Category: Silly Predictions

When Will The Bubble End? When We Give Up.

“Oooh! Ahhh! That’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.” – Lost World:  Jurassic Park

What do you call a swimsuit a girl wears to an animal park?  A Zookini.

One time, Pa Wilder told me he had been interested in buying Sears® stock in the early 1980s.  In addition to growing, it also paid a nice dividend.  He’d calculated that the dividend from the stock would have paid for the stock, and he could have sold it in the 1990s and been dollars ahead.  He didn’t.  Ma Wilder flatly refused.  She didn’t like stocks during the day, and I know she would have hated bitcoin in the evening.  I’m sure it would have been her crypto-night.

Ma’s philosophy was that hope isn’t your friend when it comes to most things in life.  And especially the stock market.  The stock market is really built on hope.  Many stocks have projected growth “priced-in”.  This means that they sometimes sell for many times their projected earnings.

Since 2008, the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury have done absolutely everything that they can to keep the prices of stocks up.  The biggest thing they did was to cut interest rates to zero, on everything but dirt.  On dirt, the Fed™ charges high-interest rates – I guess you could call them loam sharks.

In one sense, interest rates serve as an alternative to buying stocks.  If I can park my money in Treasury bonds and make a few percent (essentially keeping up with inflation) then that’s a stable investment.  Horses hate that as well – they often can’t invest because they don’t have a stable income.

I named my horse Mayo.  Sometimes, Mayo neighs.

But when the interest rate is zero, the government is printing cash as fast as it can, investments are pushed toward stocks, and more and more cash piles in.

This makes the investments silly, as more and more cash chases revenues.  In a world filled with eternal hyper-growth, this works.  But that world doesn’t exist, so essentially the stock market becomes a Ponzi scheme or a cargo cult of prosperity.

It’s good if you get out on time.  You get the upside of growth.  You can get dollars out of the market that you can buy things with.  Like me, I blew all my stock market gains on a limo without a driver.  Spent is all and nothing to chauffeur it.

But eventually?  The market falls.

Sorry if that joke didn’t land well.

Normally, that’s healthy.  Falling markets weed out weak and bad companies.  Falling markets are actually healthy since they clear out the junk.  On top of that, CEOs will never be worthless, since there is a pretty healthy market for slightly used internal organs.

We live in a world, however, where the markets have been aggressively managed.  The idea of a recession is scarier to a politician in office than almost anything.  People without jobs look for someone to blame, and politicians will do anything to avoid blame.  Heck, Joe Biden would do whatever he could to set Hunter up for life, that is if Joe was ever tried for murder.

The result is that the economic policy is aggressively tied to growth, regardless of the consequences.  It’s like trying to keep a party going long after everyone should have gone home.  The best way to do that?  Switch from beer to wine.  When people start to lag?  Swap out to vodka.  Then, for a final shot?  Pure grain alcohol.  Sure, that sounds like Nancy Pelosi’s breakfast routine, but when you’re trying to run an economy like Pelosi’s daily frat party, eventually it has to stop.

And the longer you’ve been drinking?  The worse the inevitable hangover.

Did you know Helen Keller had a cat?  Neither did she.

That’s where we are.  The booze has been pulled away from the table.  At some point, I’m certain, that the Fed® will run out of tricks to keep the party going – even they have a limited supply of cocaine, especially since Johnny Depp found the spare key they keep under the mat.

I’ve been wrong before.  Perhaps the party isn’t over at this point.  Perhaps there’s some adrenaline that they can inject in the eye socket of the economy to keep it dancing a few more years.  Biden would love to kick the can down the road and have it keep going until at least 2024.  I mean, he’d love that if he knew what day of the week it was.

But every party has an ending.  And as long as this one has been going, it will be bad.

We never really paid for the party in 2008.  Sure, the Great Recession was bad, but the housing bubble never really cleared.  How can I tell?  It happened again.

Right now the average rent in the country (I read in some disreputable source) is $1,800 a month.  I’d say housing prices were so high that NASA put them there, but NASA can’t put anything nearly that high.  If people didn’t learn the housing bubble lesson, the housing bubble never really popped.

I hear NASA wants the next person on the Moon to be a woman – so dinner will be ready when the men get back there.

The housing bubble pops when people start buying houses again – not as investments, but as places to live.  The stock market bubble pops the same way – when most people don’t want to buy stocks.

And from May, 2022, there’s a lot of pain left before that happens.  The way the stock bubble ends is with utter capitulation, with people being so disgusted that they ever thought that stocks were the road to riches.

Only when people stop thinking that houses and stocks are magic money machines, will it be over.

The reason Ma Wilder wouldn’t let Pa buy the Sears© stock is that she had seen the aftermath of the Great Depression, and had seen stock speculation ruin the lives of many, many people.

When we get there, we’ll know it’s over.  Will it be this year?  In five years?  In ten?

Being a waiter might not be a glamorous job, but at least it puts food on the table.

I don’t know.  But I feel the combination of debt, inflation, and the generally fragmented nature of society will bring crisis.  The good news?

It’s still a beautiful night, and I think someone left a beer in the cooler.

Joe Biden: Tasting Your Frustration Edition

“I can taste all the flavors from the past sixty years. I can taste the Korean War.” – Bob’s Burgers

I have the memory of an elephant.  I recall seeing one at a zoo once.

Yesterday, thankfully, Resident Joe Biden indicated he was really in tune with modern Americans.  During a press conference, Joe stated, “I understand the frustration.  I can taste it.”

Taste it.  Yes.  Normally, I goof on Joe about being a bit addled, but here he’s nosing in on my gig.  “I can taste it.”

I wonder, what exactly frustration tastes like?  Is it like the dinner I made last month when Pugsley asked, “Was it supposed to taste like this?”

I wonder if, to Joe, our frustration tastes like something exceptionally expensive.  A fine Bordeaux or, say, gasoline?

Thankfully, Joe is willing to devote all of his senses to solving our problems.  I wonder if Biden smells our bank accounts?  Probably not, though I heard that Joe took an interest that the supply chain issues have made stores run out of Pantene® – Joe said he’d personally sniff out the situation.

What’s the difference between The Mrs. and I?  When she says “sniff this” it’s usually pleasant.

Thankfully, in the very same press conference, Biden also said, “. . . inflation is our strength . . .”  Yes.  He said that.  Pretty quickly, Nina Jankowicz (the Jerry Springer of government officials, except Jerry would kill for her jawline) got up and echoed that thought:  “Inflation is our strength, and war in Ukraine is peace.”

Okay, I’m making fun of these people, but in truth, they aren’t serious people.  They’re an administration that might actually think that Robert Downey, Jr., is really Iron Man® and really might come and save them after he stops the Russians in Kiev.  And that’s me being charitable in my assessment.

When it comes to government, one of the Leftist talking points was that, with Biden in the White House, we’d have the “adults back in charge”.  In this case that’s an apt description, but only if the adults in question are a collection of diversity hires unable to get a job where an IQ greater than room temperature (Fahrenheit, not the meter thing).  Oh, and they are in favor of The Current Thing, whatever it is.

Pictured:  White House security badge.

Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine dresses and calls xirself a woman.  Xir also dresses like and calls xirself an Admiral.

As the assistant secretary for health, Levine told NPR that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera, about the value and importance of gender-affirming care.”  It’s no wonder that Biden appointed a Supreme Court Justice that said she couldn’t define what a woman is.  How ever did she decide what to put on her driver’s license?

So, that leads me to several options when it comes to the economy.  The first idea is that we have left the equivalent of a group of dim-witted glue-eating children in a room filled with razorblades, poison ivy, cyanide, and whatever hellish creature that Australia might produce that I haven’t had a nightmare about yet.  Carnivorous, poisonous koala bears that fly and have scorpion tails, perhaps?

Why did the koala drop out of the tree?  It was dead.

Regardless, these idiots were saved from being Marxist perma-baristas by vote harvesting and have somehow gotten the keys to the economy.  Of course, never having heard of debt, inflation, or Zimbabwe, the best idea that they had is “make everyone rich by printing more money”.  Really.  That’s it.

That’s the first option, actual idiocracy.

But what if this is the desired result?

Thus, the second option.  The Cloward-Piven Strategy dates from the 1960s and was based around breaking the system through welfare.  Cloward and Piven were two married professors that decided that since they were making money from the public for doing essentially nothing, that everyone else should be able to get a piece of that action, too.  Economies aren’t based on people being productive, right?

The end idea of their strategy was bankrupting the country through increased pushing of social programs.  Why do that, to help people?  No, the aim was revolution in the United States.  And this wouldn’t be a revolution like the French one (which was a head of its time) which proved that the French can win a war, if it’s against the French.

What’s a good way to start a revolution?

King George was only 11 inches tall – he was unfit to be a ruler.

Doing exactly what the current idiots are doing.  It used to be just the commies like Cloward and Piven and their cousins Pol Pot and Stalin who wanted to change man, to make him perfectible.  Now, the World Economic Forum (LINK) is on with the same old idea that’s caused so much grief over the past century and change.  They have an agenda to make man a global economic cog in a machine where only one culture, one set of ideas is acceptable – in the world.

Strangely, the outcome of the “toddlers in charge” plan looks a lot like the outcome of the “Global Commie Power Grab” plan.

So, was Joe being stupid when he said “inflation is our strength” or was he just slipping and sharing the quiet part of the plan that he wasn’t supposed to say?

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part IV: Grooming A Society

“I’m sorry, I believe in good grooming.” – The Simpsons

I was outbid trying to buy a shopping center.  I guess the old saying is right:  you just can’t win a mall.

The biggest part of a dictator’s ability to control a people is the control of their thoughts.  Sure, a large supply of bullets is nice, but if you use that method, sooner or later you run out of people to control.  How, then, is that sort of mental crowd control done in a nation that once staged a rebellion over a tax on whiskey?  The answer is simple –a little bit at a time.

The first step in that is to program the people.  The easiest way to do that is to control their education and their entertainment.  In the modern world, it is that combination of education and entertainment that form our modern-day mythos – the very definition of who we are and what we stand for.

Education was the easiest part, and, by necessity, the first.  The problem (from the standpoint of those that would set the world up for dictators) is that educators aren’t swapped out yearly.  No, educators often are in a classroom for decades, watching hundreds of their children move from grade to grade.  I think my kindergarten teacher was old enough to have known Moses personally, though in her defense I was probably more of a handful than those James and Younger brothers she told stories about.

True fact:  They charge a $6 entry fee to see Karl’s grave.

That’s why the real Leftism (as far as I can tell) didn’t start showing up in the classroom until, perhaps, the 1960s.  That had given them time to infiltrate the colleges and begin to sway the way that teachers were taught.  I knew something was up when I told one teacher I was struggling with a class.

“Who, the Bourgeoisie?” she asked.

An aside – teachers often slant Left/Globalist anyway – they work for a government, after all.  The teacher unions are strongly Leftist in political leanings.  Educating a group of teachers and then placing them in the schools only changes the schools slowly.  But after a while, a critical mass is achieved, and government schools become indoctrination centers for Leftist thought.

To be clear – government schools have always been indoctrination centers.  The previous versions prior to the 1960s had (in my opinion) more innocuous indoctrination, putting memes like these in the heads of the students:

  • The United States is a force for good,
  • Christopher Columbus was alright,
  • The Inalienable rights are: life, liberty, and the pursuit of PEZ™,
  • Hard work is important,
  • If you pee on the playground you have to go see the principal,
  • Religious values are one of the things that make the United States strong, and
  • There is a morality beyond mere legality that keeps society cohesive.

I could keep going on this list.  But the values that the kids were programmed with led to a prosperous society that, generally, was also a society where you trusted your neighbor and, even though he might have voted for the other guy, was still on the same team.  Was it perfect?  No, of course not, and a lack of skepticism led to all manner of government shenanigans being ignored – MK Ultra, I’m looking at . . . what was I saying?

Is it just me, or is that glowing?

The change in schools was the vanguard of that Leftist.  Ideas were infiltrated that began to chip away at the idea of values.  Equity in education became a buzzword even in the 1970s, decades before managing the equality of outcomes became the goal.  Heck, you could even teach math and give grades back then.

Of course, the Leftist ownership of education wasn’t the only thrust at that time.  Movies and television began to change as well.  I didn’t see first-run episodes of Leave it to Beaver nor All in the Family, but I could see the shows couldn’t have been more different as I watched them on reruns.

Leave it to Beaver was a show about kids going through typical kid problems, and also dealing with that oily Eddie Haskell.  That also led to the Funniest untrue rumor ever:  Eddie Haskell was played by a young Alice Cooper.  It would have been far more interesting if Eddie had a guillotine.

I did hear that Rob Halford did move to a Tibetan monastery.  I guess that makes him a Buddhist Priest.

All in the Family, though, was a show that could have been called All in on the Narrative.  All in the Family was simply a tool to move the narrative to the Left, plus it showcased that family-dividing character – the ever-bumbling incompetent father.  Later shows in the 1970s moved the father to a position of irrelevance: single-parent households became a staple of sitcoms.

Sitcoms were used because nothing is better at attacking power than comedy, since it allows the comedian to poke fun at the weakest parts of their enemy.  I wonder why comedy is out of style . . . hmmm.  Oh, wait.  Amy Schumer.

I could go on about movies, but they were playing their role in pulling the narrative along.  There’s a reason that The Exorcist, The Omen, Halloween, and Friday the 13th all had monsters that were young – essentially the monsters were all children (or, started out as kids in Halloween or Friday the 13th). . . Gen X age.  No wonder my kindergarten teacher called me a little monster!

The propaganda in both television and film was the same:  show the most sympathetic case of (insert movement – divorce, abortion, gay rights, et cetera) and then milk it for everything that it was worth.  It didn’t matter that the case represented the very edge of reality, that small 0.01% of cases – no, publicize it and create an emotional backstory.

Why?  To program people.  When I look back at many (not all!) movies from that time frame there are places I can see the Narrative Programming being implanted.  Heck, when I was a kid I wondered why people on the Right couldn’t be funny.  They can be – P.J. O’Rourke taught that to the world.

I saw one bee I thought was drunk.  Turned out he was just buzzed.

I don’t think it was a coincidence that church attendance started to go down in the 1970s.  I don’t have a lot of data on why – perhaps single-parent households are less likely to go?  Regardless, there’s plenty of data that shows when.  The 1970s.

The Left focuses on identity and has since before the 1970s.  The big reason for this focus is that class never really existed here in the United States in any sort of formal fashion.  We never had Lords and Ladies and Kings, just rich people and poor people.  And most poor people think there’s at least a hope that they’ll become rich people, which is why the lottery is still a tax on people who can’t do math.

So, that left only identity.  The playbook on the Left was to let every identity group know that they were a victim.  Women’s Lib.  The 1967 riots.  Certainly, there were legitimate grievances in some cases, but the Left wanted to create division between groups – and it’s possible to show how every group has been treated unfairly.  Except for the Dutch.  They had it coming.

Their answer was simple:  normalize the victim status of nearly every group in order to fragment society.  What is normal changes, first slowly, then all at once.

Joe walks into a bar and sees a hot woman and asks her, “So, do I come here often?”

Joe Biden in 2008 was against gay marriage.  Joe Biden in 2022 wants to make it illegal for states to stop kids from getting hormone blockers.  Yes – the same man who said that “marriage is between a man and a woman” only fourteen years ago now wants minors to receive powerful hormones that will unalterably change their bodies.  On a whim.

What is normal now changes in a heartbeat, which is easy once the fixed morality of religion is gone.  Then, the only standard becomes the law:  if it’s legal, it must be moral.  And in a dictatorship, who makes the laws?

 

Next Up:  There’s more to come in this series, but I’m waiting on some reference books to show up.  See how hard I work for you?

The Economic Fate Of The United States: Two Choices

“No, you’ve already made the choice. Now you have to understand it.” – The Matrix Reloaded

I spent hundreds to rent a limo, but there was no driver.  All that cash on a limo, and nothing to chauffeur it.

I did posts about inflation before inflation hit, but I’m not a psychic.  It’s not like I work for ESPN or something.  No.  This inflation was absolutely predictable, and in fact, has been absolutely predictable since 2008.  Ben Bernanke’s Fed© Approved™ solution to the Great Liquidity Crisis during the Great Recession was simple:  print a lot of money.

Make no mistake, the economic problem was big back then in 2008.  I personally saw an entire segment of the economy reach a full dead stop.  Rail cars piled up at the sidings on my drive to work near Modern Mayberry because the railroads had no place to put them – miles of them.  I mean, without rail cars how could new railroad employees train?

Why did this happen?  Nobody knew which banks had money and which ones didn’t.  The trust that underlies the system had been blown up by a series of banks defaulting, with stocks crashing, and bonds plummeting.  Heck, even physicists stopped trusting atoms – they make up everything.  The Fed’s® solution to this lack of trust?  Like I said, print money.

They were sneaky about how they did it – they printed money and gave it to the banks by buying up the awful assets they had on the books.  The money vacuumed up the bad debt like Charlie Sheen on the set of Two and a Half Grams.

Something tells me he’d be a more thoughtful Fed® chairman than the one we have now.

The printing also kicked the can down the road.  We could spend all day about the causes, but the reality is that we are the can that was kicked down the road.  Our current inflation is the result of keeping the party going even when the system should have cleared out the bad debts, cleared out the dead companies, and cleared out the waste that caused the crisis.

Would it have been tough?  Sure, especially on elevator repairmen – but their business is always up and down anyway.

So, now what?

The reality is simple.  As a nation, we face only two choices.

The first choice we could make is to keep doing what we’re doing.  We can keep printing money, and keep pretending that the economic problems are created by the sanctions we put in place over a regional border conflict that we helped create and certainly encouraged.

The result of the decision to keep printing will first be higher prices.  Higher fuel prices mean less driving, but they also mean that the cost of nearly everything you buy costs more:  food, trash service, beer, PEZ®, posters of Elvis (especially posters of the The King after he discovered carbohydrates), everything physical will cost more.

Why can’t Elvis drive his Cadillac™ in reverse?  He’s dead.

Oh, sure, hyperinflation seems like fun at first.  Rising prices, rising wages . . . but the wages never keep up with the prices.  And businesses can’t keep up with the rising costs, so long-term contracts that had been great are now unprofitable.  Bare shelves show up.  People rush to ditch cash to buy stuff because they know that Kraft© Mac n’ Cheese™ is going to be 20% more next week, so canned goods have a better rate of return than the stock market.  Some people don’t like canned food, but for me it’s ate out of tin.

But then banks have finally gotten wise, and we’ll see higher interest rates on car loans, home loans, and student debt.  Higher costs on cars plus higher interest costs mean lower new car sales, especially when people are struggling to find change in their couches to buy Pizza Rolls® and Twinkies™.

Lower new car sales mean fewer new cars made.  Which requires fewer workers.  Which increases unemployment.  Eventually, there’s a recession or depression as economic activity ceases to be meaningful – weird things happen as people resort to a manic level of activity.

The banks finally get wise and loans don’t come with an interest rate, they come with a scheme to create a way that the bank doesn’t go bankrupt as the currency value plummets.  The values are pegged to a commodity (like gold) or an inflation index.  Bankers have been through this before in country after country and know every trick to keep themselves whole.  I assure you, inflation has their interest.

I saw a homeless man talking to his shadow.  That means six more weeks of inflation.

Ultimately, the orgy of printing results in destitution, unemployment, and a political and moral crisis.  How bad is it?  Reminders of the hyperinflation caused by worthless money during the Revolutionary War are still in the Constitution – “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make anything but gold and silver tender in payment of debts.”  I even keep a copy of the Constitution on the wall – The Mrs. calls it the Decoration of Independence.

Wonder why the German bankers are so crazy about not letting the euro hyperinflate?  They’ve been through that before.  And German bankers are generally pessimists, which is why they study Russian.

Sadly, we’re seeing these impacts even though many of the trillions in printing haven’t even hit the economy yet.  Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill hasn’t even hit the economy yet.  Think construction is expensive now?  Wait until there are a trillion more dollar in construction contracts that hit the economy in the next six months.  That will lead to millions of guys standing around trying to look busy.

I wanted to build highways, but I decided not to go down that road.

So, that’s path one – keep going and wait for everything to blow up like slobber from a pasty dingo with a bag of decade-old beef jerky, which seems like an oddly specific analogy, but I have my reasons.  What will be on the other side?  No one can say – often, hyperinflation destroys the entire fabric of the country, making the people desperate, willing to do anything, even watch another Marvel® movie.

There is, of course, a second choice:

Quit printing money.

Stop entirely.

Have the Fed® increase the interest rate to slow down the economy and re-value the currency.  Stop the shenanigans.

The result of that is, of course, also a major recession – probably worse than the Great Recession of 2008.  Possibly as bad as the Great Depression.

There will be plummeting home values as interest rates increase.  There will be unemployment.    But once the debt clears, in a decade or so, what will be left will be an economy that is based, perhaps, on a more fundamentally sound currency, or even one that won’t inflate until it is worthless.  I can dream, can’t I?

It’s not a pleasant idea, going through that pain.  But in the end, it provides a chance for economic prosperity.

That’s it.  Those are really the only choices I see in the economy.  We’ll have to pick one.

I have no faith that the second path will be taken.  Why?  This graph, for one.  Looks like people who like free stuff, vote for people who give them . . . free stuff.

Romney supporters signed their checks on the front, Obama voters signed theirs on the back.

It requires making a hard choice, a knowing difficulty.  It’s like having the discipline to eat the broccoli and skip the ice cream before they wheel you out to read things off the teleprompter.  I have seen no sign of the political class of the United States being willing to make any difficult decision.  I have seen only a little appetite in the general populace to take the tough road.

No, I think we’ll make the first choice.  When inflation gets worse?  My bet is that the reaction of the political leadership will be to send checks to everyone.  Wait and see.

No, I’m not a psychic.  But I wish I was a remote viewer.  I’m still looking for the one from the stereo.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part III

“No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power tyrants and dictators cannot stand. The Centauri learned that lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.” – Babylon 5

I like the electronics DIY store – The Ohm Depot.

Part I of this series can be found here (LINK), and Part II can be found here (LINK).

Thinking about dictatorship is difficult.  I was raised in a system that considered dictatorship more or less impossible.  We didn’t even have any jokes about dictators because we didn’t speak Spanish, German, Italian, Russian or Chinese.  I was raised in the wilds where you could be certain that every house contained more firearms than people, usually many more.  And safe?  Doors were rarely locked.

They taught us how to use rifles effectively in school.  I even won the prize for marksmanship in eighth grade, which was a personally autographed photo of Andrew Jackson.  Every boy took the test and got his Hunter Safety card, except me.  I’d had my card since second grade.

The girls?  Who knows what they did while we were shooting rifles, making models, and talking about football.  This class was for boys only, and strangely we didn’t have difficulty identifying what a girl was.  We didn’t even have advanced biology degrees to tell the boys from the girls back then, though I will admit to have been an avid amateur biologist while I was in high school.  And even I could tell the difference.

So, back to the point, dictatorship was something that I didn’t think a lot of.  And there’s no way that it’s a certainty since Civil War 2.0 is still a very real possibility.  That being said, I started to research a bit deeper.  What are the signposts that a dictatorship is near?

A truck carrying Vicks Vap-O-Rub® overturned yesterday.  Thankfully, there was no congestion.

Most of the articles were written by Leftist journalists who wanted to reee! that Trump was the worst tyrant since Stalin’s more evil brother.  One of them was even in a magazine for young adolescent females, whatever those are.

I found one article (Trump era, pre-George Floyd, pre-‘Rona) that had the following conditions (LINK).  I didn’t think the article was great.  But, being written by a writer from India, it was refreshingly free of Trump Derangement Syndrome.  Here is (more or less the list, with some minor edits from me):

  • Control of the Media: CNN®?  Leftist think CNN™ is centrist.  Outside of dissident media on the Internet and (sometimes) Fox©, I think we can firmly check this box.  The denial of Hunter Biden’s laptop, anyone?
  • Rigging of the Electoral System: That is more than self-evident from the strange and obviously fraudulent results of the 2020 election, but it is also 100% admitted by the Left, in Time Magazine, no less.  It’s here (LINK), though it’s now behind a wall.
  • Control of the Judicial System: This is only mostly, since Trump managed to put several justices on the Supreme Court.  All in all, though, the court system has skewed Left for ages.
  • Spying on the Population: This box has been checked since 2001 and the Patriot Act.  Snowden, anyone?
  • Harassing Dissidents: Compare the reaction to people literally burning down cities and staging insurrection in the streets to truckers peacefully protesting.  Also:  say something that is against The Narrative on YouTube®, see how long your account lasts.  As a website operator, I certainly know when I’m over the target because the site catches flak.
  • Suppression of Dissidents – Dissident Protest is Terrorism: January 6th.  End of story.
  • Promotion of Civil Unrest: George Floyd protests were going to happen, regardless of the person.  It just needed an appropriate victim and the video spread far and wide, even though drugs killed St. George of Our Lady of Fentanyl and not a police officer’s knee.  Riots were going to happen – it was part of the plan.

Ouch!

By my count, that’s seven out of seven, and that’s just since December of 2019.  It’s interesting just how much Donald Trump, despite not really achieving much of lasting note, upset the system.  Trump didn’t restore law and order.  Heck, he couldn’t even restore Firefly.  But yet, they were willing to take off the mask just to get him out.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Or maybe that was the point?

Taking a step back, civilizations have a lifespan.  The following cycle is attributed to Alexander Tytler, a dead Scottish guy.  There are two problems with this:

  • There is no evidence Tytler ever said anything like this.
  • The name Tytler makes me think of an Austrian politician who moved to Germany and was popular in the 1930s and early 1940s and then decided to get breast enhancement.

Okay, deep down, I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old.

The real author of the Tytler Cycle is probably Henning Prentiss, an executive, who is also dead and whose name is not nearly as funny.  The 1943 speech it’s from is here (LINK).

So, here is what Tytler Prentiss had to say:

“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.”

The end state is what we’re really interested in – the failure of government, the loss of hope, and the dependence on someone, anyone, to save them.  All they have to surrender is control.  And, in the United States that doesn’t necessarily mean the same party – in many ways the GOP is just the “for God’s sake, don’t put me in charge, they’ll expect me to do something” wing of the Democratic Party.

How did the Roman Senate choose a new dictator?  They played rock, paper, Caesars.

The Strong Man himself is certainly out there right now.  He might be unknown to us, but he is building, biding his time.  It’s almost certainly not AOC, since she’s not anyone’s idea of a problem solver unless your problem is needing a Margarita, no salt.  It’s not someone too old like Bernie Sanders who will turn to dust if Sunlight ever hits him – which is why he has coffins in the basement of the multiple mansions he owns.

It’s certainly not the Ad Libber in Chief, since he (like his pants) is in the process of being dumped (you don’t think those releases about Hunter’s laptop are coincidental, do you?).  No, someone young, vigorous, yet already sold to The Narrative.  Dan Crenshaw (World Economic Forum™ Young Leader®), my eye is on you.

But it doesn’t have to be Dan.  Any man who has The Plan, charisma, and reasonable personal hygiene (including regular showers) might become the Strong Man.  It won’t be a woman:  the masculinity of the “tough” solutions will be a part of the sales pitch, along with the ever so regretful admission that temporary controls are needed to restore the abundance of the past.

So, control is surrendered.  Rights are conditional –rights will be honored as long as it is convenient, ignored, or suppressed when not.  The budding Kommissars of Australia provided the poster child for the sudden evaporation of rights when inconvenient for government.  In a continent where every insect is an inexhaustible vat of poison, every animal has fangs and can disembowel a man with a kick, and the nectar of half the plants does things that would make H.P. Lovecraft shudder, who knew that the most dangerous creatures were . . . government employees?

I went to Australia and they asked me if I had a criminal record.  I said, “I didn’t know that was still required.”

Keep this in mind, as well:  The United States government is fine with taking $300 billion of Russia’s funds.  Think the Strong Man would hesitate to confiscate all the funds of a dissident?  Most dissidents I know don’t even have half the nuclear weapons Russia does.

What does the dictator, the Strong Man want to control, then?

Well, all of us.

How does he do it?

Well, the Strong Man can control other things that allow him to control his people:

  • Food
  • Money
  • Pharmaceuticals
  • Media
  • Politics
  • Culture
  • Technology
  • Communications
  • Family Structure
  • Energy
  • Immigration
  • Fertility

If the Strong Man doesn’t like me, he can kill me and replace me with a compliant citizen and use my money to buy himself something nice, like a new watch.  All for the greater good, of course.  Orwell described the real goal of every Strong Man best:  “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Wow – this part got darker and emptier than the space between Kamala’s ears between ideas.  I’ll close with this happy thought:  Bondage leads to faith, faith to courage, and courage to liberty.  And remember, there are large parts of the United States where guns still far outnumber people.  Regardless of the detours we take into darkness, there will always be a light for mankind.

I mean, unless the light is the comet that’s going to hit us.  Oh, wait, I wasn’t supposed to give spoilers for 2023 yet!

Not my original.

Next:  (There will be a delay in this one, perhaps next week, perhaps the week after) Mechanisms of Control

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part II

“Did you ever run for dictator of anything?” – Green Acres

Why didn’t Julius Caesar ever say “thank you” to anyone?  He didn’t speak English.

This is Part II of the series.  Part I can be found here (LINK).

The history of when the United States started to slip into a dictatorship is long, but I’ll start with the Civil War.  The worst part of the Civil War (besides, you know, all of the dead people) was Lincoln running roughshod over the Constitution whenever it suited him:

  • Shut down opposition newspapers, arresting the owners and editors,
  • Arrested a former congressman (generally a good idea) and put him to a military tribunal (he wasn’t in the military) and then . . . deported him to the Confederacy,
  • Legalized disco, and
  • Put the entire state of Maryland under martial law.

Important Civil War Fact:  It is not true that, despite popular conception, Lincoln had written the first draft of the Gettysburg Address on a Bacon Swiss Hand-Breaded Chicken Sandwich™ wrapper from Carl’s Jr.©  Lincoln actually preferred Arby’s®.

The movie Lincoln grossed $300,000,000, which is weird because Abe normally didn’t do well in theaters.

But the slip toward despotism wasn’t done and the precedent was one people didn’t forget:  in a crisis, the rights of the citizens who oppose you are optional.  War and crisis seemed to bring it out the best, and although I could spend quite a bit about the overreaches of other presidents (Woodrow Wilson, I’m looking at you) the next person grasping for the tyrant’s ring was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR was really awful, if you love liberty.  His expansion of Federal power (unlike most of Lincoln’s) is still with us today.  As the economic crisis of the Great Depression hit nation after nation and led to dictatorships across the world, America craved their own Strong Man.

It also explains why he never ran for office.

Roosevelt was more than ready.  It is quite arguable that the vast majority of the things that Roosevelt did made the crisis longer.  It is acknowledged today by the Federal Reserve™ (thanks, Wilson) that they not only caused the Great Depression, but that their actions made it worse.  It makes me so mad:  if I didn’t have a cold, I’d Sudafed®.

Roosevelt did not let the crisis go to waste.  He created power structure after power structure in the country.  Social Security.  Threatening the Supreme Court so that his definition of the Interstate Commerce Clause was adopted, which allows the Federal government to reach into almost every business in the country today.

Roosevelt also violated the idea that presidents served two terms, and two terms only.  Thankfully, he died about 300 years into his presidency.  And, thankfully, he inspired a Constitutional Amendment to prevent anyone from rolling in his wheelchair tracks.

But the rot of creeping state control continued.  What held it at bay was, thankfully (and oddly enough), the Soviets.

I didn’t like their food, though – I’m against the Soviet Onion.

Centralization is always the goal of the dictator.  In order to compete with the Soviets, though, we needed to keep our economy in overdrive to build more jets and missiles and nuclear bombs.  The easiest way to do that?  Dispersed knowledge.  Incentives.  Voluntary cooperation.  In short, capitalism.  The Soviets may have thought that they’d bury us, but in reality they never could keep up with a people motivated by freedom, patriotism, and profit.

We buried the Soviets.

But the requirement to beat them also required a people in the United States that were ill-suited for a Caesar.

Unfortunately, in addition to building missiles, the communists had been trying to hollow out the institutions of the United States.  It’s ironic:  the Soviet Union was hollowed out by communism around the same time that the big rot of communism that the Soviets planted in the United States started to show here.  They wormed their way through what I now call The List of the Long March through the Institutions:

  • Colleges and Universities
  • The K-12 educational system.
  • Most Protestant religious organizations.
  • Most Catholic organizations.
  • The American Medical Association.
  • Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
  • The general officer corps of the armed services.
  • The courts.
  • Silicon Valley tech companies.
  • Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

I had a communist girlfriend who I later found out was a psycho.  How did I miss the red flags?

The control of these Institutions ultimately gives the Left the power to destabilize society.  It rots society from within.  The signs of that sort of rot are so big they cannot be concealed now:

  • 70% of citizens supporting some form of mandatory vaxx in blue states (81% in Washington, D.C.),
  • Only speech and activities approved of by the toxic combination of government, BigTechBook™, and GloboCorp® is approved,
  • George R.R. Martin is still pretending he’s writing his next Game of Thrones® book,
  • The leader of Iran still had a Twitter™ account while the President’s account was cancelled,
  • Open borders are reality, flooding the United States with many with no functional idea of liberty,
  • Firing for wrongthink is not only approved, it’s encouraged, and
  • Disney®, a global company, is attempting to override the will of the people of Florida because their employees do not agree with the idea that teachers shouldn’t talk about gay sex with five-year-olds.

That’s bad enough.  The good news is that not everyone is an NPC, waiting to receive the next government-approved Woke Upgrade that (spins wheel) attempts to convince you your computer is non-binary.  Heck, if you’re reading this, chances are high that you make your own decisions and are skeptical of much of The Agenda.

I’d like my remains to be scattered at Disneyworld®.  I don’t want to be cremated, though.

But in 2022, we have the potential for the biggest economic failure in the history of the United States.  We have the possibility of a failed economy combined with a failed currency.  This would bring economic chaos that would be destabilizing.  In the 1930s, 20% of the American workforce was in agriculture.  Now?  Around 2%.

Without jobs, in a collapsing economy?  That’s a lot of hungry people.  A lot of homeless people.

A lot of people without hope.  A lot of people who will look for a man who promises solutions.  The Strong Man.

The response?  That’s Friday’s post:  The Strong Man, and the signposts along the way.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why? This why is important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What, then, do the people want?

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

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

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

And that’s how you get a Dictator

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

The Modern World Part IV: What To Do?

“Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?” – Three Amigos

He was also the first person to use CTRL-C.

So, I promised three blogs on the Modern World.  They are here – The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers, The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating, and The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed.  As I sat preparing to do the blog tonight, I realized there was one more post to provide the capstone to the series, which I present in this post.

How do we deal with modernity outside of moving to a cabin in Montana?

Listen, despite the name, Ted made more than one bomb.

First, if you’re not healthy, get healthy.  That’s actually horribly simple to do for most people.

  • Limit the amount of food that you eat – we’re provided with a plethora of food choices daily. Most of it I don’t need.  As I’ve railed for years, most (not all!) people in the United States could go without food for two weeks with no ill effects, and many would find the experience a positive, not a negative.  Here is some sound advice I’ve incorporated into my life:  you can’t outrun your teeth.  But I can outrun most Leftists – you can tell they like carbs.
  • Sure donuts (in metric, doughnuts) are good. Avoid them.    Will one a week kill you?  No.  Will one a day?  Maybe.  Same with chips.  I had a “snack size” bag of chips two weeks ago.  Since I’ve been eating well, they made me feel queasy.  Same with donuts.  When your diet is good meat and real vegetables, donuts and that gooey cheese they serve with movie-theater nachos taste like . . . a chemical product.  Which they are.  Corollary:  don’t let your teeth dig your grave.  I wouldn’t want to ruin the gravedigger’s hole career.
  • Pick foods that are as close as possible to actual food. If you’re gonna have a chicken sandwich at McDonalds®, pick the one that’s made out of actual chicken rather than some sort of processed chicken stuff.  A baked potato or French fries?  Baked, thank you.  Seriously, once I stopped eating crap, crap tasted like crap.  If it has vegetable oil or a list of ingredients longer than, say, seven, once a week.  At most.  Heck, I even had a kid’s meal at McDonalds today.  It sure made his parents mad.
  • The food pyramid is even poor geometry – heck, I read Pharaoh used slaves to build his. Bricks might have been easier?  Regardless, real fats and meat (butter, a well-marbled ribeye) are good for you and make you feel full.  Flour spikes your insulin and all the breads (except the ones I make from grinding the bones of door-to-door salesmen) are made from flour.  Insulin tells your body to store fat.  Do the math.
  • Get exercise.   It’s good for you.  If nothing else, walk.  If you can’t walk, undulate like a snake on a baby oil-covered shower curtain.  One thing I’ve seen in life – when a man stops walking, death isn’t far away.  Keep moving.  Even if your legs are weak, you can still do diddly-squats.
  • Avoid it, except, say, once a week.  Maybe.  I’ll have an entire post on that at some point.

The other day I said, “Alexa, turn on CNN®.  I want to hear the news.”  Alexa responded, “I’m sorry Lord John, you’ll have to pick one or the other.”

Second, feed your mind.

  • Feed your mind like you feed your body. Go to the source, and check everyone (even me!) and determine what isn’t Truth.  Journalists are now being taught in journalism school (it’s like real school, but they use pictures and coloring books) that being an advocate for the globalist, Leftist viewpoint is the point of news reporting.  Understand that virtually every news story you are reading today in mainstream media is written by a rich kid who wasn’t smart enough to go to law school and believes that lying to you is ethical, as long as it advances The Agenda and The Narrative.  And sometimes they change The Agenda and The Narrative in less than a week.  Don’t believe me?  Ask Psaki about COVID.
  • The media lies. But I repeat myself.  “Truth is the first casualty of war,” quoted Ethel Annakin-Skywalker in 1915 according to something I read on the Internet.  Remember that “nurse” who told Congress of Iraqi soldiers tossing infants out when they took incubators from hospitals when Iraq invaded Kuwait?  She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.  Look it up.  Before you believe a single thing coming from Ukraine, look it up, and understand this:  your emotion is the aim.  Heck, I hear manipulating your emotions is all the rage.
  • Propaganda: even when you’re aware of propaganda, it’s effective.
  • Look for things that make you happy. When I go on the Internet, sometimes (when I’m in a growly mood) I look for things that will make me mad.  There’s plenty.  Twitter® is a sea of it.  Most social media is a sea of it.  That’s why (except for when writing for research purposes) I avoid it like the plague – remember, all work and no plague makes for an entirely different 13th
  • For 95% of people, there is no reason you can’t be happy in this moment, right now.   There are people in this world who have serious problems, but for the most part you’re really not one of them.  Even if you are, why would you let those problems rob you from a moment of being happy?  There is a time to grieve, a time to be sad.  When you let it rule your life, you’re a victim.  Stop it.  Don’t make me come over there and make you.

I brought a grenade to a water balloon fight once.  It did level the playing field.

Then, there’s marriage.  These rules aren’t for 1970, (though they would have worked) but more for today – the world has moved on.  It is far harder today to find a good match than it was even when I met The Mrs. two decades ago.  If you’re happily married, ignore and skip to the next section.

  • If you’re not married, take care in picking your partner. A lot of care.  A bad match will last just as long as a good one (if you have kids) and be amazingly costly.  And never pick woman obsessed with Star Wars® – divorce is strong with this one.
  • Avoid dating apps. They’re really just casual sex apps.  And never go casual.  Get competitive.
  • If you’re a young dude (below 35), try to get a wife who is no older than 20-24 years old and marry for values and character. Why?  Nothing good happens with a single woman in their mid to late 20s now.
  • If you’re a young woman, find a quality guy who has values and character, and stay a virgin until marriage.
  • If you’re a young person, especially a man, avoid marrying a spouse whose parents divorced when they were young (0-16). Understand their family and their values.  Understand that the values on display with the parents are another clue to how your future spouse will be.
  • If you’re a man, don’t let your wife’s work interfere with raising the kids and keeping the house. Raising kids with decent values are more important than most luxuries.
  • And while we’re there about kids, understand this – the move to turn government schools into an indoctrination center has never been higher. Which values do you want your children to have?  Yours?  The governments?

But I hear it’s at a pretty low interest rate.  Heck, I think we could refinance New Zealand to make the balloon payment.

What about economics?

  • Avoid debt to the extent possible. Never borrow to buy a car, unless it’s the only choice.  Never buy a new car unless your net worth is over $1 million or a company you own is paying for it.  Heck, I hear the best way to get back on your feet is to miss two car payments . . . .
  • I have one.  I could pay it off in cash.  Why could I pay it off?  Because I never borrow to buy cars (since 1997).  I hear Spongebob® isn’t paying his mortgage – his house is underwater.
  • Understand that luxury has multiple costs: first, there’s the cash that has to be paid every month.  Second, there’s a moral cost.  Just like a donut, occasional luxury won’t dull the character.  But every month, and forever?  It robs bank accounts and robs the most precious thing that any person controls – their time.
  • Video games are a luxury. If a person spends 20 hours a week playing video games, what else could have been done with their time?  Imagine if Hemingway spent his spare time playing Grand Theft Auto instead of sitting under the Catalan Sun drinking wine from a bota and watching bullfights?    GTA is a life stealer.  And for Ernest, so was a shotgun.
  • Why live in a big city? The high housing cost?  The crush of incessant humanity surrounding you?  Oh, yeah, you can get Thai food at 3am.
  • Realize the dollar is going to die. The United States prints them, and then other people take them.  When Jen P-saki said that this was “Putin’s Inflation” I asked the question:  “When did Putin take control of our money supply and then started printing trillions of dollars?”  If you salted away a bit of gold and silver (and lead, too) the best case is that you could give it to your kids when you pass on.  The worst case?  Well, between you and me, silver and gold might be the biggest bargains of the century in 2022 (I am NOT an investment advisor).
  • Realize that in the future, there is a high degree of probability that having “divergent” opinions to The Narrative will result in cutting people off from their money – it has already happened in Canada. You may not believe it, but it’s Tru-deau.  How will you prepare for that?
  • You have a year’s worth of food, right? You buy a little extra each month and salt it away?  It’s a lot easier to do when the shelves are full, and when shortages hit you’re not part of the problem – you’re part of the solution because you won’t be adding to the panic.  It’s not hoarding if you bought it before the panic hits.

I heard he was sad later in life.  He had a Kipling depression.

The Modern World thinks that this is a new scenario.  It isn’t.  Kipling wrote about this many, many years ago in The Gods of The Copybook Headings:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

 We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

 We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither cloud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market Place,
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

 With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch,
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch;
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings;
So we worshipped the Gods of the Market Who promised these beautiful things.

 When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promised perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “Stick to the Devil you know.” 

 On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “The Wages of Sin is Death.” 

 In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: “If you don’t work you die.”  

 Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

 As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

 And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed

“I have nipples, Greg.  Could you milk me?” – Meet the Parents

Klaus, and his cat, Mrs. Triddlesworth.

This is the third and final (for now) commentary about modern life and what modernity has brought us.  The first one was dealing with health (The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers), the second with life in general (The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating).  This last one deals with the essence of the modern world:  Money.

We are being farmed.  For money.  For time.  For votes.

I started noticing the money-farming thing in the 1990s.  I looked at what Sears© was doing back then because I was at the point where I needed to start paying bills or cultivating the lifestyle of an urban outdoorsman.  To me, what Sears® was attempting seemed obvious – they were attempting to see what the average family spent each month and were trying to swallow it all.

You could even get a Sears© store credit card to pay for it all (plus a wee 20% interest fee).  Sadly, I heard that their Sears™ credit card database has just been hacked – they now have the personal data for everyone born between 1899 and 1921.  Sears™, of course, sold everything from tools to toddler beds to toasters to towels to trench coats to twine.

But that wasn’t enough.  Sears™ bought Allstate™ so they could insure your house and car.  Sears™ bought Dean Witter Investments©, Coldwell Banker Real Estate™, and developed the Discover™ card to boot.

Outside of food, you could get a majority of your needs covered if you had a family just by buying stuff from Sears© product and their companies.  You could invest, buy a home, and even (in some places) have Sears™ mechanics work on your car.

I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys’r’Us© kid . . . bankrupt and empty inside.

This strategy failed, spectacularly, because Sears™ forgot how to sell stuff – it imagined it was a finance-real estate – insurance company and forgot that the big business that brought people in the door was the stuff.  Today, there are fewer Sears™ stores left than movies Nic Cage did in the last three months, so only 36 or so.

But the concept of “farming people for monthly payments” stuck with me.  The very best companies start with an idea of how to serve people, but at some point, the goal of all of them become money extraction.  Then they (generally) fail.  I’m looking at you, General Electric®.

Sometimes, companies even get the law changed to make a product legally required.  Example?

Car insurance.  There was a time it wasn’t required.  As of 2020 (the latest data I could find), two states don’t require it, but the other 48 require it (or bonding).  Before 1956, no states required car insurance.  Is it a good idea?  Yeah.  But I think the biggest proponents were car insurance companies who were tired of covering for the 45% of accidents that were caused by women drivers, which is weird.  The steering wheel isn’t even on their side.

What’s the worst thing about parallel parking?  The witnesses.

What other regular bills do most people pay in 2022?

  • Cable TV,
  • Subscription streaming,
  • Internet,
  • Elvis impersonators,
  • Property taxes,
  • Mortgage or rent,
  • Trash,
  • PEZ®,
  • Water,
  • Water soluble dog wax,
  • Sewer,
  • Johnny Depp, and
  • Homeowners’ associations

I could keep going.  Everyone wants a check, and most of them want it monthly so they can be as regular as Biden’s strokes.  Some of the things on the list are optional, and some are compulsory.  It took The Mrs. and I quite a lot of hunting when we moved to Texas to find a house that didn’t have a homeowners’ association.  And Johnny Depp?  Who can avoid that on a Saturday night?

But the farming gets worse.  It used to be that many (not all) families in the 1950s could get by with only one income.  Then, enter feminism.  It was far from natural – but women were made to feel in some way inadequate if they didn’t burn their bras, start smoking, and go to work and type PowerPoints®.  Or whatever women did at work in the 1960s.  Help the Clampetts?  I’m at a loss.

I gave a friend a book for his birthday.  I hope he returns it on time, it’s due in two weeks.

The number of houses for families didn’t go up any faster, but the income of the families did as mothers entered the workforce.  So, as women began to make money, the same number of families were chasing the same number of houses (suburbia could only grow so fast), but with higher income.

The result?  Housing prices went up so the standard of living didn’t even increase that much.  The nuclear family, already pulled from the extended family by events I’ve talked about in earlier posts in this series, began to feel the stress.  The net gain from women entering the workforce for many families was nearly zero, if not negative.

Don’t believe me?  Check housing prices around big cities.

As the stress from two working families shot up, the divorce rate went up.  And government dependency went up.  Thus?

People farmed for their labor became dependent people farmed for votes.  How can the Left keep winning like this?  That, sadly, wasn’t the only big economic change to hit the modern world.

College became (during the 1970s) another way to farm people for money.  The Average Midwestern College® in the 1970s could be paid for with a typical part-time job with money left over for pizza, Pepsi®, and a Ford® Pinto™.  The Pinto® might have been the best argument ever for car insurance.

Before then, most people didn’t go to college, because it wasn’t required to get a good job or start a good business.  But as numbers of people attending college went up, supply and demand kicked in.

The supply of college slots increased, sure, but the colleges found that they could charge a lot more for school.  But politicians decided that everyone should be allowed to go to school, so they introduced the Guaranteed Student Loan.  This was a government program where you could borrow enough to cover the tuition at most schools.

Okay, say it out loud.

Heck, I’d like to thank student loans for getting me through grad school.  I don’t think I can ever repay you.  I kid.  But the last loan payment was due on 1/1/2013.  I made sure to not pay ahead, so if 2012 was the end of the world, at least that last payment would have been a freebie.

Colleges, of course, decided that you could pay the borrowed amount PLUS more money, so tuition went up with loan amounts.  More students plus higher tuition led to more loans.  This led to more debt.

Now the average student loan debt is over $39,000.  The total student loan debt in the country is $1,7 trillion.

Where did this $1.7 trillion go?  To climbing walls.  To cool dorm rooms.  To spring breaks.  To new buildings.  And, far too much of it went to Leftist professors teaching their students that the problem is too much tradition, and the solution is even more modernity and “free” medical care.

What kind of Medicare would Moses have?  Part C.

Yes.  Medical care.  In general, the very best medical advice I’ve seen says to stay away from doctors as much as you can.  Eat healthy food.  Get exercise.  Stay hydrated.  Wash your hands.  Try not to get crushed under heavy things.  Avoid Chicago.

The problem is that none of this is very profitable for the medical industry.  Healthy people are lousy customers.  Goldman Sachs® asked it themselves, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”  Yes, this is a real quote.

Well, no, curing patients doesn’t work for big financial companies – they hate that idea.  No one makes money off of diet foods if you maintain a healthy weight.  No one makes money off of insulin if you can avoid diabetes.  And they actually want you to get cancer.  This is again a comment from the same Goldman Sachs® report:  “Where an incident pool remains stable (e.g., in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”

Hmmm.  Does the Pfizer™ vaccine make more sense now?  If they have their way, boosting will be an annual event.  Does that sound sustainable?  I’m sure Goldman Sachs© is thrilled.

Are psychoactive medications sustainable?

But people owning things appears to be cramping the style of the elites.   The latest idea that has been widely talked about is the Great Reset – a transition away from past economic ideas, such as “ownership” and “family” and “freedom” and “sleeping in on Saturday morning”.

We’ve been moving towards the Great Reset.  According to their thoughts:  We’ll own nothing, and like it.  Then, our time could be farmed forever.  Our desires could be controlled and programmed.  We’ll like having nothing because that’s what they designed.  And they’ll further atomize and alienate us.

Because that’s profitable.  Don’t believe me?  Listen to them, in their own words:

Russia And The End Of The Dollar

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

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

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

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

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

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

What could go wrong, stealing cash from random people?

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

See, one silver lining!

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

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

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

What does Russia import?

  • Telephones
  • Car Parts
  • Computers
  • Medicine

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Babylon Bee has the real impact figured out.

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

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

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

Why would we want to solve problems?

Let them eat electric cars?

And Joe’s responsible for the invasion, too.

Leaked pictures from Joe’s energy briefing.

The goal.  No matter what it costs.

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

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

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

One person sums it up . . . .

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

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

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

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

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

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