottle while he’s nursing”..
Shame, Loss of Feeling of Self-Worth – One of the compromises for society today is that most people aren’t in business, they have jobs, and many people feel in control at work, especially when they are contributing and working with a great team. However, lose the job? The understanding of dependence hits in an avalanche. Likewise, being dependent on the state for life just turns a person into a dehumanized cog who votes for the benefits.
Political Indoctrination – Upton Sinclair, a miserable Leftist himself, said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” He sniffed around the problem, but didn’t realize that the same problem existed with his beloved Leftism, but his book sales depended on him not understanding that.
Self-Censorship – When social or economic standing is based on not having the wrong opinion, people are afraid to stand up for what’s right.

I pretended to gag at dinner one night, but the family knew it was just another another dad choke.

This, in many more words, is what Jefferson was talking about. And this is what we have seen repeatedly in countries where tyranny takes hold.

Dependence is also a drug. When a person falls in love with their dependence, it becomes the easy way to explain giving up. I’ve met people who love their dependence, who list their medications and conditions with a pride like they’d been given a medal from the disability fairy. It’s a free pass to explain how they’re not responsible for their life.

Thus? Jefferson was right:

Subservience comes from owing everything to the master,
Venality, (roughly, being corrupt) is part and parcel of dependence, since the life of a dependent person is built around personal gain,
Suffocates the germ of virtue, since life becomes about the material, and
and prepares fit tools for the design of ambition. This is the lynchpin. This is the desired end state.

Thomas Jefferson bought a 2006 Ford® Taurus™. He called it his Jefferson Carship.

Dependence is everything that the Left wants, because is serves their purpose. To be clear, demagogues on the Right can use this, too, but most people on the Right are actually into individual freedom, and won’t follow a leader that pulls them away from that. Remember when Trump got booed at one of his own rallies when he brought up the Vaxx?

I remember.

But this isn’t about them. This is about us. My suggestion to every person is to look at areas in their lives where their dependence is unhealthy, and be aware of them. That’s the first step.

Then? Eliminate every one of them that you can, and rather than being ruled by fear, be ruled by your own choices.

That’s the opposite of dependence, and is better for you in every way.

How Occupy Wall Street Led To The Current Woke Crisis

“Being a villain is such a waste of time!” – The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show

The way she set up the pieces, I think she might be planning on eating them, rather than playing a game.

Once in a while, it’s good to take a step back. Where are we?

First, it’s important to review that the economy is not the financial system. The economy consists of the stuff we make, and the people who make it, and their productivity. It’s matched with people who want that stuff.

Stuff can be anything people want to pay money for: PEZ®. Cars. Machetes. Beer. Zirconium nose hair trimmers. Video game software. Pictures of PEZ©. Gasoline. Streaming movies about PEZ™. Velvet Elvis™ paintings (I still need one, I prefer the “mid-carbohydrate, wearing sunglasses and a sequined jumpsuit” King). Houses. People to polish the PEZ® statues I keep in my yard. Did I mention beer?

Notice that the stuff is physical stuff as well as information and services.

What’s not required?

I have the heart of a lion! I have the eye of an eagle! I have the legs of a gazelle! I also have a lifetime ban from the zoo.

Money. Debt. Interest rates. These are fundamentally constructions of humanity, and are meant only to make transactions easier. They are not required. When Pepsi® wanted to do trades with the Russians, they traded cases of Pepsi™ concentrate for seventeen submarines, a frigate, a cruiser, and a destroyer. Think about how cool that was: for a time, Pepsi© had a navy that could have probably made France surrender in a fury of carbonated corn syrup. Again.

And how cool would it be for a soft drink company to stage a march down the Champs-Élysées while Parisians cried? Honestly, it probably would have led to a better outcome than they currently have.

But what happens when the tail (finance) wags the dog (the economy)?

I guess the best answer goes right back to France, but this time not to around 1990, but to around 1790. What did the masses see? They saw the upper class scamming and cratering the economy while eating piles of bacon-wrapped shrimp, or whatever passed for a delicacy in 1790s France. The system really was rigged, but it was so rigged that poor Marie Antoinette couldn’t imagine actual hunger.

I will admit, they had cutting edge technology.

Here, though, I think that the Powers That Be see the end coming. Remember Occupy Wall Street?

Yeah, it was a bunch of smelly hippies that mainly spent time arguing about who was in control of the collective, and it featured all of the woke crap that is currently being paraded, but back in 2011 only the smelly hippies took it seriously. Oh, my, to be back in 2011.

Anyway, what happened after 2011?

The media and the Powers That Be were scared. How scared?

A neutron walks into a bar. The bartender says, “For you, no charge.” The electron next to him yells “That’s discrimination!”

They upped the ante. If people were unhappy about the manipulation of the banks and the mortgage-led meltdown of the Great Recession, the answer was simple from the Powers That Be: “Look, a squirrel!”

They doubled down on every single thing that is Woke. And, why not? The seeds were simmering as the Leftists took control of the education system and threw children into sex education that was really indoctrination, often without the knowledge of the parents or their consent, was yet another thing that finance could get behind.

And when finance gets behind it? All the companies that require finance get behind it, too. The attempt is gone a bit farther – an attempt to regame the system so that the financial imbalances built on decades of mismanagement could be controlled. Every aspect of finance and money, if it were only in the control of the Powers That Be, well, then the tail (finance) could really control the dog (the economy).

Looks like the Woke want to refund the police?

But here is the salvation. The Powers That Be only understand the financial side of what’s going on – the shadows on the wall. They do not understand the systems that they need to survive. Remember Mike Bloomberg in 2016 saying, “I could teach anybody, even people in this room, to be a farmer. It’s a process. You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn.” This is the shallow understanding of a person whose feet have never left asphalt and concrete, and learned all he needed to know about farming by watching Green Acres.

Mike Bloomberg doesn’t understand where the food he eats comes from. He does not understand it, and cannot recreate it. No matter what Mike Bloomberg does, he cannot use his financial magic to create one kernel of corn, not one molecule of water. Financial magic encourages production of corn, but cannot make it.

Woke culture cannot produce prosperity, or a single PEZ®.
Printing money cannot produce a single steak.
Financial manipulation cannot produce a single velvet Elvis©.
The tyranny of the Left cannot produce a human civilization.

The regular person has spoken this week – Bud Light® is now off the menu for millions and I’ve heard that it lost up to 70% or 80% sales last week. Will it kill Bud Light™? I doubt it. Drunk people often don’t make the best decisions, but, then again, I’m here.

How to remove 80% of beer drinkers with this one simple trick.

I think bud light will manage to survive, but we are seeing the cracks in the woke agenda that showed up after Occupy Wall Street – at some point, regardless of all of the financial shenanigans, at some point someone has to want the crap that’s being produced.

To those that look at the mess that we’re in, I can assure you of this – it’s all going away. It’s merely a matter of time. The economy is not the financial system, and a bank cratering doesn’t destroy all the corn that Mike Bloomberg has no idea how to grow.

Or maybe he could teach me otherwise?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – Trump And The End Of Civic Nationalism

“You’re not changing anything.” – Rambo

What do you call an indecisive body of water? Well . . . .

Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
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.

I’ve changed the Clock O’Doom. Why? It is clear that we’re way past five and six. We are having organized violence, regularly. And the lynchpin for nine is common violence that is justified.

This is clearly happening – just check the wind. “Kill a guy on the Right who used pepper spray? No charges.” “Kill a guy on the Left who is pointing an AK-47 at you? That’s murder.”

The Right is being hunted, and punished for pushing back. So, we have a seven, certainly. And a nine, certainly. What we are missing is an eight. I moved the clock to a seven.

This is moving sideways, and things are changing quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – Banana Republican – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Death of the Civic Nationalist – 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 770 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Banana Republican

I remember reading sword and sorcery books as a kid, mainly Conan the Notthetalkshowhost. I recall one axiom of a king who usurped the throne: kill the previous king. Nothing good comes from a realm with two kings.

Conan books were fun. But in real life, when politicians go out of their way to find a law to imprison their political opponent, it’s something that Lavrentiy Beria, the head of the Soviet NKVD under Stalin would have love, he said, “Show me the man, and I’ll find you the crime.”

Beria was an awful person who didn’t die nearly painfully enough, but he has become an instruction manual for the Left. Why?

That’s the Leftist singularity: no one on the Right is good, and everyone on the Left is great. Thus, the only view that can survive this singularity is the most Leftist idea. The difficulty most people have in assessing Leftist politics is that Leftism is not a political viewpoint: it is a religion.

Monty Python™ parodied that perfectly in their movie, The Life of Brian, when a member of the Judean People’s Front (or was it the People’s Front of Judea?) wanted to make sure that the rights of people who wanted to have babies but were dudes were enshrined in their politics. “Where is he going to keep the fetus, in a box?”

It’s absurd, but dealing with absurdity is a requirement in 2023, when a dude with all his bits won several of the NCAA® women’s swimming championships. Saying this is wrong makes me a “transphobe”. I wonder if suggesting that a 5’6” woman who weighs 76 pounds is mentally ill makes me an “anorexiphobe”?

Regardless, Trump declined to cross the Rubicon on January 6, so he was impeached. Huh?

Trump scares the Left. Trump likes trans people, likes all of the rest of the LGBTQ+ salad of people, but he is evil because . . . ?

It’s because he’s the first person to be president in decades that shook the status quo. W? He was on board with everything the Left wanted to do, just in a slightly different wrapper. Compassionate Conservatism, anyone?

Trump is a rallying cry on the Left. I would imagine they hate him more than they hate the memory of a certain Austrian painter*. He is the focus of hate on the Left.

“He made us look silly in front of the French!”
“He wanted to send people who had crossed the border illegally go home!”
“He has a golden plated PEZ® dispenser!”
“He made me feel attacked because he wasn’t Hillary!”
“A ghost of a lesbian who was shunned in 1634 told me that Trump was against furries.”

*Better known for other things.

Nearly every attack on Trump is built on emotion, because Trump wasn’t on the Right, Trump was a 1990s middle-of-the-road guy, but the Left had moved into Lenin territory by the time he ran.

Perhaps the biggest sin he If you look at the actual outcome of policies, Biden has been more of an enemy of the United States than Putin, Stalin, and Brezhnev combined. Trump actually, for the first time in decades, had the economy spun around, and was the only President in ages to negotiate for pure American advantage.

Obviously, he must be punished. So?

Any statement he makes must be the basis for a crime. He was impeached for trying to uncover Biden’s Ukrainian corruption. He is under indictment for paying tramps not to talk about him. He’s under investigation for questioning voting impropriety in Georgia for a silly question, and in Washington, D.C. for having fewer secret documents than Biden had in his garage.

When polarization leads to the desire to put political opponents into prison is acted upon? It’s no better than Zelensky putting his opponents in jail and shutting down dissident media, or Putin shutting down any media that disagreed with him. It is the end point of a Leftist regime who cannot accept any opinion that deviates from their ideals, no matter how small.

Why is Trump being indicted? Because he’s breathing.

Violence and Censorship Update

It looks like the fight back is beginning. I could write quite a bit, but here are a few memes that show the Normies are awakening:

Keep this in mind.

The trans-violence-abuse connection is coming in strong and is hitting the awareness of middle America. I’m shocked, shocked I say that a group so unstable they’ll self-mutilate and that has avowed to recruit children has been committing violence.

Stonetoss, calling out the Left. Just like napalm in the morning, it smells wonderful.

Who would have imagined that if you marginalize an amazingly productive group and give them no reason to love their country, that they’ll sell out.

Huh. New restrictions. Who would have imagined that? From the same people who brought you the Patriot Act.

Biden’s Misery Index

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

Yup, up again. This economy has the pedal depressed to “fail”. Brandon is a president that makes Jimmy Carter look like an economic genius.

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 still minimal right now. I’m betting it stays down until June at the earliest.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was down a bit more. I think this is a conscious attempt to keep things together, plus the media is all in on “peaceful but fiery protest” mode.

Economic:

Economic numbers are back up, a tiny bit. The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which isn’t good.

Illegal Aliens:

I’d say the border is wide open, but we have no border.

The Death of the Civic Nationalist

What does it mean to be an American? What are American values? If the Left is to believed, “everyone is an American, they just haven’t gotten here yet”. This was also the belief of the Civic Nationalist – bring in a Somalian who doesn’t know a bit of English, and throw them into a group of government-funded housing, pay them to go to school, and they’ll be as American as Joe down the street. Heck, anyone and anything could be American! Cannibals? Child molesters? As American as apple pie.

Surely, cutting off parts of your flesh because you deny reality is the most important part of the soul of being an American.

But it’s not true. And even to the most ardent of Civic Nationalists, it’s becoming apparent that the experiment of “import the third world, they’re Americans” is failing. However, it’s not like LGBTQ+ is a cult or something.

I’d make a joke comparing the Jonestown cult to LGBTQ+ folks, but the punchline is too long.

Patently, that is false. Being an American has at least some ties to the people that forged this nation out of the (mainly) wilderness that existed prior to the advent of Europeans on the continent. The idea that a person who just dropped off a plane, speaks no English, and becomes a resident because someone snuck through the border and is now an American is . . . ridiculous.

America has more culture than McDonald’s® and highways and Wal-Mart™. It has a proud history of people who have fought for independence, and fought for freedom, and fought for the simple right to be left alone. One survey I read of immigrants showed that they were not at all good with the Second Amendment, and wanted a lot more government intervention in their lives.

At what point does this become a crisis? I think it’s too late:

This represents a major change from the values of the country. Sure, it’s not only the immigration policy that led to this . . . oh, wait, it is. None of these values were evident in 1960. What changed? The Leftist indoctrination of students at colleges (based on immigrant influence) plus the change in the people who took the poll. Immigrants don’t have American values. But when we shovel enough in?

They’ll show what they believe in, which has nothing to do with the values that he Civic Nationalists hold. And no one voted for this.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/ycinnewyork/status/1632952440650620928

https://twitter.com/i/status/1630898009687900161

https://twitter.com/i/status/1641972791850467329

https://twitter.com/i/status/1641505237495160832

https://twitter.com/i/status/1641944965046747136

https://twitter.com/i/status/1641898070873985028

https://twitter.com/i/status/1638324077604622336

https://twitter.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1632971822923915268

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/03/07/antifa-forest-creatures-set-fire-to-cop-city-in-atlanta/

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/Newsweek/status/1638545563099471880

https://www.bizpacreview.com/2023/03/18/detroit-man-finds-out-the-hard-way-its-a-bad-idea-to-rob-concealed-permit-holder-and-his-friend-1342005/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11881265/Take-NYC-style-Watch-fearless-Good-Samaritan-tackle-armed-man-fleeing-cops.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11735803/Armed-intruder-left-critical-condition-shot-neck-homeowner.html

https://archive.fo/7qvGi

One Guy

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11950919/Army-sergeant-CONVICTED-murdering-Black-Lives-Matter-protester-George-Floyd-unrest.html

https://www.austinchronicle.com/news/2023-04-07/might-have-to-kill-a-few-people/

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/will-texas-governor-pardon-army-sergeant-sandbagged-soros-da-self-defense-shooting

Body Count

https://layoffs.fyi/

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.zerohedge.com%2Fpolitical%2Fmore-75-americans-aged-17-24-arent-fit-military-service-dod

https://apnews.com/article/community-college-enrollment-bb2e79222a4374f4869dc2e5359f2043

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11781425/More-60-men-20s-single-compared-just-30-women.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11780875/Gender-bender-America-FIFTH-Gen-Zers-identify-LGBT-seven-times-share-Boomers.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11890655/Philadelphia-PAY-pregnant-women-1-000-month-curb-falling-fertility-rates.html

https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fbusiness%2Fstory%2F2023-03-14%2Fdeaths-broken-limbs-distracted-driving

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11732497/More-48-000-Americans-committed-suicide-year-report-finds.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11863109/Oregon-SLAMMED-rising-assisted-suicide-rates-death-tourists-adding-431-tally-2022.html

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/is-coincidence-now-the-leading-cause

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2802602

https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/3917058-teen-overdose-deaths-have-doubled-in-three-years-blame-fentanyl/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11794373/New-Frankenstein-opioid-pills-40-times-potent-fentanyl-sweeping-U-S.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11942825/Biden-launches-fentanyl-public-health-blitz-young-people.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11776999/The-blanketed-fentanyl-NINEFOLD-rise-deadly-opioid-use-western-US.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11701187/Zombie-Nation-Shocking-images-lay-bare-Americas-drug-crisis.html

https://cms.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/2023-03-21_10-13-03.png?itok=AfYA-GtO

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11793647/Number-migrants-caught-crossing-border-illegally-surpasses-1M-mark-fiscal-year-2023.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11851659/Massive-horde-migrants-storm-El-Paso-border-checkpoint-brazen-attempt-enter-US.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11865349/El-Salvador-mega-prison-takes-intake-gang-members.html

Vote Count

https://newstalk1130.iheart.com/featured/common-sense-central/content/2023-02-27-liberal-group-running-massive-election-bribery-scheme-in-supreme-court-race/

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/signature-verification-software-used-maricopa-county-says-10-high

https://raheemkassam.substack.com/p/fox-vs-dominion-discovery-docs-show

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/athena-thorne/2023/03/07/the-american-left-rigs-elections-everywhere-else-so-why-wouldnt-they-do-it-here-n1676250

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/03/15/true-the-vote-requests-special-master-in-konnech-case/

https://thefederalist.com/2023/04/03/heres-a-look-into-popular-voter-database-erics-left-wing-origins/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11761979/Kari-Lake-vows-Arizona-gubernatorial-defeat-state-supreme-court.html

Civil War

https://twitter.com/citizens_sanity/status/1630217694224973824

https://mises.org/wire/secession-inevitable-war-prevent-it-optional

https://theconversation.com/secession-is-here-states-cities-and-the-wealthy-are-already-withdrawing-from-america-200813

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/3886527-texas-lawmaker-files-texit-bill-to-spur-vote-on-exploring-secession-from-us/

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/greater-idaho-movement-absorb-rural-oregon-counties-bad-country-top-dem-warns

https://www.planetizen.com/news/2023/03/122184-nations-most-advanced-secessionist-movement

https://dnyuz.com/2023/03/18/oregons-rural-urban-divide-sparks-talk-of-secession/

https://www.governing.com/now/we-cant-all-get-along-whats-driving-modern-secession-movements

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11873063/66-MILLION-Marjorie-Taylor-Greenes-call-national-divorce-blue-red-states.html

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/3884444-what-if-marjorie-taylor-greenes-secessionist-fantasy-came-true/
https://headlineusa.com/sellers-national-divorce-prevent-bloodshed/

https://highlyrespected.substack.com/p/the-national-divorce-delusion

https://andrewmtanner.medium.com/how-america-gets-a-divorce-d549ac6d89bb

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

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d9p9q/trump-indictment-civil-war-the-donald

https://www.mediamatters.org/tiktok/i-smell-civil-war-far-right-tiktok-users-are-alluding-violence-following-news-trumps

https://abovethelaw.com/2023/03/j-michael-luttig-federal-judge-civil-war-donald-trump-2024-election/

https://tomluongo.me/2023/04/01/indicting-trump-is-the-end-of-us-politics/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They also don’t like tank tops.

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

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

Huh. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

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

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

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

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

I’m no rube. I saw Scarface.

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

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

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

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

Huh. Surely those things weren’t connected?

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

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

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

That’s the history lesson.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deflation? Inflation? All I Want Is A Good Steak.

“Oh, my God! The automatic pilot! He’s deflating!” – Airplane!

I went to see a hedge fund manager at work and punch him in the face. And then get a Quarter Pounder®.

Welcome to the next step down. But how is this going to go?

First, there are signs that this will lead to more inflation than a Kardashian’s butt experiences in an entire season of whatever crap they’re doing on TV. Here are some signs pointed towards inflation:

It’s inflation season. That comes right after blowing up Russian pipeline season, duck season, rabbit season, duck season, rabbit season, and train derailment season.
$2 trillion (a number no doubt made up because it sounded good to whatever political appointee approves these things) of newly printed cash has been allocated to “stabilize” the banking system.

When Bernie Madoff stole his investors money, the Fed® didn’t backstop the investors, even though they couldn’t keep up with the compounding interest of Madoff’s lies. That was deflationary. But backstopping all bank customers, everywhere?

That’s more inflationary than Stormy Daniels, umm, attributes. I heard a rumor that half of Oprah’s money was in Silicon Valley Bank®. She got very upset when she thought that Elon Musk would be the only remaining African-American billionaire.

Everyone needs a backup. Mars is Elon’s planet-B.

The latest announcement from the Fed® on their plans to stop inflation sounded desperate. I imagine that Janet Yellin would offer to learn poll dancing if she thought it would lower inflation. I think that might work, since never in the history of mankind have so many dollar bills jumped back into pockets than when Janet walks on stage.

What about things that indicate that deflation might be around the corner?

During the implosion of Silicon Valley Bank™, it sounds like all of their bondholders and shareholders got vaporized. So, at least $15 billion and probably closer to $30 billion in cash was vaporized faster than a hoagie at Oprah’s house.
The stock market is down. When the market goes down, the money doesn’t power a secret spaceship, it just disappears like my biological father did when my biological mother got pregnant.
When interest rates go up, housing prices go down. Why? People buy houses based on borrowed money, and higher interest rates don’t increase the amount of money that they pay at (spins wheel) the PEZ™ factory. Nope, it just makes the house payment more expensive, unless the price of the house goes down. This is deflationary, because right now housing value is vaporizing like crack at Hunter’s place on a Saturday night.

The Chairman of the Fed® thought he was a magician, but he had chocolate on his shirt. He thought he had Twix® up his sleeve.

Here’s another, weird, example.

While I was writing this, The Mrs. walked by my secluded writing spot in the sitting room, and asked me, “Hey, want a steak?” I had a scotch already, so, that’s perfect!

“What answer do you expect me to give you?” She cooked the steak. This was a perfectly marbled ribeye, an inch and a half thick. She seared the sides, and it let out a gentle “moo” as I cut into it.

What did that ribeye cost? $12 a pound.

Why?

Well, there’s been a drought in prime cattle country. Cattle gotta drink.

The Mrs. and her brother own the better part of a buttload of land. The year before they got $6,000 for the hay. They fertilized. After Russia invaded the Ukraine, fertilizer prices spiked. They decided to just grow whatever grew and not spend the $3,000 to fertilize it.

They made $6,000 for the hay, same as the year before even though they had half the hay this year.

Sorry if that joke was corny.

For cattle farmers, growers, leaders, ranchers prices went up, but what they got for a cattle didn’t. Therefore? In March of 2023, I can get a pound of the best ribeye ever to grace a cast iron skillet for $12, whereas two Double Quarter Pounders With Cheese™ would cost me . . . $12.

This is not a hard choice.

In 2024 or 2025, though, I expect that same beef to cost double or more. I’ve been nagging my brother in law to get some cattle.

Why?

I like steak way more than the crap they serve at McDonald’s®. So, in some places, there is deflation right now.

Houses.
I read today that there are several projects in Vegas that just received stop orders because the financing fell through. If a project is a good idea at 1% interest and 2% inflation, it may not be a good idea while skydiving with a bag of loose change as your parachute.
Plans that don’t have financing. In an inflationary environment, a plan that doesn’t have financing is as useful as a waterproof towel.

There’s also been a rush towards our border of illegals that are desperate to come to a horribly awful and racist country. Is this inflationary, or deflationary?

Inflationary. Illegals do take jobs that are low on the pay scale, so that strawberries are 0.03% cheaper. Is that deflationary?

Can we call Transformers® Carmen?

No. It’s inflationary. Illegals do make things like strawberries, lettuce, and cocaine cheaper, but they do actually cost about $10,000, each, for every year that they’re here for things like welfare, schools, roads, etc. So a family of five? Costs everyone at least $50,000 per year.

Where does the cash come from?

That’s the genius! We print it!

So, inflation or deflation?

Yes.

Our currency is going to zero, probably sooner than many might anticipate. What will go up? In 2023, not cows. But in 2025? Yeah, nearly certainly.

Some things will come down – I can’t predict them all. But the Fed™ will never stop printing. Their choice is this:

Increase rates and blow up banks, the stock market, and house prices.
Keep rates the same and blow up the currency.

The current plan.

The currency is toast. So is Biden’s chance at re-election. This time next year? I expect that we’ll see all of the above in full motion. I predicted in 2018 that 2025 we’d see a big breakdown, and I’m not betting against that now. Biden will likely go down as the single worst resident of the White House in history.

I only hope that this complete economic and societal breakdown will finally rid us of the scourge of Kardashians. At least then it will be worth it.

Silicon Valley Bank? You’re Soaking In It.

“Why don’t we pretend he didn’t die? Just for a bit . . .” – Weekend at Bernie’s

Why can’t Ray Charles drive? He’s dead. (Outside of this one, memes are “as found”)

On March 15, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was walking to work, since Rome was declared by Gretanius Thunbergium to be a “walkable city” because she was concerned about the sweat of galley slaves and horses making the oceans too salty, thus enraging Neptune, the god of the sea.

This particular day was a good one in Rome, and the bright warm Sun shone down on Caesar as he made it to the Senate. Caesar loved the Senate, since all of the Senators were really cool and he loved hanging out with them to watch the gladiator games every Sunday.

Then, on arriving at the Senate? Caesar was stabbed in the back by raising interest rates, and, with his last, dying words, he said, “Please, take this salad dressing, and remember me by it. Oh, and name a way that babies are born after me. And Kaiser and Czar might be cool titles for kings in the future.”

Okay, that might not be exactly what happened. But you can’t prove it wasn’t, because it’s not on YouTube®.

But interest rates have been a thing since long before even Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, took the throne, and then became a human pincushion. And they’ve been gumming up society both before then, and also since then.

Last Friday, on March 10, a curious thing happened – the 19^th largest bank, Silicon Valley Bank, went tango uniform. To paraphrase Python, Monty:

“It’s a stiff. Bereft of life. It rests in peace. If you hadn’t backfilled the coffers with Federal Reserve® notes, it would be pushing up daisies. Its metabolic processes are now history. It’s off the twig. It’s kicked the bucket. It’s shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible. THIS IS AN EX-BANK.”

How, exactly, does a Norwegian blue parrot bank die so quickly?

The truth is, it has been dead for a bit. I’ll explain. You can get explanations of this elsewhere, but none of them will be as funny, since that’s what my job is.

When banks take in money, they have several options of what they can do with it. They can bury it in Mason® jars in the back 40, they can loan it to other people, or they can park it in an investment. Back in 2008, the big financial crisis was that the loans were to people that could never have paid the money back. I was offered a guaranteed approval home loan on a house (with zero down!) that was ten times my income.

“Why would you offer me that? I could never pay that back?” was my response.

The loan lady sighed audibly over the phone. “I know, but I’m required to tell you that.”

It’s like they never learned anything.

So, part of the problem in 2008 was that the loans were junk because some folks said, “I could use a pool surrounded by marble columns with a champagne fountain built out of PEZ™. I’m in!” even though they only made $32 dollars a month. They even had a name for these loans – NINJA – “No Income, No Job”.

These banks also gambled with the cash of the average depositor, investing in champagne PEZ© fountain manufacturers. Hey, how could they lose?

Oh, yeah. Things don’t go up forever. So when they end? It gets ugly.

The response to that by the Fed® was to use a cash cannon and barrage the banks. The idea was this, the banks would soak up the cash to paper over the bad debts, and if they had extra cash, they’d park it at the Fed™. Essentially, the Fed™, working with the banks, made sure that the bankers could keep getting big bonuses, not face criminal charges like the average small-town banker might if he stole the cash from the deposits to pay for his 4.5 out of 10 mistress and trips to Vegas.

It’s like there are different rules for you and I.

Nope. They got to keep their penthouses, private jets, and bimbos. In order to keep this nonsense so it wouldn’t implode, the one thing the Fed™ had to do was keep interest rates low. If the Fed© had tried this in 1975, or 1985, or 1995, the world would have punished it by driving the value of the dollar down (faster), cratering purchasing power and the economy.

But after 2008, there was no other big power. Japan was a basketcase, Europe was still the Jekyll an Hyde level continent, with Western Europe mainly concerned about how many “Syrians” they could import, and Eastern Europe mainly working out how to make more potatoes so they could make more vodka. Roads? Why?

That left the United States as, amazingly, still the only kid with a currency anyone trusted, even though we were spending like a sixteen-year-old with dad’s credit card.

Huh, wonder when YouTube® will ban people for this?

Oh, the Left is already trying to censor people. Nevermind.

I like the cut of his jib.

Not now. The COVID world created the Trump/Biden policy of “How can we spend more money today?” Contrast that with China’s “No body count is too high” policy, and, oddly, the world began to trust the United States less. Add in Biden’s incoherent policy of a.) letting wars start and b.) pushing away allies like the Saudis, and now we live in a world driven by chaos.

And we’ve lost the trust of the world.

So, the banks still do the same three things with the cash deposited in their banks: Mason™ jars in the backyard, loan it, or invest it. Last time, the banks invested in whatever crap floated in the window. That was silly.

The banks thought they had cracked the code: this time, they invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds.

Yay! That’s what a sober person would do, right?

Well, maybe. But when a bank buys a 10-year bond that has an attached interest rate of 0.08%, and the stated inflation rate is 6%, the value of that 10-year bond craters. Interest rates go up? Bond values go down. It turns out Silicon Valley Bank™ had some of these bonds. How many? Enough to wipe out all of the shareholder and bondholder (yeah, they bought and sold bonds) value. And it’s not limited to them. Here’s the take on the unrealized losses of the biggest banks in America:

Losers in 1901, Losers in 1921, Losers in 1929, Losers in 1937, Losers in 1945, Losers in 1948, Losers in 1953, Losers in 1957, Losers in 1950, Losers in 1960, Losers in 1969, Losers in 1973, Losers in 1980, Losers in 1981, Losers in 1990, Losers in 2001, Losers in 2007 . . . Oh, wait, the banks didn’t lose anything, it was just regular people.

The FDIC insures deposits to $250,000. Except when (reportedly) Oprah had half a billion in that particular bank. Turns out that the United States blinked: “You get all your money, and you get all your money, and you get all your money,” because Oprah is more important than you and I.

Two other banks have failed already. You can see that some of their CEOs were serious people only worried about the welfare of their depositors.

Yup, the “adults” are in charge.

This will not result in an immediate run. The Fed® and the Treasury will continue to backstop the banks because to do otherwise would collapse the system. They even say so. Valuing assets “at par” means at what the banks paid for them. I own a car from 2003. In Fedspeak® that asset would be valued at the initial purchase price, despite the fact that it has one light-second worth of miles (kilopascals) on it. Here’s proof:

See? I’m a respected journalist. Besides, I believe I am the VERY FIRST person to note that the reserve ratio had gone to zero. You can check it out. This will help my lawyer if I’m ever sued. (Serious about the very first part.)

The Fed™ is screwed. They want to keep Biden in office, which requires low interest rates and a booming economy and no inflation. But to lower inflation, they have to jack up the interest rates far above the rate of inflation. Biden cannot be re-elected. Period, unless there’s a global war.

Nah, people would never buy a war started due to economic issues.

Ooops. I’d say sorry, but this is already in the playbook.

Me? My bet is this can keeps rattling around causing damage for several months. Six or seven? Maybe. Eventually, the Fed® is going to figure out that they can’t paper over this mess.

In the meantime, the cash for businesses will dry up, and the only people that can borrow money will be those that don’t need it. New projects? They’ll be cancelled unless the company has the cash or it will ruin them if they don’t stop. New housing? Forget it. The housing market will collapse, (it already is) and the costs of new stuff to make new are so high that no one can afford it, forget the interest rate.

People will stop eating dinner in a restaurant. We already have.

No, the Ides of March won’t be the end. But you can see it from here. While you can, enjoy the nice walk on a sunny day.

And Neptune? He’s always been a whiney bitch. Ignore Neptune.

Bulgarian Mall Lawyers, Proteins, And . . . Life?

“I remember thinking ‘Jesus, what a terrible thing to lay on someone with a head full of acid’.” – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

If you were looking for good jokes, it’s nacho day.

Wednesday is a day that I normally cover economics, but I’m going in a different direction today. As Wilder, Wealthy and Wise has had over 300 Wednesday posts since I cranked it up in this format back in 2017, that’s 300 comments on wealth and related economic topics, something like 1,500 memes, and so tonight, I’ll only briefly talk about economics: we’re screwed. Pic related.

Okay, that looks like a mountain that Yosemite Sam® has to climb to catch a varmint.

Okay, with that over with, let’s shift gears entirely. Why? Because, why not?

Let’s talk about Life.

I’m going to start with a number. 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

I wrote it out with all the zeros because that’s a lot of zeros, and bloggers get paid by the character. I could have written it out as 1×10³⁰⁰, and it would have been the same, but not had the same emotional impact. What, exactly does 1×10³⁰⁰ represent?

Yeah, if I divide most anything by 1×10³⁰⁰ I get zero.

Let’s take a step back. RuBisCO (short for ribulose-1,5-bisphosphate carboxylase-oxygenase, not Russian Biscuit Company) is probably the most common protein on Earth, making up about 30% of the protein in a plant leaf. When you eat lettuce, you’re chowing down on lots of RuBisCO. It looks like the picture below, sorta, but is much more tasty with some ranch dressing or a nice raspberry vinegarette:

When I was weightlifting I bought expired protein powder. There was no other whey.

By Ericlin1337 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67176768

This pile of spaghetti is a mass of amino acids, but it has a really important task – it rips apart sweet, sweet CO₂ so grass can eat CO₂ and can grow to be eaten by a cow and turned into a ribeye. Or so tobacco can grow and turn into a nice Macanudo™. Or so grain can grow and turn into scotch. A day without RuBisCO is a day without a decent dinner.

Planet Earth without RuBisCO is probably a barren rock.

If you stretched it out, it’s nothing more than a chain of amino acids that are the building blocks of the RuBisCO protein. RuBisCO doesn’t turn CO₂ into steak without being mashed together, just right. The protein (which is just a bunch of amino acids connected up) has to be folded up. If it doesn’t fold up perfectly, it doesn’t work.

The Japanese gang member responsible for keeping the crime boss’s beer cold is called the Yakoozie.

That’s where all the zeros come in. The proteins that turn into RuBisCO can fold up in to make that spaghetti-looking thing in quite a few ways. 1×10³⁰⁰ of them, approximately. There are more ways that single protein can fold up than there are planets in the entire observable universe. There are only 100,000,000,000 total planets (our best guess) in the Milky Way. Again, our best guess is that the ones that aren’t too hot (Mercury) or too cold (Pluto, still a planet in my book, screw you Neil DeGrasse Tyson) are about 300,000,000.

Now compare with the number of different ways just one protein required for life can fold and be useful. Keep in mind, that when proteins fold wrong, bad things happen, like they don’t work. There are even worse consequences, like having brains rot – mad cow disease is a misfolded protein that replicates in the brain and causes people (and cow) brains to turn into brain sponge. And not the good kind of brain sponge.

Now, as much as I love Bulgarian Mall Lawyers and their ability to be tenacious in personal injury suits and ability to do rudimentary divorce work, if they’re allowed to use shotguns. No, having Bulgarian Mall Lawyers attempt to fix a Bulgarian Mall Lawyer copy machine in their law office that used to be a Spencer’s™ gifts (right between the place that used to sell cheese and sticks of meat and Waldenbooks®) by poking at it with pencils is far more likely than having a protein folded correctly. But let’s see a protein convince my ex-wife to sign the papers.

How do you get two Canadian brothers off a couch in a hurry? Say, “please get off the couch.”

So, we have 1×10³⁰⁰ ways to fold a protein wrong, and 300,000,000 planets. I’ll even spot you that there have been several billion years. And billion years is a long time, almost as long as my first marriage. But 1×10³⁰⁰ is so large that it’s more likely that I put in several pallets of 2x4s, drywall, nails, paint, shingles, carpet, doors, wiring, outlets, and plumbing components into a box and shake the hell out of it and get a house I could live in than have RuBisCO form.

And RuBisCO is important because it is so basic – it’s the building block for extracting energy from sunlight. No RuBisCO? No Nabisco™. To top it off, it forms and folds in milliseconds inside the leaves of every tree on Earth when the temperature and chemistry is right. We have no idea how it does this, and couldn’t computationally predict this.

This is just one protein that needs to be folded up properly for everything to work out so I can have a decent steak, scotch, and cigar. When looking further at things like the storage of information on DNA, it starts to look like the ultimate information storage device ever created – the DNA in one cell of a typical human is over six feet (seventeen milliliters) long. The DNA in all of the cells of your body is twice the diameter of the Solar System, but if you were to stretch all of it out, it’s unlikely you’d be able to go to work on Monday. Each cell contains three billion base pairs of DNA, or almost the number of words in the average Stephen King novel.

RuBisCO is improbable. DNA? Wow. The squish bits that make us up are at the smallest level more complicated than anything man has ever created, with the exception of the way that a VCR needed to be adjusted so it didn’t flash 12:00.

David Bowie’s VCR always flashed 12:00, too. Time may change him, but he can’t change time.

One of the ideas of those who would contemplate that life on Earth in general, and humanity in particular, came from random chance must confront are the mathematical impossibilities of things like RuBisCO appearing at random out of only 300,000,000 planets times 8,000,000,000 years. Further, they have to accept that the number and types of elements available for this are all, randomly, in the proper proportions and properties to support life.

This doesn’t even deal with the observed rates of genetic drift, or the creation of amazingly improbable structures like the human eye or the brain. The brain exhibits non-trivial quantum effects, so from the smallest possible structures of humanity to the largest imaginable structures of the Universe their appears to be an intent. Random chance cannot remotely explain what we are, and how we have been created, or this marvel we call consciousness, or what Bulgarian Mall Lawyers call, “a new client”.

It is readily apparent, based on logic and mathematics alone that there are only a few possibilities:

That the Universe has been created with intent and a pattern (the big G God),
this is all a simulation (the little g god),
that life (and thus humanity) was designed and seeded among the stars (which begs, by who or what?)
that the purpose of the Universe may be solely for the creation of the Ultimate PEZ® dispenser which may take the form of Yosemite Sam®, or
that there are forces that exist in realms in which we cannot yet discern through any physical means.

Random choice is out, mathematically. Every single time I see it resorted to, it’s a kludge and requires more faith than that which would be required for God.

How else would you explain Yosemite Sam™ or Bulgarian Mall Lawyers?