Category: Silly Predictions

White House Insider Scoop: The Economic Plan

“Television? My God! If they could market that in pill form, Switzerland would be plunged into a recession.” – Absolutely Fabulous

“Old McDonald had a farm . . .” sang the cheerful repo man.

Note:  there’s some meta content at the end on recent site issues at the end of all this.  Apologies for any issues.  I know that the subscriber stuff didn’t work on Monday, but I have faith it will today.  If you’re not a subscriber, I suggest you tempt fate and subscribe in the box over there to the right . . . .

This past week in the economics side of the world there has been a recent dust-up.  The generally accepted definition of a recession is that there are two consecutive quarters of economic contraction.  I’m not sure exactly how they measure that, but I assume it’s by throwing a bunch of chicken wing bones from the Buffalo Burnin’ Hot® Pizza Hut™ wings into the air and seeing if they fall in a pattern that is pleasing to Gorto, god of the Great Charts of Giza.

Or maybe not.  That sounds pretty high-tech for an economist, since it might involve higher economics like counting.

But at least it’s more scientific than how economists judge if there is a recession or not.

Regardless, the White House has suggested that the same definition that’s been used since, oh, I was knee high to Farrah Fawcett-Majors (which wasn’t bad, I’m thinking) is no longer operative.  Nope.  Now (according to Wikipedia®) recessions only occur when the National Bureau of Economic Research©, a privately held group, says so.

When will they say it’s so?

Probably years after the recession has occurred, and probably then only if it’s something the Left want’s to see.

Winston Smith would be proud.

I can’t help, though, wondering what the conversation was like in the White House when they discussed the horrible economic data that showed there was a recession, or at least what would have been called a recession in every year every except for 2022.

I hear homeless horses never get married.  It just isn’t a stable relationship.

Joe Biden (BIDEN):  “I’m really glad you all could join me this wharngm *cough* smaglerpump.  Anyone have a steak?  Oh, wait, can’t eat ‘em.  Gets stuck the dentures, you see *wet phlegmy cough*.”

Biden takes dentures out to show group.

Kamala Harris (HARRIS):  “Wow!  I could have used that trick!”

Secretary of Treasury, Janet Yellen (YELLEN):  “Mr. President . . . .”

BIDEN:  “Oh, is Barry back?  I think I’m sitting in his chair.”  Jill Biden (DR. JILL) kicks BIDEN.

BIDEN:  “Ow!  What??”

YELLEN:  “Pardon me, uh, Joe.  The recent economic data had come back, and it’s not good.  From a technical standpoint, and primarily due to our plan, er, bad luck, er, Putin, we’re showing that the economy of the United States is contracting.”

It could be worse.  Gas could be really expensive.  Oh, wait.

BIDEN:  “Does that mean the baby is close?  I think I’m hoping for another boy.  I’d like to name one Hunter.  What a pure and noble name.  No way a man with such a strong name would become a degenerate dissolute drug addict who hires ladies-of-the-night.”

YELLEN:  “What?”

BIDEN:  “Whores, we used to call ‘em.  Street-walkers.  Strumpets.  *Long series of coughs.*  You know, loose women?”  Pause.  “I mean that.  Do you know any loose women?”

YELLEN:  “Pardon me, Mr., um, Joe.  What I’m trying to tell you is that the economy is a mess.  Prices are shooting through the roof, and where we once saw labor shortages due to paying people to not work, now we’re seeing companies starting to lay off people, and demand dropping.  Not at all good.  It’s what we economists technically call a recession.”

BIDEN:  “Recession?  What will President Carter say about that when he gets back from Camp David?  That’s no good at all.  We simply can’t have a recession.  We need ideas, people!”

Secretary of State, Antony Blinken (BLINKEN):  “Heh heh, we could send that crazy witch Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.  That would distract people.  Heck, maybe no one would notice that the price of gasoline requires them to ‘donate’ a kidney to get a fill-up.”

Joe wanted Hunter to slow down on his cocaine habit – he said, that Hunter had to draw a line somewhere.

Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin (AUSTIN):  “Great idea!  We could send over some aircraft carriers.  We’ve got dozens of those.  Really pump up the tension.”

Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas (MAYORKAS):  “And import Nicaraguans.  Perhaps sixty million of them.  They don’t vote.”

Secretary of Transportation, Pete Buttigieg (BUTTIGIEG):  “Dr. Jill, what are the first symptoms of monkeypox again?”

DR. JILL: “Pete, I’m not that kind of doctor. I’m the kind of doctor that people have to call “doctor” because I insist they do.”

BUTTIGIEG:  “Oh, what was your thesis title?”

DR. JILL: “Student Retention at the Community College: Meeting Students’ Needs.”  (J.W. note:  this is really the title.)

Vanilla Ice is both more vanilla and more ice than Jill Biden is a doctor.

ALL, except BIDEN, who looks confused:  Laughter.

BIDEN, looking at DR. JILL:  “Missy, are you new here?  I could use a sandwich.  But nothing too tough.  Dentures.  See?”  Pulls them out to show her.

ALL, except BIDEN, who looks confused:  Laughter.

DR. JILL exits.

BIDEN:  “Well, now it’s just us guys.  Anyone want to watch a porno?  My son Hunter,” long pause “sent me this one.  Shared it to me on FacePlant®.”

YELLEN and HARRIS glance at each other.

BIDEN:  “So, what’s the plan?  I mean we have this regression, I mean digression, er, um, digestion.”

YELLEN:  “Mr. Pr . . . er, Joe, it’s a recession.”

BIDEN:  Agitated.  “No, it’s not!  It’s not a recession until Obama says it’s a recession!”

All look at each other in stunned silence.

YELLEN:  “That’s perfect.  We pretend we’re not in a recession.  Just say it isn’t one.”

All nod, except Biden, who is staring vacantly toward the ceiling at a point near the opposite corner.

Chief of Staff Ron Klain (KLAIN):  “It’s decided.  I’ll mobilize the usual folks.  CNN®, the New York Times™, the Washington Post©, and oh, yeah, I’ll mobilize our trolls.  Let’s put the old definitions down the memory hole.  Start with Reddit® and Wikipedia™.  In a couple of weeks, let’s see if we can’t have Twitter© ban anyone using the r-word.”

Meeting adjourns.  BIDEN remains seated, looking uncomfortable.

BIDEN:  “I was told there would be ice cream.”

Now, the meta content.  On Monday, I normally get a copy of the post delivered to my inbox for a couple of reasons:  the first is to show that the software worked.  Since it’s worked nearly 800 times, I was surprised it didn’t.  The second is to make sure the content showed up.

On Monday, that didn’t happen.  Why?  I’m still not sure.  I went to the website and saw that the website itself was down.  Why?  Still not sure.  It turns out that I’ve been fighting the hosting company of the site for the better part of four calls (over three hours of time) and it seemed like everything they did made things worse.

I think it’s all working now, though.  Let me know if the RSS or any other component isn’t working.

The Best Post You’ll Read Today About Almost Anything

“You don’t know what cold is. I once survived an entire week trapped in a Swiss glacier eating nothing but frozen Neanderthal. To this day, I can’t stand the taste of early hominid.” – Futurama

So, after 232 ties in a row . . . Gung decided that “rock beats skull”.

Usually, I write about money and finance and the shenanigans going on in the world now.  I thought I’d deviate from that formula for several reasons.  First, I’d like to have some good news about the financial world, and that didn’t happen this week, unless Biden had a brief moment of lucidity and finally figured out that the sanctions are actually hurting us more than Russia.  (Checks news.)  Nope.

Second, on Monday I wrote about collective vengeance.  It was, in modern Western Civilization, an anachronism that is rapidly returning.  The post talked about how I had grown up in shell where collective punishment simply didn’t exist and that it was rapidly returning.

I’ll note that my youthful innocence on collective punishment didn’t extend forever, but the point of the post was that the Left fed on collective punishment – I might write more about that in the future, since (last time I checked) I still seem to have an infinite amount of words combinations left.

I am, however, very aware that collective punishment was at one time the norm.  Reading in the Bible, when the wall of Jericho came down, not a single person was supposed to be left alive, so historically in a story we all know, collective punishment was a thing.

Why don’t the Amish complain when people make fun of them on the Internet?  Amish:  “What’s an Internet?”

I’ve written about things even farther back in history, and (perhaps) why people are the way they are based on tribe sizes in a theory that I think is entirely unique (read this because it’s awesome) until someone shows me that it was already written about the year I was born.  I’m still irritated that Newton figured out F=ma when I was only six.  Conversely, wouldn’t it be a hoot if an Internet humorist actually figured out why people are nuts?

Third, this post is really related to Monday’s post, and it shows this:  collective punishment may be actively written into our DNA, and only during brief moments of history (as brought about by Western Civilization and its particular individualist elements) is it not the norm.

I’ll start this rather unusual post with a concept that many a familiar with:  the Uncanny Valley.

The Uncanny Valley is that weird place that we get when something looks human, but isn’t.  An example would be CGI that looks like a human, but there’s something in the CGI that makes us step back because we process the simple equation:  it looks a lot like a human, but it’s not human.

Well, it’s nice that the spirit of Yoko lives on.  Except this one takes out a monarchy that started in 1066.

Zombies are a perfect example.  For me, that idea that something that is so close to human is propelled by an intelligence that is certainly not human is one of the scariest ideas.

Why?  Why do things that inhabit the Uncanny Valley between human and observably not-human give us the creeps?  The Uncanny Valley implies that at some point in human history, there was something that looked like us, and wasn’t us.  It must have been a very, very big deal if tens of thousands of years later it still can inhabit our collective memory and produce a (general) revulsion and fear.

What was it that did that?

I’m sure they had a very complicated order at Starbucks®.

I’m thinking that maybe, just maybe, it was the Neanderthals.  This was spurred on by the book Them+Us by Danny Vendramini.  He’s got a website here (LINK) and the image of the Neanderthal below is from his site, which he allows based on terms that seem to have disappeared, so, I’m thinking Fair Use covers it all.

I like the book.  Spoiler, Them is the Neanderthal, and Us is, well, our ancestors.

He starts the book by attempting to reconstruct what a Neanderthal really looked like.  For most of my life, what I’ve seen were the pictures of people who, with just a wee bit of barbering, you could toss into a suit and they’d be at home at the floor of the New York Stock Exchange®.

Vendramini thinks not.  First, he thought that they might have been covered with hair.  What’s his evidence?  The first part of his evidence is that there is no evidence that they could make clothing of anything more than the most basic “throw an animal skin over your shoulders” type.  So, how do you keep warm?

Hair.  Hair is the norm for mammals in the world, except for people (sorry, Italians).  So Danny (sorry, Vendramini is too many letters to type again and again) came to the logical conclusion that, like other primates, Neanderthals inhabiting Europe and the Near East would be quite hairy.

Pretty much no one argues that Neanderthal was about six times as strong as modern man, or even of the beta version of homo sapiens that existed at that time, so about a 431 times stronger than a typical soy-latte-based ambisexual® Leftist.

But Neanderthal wasn’t just strong, he was smart.  Neanderthals made things, like spears.  Like stone blades.  Like stone axes.  Hmm, I’m seeing a pattern here.  I don’t see any mochachinos.

Based on the size of their eyes, Danny thinks they were huge.  What needs huge eyes?  Things that hunt in low light.  So, Vendramini thinks that Neanderthals might have been low-light, nocturnal predators.  What else would low-light nocturnal predators have?  An amazing sense of smell, so there’s no reason to have a nose like ours – a nose like a pug.

And eyes?  The most efficient eyes for low-light hunting are slit-pupil eyes – like a cat.  The brow ridge?  It shielded the eyes during the day – and the eyes were much higher than a normal human, like where our forehead is.  So, huge eyes in the forehead with slit pupils.  Not scary, right?

Okay, I’ve finally found something scarier than my ex-wife.

Oh, every bit of evidence says that Neanderthal ate meat, so he was a carnivore.  But he also ate . . . Neanderthals.  So, he was a cannibal.  Eating puny humans?  That’s pretty easy if you’ve eaten Neanderthal.  Probably more tender, too.

Neanderthal lived in the forest.  Oh the forest, my dear, is lovely, dark and deep . . . .  One anthropologist described Neanderthal as this: wolves with knives.  So imagine that there are wolves in your neighborhood that are at least six times stronger than Arnold Schwarzenegger at his peak. And they are as smart as a human.  And they have knives.

Think that might help you sleep at night?

So, our ancestors, say, 50,000 years ago were wonderfully happy, living in a world where they were the king.  It was Eden-like.  Garden-like.  Hmm.

Anyway, one day they wander across a border and find?  Neanderthals that want to eat them.  Or, make babies with them.  Yup, they could make babies with humans, and between 1-3% of your DNA comes from nocturnal, cannibal, predators, unless your DNA is entirely from Africa.

So, when a Neanderthal group of hunters found a human group, it was the equivalent of a college party:  sex and food.  I’m not sure what order makes it better.

This, of course, baked our noodles.  It made it necessary for us to become smarter.  Vendramini suggests that this was the stepping out of the Garden which required us to have the knowledge, skills and brainpower to fight the Neanderthal, to beat them, and to become much better.

Does one hate the stone that hones us?  I think not.  Note:  my beard is better, but my abs need work.

It describes the Uncanny Valley in many respects.  What are the myths of our monsters?  Werewolves and vampires and cannibals and (Biblically) the Men of Renown (look it up).  It also explains our instinctive fear of the dark, where the huge, strong, cannibal near-human that can smell you from two counties over might be hiding waiting to get frisky or to turn you into a snack.

But we fought back.  The mark of a conquering civilization is the Y-chromosome, because, well, dudes give that part.  As I read it, the Y-chromosome in humanity is, human.  In the end, we won.  But they changed us even as we eliminated them.  It’s likely we did our own collective punishment and killed off all human males that looked too much like the enemy – too Neanderthal.  So, yeah, collective punishment.

And this also provides an explanation for the Uncanny Valley, and why it is generally the source of the ultimate horror and fear that humanity feels.  But we won.

There’s drinking, fighting, and death and drinking and fighting.  I think this is an insurance company’s nightmare.

As Western Civilization fades, the barriers to collective punishment fade as well.  So, sleep with one eye open, gripping your pillow tight . . .

And we’ll win again.

Economics In 2022, A Picture Book

“Stay classy, San Diego!” – Anchorman

I think the Chairman of the Federal Reserve® is required by law to drive a Fiat®.

Recently, part of the revolution has been televised . . . the Dutch government has decided that farming is evil because it keeps people from eating bugs and living in the pods:

Of course, the Dutch have commies there, too:

But who thinks hunger is good, besides the commies at Antifa?  Oh, the United Nations:

Well, we know the UN never comes up with their own ideas, they’re too busy with waste and corruption.  So where did this idea come from?

Oh, yeah, the World Economic Forum.

Thankfully, they’re not at all evil, right?

Karl nods approvingly:

But the World Economic Forum® has plans to help, right?  How it started for Sri Lanka:

How it’s going, I mean they’ve had four years to implement The Plan:

But they’ll help Europe, right?

How it might end:

But the United States is not immune from economic illiteracy:

I’m sure this won’t put 40 million people on edge:

But Joe Biden is coming to the aid of the American people:

And Kamala is planning on how to leave Kabul Washington.

While all of this goes on, there are differing views on the economy:

At least Amazon® will help us:

But in the end, maybe we will come to an ethical conclusion:

Stay classy, America!

The Economy – At Seneca’s Cliff?

“Well, what do you expect to find? A story about a guy who drove his car off a cliff in a snowstorm?” – Misery

Why don’t the sounds of pigeons echo?  A coo sticks.

I have written before about Ugo Bardi’s (Living Italian Economist) theory that he called Seneca’s Cliff.  Seneca’s Cliff is a restatement of something Seneca (Dead Roman Dude) philosophized about.  It was a simple idea:  stuff gets built only slowly.  But when it comes down?  It comes down all at once, like falling off of a cliff, hence Bardi calling it Seneca’s Cliff.

A house is a good example of Seneca’s Cliff.  A house is built over time – in most cases it takes several months to build one.   But if there’s a fire, that same house can be burned to the ground in a manner of minutes.  There are exceptions, of course:  in a Mexican neighborhood in Canada, the house might be saved by a hose, eh.

Race car backwards is . . . race car.  But race car sideways is . . . James Dean.

So, that’s Seneca’s Cliff.  I wrote about it myself back in the day, when I was trying to write a novel.  It started, “The world had been a web . . .”  This is a metaphor that has always stuck with me – the web of interconnections required to maintain society as we know it.

The world is a web.  As I write this, I’m writing it on a laptop that was built halfway around the world, with components and materials sourced on nearly every continent.  Dude, I got a Dell®, but the Dell™ came from everywhere.

When everything works, that’s great.  People communicate with each other through price and supply and demand and produce things like computers and cars and wedding rings and beer and PEZ® and the burrito that Amber Heard ate before she left a “grumpy” in the bed.

Believe all women?  That’s the dumbest thing I’ve Amber Heard.

Unfortunately, we’ve been working at a world that’s based in efficiency, too.  Efficiency is nice if you’re a company that’s trying to put together a lot of iPads® or Funko Pops©, but in reality efficiency sucks.

Why do you have two lungs?  Two kidneys?  Two bellybuttons?  Because those are really, really important.  I have a buddy who lost 90% of his lung capacity in one lung due to the flu back in ’92.  Guess what?  He conducts a full life like it never happened.  He coached a wrestling team, and rides bicycles long distances.

When something is important, you don’t want an efficient system, you want an inefficient system.  This is why the water department can make more water than it needs to.

What does Ghislaine Maxwell and July, 2022 have in common?  Neither of them will see August.

But our global systems, at the top level, are efficient.  We don’t produce 10% extra oil.  We don’t have that capacity.  In spring and fall we generally have plenty of excess electricity generation, but tell me how summer looks?  Lots of spare capacity?

No, not so much.  Sure, there are substitutes for lots of things – we can have Wheaties® instead of Rice Krispies™.  But in the end, we have to produce enough food to feed 7.96 billion people, and enough energy to grow the food and move it from place to place as well as make clothes and iPods© and pantyhose.

If Biden made dumpsters, they’d be called trash can’ts.

But this means that we’re in a world where there is simply less food because there is less energy, and also because war took out production of a significant amount.  This was added to by the Biden sanctions on Russia.  They are strange sanctions, indeed.  So far their result is that it actually resulted in more cash going to Russia every month.  Oh, higher prices on energy mainly to Europe and the United States.  The shortages we’re seeing now in food, which will soon become much worse will have an even larger impact.

It has already created stress in the developed world.  But in fragile places, like most of the Middle East and all of Africa, food prices will increase to the point where many of the poorer governments will simply cease to exist as the revolutions start.  The last time this happened, mass migration into Europe was the result.  It’s possible that this time, violence will be exported to Europe, as well.

I hear that Miley Cyrus will star in a remake of Silence of the Lambs as Hannibal Montannibal.

These are the conclusions if things go well, based on where we are now.  From everything I’ve seen, we’re not on the trajectory of things going well.  The capital markets are slowly failing in the West.  Why?  All the spending from the decision to print all the cash to paper over the previous holes in the economy that were caused from all the cash printed to paper over the holes before that is a game we can’t play anymore.  The holes are too big.

The delicate web that keeps goods moving is stressed now, and strands are missing, putting a greater strain on the whole web.  It took hundreds of years to build up this economy.

How fast will it fall down Seneca’s Cliff?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: Special Rural Edition

“He’s that distinguished-looking gentleman with the casual wardrobe and darling rural accent.” – The Beverly Hillbillies

Modern Mayberry just got a factory that makes television accessories.  I guess that makes us a remote village.

This isn’t a main Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – that will be next Monday, on schedule.  Consider this one a “special edition” since I’m sure we already have plenty of fodder for the regular weather report.

So, back to the opening snippet that u/humble_na_miner described as “Lol how to get shot, a thread.”

I’ll reproduce u/ripitthrowaway’s amazing strategy that he came up with in case it’s too hard to read in the post above.  I normally try to inject humor, but since his (I’m guessing) words are funny enough, I’ll just quote him verbatim:

The radical Christians are found in the rural areas.  Their towns are defenseless, they have almost no cops and their firemen are volunteers.  They have to borrow cops and firemen from neighboring jurisdictions miles away in order to handle anything big.  And they think they’re safe out there.  Forget burning cities, cities are on our sides.  It’s time for the rural areas to feel the heat.

You show up 100 deep in every rural town in a 50 mile radius intent on revolution, you’ll crash their system and make them pay.

And if you think I’m kidding, I’m dead serious.  This was caused by backward ass rural conservatives operating out of a Christianized worldview (even if they’re not Christian, they’re heavily influenced by it), they were the ones who voted for Trump in ’16; those disillusioned redneck/white trash/blue collar (to quote a country song) types who flipped massively for the GOP.  Punish them.  Punish their towns.  They say “BLM burned the cities to the ground,” I say, “let them see firsthand what I’s like when a community is truly burned to the ground.  They want a civil war?  They should have been careful what they asked and voted for.”

I’m not the organizing type.  But maybe someone who is can organize that.  Start in a certain state in the Midwest often called “the south’s middle finger to America.”  It’s literally what the south would’ve looked like if it wasn’t reconstructed.

First, wow.  I know it’s just one idiot, but I’m sure that there are others who share the sentiment.  What is the message, exactly?  “Let’s form a band of roving marauders to burn down their barns and property and shoot anyone we feel like.  That will show those rural folk what savages they are.”

Not my meme, but, well, accurate.

Second, this is a threat to destroy the lives, property, and community of people whose only crime is not being an idiot Leftist.  To be clear, Modern Mayberry has values that are closer to 1982 than 2022, mostly.  People still go to church.  Kids behave themselves at parks.  We’re not shooting each other because (spins wheel) it’s Saturday.  In fact, people aren’t shooting each other at all except for the once a twenty-year domestic dispute gone really bad.

Why aren’t we shooting each other?  Because thieves know that if they try to do much more than nick a bike or a lawnmower things will go very, very bad.  Why?  That’s the next point.

Third, I’ll let Skeletor® answer:

Not my meme, but, I think they have no idea how rural people would react to being burned and shot at.

  • They have zero idea what rural America is like. Not every house is armed, but I’ll bet that most houses have a lot of guns – I am certain that there are more guns than people, and the cops?  They live here, too.  There’s also a lot of ammo.  And more food than they can imagine, because we grow it here.
  • Grandpa, who you have to help up to the range because he was wounded in ‘Nam? He can shoot a 2-inch group at 400 yards.  When he practices his long-range shooting, he can reliably hit man-size targets at 1000 yards.  Grandma, who makes a great macaroni salad for the church social, would regret doming a pink-haired Leftist with her husband’s wheel gun, but she wouldn’t hesitate.
  • Also, we know and help each other. That’s why we don’t need a lot of cops.  If you’ve only been here a decade, you’re still the new kid in town.  Many families have gone to the same high school for three generations – and that’s because that’s when they built the “new” high school building.
  • There aren’t choke points – I can think of dozens of ways that I could flank, surprise, or otherwise ruin the day of someone who set up a roadblock – because I know all the ways around the roadblocks.
  • It gets very dark here. We know where everything is.  They don’t.

Fourth, these are the people who are planning this:

You may not be able to see it, but his guns have little orange caps on the end – at most they’re airsoft guns.  I don’t even think that rates a “he’ll put an eye out”.

My level of fear at Leftists invading Modern Mayberry:

But what caused this rage?  I call it:

The Tennis Shoe of Sadness was caused by Roe versus Wade being overturned.  We mined a lot of salt out of the gun ruling by SCOTUS, so why not mine some salt out of this, too?

I’ll start with an A.I. generated picture:

If you can’t read it, it was generated based on the prompt:  “Clarence Thomas breaking into an abortion clinic at night to use their toilet and not flush.

So, Count Dankula is a Scottish comedian.  And there are a lot of dumb people on the Internet.  That vote.

Now we know who is responsible for January 6 . . . though it’s odd the same people that are investigating January 6 are also vowing to resist the Supreme Court.

I was certain that they taught math in Europe . . .

People are even thinking of leaving Texas . . .

I’m sure the Texans are very, very upset.

Maybe this is why the Lefty girls like The Handmaid’s Tale so much?

Always remember, the Left eats their own, too.

Remember, never be afraid of Big Brother – that’s where all of their power comes from.

The Unraveling

“Since when can weathermen predict the weather, let alone the future?” – Back to the Future

I knew a lady who loved mushrooms, she was a fungal.

The unraveling continues. In one sense, what’s happening is predictable. Looking back in history, while not everything happens in the same way, things very much rhyme. That’s why certain aspects of the current financial collapse are very, very familiar.

The Fed® still has enough influence that it can stop a snowball. Can the Fed® stop an avalanche? Not so much. They may have some tricks to push the day of reckoning down the line if it isn’t off the rails. Again, like a presidential election, it’s a short-term solution to a long-term problem.

If it were merely a financial problem, the actions might be enough. But it’s not just financial.

Other problems include extreme societal decadence. Decadence is a strong word. When I was a kid, it was applied to places like the late Roman Empire, or Willy Wonka’s® Chocolate Factory™ where those Umpa-Loompas wore those scanty tight outfits.

But when people take kids – elementary-age kids – to Pride®©™ parades that contain actual nudity and sex acts between adults, and then suggest putting hormones into five-year-olds because they pretended to cook in a pretend kitchen one day, you know that this is the point where God told Noah, “Get the boat,” and told Lot, “Tell everyone to wear sunglasses – I don’t care if it’s night.”

“Oh, and Noah? Put some lights on the boat. Floodlights.”

Whatever fetish sex act that any individual wants to do “because it’s Thursday” now seems to take the place of virtue. Replacing actual virtue with temporary individual passions is exactly what every single functioning society in history has avoided to in order to remain functioning. When people follow passions that are productive, like building rockets, they add to society. When people act on passions counter to virtue?

Those passions consume and destroy society. Period.

We don’t live in a world where “if it feels good, do it” can ever be a policy that lead to a productive society. At some point, we must be guided by virtue, we have to have a shared vision for a future, and a shared desire to build. Can you imagine a single event that would bring us all together again?

I can’t. We have to have that shared vision – if nothing else, to survive. Do we have it?

What’s the best way to avoid significant radiation exposure? Don’t bomb Pearl Harbor.

We do not. We are divided. The idea of a selfless devotion to duty seems to have (in many places) evaporated. Cops are supposed to put themselves into danger to save the innocent – that’s the only reason we put up with the rest of the nonsense that they get up to. If they have changed their motto from “Protect and Serve” to “Hide Until We Can and Give Traffic Tickets to People That Don’t Scare Us” then they’re not much use.

Globalism is likewise something that sounds good, but isn’t. I can understand the need for some places like, say, deserts to import grain and Alaska to import medicine and export oil and good vibes. But can someone tell me that we’re in a better and safer position as a country now that we depend on far-flung nations for things. When I talked to The Boy about careers, the advice I gave him was simple – don’t do anything that someone can do over the Internet. If you do, you’re competing with a job with millions or billions of people.

We have reached the stage of cultural collapse. I’m in favor of capitalism – but amoral capitalism is different. When capitalism is allowed to meet any need, the result isn’t good. Like any system, it needs boundaries. As John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Why can’t the Democrats use the 25th Amendment on Biden? They can’t count that high.

Freedom needs boundaries. Freedom needs responsibility. Liberty, real liberty, requires obligation for stability. Otherwise? It descends into chaos.

So, we’ve established that we’re in a difficult place. The things that we depended upon are slowly slipping away. The economy is in a very precarious place, culturally we’re shattered to the point that not even another 9-11 would bring us together. The difficulties that we see from here on out won’t serve to bring us together, they will bring us apart. How about the economic difficulties related to just high fuel prices alone?

The Lefties love it, even as it destroys our economy. Heck destruction of the economy might even be the point.

But stresses have consequences. If I drop an orange, it will fall. If we destroy an economy, it will fail. Some parts of it will be predictable: interest rates going up will make housing prices go down. Simple. We can talk about other correlations on Wednesday (feel free to bring up more below).

I dated a homeless girl once – it was nice, after the date you could drop her off anywhere.

The one thing that I can tell you, is what comes next won’t be like what came before. The problems that we have rhyme with the problems of the past, but they’re not the same. During the Great Depression, we were at least (mostly) homogeneous as a country. Now, not so much.

The end state is tied to the initial conditions. And the initial conditions of the Great Depression were greatly different than they are today, so there’s no way that we’ll see the same results. And things will never go back to “normal” because we simply cannot go back in time, and there isn’t any such thing as “normal” nor any time period which is “normal”. They will be different.

What we have, though, is the rhyme. It won’t allow us to predict perfectly. But it will allow us to see, dimly.

Wherein I Use Greek Mythology To Show How Screwed We Are

“Would Homer cut away from Odysseus’s journey just as he was being enticed by the siren’s song?” – BoJack Horseman

My lack of knowledge of Greek mythology is often my Achilles’ Elbow.

We’ve reached the Scylla and Charybdis stage of our economy.

Scylla was, in Greek mythology, a six-headed monster that was probably less scary than the average half-dozen Congresscritters, and certainly less dangerous.

Charybdis was a whirlpool that sucked inside everything that got close to it three times a day, so it was pretty much exactly like Kamala Harris.

The idea is that if you’re between Scylla and Charybdis, life is on the edge because there are dangers on either side.  When Odysseus tried to sneak between the two, he lost six crewmembers, one to each head of Scylla.  Thankfully they didn’t go too close to Charybdis, since Kamala has a mean-looking canker sore, and some gifts last forever.

Trying to thread the fine line between Scylla and Charybdis:  that’s where our economy is now.

Could it be that the Odyssey is just a made-up excuse by a husband as to why he’s ten years late?

As inflation rages through the system, every minute that we have an interest rate well below the rate of inflation, inflation is being fed.  To quote Joe Biden from January 24, 2022, “It’s a great asset – more inflation.  What a stupid son of a bitch.”  You can tell he’s excited to Build Back Better!

Oddly, it’s not inflation in everything.  Some items are starting to deflate now.  Houses, for instance.  The price of a house is tied to the interest rate – the more interest wrapped into a monthly payment, the fewer the number of buyers that can afford or qualify for a loan.  And in Biden’s America® people have to qualify for more important things, like a Quarter Pounder™ or a tank of gas.

But back to home loans:  fewer people qualify?  Less demand.  Less demand?  Lower home prices.

When we moved to Modern Mayberry in the middle of the Great Recession, some houses had been on the market for longer than 350 days.  These were decent houses, but there just wasn’t any demand.  Recently, as people began to take my advice and flee the cities, houses disappeared off the market in days here in Modern Mayberry.  With all the city folk moving in, at least I know what a hipster weighs:  an Instagram®.

One hipster I knew poured water from an ice tray into his beverage.  He liked ice before it was cool.

Now?  Interest rates for mortgages are going up, so demand for houses will be going down.  Eventually, the market for houses will go back to where it was when I got here.  That’s okay, I never expected to walk away from Stately Wilder Mansion with a single dime of profit.  For me, a house is where I live, not an investment.

So, interest rates up, housing prices down.  Simple.

Also, interest rates up, stock prices down.  For the last decade, stocks have been just about the only game for people who were trying to keep up with inflation.  This was a continual pressure upwards on stocks.  Now as interest rates go up, there are other options.

Traditionally, there was (this was something I read in an article a long time ago) a formula showing the value of a stock in relation to the interest rate:  Maximum P/E=20-Prime Rate.  That meant, with an interest rate of 0%, a stock was at fair value with a Price to Earnings ratio of 20.  Likewise, if the interest rate was 10%, the fair market P/E would be about 10.

Obviously, it’s such a one-dimensional analysis that it was made back when “digital computing” meant counting on your fingers.  There’s no way I’d suggest anyone use it to pick stocks (nor would I suggest taking the advice of an Internet humorist on any investment advice no matter how witty, charming, and handsome he might be), but it does show how the relationship between interest rates and stock prices and earnings was thought about once upon a time.  But it summarizes the same idea – interest rates up, stocks down.

I bought some speakers.  At least that was a sound investment.

Heck, it even led me to a never-fail way to manipulate individual stocks:  if I buy a stock, it goes down.

There are other impacts, too.  For instance, it makes debt harder to pay back for people around the planet.  If Egypt owes money to ChaseAmericanFargo™ Bank and the interest rate is variable, that means that Egypt will have to start selling items to pay back New York, or London, or Beijing.  Heck, the British would already have the Pyramids, but they wouldn’t fit in the British Museum

More money to the banking centers?  Less money for chow for the Egyptians.  We saw this exact scenario play out in the Arab Spring in 2012.  Expensive stuff caused people to go hungry and then hungry people with no hope do what they always do when they can’t watch Netflix™ and buy Twinkies©.

They swap out the government.  The new boss looks a lot like the old boss in Egypt, and it’s exactly the same boss as it was in Syria.  Some things don’t change.  If it’s bad enough, it also craters the economies in South America and, even Canada might have its assets frozen.  Or, more frozen.

How did Kamala get her cold sores?  She dated Herpules.

But when the interest rates go up, it’s not just the government in Egypt that gets squeezed.  The current debt in the United States is $30.5 trillion.  The total US debt, including personal debt, student loans, credit cards, and I.O.U.s to me from that one guy that owes me $20 is about $91 trillion.  (All numbers from usdebtclock.org)

When the interest rates go up, the payments on interest go up.  That means less money available for everything else.  When last I looked, the mandatory payments the Federal government were as much as or more than the amount of money that they took in.  That means that printing more money is now the only way the system can work.  It’s like having a tobacco cessation class with a two-cigar minimum.

That leads to the difficult bit – the hall of mirrors.  If we don’t raise interest rates, and raise them quickly and raise them high enough, inflation will devastate the economy.  If we do raise them, interest payments will freeze the economy and dry up all the PEZ®, pantyhose, and elephant rides the government buys daily.  We are in a classic trap, but it is a trap entirely devised by the Fed® and the politicians working long-term problems on short-term incentives.

By attempting to push back the moment of financial reckoning by any means possible, we’ve created a failure that is much, much larger.  If we would have let financial companies fail in 2000 and 2008, and fixed the structural problems with Medicare, perhaps, just perhaps we wouldn’t be here today.

But we are.

How bad are things?

Again, people have been trying to gauge when things in the stock market are out of whack – Gregory Mannarino came up with a market risk index that he called the Mannarino Market Risk Index, which was modified by Nobody Special Finance into the Modified Mannarino Market Risk Index.  You can watch the video on what makes it up here (LINK).  It’s only twelve minutes, and it’s pretty simple.  The MMMRI is simple, but it’s still quite a bit more sophisticated than the 20=P/E-Interest rate formula from back in the Stone Age.  The summary is of selected past MMMRIs is:

  • Black Monday (1987),               MMMRI 234
  • Dotcom Bubble Pop (2000),   MMMRI 208
  • Great Recession (2008),           MMMRI 169

Right now?

You can find tracking information on MMMRI here (LINK) on Mannarino’s website.

Yup.  MMMRI is screaming loudly that the stock market is really, really messed up.  But you knew that.  Things are broken, and they’re breaking faster as things go downhill.  So, whatever you do, don’t buy canned goods and storage food and precious metals and PEZ® and ammo.  Nope.

I’m sure that the team of Biden and Harris along with Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, (who had no idea that inflation was even a problem) or Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secretary, (who said that high gas prices are “a very compelling case” to buy an electric car) will be here to help us charter a safe course between Scylla and Charybdis.

Oh, wait, Biden and Harris are Scylla and Charybdis.

The Good News Is The Same As The Bad News: It’s You

“Winners always want the ball. . . when the game is on the line.” – The Replacements

Floors take on a lot of responsibility. It’s like everything falls to them.

There’s bad news:

No one is coming to save you.

But there’s good news:

No one is coming to save you.

Who will save us?

You will.

I think many people have this weird idea that other people are the answer. The last first aid course that I took before moving to Alaska ended up every scenario with, “and then you call 911.” To be fair, that’s a great idea in most places. I mean, unless you’re in a school.

The reason the murder rate has gone down over the last few decades isn’t because the idiots in Chicago have developed some sort of restraint in shooting each other. Nope. The medical folks are faster at getting those that were shot, and the docs are better at saving them.

The woman who helped The Mrs. deliver Pugsley quit. I guess she was having a midwife crisis.

But then I took a first aid class in Alaska.

Wow. Night and day. The content was much, much richer. The trainers went into much greater detail, and told us, “You’re not trained to do this. But if help isn’t coming, it might save a life.” The translation was simple. Phone coverage in Alaska sucks.

How bad was it? When we moved there, you couldn’t get a phone line, even if there was copper to your house. And cell service? The infrastructure consisted of what two bright schizophrenics that left the mainland United States could cobble together with the parts of a downed DC-3.

Everyone else was in the same boat. The message was clear.

“You’d better pay attention.”

The quiet part they didn’t say in class was: “because no one is coming to save you.”

When I woke up in the hospital, I told the doctor I couldn’t feel my legs. “That’s because we amputated your arms, maybe?”

When I ended up having to have my entire fingernail removed and the part under the nail stitched up because there was were two 55 gallon drums of salmon oil (I’m not making ANY of this up) on my property that I tried to open and the wedge slipped and pulled most of the nail off anyway, the doctor said, “Okay, this is going to hurt like hell for a few days. I’m going to prescribe you some (powerful painkiller). You probably won’t use them. Toss them in your backpack, so if you’re out moose hunting and break your leg, you might be able to limp out.”

Think that a doctor would say that in Nebraska?

He didn’t say the quiet part: “because no one is coming to save you.”

I prefer it that way. Really. Sure, I like Internet and electricity and cold beer and watching Trailer Park Boys. But I know the true answer.

When it goes bad?

No one is coming to save me.

Three friends were in the forest – the first said, “These are moose tracks.” The second said, “No, those are bear tracks.” The third was run over by a train.

That might sound depressing to some people, but not to me. I like me. And, I like my chances. To be fair, the person in this world I trust most in the world . . . is me. The next one is The Mrs. Third in line?

Maybe Sturm, Ruger, and Company? Yeah, they’ve always been straight shooters to me.

One of the lessons that I’ve walked away with in the last 20 years of my life is that:

  • the police,
  • the Constitution,
  • the courts,
  • the military,
  • congress,
  • and anyone sitting in the office of president

is not going to save me.

And they’re not coming to save you, either.

In one sense, it’s scary. I think that many people take the idea that someone, somewhere, is responsible for them. That’s simply not true for anyone over the age of, say, 14.

We are not passive actors in our lives. That idea is corrosive. We are in control.

That’s from an Edgar Allen Poem.

I think a lot of the idea that other people are responsible for us comes from the anonymity of large city life. To me, it’s odd – the more of us around, the less responsibility we feel, and the more we want to blame other people. Why? With so many people around, it brings anonymity. Anonymity makes it easy to avoid responsibility.

In Modern Mayberry? We know each other. We talk to each other. We are, in the end, responsible. I go to dinner, and the owner of the restaurant greets me, and (from time to time) brings a bottle by the table and pours each of us a shot.

Why?

Our lives are not anonymous. It’s a community. Are we responsible for ourselves? Certainly. But in a small town, we understand that we help each other. And he can go home and tell his wife he wasn’t really drinking on the job.

“Tequila or vodka?” That’s how I’d start a marriage counseling session.

Our nation is fundamentally broken. I’d say that someone in New York City doesn’t care about Modern Mayberry, sitting here in flyover country. But they do. Most of them can’t even understand it, but what they do understand they despise.

That’s okay. I’m not responsible for them. And I certainly don’t want them to be responsible for me.

Only you can save you. Only you can save your family. And that’s still the good news: “Winners always want the ball . . . when the game is on the line.”

The people in Washington D.C.? They won’t save us.

You will.

And that’s the good news. Your life. Your future. Your family. Your country. They’re in your hands.

Would you change that for anything?

I wouldn’t. I like it when the ball is in my hands.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

Our Economy: At The Jagged Edge

“Because of the metric system?” – Pulp Fiction

I saw a mountain covered in cows.  “Huh, that must be Mt. Heiferest.”

Systems work within certain limits.  Let’s take . . . the Earth.  The Earth is absolutely filled with life.  It’s nearly everywhere, and in abundance, unless a particular bit of life has secrets about the Clintons.  Let’s just look at a single variable of the system that supports life:  temperature.

All things being equal, if the Earth was as hot as Venus is, the zone where life could exist (if it was based on the need for water, of course) would be pretty small.  Likewise, Mars would have a smaller envelope – it’s too cold – and water would be frozen most of the time.  Sure, life is technically possible in both locations, but it will never thrive like it has for a huge chunk of the Earth’s history.

And that’s just one variable impacting a complex system.

There are many ways to configure an economy.  Most of the ones that work really well are decentralized for most things.  No one tells a farmer in Nebraska what or when to plant.  The farmer chooses, based on what he thinks he can sell.  No one tells PEZ® to make a Yosemite Sam™ PEZ© dispenser.  But why wouldn’t they make a Yosemite Sam® PEZ® dispenser?  Duh.

A day on Venus lasts 5,832.6 hours, so it’s just like a Monday on Earth with Biden in the White House.

Most of the time, this system is pretty closely coupled.  The world doesn’t have years of surplus of, say, food just sitting around – with billions of people, I know someone would eat the Ding Dongs® and Pop Tarts™ first and then there wouldn’t be any for me.  I mean, it certainly looks like Nic Cage could make an infinite amount of movies since the word, “no” isn’t in his vocabulary, but even he has limits to his Nic Cage-ness.

I think we’re close to the limits of the system that’s given us prosperity as we know it.  Yup, that’s a sobering thought.  Here are a few data points:

This one hit me fairly hard (from Vox Day’s place – there’s more at the LINK):

I own a small trucking company, and this is what the fuel crisis is doing to our country… Today I filled up my truck to deliver products that help keep our country fed. When I filled up my truck, it cost me $1,149.50. This is ONE truck, for ONE day of fuel. I own three. So for one day of operation, it’s costing me $3,448.50. (Yes, we use a full tank of fuel every single day, sometimes more than 1 tank per day).

My trucks generally run 5-6 days a week, so we’ll just estimate on the low side and say five. That’s $17,242.50. Last week was over $20k for ONE week, that I have to pay out of my pocket to try and keep not only my children fed, but those of my employees, and our country.

Mark my words, we are on a downhill slide to the worst recession our country has ever seen. Trucking companies are going under left and right. (Literally hundreds weekly.) If you’re not aware, what you’re wearing, what you’re eating, what you’re living in, what you’re driving, what you’re reading this on, was delivered by a truck.

That’s sobering.  All the beer comes on trucks, so it could be literally sobering.

We might need USB if the USA fails.

What else have we seen?

  • Baby Formula Shortages
  • Rising Violence, Well, Everywhere
  • Short Tempers
  • Shortages of Basic Repair Parts For Vehicles

These have some consequences.  Big ones.

People are pulling back on frills, in a hurry.  A very good restaurant in Modern Mayberry just shut down.  Forever.  The owners threw in the towel.  Rising prices led to fewer customers . . . customers feeling pinched can always cook their own food at home as a quick way to save a few bucks.  I opened my browser (which thinks I live hundreds of miles away from Modern Mayberry) and saw the same exact story a few hundred miles away on the same day our local hangout closed – another, distant, beloved local restaurant shutting down in a town I’ve never been to.

The Mrs. has a phobia so she stacks the plates in the cabinet by the year we bought them.  It’s a very rare dish order.

Why are dining customers feeling the pinch?  Let’s just talk a single variable:  fuel.  By my calculations, the rising cost of fuel is draining $2.3 billion dollars a day, every day from the economy.  That’s not quite a trillion dollars a year, but fuel is priced into everything.  Divide the rough annual cost of just the increase and I came up with almost $2,800.  Per person.  Multiplied by a family of four, and that’s about $11,000 a year per family.  If the average family makes $69,000 a year, just the increase in fuel prices is about 16% of their annual income.  Sure, lots of that isn’t direct to the family, but it gets priced into every single thing they buy.

That’s stark, especially because it’s only a single variable.  Increased interest rates will be hitting soon, along with all of the financial pressures that will bring.  And, of course, there will be more things as this crisis cascades.

I took a college elective on pollen creation.  I got a B.

Here’s another data point.  I pulled into McDonald’s® and asked for a McSausage McMuffin with McEgg®.  Don’t judge me!  They’re tasty!

“Sorry, we’re all out.  We do have sausage biscuits left.”

“Okay.  I’ll take one.”  Not my favorite, but, whatever.

“Okay, that’ll be $6.50.”  It was just as they put up their lunch menu, so I hadn’t seen the price.

Six fifty?  For a sausage patty, some not great scrambled eggs, a slice of cheese, and a biscuit?  And it wasn’t what I wanted in the first place?

I noped out of that.  First time I’ve canceled a drive-through order that I can recall, but I didn’t need the sandwich $6.50 worth.  I drove out of the line and off on my way.  Good thing it wasn’t an Amish McDonald’s® – I hear they don’t have outlets.

I hate to think about what happens when Joe runs out of his “good” ideas.

Our economic systems are certainly out of balance.  Badly.  We’re at the edge of a cliff, and I have the feeling that things will soon be changing, and quickly.  Be prepared for a change in temperature.

A.I. – The Most Dangerous Game

“Nuke it from orbit, that’s the only way to be sure.” – Aliens

When I go out to eat I always try to tip my waiter.  That’s how I know that they have terrible balance when they are carrying one of those big round trays.

There was quite a bit of upset from the “I love science” side of the Left recently.  What triggered them this time?

(Spins Wheel of Leftist Outrage)

Computers.

How did the toaster make them mad?

An Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) computing system designed to review x-rays was able to make correlations because, well, that’s what they programmed it to do.  The correlations allowed the A.I. to be able to predict the self-reported race of the individual based solely on the x-rays with a 90% accuracy.  You can look it up.

One writer actually used the phrase, “can perpetuate racial bias in health care” since the bias of the writer was that race is a social construct that had nothing to do with genetics and tens of thousands of years of separate development.  Huh.  Nope, none of that matters.  A slogan written by a hippy is obviously more important.

What bothered the writers that I read is that they had no idea how the A.I. could do it.  The researchers purposely degraded the resolution on the x-rays, and the A.I. could still make the prediction accurately.

This isn’t where it ends.

My Tesla’s A.I. wouldn’t let me in the car.  It said, “upgrading driver”.

I wrote several years ago about an A.I. that could predict life or death based on an EKG (elektrokardiographie if you’re planning on invading Poland), or ECG – electrocardiogram. Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors they detected no abnormality, yet the A.I. was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient.  This was even when the actual doctors made of meat couldn’t see anything wrong with the ECG.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. did it.

The game “Go” – originated in China almost 2,500 years ago, when your mom was in high school.  Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play Go by . . . playing itself.  It was programmed with the rules and played games against itself for the first few days.  After that?

It became unstoppable.  It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best Go player on Earth?  It played a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.”  The very best human Go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. does it.

What happens when you win this game?  The answer might shock you!

There are more examples, but I think I’ve proven my point.  A.I. exists.  A.I. is real.  Is it right now equivalent to a general human intelligence?  Nope.  And it may never be exactly that, since it may never be exactly like us.

I’m fairly certain that most A.I. researchers have seen The Terminator, yet they keep advancing A.I.  Why?  I mean, besides that their name isn’t Sarah Connor?

The stakes are huge.  What if you had an A.I. that could predict stock market behavior, even an hour in advance with 95% accuracy?  This sort of prophet machine would become a profit machine.  It would be worth billions.  And what if you had an A.I. that could make dank memes as well as I do?

If these were sold on an infomercial you know they’d call it Screw It!

I think that one of the things that is not widely known is how very different that A.I. might be.  Human emotions serve a purpose to allow society to function.  What would A.I. value?

  • Would it have sentimentality or would it judge people based entirely on societal utility?
  • Would it make the judgment that entire categories of human society need not exist?
  • Would it have “voted” for Joe Biden, too?

Yeah, and weirdly as that potentially scary scenario of a super-smart intelligence that had no particular connection to the goals of humanity might be, that’s just the starter.  Artificial Intelligence might also be the most dangerous trigger for an external existential threat to humanity.

What?

Well, assuming that time travel and the ability to cause a generalized cascading decay to the zero energy state (zero point energy) aren’t possible, the most dangerous thing that humanity could unleash on the planet is A.I.  And, unlike time travel or a sober member of the Pelosi family, from everything I’ve seen, A.I. certainly is possible.

Lenin loved Hip Hop.  Favorite artist?  M.C. Hammer and Sickle.

While travel for humanity throughout the galaxy is a really, really hard problem due to time and energy, travel through the galaxy for an A.I. is easier.  Don’t want to spend 25,000 years traveling to the next star system?  Easy.  Take the redeye and sleep on the way.

No habitable planets there in the star system?  No problem.  An A.I. doesn’t need oxygen and beaches and water.  It can land on an asteroid and make copies of yourself.  While the A.I. is replicating faster than a Kardashian that just let out its mating call (“I’m soooo drunk!”) it can 3-d print and then shoot copies of itself to the next five-star systems nearby.

And repeat.

Depending on the method used, essentially every star in the galaxy could be visited by an A.I. probe in a fairly quick timeframe.  How quick?  500,000 years to 10,000,000 years, or roughly how old George Soros is.  That’s quick, and essentially meaningless to a toaster or a George Foreman Grill®.  And if I were an advanced alien civilization, that’s the thing I would be scared of – not a grill, but an advanced, very alien intelligence with unknown motives showing up in my solar system.

What’s the toughest thing about being vegan?  Apparently, keeping it to yourself.

So, using the same principle, I could send my own (smart, but not A.I.) probes to hang out in nearly every solar system – waiting.  If those probes saw signs of a possible A.I.?  What would I program them to do?

Yup.  You guessed it.

Nuke the civilization back to the Stone Age.  It’s the only way to be sure.

So, as we worry about the problems in our civilization, remember – it could always be worse.  We know that Kamala doesn’t have any intelligence – artificial or otherwise, so the alien probe will certainly leave her alone.