Category: Panzers

The United States And The Road From Abundance To Bondage

“Is life in bondage better than death?” – The Ten Commandments

I heard Leftists can’t find tasty mushrooms:  someone said they lost their Morel compass.

Henning W. Prentis, Jr., presented a speech at the mid-year graduation of the University of Pennsylvania in 1943.  Mr. Prentis was the President of the Armstrong Cork Company.  Now, you might think that a cork company would only be of interest to the Swiss Army, but Armstrong was a different breed:  during World War II Mr. Prentis had Armstrong Cork making .50 caliber ammo, tips for warplane wings, sound insulation for submarines, and camouflage.

If your wife can fix a car, fix dinner, and then set a broken bone?  You have a Swiss Army Wife.

Eventually, several divisions were spun off, and it’s certain that you’ve walked on Armstrong Flooring and sat on furniture that was made by yet another Armstrong subsidiary underneath ceiling grids and ceiling tiles that were made by yet another Armstrong company.  All of this was started in a little Pennsylvania cork company way before Pennsylvania’s voting fraud made Kim Jong-un consider moving to Philadelphia.

Anyway, Mr. Prentis seemed to have an awful lot to say – his commencement speech clocked in at 4,953 words.  At 125 spoken words a minute, that’s nearly 40 minutes of straight talking, with zero memes or bikini graphs – looks like he didn’t know how to put a cork in it.  And all of those speeches were before the long lines of diplomas.

Graduation must have taken six days back then.  If you want to read the whole address, it’s here (LINK).

Mr. Henning Prentis’ essay has some very relevant content to today – I’ve posted just a few bits of it below.  I’ve fixed some punctuation, but the words are still Henning’s.  But I still haven’t found the answer to the most important question:  Who the heck names their kid Henning?

The historical cycle seems to be: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to apathy; from apathy to dependency; and from dependency back to bondage once more.

At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies. Under such circumstances, the competent citizen is certainly not a fool if he insists upon using the compass of history when forced to sail uncharted seas.

Usually, so-called new remedies are not new at all. Compulsory planned economy, for example, was tried by the Chinese some three millenniums ago, and by the Romans in the early centuries of the Christian era. It was applied in Germany, Italy and Russia long before the present war broke out.

Yet, it is being seriously advocated today as a solution of our economic problems in the United States. Its proponents confidently assert that government can successfully plan and control all major business activity in the nation, and still not interfere with our political freedom and our hard-won civil and religious liberties. The lessons of history all point in exactly the reverse direction.

Prentis’ quote can, thankfully, be summed up in a single chart that won’t take you 40 minutes to read:

Let’s not be like Russia circa 1917, okay? (Source for base: Wikimedia, CC-BY-SA-4.0, J4lambert)

In the United States, we were (mostly) blessed by abundance for decades at a time.  The Great Depression wasn’t the normal condition for the United States – it was an aberration of a fairly prosperous place.  But the Great Depression really was bad – Bob The Builder® was just called Bob then.

Inertia has a quality all of its own, but luck always helps.  After World War II, Europe was mostly devastated by the war.  Half of a decade of bombs and artillery shells and tanks and armies had killed millions, but also destroyed a majority of European and Asian governments plus much of the productive infrastructure.

America, meanwhile, had been untouched.  It had the oil, the steel mills, the agriculture, and the workforce.  It created consumer goods for itself and products for the world.  There was little competition.

Last time I bought land it was in Egypt.  Turns out I fell for a Pyramid scheme.

Oh, sure you could buy the Soviet version of Chevy Camaro® called the Lada Latitude©.  The Latitude™ was modeled on the Soviet T-34 Tank (500 horsepower diesel engine) that went zero to 32 mph in 45 seconds, and sported a stunning 1.17 miles per gallon in the base model.   It was also available with optional dual jet engines from a MiG-21.  Sadly those engines didn’t allow the tank to move, but did allow the wolf to blow down that pesky brick house, along with those capitalist swine.

There are many things you can call Soviet engineering.  Subtle is not one of them.

But post World War II gave the United States, and then, gradually the world, abundance, leading to selfishness.  Selfishness was probably best showcased in the 1970s and 1980s.  Tom Wolfe even titled the 1970s “The Me Decade.”  The 1980s followed suit – the pursuit of wealth was seen by many as the goal.  Morality?  The market (and leisure suits) were the definition of morality.

The 1980s bled into complacency, and finally into apathy.  The Grunge movement was a reaction to materialism.  What did it all mean?  What does any of this matter?  Pure apathy, so let’s not bathe and get a bunch of piercings and tattoos.

Now we are in a nation where citizens aren’t seeking freedom – they’re actively seeking dependence on the government – free money (guaranteed basic income), free healthcare (Medicare for all), and all manner of other support systems.  To quote one Mr. Harvard McClain (1950s?):  “If your government is big enough to give you everything you want, it is big enough to take away from you everything you have.”

Sure, I want everything for nothing from the State, but in every single time that’s been tried in human society, it always ends the same way – with the people becoming the enemy of the State.

And that’s how you get to Mr. Prentis’ last stage: bondage.

For a guy dealing with cork, Mr. Prentis has some pretty good vision.

Oh, and I don’t have to yell to get The Mrs. to come downstairs – she can hear a cork pop all the way across the house . . . .

Fragility, Resilience, Or Antifragility?

“When we finished he shook our hands and said, ‘Endeavor to persevere!’” – The Outlaw Josey Wales

I guess there are a lot of rivers in France, which makes sense.  Water follows the path of least resistance.

In our lives we have choices in how we react to the world, just like you have a choice of computer passwords.  I tried to choose “hi-hat” but the computer responded that “Sorry, password cannot contain symbols.”

While models always come with limitations, I was struck by an analysis that Vox Day (LINK) posted the other day.  In this, the original author that Vox discusses, Samuel Zilincik, refers to three types of opponents – Fragile, Resilient, and Anti-Fragile.  The author discusses these qualities in terms of how certain nations fought through the history of time.

When I was reading, I thought that’s one way of looking at people as well as civilizations engaged in conflict, so, why not?  Bear with me a little bit as I use World War II as an example that relates three nations to three states of being.

As an example, France was Fragile during World War II.  Yes, I know that World War II France wasn’t a person since if France 1939 was a person they’d have been Inspector Clouseau, but stick with me.  After the German invasion, everything about the French and British response was fragile.  Horrible communication, absolute battlefield collapse of poorly disciplined and trained soldiers, failure of leadership to create even the most rudimentary strategy against mobile warfare, and a general collapse of all French public will after the Germans showed up on the doorstep of Paris.

And the food wasn’t great, either.

We know the jokes about French military performance.  But France was fragile.

How are people fragile?

Bakeries in Denmark don’t add too much sugar to pastry – they don’t want to be sweetish.

I’ve been in tough situations with people, and seen some give up.  In extreme cases, it took very little for them to break down – relatively minor incidents led to implosions.  It was like an Antifa® member losing their cellphone with all their Starbucks™ points.  A complete catastrophe!

But I’ve seen normal people lose it, too.  More than once.  Ever see someone break down because of a bad test score?  Ever seen someone break down because they couldn’t get over a break up?

Fragility comes from having to defend things that aren’t your principles.  The French couldn’t stand to see Paris become a war zone.  My friend couldn’t stand to see a girl that he wasn’t suited for go away.  I wasn’t there to give the French emotional support, but I was there for my friend.  And he was there for me when I got divorced.  The core of fragility is holding on to things that aren’t principles.

Once you understand that everything that you own can be taken from you, but that you still own your attitude and the way you feel about things, you are less fragile.  In fact, you move toward the next stage:  Resilient.

In World War II, the one country that screams resilience more than any other was The Soviet Union.  Yes, Stalin was perhaps the most horrible man to have ever lived and communism is the worst system ever devised, unless your goal is human suffering and misery.  But the Soviet people fought.  And fought.  And fought.  Whenever a Russian dropped, he was replaced by another Russian and a Mongolian and two Uzbeks for good measure.  The Soviet Union had redundancy.  Even though they were generally inferior in many ways, the Soviets didn’t give up.  And, when the German supply lines were overextended?

I hear the bread was great in the Soviet Union.  People would wait in line 8 hours for a single piece.

The resilience worked.  The gradual wearing down of the technical superiority by numerical superiority and a willingness to not surrender.  If you have to choose to fight an enemy, a resilient one is far worse than a fragile one.

What makes a person resilient?  That’s the focus on values.  Sure, the Soviet Union had some really lousy values, but they were willing to fight in what they called The Great Patriotic War for the idea of Russia, even though sometimes the troops advanced with guns pointed at their backs, that was more the exception than the rule.

When you live for values and refuse to give up, you become resilient.

The last way a person can live is to become Anti-Fragile.  Anti-fragile is a term that I saw for the first time from Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the econo-philosopher.  It means that if you drop a vase, it doesn’t shatter, it doesn’t persist, it becomes stronger.  Vases don’t do that.  But systems do.

Well, maybe not drop it, but attack it with several carrier air groups?

The United States in World War II is an example of an anti-fragile system.  When attacked at Pearl Harbor, it became stronger.  Even though Battleship Row at Pearl was in flames, that attack mobilized the American people.  Pa Wilder signed up on December 8, 1941, as did millions of other men.  But those that didn’t sign up formed a pool of men and women that filled empty factories, constructed new ones, pumped oil, farmed, and built ships and planes and truck and tanks on a level never seen before in history.

Although it’s certain that the majority effort that it took to win World War II in Europe was done by the Soviets, it’s arguable that the Soviets would have folded in 1942 or 1943 without the food, trucks, planes, and ammunition that were provided by the United States.

The United States won the War of the Pacific nearly singlehandedly, although it’s early efforts in North Africa left the British shaking their heads and wondering if the United States could even field an army capable of fighting.  The United States emerged after World War II as an industrial, economic and military behemoth.  No one would argue that the United States of 1945 was weaker than the United States of 1941.  The United States in 1941 is a great example of anti-fragility.

Oh, yeah, don’t forget the atomic bombs.

The prettiest atoms become atomic models.

How do people become anti-fragile?  Well, start by being resilient.  Then?  Add learning.  If you can recognize your mistakes and learn from them?  That’s a good start.  Capacity?  Oddly enough, a person operating at peak capacity has less anti-fragility – they have little capacity to improve and a great deal of capacity for failure.  Efficient systems are prone to failure.  The two-income household was, even before this economic downturn, more prone to bankruptcy, rather than less.

Why?

Because the system is too efficient – most couples tend to use every dime they earn.  When one income goes away?  They system fails.  Unused money (savings) is redundancy.  It’s inefficient, but it’s capacity that you have for the unexpected.

And if you’re not focused on keeping everything, you can take risks.  Lots of them – just so long as the risks aren’t so big that they crater you.  This blog is one of mine.  And the younger you are, the bigger risk you can take without cratering your life – you have time to make it up even if you lose everything at age 25.

I wouldn’t let my kids sleep in the bed with me when they were little.  I told them I couldn’t risk the monster following them into my room.

A vision of Truth is required.  One time a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and he noted that I might be trying to write what people want to read, rather than what I believe.  Nope.  My soul is in this.  Do I agree with everything I’ve written?  Of course not.  I’ve written over 535 posts over the course of 3.5 years.  I’ve learned.  Some of my views have changed as I have changed.  I’d be foolish to not change my views as I learn and understand more.  But as I experiment, my soul has to be involved – I have to be a seeker of Truth, even in my experiments.

I’ve had a few moments of being Fragile in my life – mainly when I was trying to hold on to things and situations that I should have left behind me.  I’ve had the majority of my life lived in a Resilient mode, putting one foot in front of the other and moving onward.

I can see that the best and most productive times in my life are when I’ve lived it in the Anti-Fragile mode.  It may seem odd, but in many ways the Resilient mode is the enemy of the Anti-Fragile mode.  Resiliency is about persevering.  It’s not bad.  There’s rarely any traffic on the second mile and working harder is, in some ways, the easy way out.

But when you achieve an Anti-Fragile life?  Sometimes you achieve something amazing enough to even surprise yourself.

And always remember that when Germany and France go to war, you know 100% who will lose.

Belgium.

Victory and Sacrifice

“It ain’t over until we say it’s over.” – Animal House

VICTORY

After one victory, I threw my ball into the crowd.  The people at the bowling alley did not like that.

This is not going to be a typical Wednesday post.  I had one planned out, notes ready.  Then, while smoking soon to be worthless Federal Reserve Notes™ while drinking one my last bottles of Leftist Tears© from 2016, I changed my mind about what I was going to post about.  I think you’ll like it.  And the best part is I already have notes for next week.

I first heard about the following story from Lindybeige.  His video is below.  It’s long, at nearly an hour.  It also has the very best commercial for ear buds (in the middle of the video) that I’ve ever watched.

On February 26, 1943, German forces in Tunisia began an attack toward the west.

American and British troops were to the west of Tunisia in Algeria, and British troops were to the east, based out of Egypt.  The idea of the attack was to cut off the British and American troops in the west, so the British troops coming out of Libya and Egypt could be defeated in the east.

North Africa was a mess for the Germans.  The British were doing a magnificent job sinking Axis supplies, so they were running out of stuff they needed to make war.  The Axis had also lost most of its territory: the Italians and Germans had been kicked out of Libya and were just barely hanging on in Tunisia, whereas the British were desperate to take Tunisia so George Lucas could film Star Wars® there in 1975.

Fun fact:  Star Wars© is closer in time to World War II than it is to 2020.

NOTPANZ

Of course, in the last interaction I had with the police, it was the goat they were looking for.

The Italians hadn’t switched sides yet, so they were still fighting alongside of the Germans in North Africa.  Like Mitt Romney, the Italians tend to switch sides quite a bit.  I heard a rumor that the Italians were going to switch sides and join with COVID-19 and fight against humanity this August, but that hasn’t happened.

Yet.

Anyway, the German operation had the super sexy name of Operation Oxhead, which also describes the operational name I gave to my divorce.  Also, like my divorce, it was a last ditch effort to maintain my sanity.  The German word for Oxhead is “Ochsenkopf” which is what I imagine Germans yell at each other during sex.

As part of the Operation, a German colonel named Rudolf Lang was given command of a pretty significant body of tanks and troops.  He had 77 tanks.  For a battle in North Africa, that was a pretty sizable force.  He also had a technical advantage – of those 77 tanks, 20 were the new Tiger tanks.

Tiger tanks were big and slow, but they were well armored and likely the most technically advanced tanks in North Africa at the time.  Heck, they might have been the best tanks in the world at the time.  To have 20 of them was quite an advantage.  And the Tiger was far better than the Swiss tanks, which were always in neutral.

TIGER

I’m really into turrets.  I love tank tops.

Lang was supposed to attack up a mountain pass, Hunt’s Gap, and the only thing in his way to achieving his objective was the 5th Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment and the 155th Battery of the 172nd Field Regiment Royal Artillery.  Certainly that sounds pretty impressive if you don’t speak military, but the 5th Battalion probably was somewhere between 400 and 600 soldiers and officers, whereas the 155th Battery was 130 soldiers and officers.  So, somewhere between 600 and 700 guys.

Lang had 300 guys just sitting in tanks.  There were at least another 13,000 soldiers, many of which had already seen combat on the Eastern Front.  All of Lang’s troops were headed for those 600 or 700 guys.

At least the British were highly trained, right?

No.  Those 600 or 700 guys who were trained in lightning fashion and mostly hadn’t seen any combat besides a fight over a girl in a pub.  So, unless you counted numerical superiority, experience, or weapons superiority, the British had everything possible going for them.

There is a moment in time that you know that life is about to become very challenging.  That happened for the British troops around 6:30am on February 26 when they came under mortar fire.  Mortars are those tubes that you see soldiers drop ammunition in before it goes “fwoop” and shoots up in a ballistic arc.  The German mortars had a maximum range of about a mile.

MMORTAR

Was this the 1943 version of a “free continental breakfast”? 

The guns the 155th Battery had were 25 pounders, but they only had 8 of them.  These had a range of ten miles.  For a fight to occur with the enemy at less than a mile wasn’t what they were set up for.

The German mortar fire was accurate.  But the British held.

Then?  All the things that you might imagine if you were living a nightmare where you were waiting for happened.  The Tiger tanks showed up around 11AM.  And the British took out four of them.  The Germans withdrew, until 1PM when they showed up again, within 600 yards with thirty tanks.  And they had company, with 8 Bf-109 Messerschmitt fighters, who generally shot up the place, setting the British ammunition and explosives on fire.

The British, realizing they had to have ammunition, actually unloaded the ammo from the burning trucks.  The British knocked out another three tanks.  Again, the Germans withdrew.

At 5:30PM the next attack began.  Tank fire took out British cannon, one at a time, with some fighting between tank and 25 pounder taking place at 10 yards or less.  I personally can’t imagine the courage that took, launching an artillery shell designed to go miles at a tank right in front of you.  Since they were using armor-piercing shells, the also had to use the highest propellant load.

Courage, plain and simple.  The last voice message on the radio was, “Tanks are upon us.”

I can’t find casualty figures for the infantry.  I’m sure the numbers were horrible.  The survivors eventually broke and escaped to the west, probably not long after the 5:30PM attack started.

The artillery?  When the day started, there were 130 men, as I mentioned.  Nine made it back to British lines, and seven of those were wounded.  Several were taken as POWs, and survived the war, but I don’t have a definitive number.

25POUND

This is the same model that was used by the 155th.

It sounds like this might have been a useless activity, but it wasn’t.  The actions of the 155th Battery slowed the Germans down long enough so that the British were able to put together a defense to turn them back.  This blunted the German attack, and the last German offensive in North Africa was over.  A few months later, 250,000 Axis troops would surrender in North Africa.  This was at least partially because the 155th held.

Their sacrifice turned the tide of battle.  Whenever you feel that you can’t win, well, you might not win.  But continuing to fight the good fight for as long as you can may help others win.

Rudolf Lang, the German commander, even got a nickname from his own troops after the battle – Panzer Killer – I was able to find the dispatch online which was sent to Berlin where it was mentioned by his superior officer.  Now, that sure sounds like a cool nickname.   But when it’s given to you by guys whose job it is to drive Panzers?

Not so much.

I said the last voice message from the 155th was, “Tanks are upon us.”  That, however, wasn’t the last message the 155th sent.  There was one more message, in Morse code:

. . . –

If you think of this as a sound, think of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, that’s the sound, and that dot-dot-dot-dash was played on every BBC broadcast during the war.  It’s a letter.

. . . – is the letter V.

For Victory.

Your effort matters.

Your Economy, Featuring: Romans, Rothschilds, and Rioters

“You have two settings-no decision and bad decision. I wouldn’t let you run a bath without having the Coast Guard and the fire department standing by, but yet here you are running America. You are the worst thing that has happened to this country since food in buckets and maybe slavery!” – Veep

DOLPHIN

I had made a mistake and bought too many art supplies.  That was my excess stencil crisis.

Cui bono.  That’s Latin for “who benefits,” and in this case doesn’t have anything to do with the singer for the band U2©, who have been benefiting from everything.  Even my GPS is branded by U2™, and it sucks.  The streets have no name, and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

Cui bono.

That quote being in Latin is especially appropriate for today’s post.   Marcus Licinius Crassus (115 B.C. – 53 B.C. – they aged backwards then) goes down in history for creating the first fire department that Rome had.  At his own expense, he recruited and trained a brigade of 500 men who, at the first sign of a fire, would speed toward the smoke and flames.

Crassus would rush to the fire with them.  Once the fire department was on site, Crassus would find the building owner and offer to buy the burning building at an obvious discount.  I am not making this up.  Obviously, the longer the fire went on, the lower Crassus’ offer would go.  Once the property owner had sold, Crassus would give the signal and his fire department would save his newly purchased building.

I’m sure that sometimes the fire got away from him, but most of the time Crassus profited from the deal.  It was a fire sale, right?

ARSON

When I was working as a firefighter, in one building all that was left was the bottom of a shoe – it must have been the sole survivor.

Often, Crassus would then rebuild the building using his army of slave architects and artisans (not making that up, either), and then lease the building back to the original owner.  So, Crassus even had a way to get his money back.  Crassus was wealthy not only by ancient standards, but by any standards.  He’d be worth at least $11 billion in today’s money.

Cui bono?  Crassus.  I looked for a name I could call Crassus, but it was hard to find one, this being a family-friendly blog.  I’ll settle on cullion.

This is an early example of economic plunder.  Legal, yes.  Honorable?  No.

It didn’t stop with Crassus.

UBER

I once paid $20 to meet the Prince, but I partied like it was only $19.99.

When you search the Internet for tales of Nathan Rothschild back in 1815, you’ll find a host of stories that from the scholarship of 2020, don’t seem to be supported.  But what generally seems to be agreed with (even by the Rothschild Archives – LINK) is that during the Napoleonic Era, Rothschild and his brothers across the European continent had a fairly sophisticated system to transfer news and information to each other.

Information is just like a building fire in Rome:  the sooner you catch it, the more it is worth.

What had been vexing everyone in London during June of 1815 was the return of Napoleon from exile and his resumption of power in France.  Since Europe had been fighting alongside Napoleon or with Napoleon for nearly 20 years, people in the United Kingdom were scared to death that a victory by Napoleon could lead to another 20 years of war.  And just like today, no one wanted to watch a re-run.

NAPOLEON

Napoleon broke out of exile because he needed more Elba room.

Lord Wellington had been put in charge of a coalition of armies from across Europe, 68,000 total troops.  Joined by 50,000 Prussians under Blücher (cue obligatory whinny), Wellington met Bonaparte at the small village of Waterloo.  Napoleon wasn’t alone.  He had 73,000 French soldiers, and Wellington had left his panzers in his other coat, so the French fought back like they’d have to shower and give up cigarettes if they lost.

Spoiler alert:  Napoleon lost, but barely.  I think it had to go into at least one overtime, and there were some controversial instant replays.

The story goes that with the Rothschild information network, Nathan was notified about Wellington’s victory before anyone in London.  By knowing that, Nathan could make a killing in the stock market.  How well did he do?  We don’t know.  His courier wrote him:  “I am informed by Commissary White that you have done well by the early information which you had of the Victory gained at Waterloo.”  It is reported (LINK) that the Rothschild fortunes went from £500,000 to £1,000,000 in that year.  So probably pretty well, since I assume a £ is a metric $ or something.

Yes, I know that there are other stories about Nathan’s Big Day Out® that are much more exaggerated, but this one does fine in proving my point:  the best time to make money is in an uncertain market.  Or, as has been attributed to Nathan:  “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.”  Especially if, like Nathan and Marcus, you can remove the uncertainty and make your bet a sure thing.

ELMO

 I did invest in an Asian/Middle East fusion restaurant called, “Wok Like an Egyptian.”

This went on during Roman times, and it went on during Napoleonic times.  Is it going on today?

It certainly is.  I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other week, and he works for a company that was funded by a private equity firm.  Per my conversation, they deals that just his company is looking at are in the range of one hundred million to one billion dollars.  Sure, that’s a pretty big range.  But the kicker was this:

“There are pools of billions of dollars waiting for deals.”

What kind of deals?  Deals on great assets in a collapsing economy.

As we look at the wreck that we’re seeing in the economy due to the WuFlu and now the great #BLM (Burning Looting Marxists), what sort of reaction are we seeing?  Does it surprise anyone that 269 companies (LINK, H/T to CA at Western Rifle Shooters) are supporting the (actual, really founded by Marxists, look it up) BLM?

Does it surprise anyone that hundreds of millions of dollars are flooding in to BLM and affiliated organizations?  And I’m not exaggerating the amount – the fund just for bailing out rioters and looters in Minneapolis was over $90 million dollars.  Some people can loot a whole week and not make that much!

The support for BLM could be from one of the following sources, and I suspect that one or more is in play depending on the company donating:

  • Genuine support for civil rights. Sure, I believe that from companies that import goods made by overseas labor treated more poorly than the Wilder family treats our outdoor cat.
  • A cynical ploy signaling corporate virtue to get people to buy burgers. Think of it like an advertisement, but instead of featuring the social justice flavor of the week, it’s BLM this week.
  • Coordinated donations with full knowledge that the money will go toward a Marxist transformation of the United States.
  • Selected by the CEO’s secretary executive assistant at random.

SJW

I never let BLM members into my basement – I don’t want a whine cellar.

Amazon® has really been impacted by COVID-19.  I’m betting that every facet of Bezos’ business has been helped, from their online shopping to their web infrastructure to their movie rental business.  Coronachan has been good to Jeff.  But I don’t blame Bezos for that – I don’t think it was his plan to infect the United States with a virus and convince everyone to stay in the basement for three months and then have seven pages of BLM merch to sell.

Because if he did?  That’s some real Bond villain stuff and I’ve got to say, that’s the most anyone has ever done to try to convince me to buy a Prime® subscription.

Cui bono?  I mean, besides Bezos?

Someone is going to profit from BLM, even beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars donated recently to it, and even beyond the billions of dollars that will go to purchase assets during the crisis.  And it may not be money, or burger sales.  It might be measured in raw power, the power to turn a society towards the Marxist goals of the founders of BLM.

But even Crassus knew that once a fire got started, it just might get away from you.

Stalingrad, Democide, and Maybe The Government Isn’t Here To Help You?

“What does a Nietzschean mother hope for her son when she names him Genghis Stalin?” – Andromeda

JOBICIDE

Actual Joke From the USSR (via Wikipedia©):  Stalin reads his report to the Party Congress. Suddenly someone sneezes. “Who sneezed?” Silence. “First row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot, and he asks again, “Who sneezed, Comrades?” No answer. “Second row! On your feet! Shoot them!” They are shot too. “Well, who sneezed?” At last a sobbing cry resounds in the Congress Hall, “It was me! Me!” Stalin says, “Bless you, Comrade!” and resumes his speech.

In August of 1942, the civilian inhabitants of Stalingrad probably totaled about a million people.  That number included the normal residents, but also a huge influx of Soviet refugees caused by the Axis push through the Ukraine.  However, the German Army Group: South was on the attack, and had been pushing toward Stalingrad for weeks.

According to Google Maps™ at the end of July, 1942, Stalingrad was less than a nine hour stroll from the German position.  I assume that includes a lunch and bathroom break and maybe a juice box at halftime, but you never can tell since those Germans were sticklers for keeping to the schedule.  Besides, I’m not sure that the Germans had good cell reception at that point, so they might have had to ask for directions.

Stalin decided that the Soviet soldiers would fight best if they had their backs to a city filled with innocent civilians, so he had absolutely forbidden any evacuation of Stalingrad.  At least, any evacuation of people.  The Soviets did take the time to get the grain, cattle, and railway cars out of Stalingrad.  At least Stalin had his priorities straight, right?  I mean, railway cars don’t eat and don’t complain.

JETSKI

Popular German Joke During Stalingrad:  Our troops have captured a two-room apartment with kitchen, toilet and bathroom, and managed to hold two-thirds of the apartment, despite heavy enemy counterattack.

Not evacuating the inhabitants of Stalingrad was entirely consistent with Stalin’s fun loving and carefree personality.  Stalin insisted that his own firstborn son become a Soviet artillery officer.  When Stalin’s boy was captured by the Germans in the first few days after Operation Barbarossa kicked off and then rolled over Soviet troops like the media over inconvenient stories about Joe Biden, Stalin was upset.

Why?

Stalin was upset that his son hadn’t killed himself rather than be captured.  So, yeah, Stalin wasn’t exactly a sentimental guy, but at least he was consistent.  And he was consistent throughout decades.  Between 1917 and 1987, the Soviet Union was responsible for (roughly) 62 million deaths of their own people.  All but 6 million of those deaths occurred while Stalin was in some position of high leadership.

I guess you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few Kulaks, right? (Stalin’s Cannibal Island and Distracted Driving)

VALENTINE

Sadly, Stalin’s line of Stalin-themed lingerie was less than successful, probably because it was made of unwashed wool and aluminum shavings.

I think I first understood the joke, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help you,” when I was about 10 years old.  It displays a pretty simple sentiment that was common in the rural area where I grew up:  government wasn’t the solution to our problems, government was the problem.  Reagan used both of those phrases during his campaign and inaugural address, but he could have been speaking for most of the farmers who had coffee in the local café.

Now, sure, those farmers were fine taking the government’s money, but what they didn’t like was when government told them what to do.  From the farmers’ perspective, government was out of control even back in Reagan’s 1980.  Those farmers had grown up in a different world:  when they were young, say 12, they could have saved up enough money from their paper route or whatever Pa paid them to milk the cows, and marched down to the local hardware store and purchased a .22 rifle of their very own along with a box of ammo to go shooting with their friends.

Not at their friends, with their friends.  City folks in the current year still can’t seem to figure that one out.

WACO

I tried to look up “ATF jokes” on Google®, but all Google™ would do was show me pictures of the ATF agents who planned the Waco operation.

The dads of those kids could go into the hardware store and purchase dynamite, without a license or even a reason.  Want to build a dam on your own property?  Go for it, though the states might have a rule or two if they ever caught you, which they probably wouldn’t.  Want to build a combination strip club and church on your own land?  It’s a free country, ain’t no one stopping you.  Endangered species?  Well, there was probably a reason for that – if it were tough enough or not so darn tasty, they would be fine.

In 1952, there were roughly 20,000 pages of Federal regulations in the “Code of Federal Regulations” – the big book that has all of the rules.  In 2020?  There are roughly 180,000 pages.  Of rules.  That’s (using my estimates) nearly two words of regulation for every person in the United States.  My two are promulgate and trout.  And you can go to jail for violating many of the regulations on those 180,000 pages.  Why do we need 160,000 more pages of regulations than in 1950?

Control.

How are you supposed to keep track of that many rules?  I’ve heard that “ignorance of the law is no excuse,” so I’m thinking that the people in America must be psychic, because there’s no way that any single person could know what they’re either:

  • required to do or
  • prohibited from doing or
  • free to do.

It’s actually the preferred end state of government:  everything is either prohibited or mandatory, and thus you can selectively prosecute anyone for anything at any time.  Everyone is guilty, and like Stalin’s buddy and head of the secret police, Lavrentiy Pavlovich Beria, said:  “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”  Everyone’s guilty – it’s just a matter of picking the person you want to prosecute.

But one man at a time?  That’s how amateurs operate.

REGULATE

Government regulations:  keeping you safe from trucks that might be slightly taller than a number written in a book by a regulator who has never seen a truck.

When I spent time last year researching the causes of death between 1900 and 2000 (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!), one statistic popped out: 262 million people were killed by their own government.  That’s more that every murder in the twentieth century, and more than every person killed in every war during that same period.  More people were killed by their own government than were killed in every natural disaster during that century.  It’s almost governments could use a warning label.  Oh, wait, government regulations are what mandate the warning labels.

WARNING

I’d post this warning, but the font is probably not legally the right size.

Thankfully, the decline in deaths caused by government decreased when communism ceased to be an active ideology.  The end of the Soviet empire was one event, and the death of Mao and the adoption of a capitalist incentives in a still authoritarian China was another that made the citizens of the world their own nations safer.

But what led to those ideologies taking over in the first place?  Generally, four things.

  • An Economic Crisis
  • A Governmental Power Vacuum
  • A Civil War
  • The Idea That Equality of Outcome Is More Important Than Equality of Opportunity

It’s ironic that the two countries both at the forefront of killing their own citizens advertised themselves as the most equal in human history, but not surprising.  Stalin and Mao did their part to create an equal society – one where anyone could be killed at any time for any reason.  They were also the reason a word was invented:  Democide.

GULAG

Well, they all look equal to me.

Democide means, in a really short definition, your government deciding you’re wasting too much of your country’s valuable oxygen.  It doesn’t matter why.  It’s that your government decides that’ it’s not them, it’s you.  It doesn’t mean the Russians killing German soldiers.  It doesn’t include the Germans bombing the Russians, soldiers or not.  It includes the Russians killing Russian civilians.  It also includes the Russians killing German civilians after they take over the places where the Germans were living, and vice-versa.  So, Stalin didn’t kill only Russians, but that was who he was most fond of killing.  And Mao?  Mao pretty much exclusively killed Chinese during his bouts of democide, perhaps because take-out had yet to be invented.

If you want to look more into it, here’s a website devoted to it (LINK).  It has the look of a Geocities website circa 1996, and some of the links that the site points to have been Clintoned:  abandoned like Bill’s ex-girlfriends and eliminated like Hillary’s enemies.  The site, however does lays out the numbers of dead for governments that decide that there are just too damn many of their own people hanging around.  Did I say hanging?  Sorry, poor choice of words.

EQUALITY

Reprinted with permission.

Stalingrad’s number of civilians dead “officially” was 40,000.  But it’s thought that 40,000 died just on the first day of German bombing back in August of 1942.  A more credible estimate is that up to half a million civilians died during the six month battle.  These citizens aren’t even listed in Stalin’s total above – these are “just” war dead, and not attributed to the Soviets.

Whew.  I bet Stalin would be pretty embarrassed if it took the Soviet total up to 62.5 million instead of just 62 million.

Why do I bring this up now?  Hmm.  No reason.

None at all.

UFOs, Tiger King, Oil Prices, and Bulgarian Models

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

AOC

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

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

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

Volume?

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

CARTM

Yup, politicians and aliens have one thing in common.

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

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

PHELPS

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

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

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

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

TIGERKING

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BULG

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

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

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

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

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

GRETA

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

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

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

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

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

Change is coming.

Deal with it.

Endgame: At Some Point? This has to stop.

“You know, when I was a kid, food was food. Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil, decimated plant and animal life.” – Soylent Green

PEPPARD

I pity the fool that thinks we’re done.

In 471 B.C., a group of soldiers of the Roman Republic broke camp one fine morning.  The way the story works out, I’m pretty sure it was a Monday.  Their plan was to go attack some smelly hill people under the command of the Roman Consul, Appius.  As the horn sounded to leave the camp, the smelly hill people swarmed down on the Roman column from behind.  In the defense of the Roman soldiers, this was way before the invention of coffee but after the invention of wine, so they probably weren’t exactly awake.

As an aside, I imagine that the whole of the ancient history can be explained by un-showered illiterate people who were hungover most of the time trying to run things.  I guess this description also applies to congress, but at least the Romans dressed well and threw great parties.  Can you imagine Bernie Sanders or Adam Schiff or Mitch McConnell being fun at a party?

Livy

Perhaps the artist was a talented person who had only ever seen birds with lazy eye and just imagined what a person might look like?

Regardless, the Roman column broke under an attack less expected than the Spanish Inquisition.  The Roman historian Titus Livius, more commonly known a Livy, is the reason we remember this battle.  Livy wrote that the reason the hill people stopped pursing the Romans were that the Romans were running away faster than the victorious hill people could wade through the dead Romans, but remember, the smelly hill people didn’t have coffee, either, so maybe they just got . . . tired.  The Roman Consul, Appius, tried to stop the fleeing soldiers, but wasn’t able to do so, no matter how he tried.

APPIUS

Appius rallying the troops.  Colorized.

When the Romans made camp far enough away that the mean hill people weren’t going to attack them, Appius lined all of the soldiers up.  Every soldier was asked, “Where are your weapons?”  Every standard bearer was asked, “Where is your flag?”  Then Centurions that had fled the field of battle were identified.

All of these men were beaten, and then beheaded, because being beheaded wasn’t quite enough.  That made a bad morning worse, but it didn’t stop there:  of the remaining men, they drew lots.  One out of each ten was executed for the overall cowardice of the unit.  Why not ten out of ten?  There were still lots of smelly hill people around, and Appius might have been faster than some of them but not all of them.

This latter part where one out of ten was killed lives on today in our language as the word “decimate,” from the Latin “deci” meaning “Lucy’s husband,” and the Latin “mate” meaning, “someone an Australian drinks beer with.”  But, in a literal fashion it means losing one out of every ten, and has been a military punishment used all the way up into the 20th century, when the Soviets did it to at least part of the 64th Rifle Division after a very bad day at Stalingrad in 1943, though rumor has it no one had fun in Stalingrad in ’43.  If you don’t believe me, read your “Argentinian” grandfather’s real diary.

I know you’re thinking, “Hey, John Wilder, that’s fun, but why are you talking about dead Roman bird-faced men when the economy is collapsing?”

COLLAPSE

To be clear, I don’t have any dirt on the Clinton family.

The United States labor force in February 2020 was 164.6 million.  In the last three weeks, respectively, 3.0 million, 6.9 million, and 6.6 million people filed for unemployment, bringing that total to 16.5 million newly unemployed.  For those of you without a calculator or fingers, that’s just over 10%.  And as bad as the rest of the news is, I had to search for it, rather than it being front page.

Think of it, the second worst unemployment numbers in the history of the United States not being above-the-fold page one news.  Instead?  “Could have been worse.  At least the sky isn’t dripping blood and lava.”

Employment in the United States has been literally decimated in the last two weeks.  Sure, it’s not as bad as being beaten to death because of those stupid scary hill people who had the bad manners to attack before lunch or being a Russian (or a German) at Stalingrad, but it’s not good.

It is catastrophic.  And next week will be more of the same, if not worse.

If we listen to some leaders, it could be “until August,” or if you listen to Bill Gates, “until the entire United States can be vaccinated and Windows 14™ implanted into their spinal column.”  Neither of those two are acceptable, especially since some people, like Joe Biden, have no discernable spine.

BIDEN

He sniffs, he sucks, he scores!

But removing those restrictions is important.  Even as farmers dump milk that they can’t put into supermarket-sized cartons and break eggs that they can’t put into 18-packs for Wal-Mart, the system is breaking down.  At a certain point the economy is important, because a breakdown in the system might be just the key for some of the more fringe elements on the Left to begin to “finally try real communism” in the United States, which will end up with a bigger butcher’s bill than COVID-19 could ever create.  Yeah, it’s a worst-case scenario, and I don’t think we’ll go there, but did anyone think the Fed and Congress could imagine $5 trillion dollars in extra debt.  In a single month?

The other side of the argument is, “Start everything back up.  Now!”

That won’t work, either.  You won’t see people crowding into quaint and cramped Italian restaurants, because nobody wants to get Coronavirus from the busboy.  People want to see the infection numbers drop before they commit to getting into a stadium with 77,000 other people to cheer on the NFL®.  Zero?  Nope.  But lower than the 30,000-ish daily (hopefully) peak of newly infected we’re seeing right now.

FIRED

Well, I guess this is the hard part of the Art of the Deal.

And if you really want to see the fireworks over this idea, wander on over to Aesop’s place.  Here’s a representative post.  The genius (and the real nuclear part) is in the comments (LINK).  As you can see, Aesop has a plan.  The plan?  Probably not.  But it’s important, because it’s a plan.

One thing that is owed the people of the United States is the plan, complete with criteria and reasoning.  We know, for certain, that after restrictions are removed that more people will die of COVID-19, and that every single death will be placed at the foot of Trump by the Left.  Even though we know that collectively the Left couldn’t organize a hunger strike at a fashion show, we do know that they’re aces at blaming everyone for everything, just like The Mrs. blames me for not having the hardwood floor installed six years after having purchased it.  Oops.  The Mrs. messed up.  She trusted me.

We also know that the devastation of job loss and economic collapse will create thousands of ‘silent’ deaths through despair and addiction.  Trump will be blamed for that economic loss, as well.  There’s no daily graphic for showing economic misery.  Well, not yet there isn’t, but as soon as it sells in the news media?  Expect it on the front page of Drudge® every single day.

MISERY

You dirty birds.  I have to apologize for this one since Misery the movie came out in 1990, but it’s at least cheap to watch on Amazon®.  Which Pugsley and I did, after I wrote this.  I guess we’re dirty birds.

When the time finally comes for Americans to emerge out of their basement bunkers fatter than Hillary Clinton after a wine evening with the ladies?  And we’re caught up on all of that “must-see TV” (spoiler:  fire insurance is a must if you live in King’s Landing®), what kind of a landscape will they see?

Americans are already getting antsy.  It won’t last until August.  I don’t think it will last past May.

The economy won’t be the same.  Small businesses are in really bad shape.  Since they don’t have a lobbyist like Boeing®, that steak house on Main Street?  Owned by Ma and Pa Steakhouse owners?  They don’t have anyone looking out for them.  They’ll get loans, sure.  But another loan on top of the mortgage on the restaurant?  Another loan on top of the bills they have for the steaks sitting in the freezer because no one is coming in?  Yeah.

That’ll help.  Just like links from the chain of the anchor would help a lifeboat from the Titanic.

I’m an upbeat person, I really am.  Work back through my posts, and I defy anyone to find me being downbeat.  I’m not.  I think that things will generally work out for me, at least until I die.  That part will probably suck.  Unless Anne Wilkes has a sledgehammer between me and the grave.

But one thing I want to stress is that hope isn’t a plan, and that hope isn’t your friend.  Hope keeps you wishing for a future you wish to see, rather than the future you can work to have.  If you hope that after Corona-chan is in the rear-view mirror, the United States will be the same, you will be disappointed.

If you hope that the world will snap back into “happy motoring” (thanks, Jim Kunstler) in June, you’ll find that hope will be a straightjacket.  Hope is not your friend, to the extent that it allows happy thoughts to replace action.

HOPE

Don’t hope.  Do.  And live.  Hope is for amateurs and dreamers.

The United States as you knew her in February 2020 is dead.  There.  You have it.  Deal with it and plan your life.  You don’t have to be among the decimated.

But know this:

The United States is dead.

Let all of us go and find her.  She is there, waiting for us.

Hans Gruber, a Hooters Waitress, Patton, and Health

“And when Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.  Benefits of a classical education.” –  Hans Gruber in Die Hard

alexkerm

Alexander the Great loved chewing bubblegum and conquering Persians.  And he’s all out of Persians.  And bubblegum wasn’t invented until 2,251 years after he died.  Poor Alexander.

One thing that I think holds people back isn’t that they plan, it’s that they don’t plan big enough.  I’ve been fortunate enough in my life that I’ve made most of my goals come true.  That may sound like a good thing, but is it?

Of course it is.  It’s really cool to be able to be successful at achieving your goals, because losing sucks, and if you have great goals you end up with Cash and Prizes®.

But what would happen one day if I looked around and said . . . “I’ve done it.  I’ve accomplished everything I’ve set out to do.”  What purpose is left to drive me?  And if I did reach all of my dreams, what’s left to work for?

An example of exactly this happening is Buzz Aldrin.  At the age of 39, Buzz walked on the Moon.  The frikking Moon.  It’s so difficult and expensive to do, we can’t do it today.  Yet Buzz was the second guy to walk on the Moon.  As a goal it’s awesome.  But like the miniature schnauzer that catches a Humvee®, what do you do once you’ve won?  Buzz didn’t have a clue, but he didn’t have a problem asking Jack Daniels™ for assistance.

Another example is General George S. Patton.  Patton had been a highly competent general in World War II – daring, audacious, and cromulent.  Yet, he found himself in a position where the war that he knew how to fight was gone – it was over.  In his diary he wrote:  “Yet another war has come to an end, and with it my usefulness to the world.”

patton

Little known fact:  French tanks in World War II had rear view mirrors.  Those were so they could observe the front line.

But Patton and Aldrin aren’t alone with this conundrum of having their success be the source of their discontent – you see this behavior again and again.  It’s a common story in Hollywood:  nobody to somebody to discovered cocaine to dead.  Or, if the actor has a heart made of titanium, they become beloved actor Robert Downey, Jr.  The most interesting part of that is the cocaine, especially to Robert Downey, Jr.  Although you might think cocaine comes from Colombia, it really comes from the boredom of having everything you want.

It’s curious that one of the things that keeps us healthy and not developing a liver the size of Johnny Depp is the struggle to achieve a goal.  In the absence of meaningful goals, bad things happen to people.  They drink too much.  They vote for the Left.  They get depressed – why get out of bed when there’s nothing to work for?

Goals are important – and there are two ways that you can lose them:

  • Believe that they are impossible and give up, or
  • Achieve them all and run out of goals.

Essentially these are the opposite problems – one is believing you’ve got to play a football game against the 1985 Chicago Bears® using 11 toddlers.  The other is being on the 1985 Chicago Bears© and playing 11 toddlers.

dallas

I know it’s a soccer ball in the trophy.  It’s not like the Cowboys® would recognize a real football.

Both are no-win outcomes.  Toddlers cannot run a receiving pattern at all.  And they cannot hold a block long enough for their toddler-quarterback to get a decent pass off.  And if you’re the 1985 Chicago Bears™, what’s the best thing that could happen?  You beat a bunch of toddlers.  I mean, it’s fun and all, but it’s hardly a greater achievement than defeating the Dallas Cowboys© or a school for ten-year-old girls that lisp.

A goal is required for good mental health.  The very best goals require that you work at your limits, pushing yourself to become better.  They’re goals that you believe you can achieve.  And they’re goals where you can see a path to make them become real.  And the best part of the goal is at the end, after you’ve achieved it, if you plan ahead you’ve got another goal waiting.

hooter

One of the waitresses at Hooters® lost a leg in a car accident last week.  She now has a job at IHOP™.

As I mentioned in Wednesday’s post (Playing The Game, And Goals For Life) I had goals, just not work-related goals.  I’ve been working to create some, and I’m not there yet.  That’s okay.  The goals have to be meaningful.  And I’m not working without a net – I have sufficient goals out in front of me that even if I couldn’t work out a work goal, I have plenty of others.  Is having a cup of fresh, hot coffee a good goal?  Dangit.  Back to the drawing board.

So, what about these great men who had everything when they accomplished the goals of a lifetime?

Patton’s uncharacteristic self-pity in the quote from his diary was the result of his achievement – the war was won, and he contributed to the Allied victory on the Western Front.  He had fame.  Only 11 men had ever had a higher rank in the military.  From what I read about Patton, I’m willing to bet that he would have been able to channel himself into a post-war United States without too much difficulty.

Would he have been a politician?  Hard to say.  It’s unlikely that he would have the desire to speak pretty little lies just to get elected.  But you can bet one thing – if he hadn’t died, Patton would have done his level best to shake up the United States.  I wouldn’t bet against him.

And what about Buzz Aldrin?  Buzz crawled into a bottle and managed to skip most of the 1970’s.  Admittedly, that wasn’t a bad decade to skip since not having a memory of the Bee Gees® is something some people would pay for.  At some point I believe that he managed to come to a truce with the Moon.  He decided to instead focus on making money for himself and to be a spokesman for his cause:  “Get your ass to Mars®.”  Is being a celebrity spokesmodel as exciting as going to the frikking Moon?  Certainly not.  But you might as well be comfortable if you flew to the frikking Moon.

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Buzz Aldrin sadly got divorced in the 1970’s.  Apparently his wife needed space, too.

But Hans Gruber got it wrong.  Plutarch actually wrote:

Alexander wept when he heard from Anaxarchus that there was an infinite number of worlds; and his friends asking him if any accident had befallen him, he returns this answer:  “Do you not think it a matter worthy of lamentation that when there is such a vast multitude of them, we have not yet conquered one?”

In this case, Alexander is saying the exact opposite of the Hans Gruber quote – that he had a goal to conquer an entire world, but wept because his dream wasn’t yet complete.  The moral of the story?

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Maybe if Hans knew his Plutarch better he might have not fallen off the Nakatomi Plaza Tower.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About Alternative Investments

“Well that’s fantastic.  A really smart decision, young man.  We can put that check in a money market mutual fund, then we’ll re-invest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest aaaand it’s gone.” – South Park

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I’ll have you know there are at least three things that you can use an empty potato chip bag for.

I was reading Bison Prepper (LINK) (and you should, too) last week when Lord Bison mentioned that stocking up on things that you used regularly as consumables was a survival strategy.  It is.  Beyond that, it’s also an investment strategy.

In the world of investment, when you buy a stock thinking the price is going to go up, it’s called “going long.”  If you were to buy Apple® stock thinking that the world hadn’t had enough iPhones®, iPads©, or iCrap™, you would be “going long.”  For this strategy to pay off, when you finally decided to sell Apple©, it would have to be worth more than when you bought it.  Buy low, sell high.

Duh.

But I started this post by writing about consumables.  What’s the deal?  Those aren’t investments, right?

I recalled reading another article a few years ago about a financial writer showing up on the Tonight Show™ with Johnny Carson, so I looked for the interview and found it – a whopping 200 people had watched it, even though it had a glimpse of Susan Sarandon while she was still cute and before her eyes popped out of her head like they were trying to escape.  The writer that Johnny was interviewing was Andrew Tobias.  Johnny said in passing:  “I like how you said that if you had $1000, you should invest in tuna.”

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I was really shocked when he said, “Sit on it.”

Tobias responded:  “If you want to make 40% tax free on $1000 you can . . . if you buy tuna fish . . . and shaving cream on sale, and get a case discount.”  The audience didn’t laugh – they were living in pretty uncertain times and the advice was serious.

Andrew Tobias posted this clip on YouTube®, and was really irritated with himself – since his jacket was buttoned it looked like he was forming a human air scoop as he sat down with Johnny.

Back when this clip was filmed was in the late 1970’s, and the economy was in trouble.  The interest rate was high – a mortgage (if you had great credit) would charge you really high rates, between 10% and 14% . . . compared to a tiny 4% or so today.  Inflation for nearly everything you could buy was running around 10%.

The entire key to making this odd investment strategy work is that you have to buy things that you’ll actually use.  Sure, Wal-Mart® sells five-gallon troughs of flaming pickles soaked in Cheeze® Ballz™, but will you actually eat that?

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It was even worse when she flipped off people we passed.

What’s a list of things that most people buy that this would work for?

  • Tuna (and long shelf life canned food) – especially good if you need to keep your mercury intake up.
  • Shaving cream and razors – buy extra if your wife is a Kardashian or you’ll look like you’re married to a Chia Pet™.
  • Various condiments – mustard keeps forever, and can be used to slow Kardashian hair regrowth.
  • Laundry soap – I have to keep this on the list, my hands are Tide®.
  • Paper goods – I’ll make a toilet paper joke, since I’m on a roll.
  • Wheat, rice, and other grains (properly stored)
  • Honey – They’ve found 5000 year old honey that is still edible, so it probably gets the nod as the most stable food ever. Plus it’s really handy to have local honey if you’re in Russia – I hear it’s made there by cagey bees.
  • Ammunition – Don’t be like JFK and have this be the last thing on your mind.

Now, you should be smart about this – if your family won’t eat cans of clams, buying them when they’re super cheap won’t really help you because then you have cans of clams that no one will eat, until there’s a food drive, and then you give them the clams.  If this sounds oddly specific, well, we don’t have canned clams anymore.  Likewise, if you decide to grow a beard, six cases of shaving cream suddenly become worthless until you decide to shave again.

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The Mrs. didn’t buy the line, “But she looked so lonely, like she could use a good home.”

And don’t be nutty.  If you live in a tiny house, putting several thousand cubic feet of tuna and wheat might not be the greatest idea.  Unless you like sleeping on cans of tuna.  There’s a limit.  When Tobias gave that advice, he suggested that it could be used for $1000 worth of stuff.  Today that translates into about $4,500 worth of stuff, if the inflation calculator is to be trusted.  That’s certainly a lot, and would translate into 20 or so tons of wheat, but you’d probably have to stack hide some of it under the bed.

One dangerous point:  if you buy something, like, say, wine and get a 10% case discount, it doesn’t really help your cause if you drink the wine twice as fast.  Or if when you see a Ding-Dong®, you immediately rip open the silvery plastic sleeve and try to suck out the “cream” filling until you are sitting in the corner in a sugar coma.  So you might want to reconsider stocking up on things where your self-control will turn a savings into a disaster for your liver or waistline.

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9 out of 10 doctors recommend water over alcoholic beverages for health reasons.  The other doctor is from Flint, Michigan.

In the 1970’s, you could do this strategy with nearly anything since prices were going up on everything, as long as you didn’t have to borrow the money – interest rates on credit cards were 18%.  As opposed to the 18% today.  Hmmm.

Regardless, if you have high-interest debt, get rid of it.  The sooner the better.  The future is uncertain, so getting rid of debt is a certain way to be in better financial shape.

In the last decade, inflation is most prominent in two things that you can’t collect like tuna:  health care and college tuition.  Oh, sure, you could pre-injure yourself, but who has the time?  Likewise, you could avoid steep college tuition hikes by sending your three year old to college, but that would make congress unhappy.  They hate competition that’s smarter than them.

The best information that I can find is that 401k plans returned an average of 7% for the last five years.  Better than a jab in the eye with a sharpened terrier, and probably still a smart thing to do.  I have one.  The beauty of mine is that my company kicks in an instant match – and whatever match I get is an immediate return – if the company matches dollar for dollar, it’s an immediate 100% return.  If it “only” matches $0.50 on the dollar, it’s still an immediate 50% return.  I’ll pay taxes on it after you begin to pull it out, assuming that it hasn’t been confiscated by Bernie Sanders to fund his “waterslides for the poor” initiative.

But the 401k immediate return is hard to say no to.

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For me?  I’ll take belt sanders over Bernie Sanders any day.

But I can easily make 30% to 40% return tax free on toilet paper, if i buy it on sale, and in bulk.  And I’ll never pay taxes on that return.  It’s just free money – again, assuming I don’t have any debt.

If I have a mortgage of $100,000 at 4%, and I pay it off, I’ll make a $4,000 return before taxes.  Not bad, but after taxes, it’s really as low as $2,000 depending on the rest of my income.  But if I get a sweet deal on non-dairy gluten-free vanilla creamer, I get all of the money I save.

There is one other advantage of putting some of your money into stuff that you’d use – you’re making yourself more resilient.  If the dollar (the United States one, not one of the phony dollars they use in places like Zimbabwe or Philadelphia) were to weaken, you have investments in things other than dollars.  I heard a story of a German boy who got a gold coin as a tip while working at a hotel.  After the hyperinflation of the Weimar Republic, that same German boy was able to buy the same hotel for that same gold coin.  Of course then it became a target for B-17 bombers, but who’s keeping score?

Oh, yeah.  Everybody.  Except the French – they’re waiting for their record to improve.

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A French border guard was questioning a German.  “Occupation?”  “No,” replied the German.  “Just visiting.”

The idea that I’m trying to convince you of is that you should think of your average daily purchases as if they were investments – because they are.  It’s not only stocks, bonds, precious metals and a 401k that are investments – what you buy on a day to day basis and how much you pay for it can also be an investment.

The other thing that many people overlook when they think of investments is their time.  How are you spending yours?  You can, like me, spend your time in a PEZ®-addled haze, watching Bojack Horseman™ on an endless Netflix© loop, or you can spend it productively, making yourself better.  That’s tax free, too.

Remember, investment means more than stocks and bonds.  It’s the things you buy, the way you spend your time, and avoiding B-17 bombers by not buying German hotels.

A.I., Health Care, Google, and Elon Musk

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go home and have a heart attack.” – Pulp Fiction

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I wanted to get a doctor appointment to treat my invisibility, but he said he couldn’t see me right now.

A computer can predict who will die using medical data better than a doctor.  As of today, like science has no answer as to how California copes with the landfill requirements of Kardashian body hair, science has no understanding of how the computer is doing it.

A gentleman by the name of Dr. Brian Formwalt led a study where approximately 1,770,000 electrocardiogram records were fed into a computer.  An electrocardiogram is also known as an ECG, for obvious reasons.  For less obvious reasons, it’s also known as an EKG.  EKG stands for elektrokardiographie, which is exactly the same thing as an electrocardiogram, but in German.  If your doctor calls it an EKG, he just might be thinking about expanding his living room.

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Always be careful when Germans research expanding anything.

But back to the study.  So, there were 1,770,000 records, but only 400,000 people in the study, so the average person had more than four records.  Obviously, these weren’t all healthy people, since I have had (I believe) exactly one ECG in my life, and it was for a pre-employment physical as an astronaut for Wal-Mart®.  At least the recruiter told me Wal-Mart© needed astronauts, before Wal-Mart™ cancelled the program when China accidentally delivered 50,000 small space shuttle toys rather than one life-size one.  I guess that’s what happens when you buy space shuttles by the pound.

But what is an ECG?

Electrocardiograms are the little machine light that makes the beep sound every time your heart beats.  The beat is measured by injecting elves into your body that send radio signals to the machine every time that your heart muscle squeezes them.  Okay, the technical side might be a bit off, but it doesn’t really matter if you or I know exactly how the machine gets the data.  It’s just the device that goes beep-beep-beep-beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep to let you know that John Wick’s® dog died.

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Cardiac surgeons are the guys you want to see for a change of heart.

Okay, so now you know everything that you might need to know about technology invented in 1895.  But it now produces an electronic file rather than the old method, where the heart rhythm was tattooed on the backs of ill-tempered Chihuahuas.  The 1,770,000 records were then fed into a computer that had been previously taught to read ECGs.  The simple question was asked – which of these patients will be dead in a year?  I mean it used to make me feel better when my doctor told me, “that’s normal for your age,” but then I realized that at some point being dead will be normal for my age.

Since all of the records were over a year old, it was known which of the patients were alive and which were dead.  Essentially, the doctors were (with very little data) asking the computer to predict the future.  It did.  And it did it better than human doctors.  Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors – they detected no abnormality, yet the computer was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient.

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Then the next doctor told me it looked like I was pregnant.  I said, “But I’m a guy.”  He replied, “But it looks like you’re pregnant.”

It doesn’t surprise me.  Computers are powerful tools that are great at taking lots of data and being able to compare it quickly.  The reason that they can do this is they:

  • Have 100% focus, and if they get a sore throat you can give them Robo-tussin®.
  • Don’t need to make payments on second wife’s Mercedes® and third wife’s Lexusâ„¢.
  • Can retain every previous ECG reading ever seen and instantly recall the pattern if needed, much like I can retain the plot of every one of the episodes of Gilligan’s Island.
  • Don’t get distracted by how healthy a patient looks or how much kale he eats.

These are great advantages.  In the future, machines will be able to do things where we may never understand how they made a correlation, or, as in this case, even what the correlation is.  Arthur C. Clarke Third Law states that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, and he’s right.  Health care generates amazing amounts of data, and also outcomes.  It’s only a matter of time until some big corporation gets evil . . .

Oh, yeah, Google®.  It bought Fitbit®.  Now it knows what you’re searching for, and it also has a treasure-trove of heartbeat and fitness data.

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Google® is female.  It won’t let me finish a sentence without giving suggestions.

Well, I guess that’s kind of scary.  But at least Google© doesn’t have access to medical records.  Oh, Google™ has patient names, diagnoses, prescription data, and records from 2,600 hospitals.  Millions, perhaps tens of millions of patients?  In (possibly) all of these states:  Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, Maryland, D.C., Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, and Florida?

Nah, that should work out fine.  There isn’t a record of Google® ruthlessly monetizing every corner of the Internet not already inhabited by Facebook™, Amazon® and Microsoft©.

I think the case is clear for someone to go through this data.  With only a few records and outcomes fed into it, a computer is better at predicting medical outcomes than a very good doctor.  If all of the data could be available?  I think we’d have a legitimate revolution in health care.

Frankly, if we don’t descend into civil chaos, I think that this health care revolution is certain.

But Google®?  Google™ has proven itself untrustworthy.

I’d suggest that we give control of the initiative to a leader that’s more trustworthy than Google®, like Bernie Madoff, but he seems to be otherwise, um, detained.  And I’m sure that Jeffery Epstein has better morals, but, um, he seems to have accepted a unique opportunity with the Clinton Foundation.

Heck, let’s give the job to Elon Musk.

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