Silly Predictions – Page 16 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

The Day America Died?

“1996 is the past too, listen to me!” – 12 Monkeys

Chuck Norris was dropped twice as a child: once on Hiroshima, once on Nagasaki.

Pugsley and I were off driving to an event today. As we motored down the road, he said, “Hey, what were the 1990’s like? I was on YouTube® and saw some commercials from then.”

I paused. Since he was born after the 1990s, it was absolutely foreign to him, except as he had seen in media and popular culture. But how to describe it? I mean, the Dole/Kemp ’96 website is still up (LINK), which is convenient, since Bob is now 96. But the 1990s was so much more than that.

“Well, we had won the Cold War. The 1970’s were about the economic wreckage from the oil shocks and inflation from removing gold backing to the dollar. The 1980’s were the last stage in the Cold War – the idea of nuclear war being 45 minutes away from ending civilization was common.”

I skipped mentioning that we’d come within a single person’s decision to launch nuclear weapons and start a world war more than once. I didn’t want to put him in the mindset of a total war. Heck, let him have his own ex-wife.

“The 1990s saw the end of the Cold War when the Soviet economy collapsed. We had, to a certain extent, defined ourselves by our enemy. In some sense, American mean not a Soviet communist. But then, we won. It was all over.”

Joe Biden knows in his heart that he is the only one who can defeat Ronald Reagan this November.

I paused, thinking about the old Mark Twain line that most people can’t tell a good thing from a bad thing, but kept going.

“We then looked around and wondered who we were, since there weren’t any Soviet communists to not-be. I think the answer we came up with was that we were shoppers. The purpose of America was to be the site of endless suburbs surrounding cool shopping malls. Heck, it’s probably not a coincidence that the Mall of America® opened in 1992.”

Looking back, I am in awe of how innocent we were, how free of strife we were – the First Gulf War took months to prepare for, but only had about 96 hours of actual ground combat with 156 Americans killed in battle. To put that in perspective, 65 troops died in the Gulf from accidents during that same time. The first Gulf War was about as lopsided as a velociraptor in a room full of kittens.

“It was unique, because the United States was sitting alone as a superpower both economically and militarily. The country was prosperous. We were even closer to a balanced budget than we ever have been since Andrew Jackson was president. I think Americans began to miss the struggle. Rock music went from a joyous celebration of freedom and beer and girls in bikinis and Cherry Pie to complaints about teenage angst.”

I didn’t jump into discussions of the Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.).

Kurt Cobain has now been drug-free for 26 years!

“Somewhere in there, we had a chance to look deep inside ourselves to find our soul as a nation. Religion seemed hard, so we decided the answer was Twizzlers®.”

What I didn’t say was that was the beginning of tearing the nation apart. By the time George W. Bush beat Al Gore in an election that was so close it went to court, the Left felt that they had the presidency stolen from them. That, along with the Clinton Impeachment, rubbed the Left raw so by 2000 they were madder than Dick Cheney on a dove hunt.

I suppose that the 1990s were also the last stage of the innocence in America, and the slide into terminal decline began here. Sure, we’d already gone from “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” in the 1960s to “I Wanna **** You Like An Animal” in the 1990s, but in 1996 an actual American President, a Democrat, thought that marriage was something for a man and a woman to do.

The Mrs. thinks I’m crazy, forgetting she’s the one that married me.

Wild stock swings, a housing crisis, and wars that kept tens of thousands of American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq for more than a decade followed, and the great rift I have written about in numerous posts (Civil War, Neat Graphs, and Carrie Fisher’s Leg) widened.

But all of that is prelude to the Day America Died: May 28, 2020. Sure, the time of death is up for debate. And everything looks the same, taxes will be due next month, and the ammunition and bagel shop still accepts United States Federal Reserve currency.

Inertia is like that. The old forms persist, even after the reason that they were invented disappeared. Even after the Greeks took over Egypt, they still used the term Pharaoh. The Senate of Rome ceased to be the Senate, but managed to stay in existence until at least 600 A.D., long after the fall of Rome. I still own a comb.

Like I said, I still own the comb. I just can’t part with it.

On May 28, however, the Third Precinct building in Minneapolis was burned down. The revolution may not be televised, but it certainly is being live streamed. From there, protests, riots, and looting spread to dozens of cities in the United States, and even across the world. Certainly, there were peaceful protests as well, but the vision we’ll remember was burning, looting, and destruction of public and private property.

It was and is obvious that the goal of the Left is simple: they want to burn it all down, every system, so that they can fundamentally transform the country as a whole. Transform into what? The hints aren’t even subtle: the “Green New Deal” combined with a wholesale rewrite of the history and legends that define America and “free” healthcare and money. The old America, the one that named an airport after John Wayne? That’s not “who we are.” Free speech that goes against the narrative of the Left? Also not “who we are.”

The Right seems to be done, too. The systems that should remove illegal aliens, don’t. They Constitution seems to be guided by “emanations and penumbras” that allow the meanings of words to take the exact opposite meaning when used in reality. For some reason, “sex” as written in 1965 was interpreted to include transgenderism which means the exact opposite of natural sex. One thing I’m certain of: in 1965 when they wrote the law, “sex” meant “transgender” to exactly zero lawmakers.

It seems as though the Supreme Court forgot that there is, sitting right near their own building, a whole other building full of people who could easily clear that up: Congress. But that seems unlikely, so the Supreme Court can just make up stuff if they want to. Because of nonsense like that, the Right is also done.

So, I was hopeful the Center hadn’t given up. I have a good friend who is more libertarian (small “L”) and he and I were chatting the other day. “They should vote all of them (Congress, President, all of them) out.” I wasn’t expecting this from him. But the Center is done, too. The Left is mad at Trump. The Right is mad at AOC, and the Center just wants everyone to shut up so they can grill in peace.

One time when we were backpacking the fire got away from us in camp. It was in-tents.

But belief is really important. We obey laws, at least in part, because we believe that we’ll be punished if we don’t. We trade dollars back and forth with each other for stuff because we believe that the dollars are money. We have a nation because we believe in it.

The math is simple. As soon as we stop believing that we have a nation, as soon as that faith dies away, we no longer have a nation. And by my guess, I’d say we lost that faith on May 28. Are police required for a country? No. We lived until 1834 before the first police force that looked like a modern unit was formed. Before then, it was a hodge-podge of volunteer day and night “watches” that looked for bad guys or danger combined with county sheriffs. Thing Mayberry, but with a lot more booze.

But law enforcement is required. If it doesn’t exist, citizens will protect themselves. The era of the rooftop Korean and the Modern Sporting Lawyer arrives once again. People will very quickly understand that in the absence of police that violence levels, especially in Leftist areas with restrictive gun laws, will skyrocket.

The other day I got bitten by a radioactive lawyer – I now have Power of Attorney.

That lack of belief in government is happening now. Maybe worrying about nuclear war wasn’t so bad after all?

Deflation, Inflation, Collapse – Now With Muppet Jokes

“Well those are whole pennies, right? I’m just talking about fractions of a penny here. But we do it from a much bigger tray and we do it a couple a million times.” – Office Space

If being in the Federal Reserve® offices give you a cold, what should you do? Sudafed.

The Federal Reserve© is scared. And inflation is currently not on their list of Halloween boogiemen –the monster they fear is deflation. Well, deflation and accidentally mixing up Pride Month and Bulgarian History Month. I think the main reason that the Fed™ is worried about deflation is that then people become like me in 2000 when I was looking to buy a computer.

Every six months I waited, the computer I could buy for the same amount of money was much faster with more memory. Computers were really a deflationary item at the time as advances kept making them better and better on a nearly monthly basis. It made sense to wait, because I could get a better deal later.

For computers, that was okay – there was a solid market for them at the time, and Intel® wasn’t going to go out of business because its next chip was going to be faster next year. But if you apply that to the entire economy, then people would have been steering clear of the toilet paper aisle in February. Live and learn.

Deflation is great for consumers – they get more stuff for less money. Deflation also discourages debt – why borrow money when the dollar you’re borrowing will be worth less than the dollar you have to pay it back with?

But deflation in an economy slows everything down worse than a Kardashian trying to take a college entrance exam. Most economies in the world are built on endless growth. Part of the economic growth is required because more people enter the labor force every year. The other part is the system is built on growing income, growing revenues, growing the bottom line – stock prices are built (mostly) not on the intrinsic value of a company here and now, but on the value of the company in the future.

I hate stonks. Gentlemen prefer bonds.

I’ve written about deflation before, but it’s probably a good time to mention some of the clues coming from the financial system. But first, I have to explain that when a loan is paid back to the bank, money is actually destroyed. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I’m a trained professional, and we’ll get there. And by trained, I mean trained as a cook at a Chinese restaurant. Okay, not trained – it was more of a wok-through.

Let’s start with a bank. In this case, my bank.

If I were to deposit $100 in my account, I have $100 in my account, right?

Kinda.

The bank now thinks it’s their money. It turns out that when you open a checking or savings account with a bank, you’re actually lending them money. The banks in the United States are actually what’s known as “fractional reserve banks” in that they only have to keep a portion (or fraction) of the money that I deposited on hand for people who come in and want cash.

Traditionally, that fraction has been around 10%. So, if I open an account with that $100 in it, the bank can lend $90 of that money out. The theory is that not everyone wants to come in and get their money back all at once, so you only have to keep that 10% on hand for people who want their money back on any given day for whatever purpose. It’s like stealing, but totally legal.

If too many people come in, the idea of the Federal Reserve™ (the Fed®) is that they’ll send the bank some cash if needed because tons of people borrow money all at once from the bank. That way if Lady Gaga is coming to Modern Mayberry and everyone decides to fork over $1000 a seat for VIP tickets to listen to her sing about her her her Poker Face, the Fed will give us extra cash. That’s why it’s called the Federal Reserve® – it’s a reserve for banks if they need cash because Lady Gaga is coming to town.

When you microwave a Muppet®, it will even countdown with the timer!

I didn’t want to go see Lady Gaga, so I still have my $100 in the bank. Therefore, my bank has loaned out $90 to Johnny Depp who was a little short for the show after buying some killer weed.

But I still think I have $100.

But the bank lent out $90.

And Johnny Depp puts his money in his account in another bank until it’s time to pay for the ticket. So, that bank now has Johnny Depp’s $90, and can immediately lend out $81 to someone else, who deposits it back in my bank.

Thus, my original $100 deposit now accounts for $171 in the economy.

As soon as the loans are paid back, the transaction unwinds and the actual amount of “money” in the system disappears. There’s a theoretical limit to the amount of money that can be created with a certain reserve rate.

But I said the Fed was scared. And I said it was scared of deflation.

My bank used to have to keep $10 in the vault in case I come back looking for my $100. Used to. As of March 15, 2020, that reserve that banks are required to keep is – drumroll please – zero. Yes. I’m not making that up. It’s right here on the Fed’s own website (LINK). The press release is here (LINK).

What this means is that banks have to keep enough cash around so if yokels like me want to withdraw $23.73 for a trip to buy some really nice earplugs the night of the Lady Gaga concert, the bank had to have that much actual cash. But now, the banks are free to loan all of it out. They could loan not $90 to Johnny Depp, but the full $100. And when he put it in his bank, they could loan out $100 as well.

In the 10% reserve, there was at least some limit to the money that the banks could create by lending the same $100. But at zero reserve? The number of times that $100 could be lent is only constrained by the number of people who want to borrow it. My original $100 could (in theory) create infinite dollars. That’s Congress level math!

My-my-my-Joker® face . . .

This means the Fed is worried about keeping banks lending, so they can keep the money supply up. The Fed also wants to keep the money moving – they want me to buy my Lady Gaga earplugs and the person I bought them from to buy some PEZ® from Wal-Mart® and Wal-Mart™ to pay that money to an employee who buys ice cream sandwiches. If people save their money, it’s nearly the same as there being less money in the economy.

That’s where the Plunge Protection Team comes in. People with 401k investments get scared when the stock market goes down. Stock market plunges are deflationary. Plus, they really hurt the investment banks, so the one thing we know about both Democrat and Republican? They both really want to make the investment bankers happy.

Wall Street crashing? Let’s have a series of well-timed purchases of stock to turn it around. Since you can look at the Fed’s balance sheet yourself, and compare it with the stock market, perhaps the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA)® going up 500 points on a day when multiple large American cities are actively on fire. The Plunge Protection Team, it is rumored, buys (or has groups like Goldman-Sachs™ buy) stocks on multiple markets to keep a crash from happening.

I hate it when the Plunge Protection Team kneads my back while I’m sleeping.

The idea is that by keeping the stock market from crashing, the economy is saved. In one sense, that’s a logical conclusion. Falling stock markets have panic as the main feature – people literally are scared to death, so they sell even solid stocks at bargain prices. As a strategy, it’s a lot like buying a drunk guy another dozen shots of whiskey. The problem’s gone. At least for now.

But you can only game a system for so long. Eventually, the game playing will come back to haunt you. And the Fed may be scared of deflation right now, but all of the injection of money via loans and balance sheet inflation and stock market propping up? The system failures get bigger, and bigger. The old tools don’t work. And the system fails. This time for good in a spasm of deflation followed by inflation followed by currency collapse.

I know you’re worried about the investment bankers getting caught up in the deflation-inflation-collapse. Don’t be! Right now, they’re selling their stock after the plunge protection team bumps up the price and buying bunkers in Montana or old missile silos in Nebraska. Yay, free market capitalism!

I’m sure that it’s a coincidence.

I’m not saying that we’ve reached the point where we’ll see the financial systems fail with this cycle. It may not be this leg down. But like the Fed®, keep one eye open.

Deflation might be hiding under the bed.

Scott Adams, Debt, and Economic CPR

“Could be worse. Could be raining.” – Young Frankenstein

I heard Joe Biden was thinking of having a horse for a vice president, to make the economy stable.

Scott Adams is the creator of Dilbert® and a close personal friend who I bonded with during the Olympic trials for rhythmic gymnastics. Okay, that’s not quite true. Scott’s a long-time acquaintance and we go to some of the same parties. Okay, that’s not quite true, either. Probably a more accurate statement is that I have quite a few of his books and he liked exactly two of my Tweets® back when I Twittered™ on a more regular basis.

The last one is actually true.

Anyway, Mr. Adams used to be a blogger, and had some interesting written posts over the years. Now, he spends more time doing a YouTube® show rather than blog (LINK). I listen to him a couple of times a month as I drive to work. I’d watch him, but the people on the sidewalk seem to mind. I guess I’m not as bad a driver as Helen Keller. But she had a real excuse, being a woman and all.

One comment I’ve heard Scott make at least twice during the COVIDanomic® crisis is that he’s optimistic about the economy restarting and taking right off. More or less he has said, “Unlike a war or some other catastrophe, everything we need for a successful economy is still sitting there. All we have to do is restart it.”

One thing I’ve enjoyed about Mr. Adams is that he’s incredibly perceptive, and the reason I listen to him is he’s a constant source of unique opinions. He was one of the first to pick Trump winning in 2016. Adams noticed the way Trump uses the language of persuasion and thought it would be the difference in the election. Me, I generally vote based on lawn signs, which is why I voted for my realtor last election.

Jeb was a pallbearer at his dad’s funeral, so he could let him down one final time.

Trump’s persuasion immediately frames and freezes the way people think about public figures. “Low energy Jeb (Bush),” and “Little Mike (Bloomberg)” were the verbal equivalents of public political homicide. Once Trump Tweeted® those phrases, ¡Jeb! and Little Mike could still campaign, but their chances of winning were the same as a belt made of watches – a waist of time.

So, when Mr. Adams speaks, I pay attention. New ideas are fairly rare and I like to steal mine while they’re fresh. As noted, many times he’s very perceptive in ways the news media forgot about being when they first caught Trump Derangement Syndrome. In this case, I think Scott is wrong. Everything may still be there, but you can no longer restart the economy to the previous levels than you could resuscitate Grover Cleveland by giving his corpse CPR. I mean, I can give CPR to a steak, but it still won’t moo.

Just like Grover Cleveland, everything is there, but putting him in a lawn chair and propping him up with a tropical cocktail (with umbrella) won’t really help. Everything’s there.

But it’s really not.

If only Grover Cleveland had Twitter®, I’m sure we’d still be laughing at the dank Benjamin Harrison memes.

Just like you can’t restart a heart after a few weeks of it sitting on the bedside table, you can’t restart an economy after months of it sitting dead in Coronapause©.

Let’s take the human body analogy a bit farther. A business is an organism. It consumes money and raw materials and produces goods and services as a byproduct. You could even call that byproduct a waste if it had anything to do with Kardashians. Companies eat metal and energy and use employee labor to pop out automobiles and beer and knee braces and fruitcake bloomers. And where would we be without fruitcake bloomers???

A lack of oxygen makes cells in your body die. No oxygen, no cells.

In business, a lack of money causes employees to die. Oops. They don’t die, they just don’t come in anymore, unless your business was in the Soviet Union, where ‘being terminated’ had an entirely different and completely Schwarzenegger-free meaning.

That lack of money for a business is called debt, and debt is what kills an economy. Just as weak people like The Mrs. complains that she needs a constant supply of oxygen after being stuck in the car with me after a week-long backpacking trip, debt is a mechanism to make sure that people and companies require a constant flow of money.

Why would a company be in debt?

Well, for small ones, the same reason that you or I would go into debt, namely because they don’t have the money to pay for everything up front. Debt can also provide money for the business to grow.

And moderate sized companies that you can buy on the stock market nearly have to be in debt. Without debt, a guy from New York would buy them out using the cash that the company had hanging around for a rainy day. They even have a name for this – a leveraged buyout (LBO). In an LBO, the person buying the company buys it with money that he borrowed against company he’s buying.

It sounds complicated, but it’s really not. An LBO is the same thing that happens when you sell your house. The person buying the house uses the house as the basis of the loan to buy the house from the owners.

And good news, it’s already several trillion higher than this!

But in the case of the company being bought out, the resulting company after the LBO is actually weaker and more likely to fail since it’s now saddled with debt. Just because you can borrow the money doesn’t mean you should borrow the money.

Giant sized companies don’t face this problem nobody but Jeff Bezos has enough money to buy his stake in Amazon®, plus he’d send his android double to come kill you if you tried to buy the company or made fun of his girlfriend. Apple® is similarly large, so they can have billions of dollars in cash on the books, too, but Apple™ doesn’t have a girlfriend. Yet.

The chain of death of a business in after WuFlu looks something like this:

Lockdowns stop businesses from being open, which
Stops the money coming to Employees so,
Employees stop buying, therefore
Businesses don’t have money.

Keep this cycle up for two months and in some cases you’ve used up more reserves than the business has. The result is either more debt, which the business still can’t pay because debt is the problem in the first place, or bankruptcy.

Well, TP is one problem that’s been wiped out.

The same cycle can be seen with landlords.

A dollar owed for rent isn’t owed to a random person,
It’s often owed to a person who has a mortgage against the property, and
If the rent isn’t paid, many times the landlord can’t pay his
But when the landlord can’t pay the mortgage, the bank isn’t paid.

If you’re worried about the bank, don’t. The old saying is that “Debt is always paid, either by the borrower, or the lender.” In the case of banks, there’s the three Fed Amigos: the Federal government, the Federal Reserve™, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).

The reason the FDIC was created was that banks failed faster and more frequently than FUNNY during the Great Depression. If people keep their money in Mason© jars in the backyard, it’s pretty hard for the other two Feds to track it, so they had to convince people the banks were safe.

They idea behind the FDIC is that if a bank goes bankrupt, the insurance will pay off the depositors. I was going to look up the total assets of the FDIC to see how big a crisis it could cover, but decided it was irrelevant. The Federal government (Treasury) or the Federal Reserve© or some group will simply print all of the money required to pay off the depositors.

I knew there was a reason that clowns scared me.

If my bank runs out of money? Well, the Fed will just lend them some. The FDIC is for amateur problems.

But lending money into a system where the primary problem is debt isn’t the solution, and it explains why things won’t just “start right up” after months where car sales are at 50% of last year, and airline flights are at 10% or less. The debt is the reason that the economy was able to fall so far, so fast. And you can’t loan more money to solve what is, at the core, a debt problem.

I do hope my close, personal friend Scott Adams is right. But I fear he’s wrong. But hey, we’ll always have those Olympic™ medals we won for rhythmic gymnastics.

The Coming End of The United States

“Hello, I’m Dr. Bean. Apparently. And my job is to sit and look at paintings. So, what have I learned that I can say about this painting? Well, firstly, it’s really quite big, which is excellent, because If it were really small, you know, microscopic, then hardly anyone would be able to see it.” – Bean

If you look closely, you can see itsy-bitsy fur bikini women.

The death of the United States as we know it is near. COVID-19 isn’t the cause of it, despite being in the news nearly as much as a Kardashian. Coronavirus is, rather, a symptom. Like any organism, as soon as a nation is born it begins the process of growth and eventual death. This cycle is a common theme in history, and I’ve visited it before in posts here because I find it more fascinating than, say, beekeeping.

One post I wrote about the how empires have a natural cycle and end date is here (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence). That post contains information about Sir John Glubb’s paper called The Fate of Empires. You can also find Glubb’s original paper here (LINK), and you’ll be pleased to find it’s been translated from Glubb’s original fish language.

Which brings us to Thomas Cole. Mr. Cole was an American painter. I say “was” because he’s now dead. This is good, because otherwise he’d have to explain to his wife where the heck he’s been since 1848. Cole did a series of five paintings depicting Glubb’s paper between the years of 1833 and 1836, which was pretty amazing, since Glubb’s paper wasn’t published until 1976. Cole’s five paintings are collectively known as The Course of Empire.

The first of these paintings is called The Savage State. It’s the first picture up above. Cole wasn’t horribly inventive with names, and it’s rumored that he had a dog named “Dog” and a cat named “Cat” and subsisted entirely on a diet of unsalted boiled potatoes. His painting, The Savage State is just that, a savage land dominated by nature, which is also how The Mrs. describes my side of the bedroom. In his painting, you can see that the civilization matched the landscape – rudimentary and rough. It’s chaotic, but that describes a great deal of the prehistory of man. This period of history can last a very, very long time, and would have lasted even longer if humanity would have failed to invent shag carpet.

If you look closely, all these paintings are set in the same place, at different times. Cole even changed the time of day from morning in the first one to night in the final one. I guess this is what you had to settle for as an 1836 version of HD television.

The next painting in the series is The Pastoral State. Each of the paintings presents the same area, just at different stages in the development of the civilization. The land from the original painting has been tamed enough for farming and herding animals. The wild nature of The Savage State has been at least partially replaced by enough control of the land that a greater degree of specialization and start of civilization is possible.

At this stage in the civilizational cycle, there is generally a single dominant culture. If there are two competing cultures, they’ll fight. This explains the Spartans and the Athenians, the North versus the South, or my ex-wife and humans not possessed by Satan. Having a single culture breeds trust, and the uniformity of purpose required for this phase.

The theme of the pastoral state is expansion along the frontier, and is characterized by growth and optimism. It’s how it feels to be on the winning team. Religion is dominant, as are ideals that are higher than self – in Rome, public service was considered honorable. Plutarch wrote about Spartan mothers and their attitudes when their sons went into battle: “Another woman handed her son his shield, and exhorted him: ‘Son, either with this or on this.’”

Legend has it that at one point when Athens was fighting Sparta, that a Spartan, hidden by a hill, taunted the Athenians by yelling, “One Spartan can beat a thousand Athenians!” Enraged, the commander of the Athenians selected his thousand best men and sent them over the hill to kill the insolent Spartan. After fifteen minutes of battle sounds and screaming, a single Athenian, mortally wounded, limped to the top of the hill and yelled down to his general: “Don’t fall for it! It’s a trap! There are actually two of them.”

This state ends when there is no more expansion and frontier. At that point, someone always gets the bright idea that they want to make a buck. The pursuit of profit then replaces the pursuit of honor.

This is the most beautiful and intricate of the paintings. Of course, I had to meme all over it. And looking at the multitudes of people in the painting I had to wonder, “What would a decent three bedroom in the suburbs cost?”

After profits have been pursued for a time, the Empire then reaches the height of power. Cole depicted this phase in his painting The Consummation. Both as a military and economic entity, the Empire will never be better off than at this time, well, at least until it builds that Death Star®. It is here that the greatest works of arts and literature of the society will be created. While the society retains the myth of the expansion, the reality is that is no longer a concern.

Also at this point, intellectuals will start rejecting all of the values that allowed the society to be great, and replacing them with ideals that are often the direct opposite of those that led to success. Virtue is replaced by vanity. Honor and discipline will be mocked as the philosophy of a fool, and be derided as inferior to the values and beliefs of amorality, nihilism, materialism, and collectivism.

Not that I have an opinion, or anything.

Somewhere about this time, with the Empire ceasing to grow, powerful groups figure out that it’s much easier to steal wealth than create it. Politicians devise ways to maximize how much money and power their group can take from the others.

This is the Cole painting, The Destruction of Empire, I see most often out of this set. Perhaps it’s a sign of the time, or perhaps it’s a sign that everyone likes a good Viking raid? Okay. Not everyone. But remember that Roman soldiers are trained, but Vikings are Bjorn.

With the Empire past its peak, the wealth is used to create decadence. Focus is on material goods, and religion declines across the Empire. Since the focus is on wealth, the welfare state forms – Romans had bread and circuses, we have EBT and Netflix®. Historically, foreign peoples from across the Empire stream towards the original culture. Why? Again, the focus is on material goods and not a cohesive society. Why would a Greek want to leave Greece for Rome? I prefer to read books about Rome in Braille – it makes it feel like ancient history.

And as the focus grows on material goods, the originality of the goods disappears. Art becomes a cynical mechanism of control and a means to harvest cash. The remake of the original is remade or rebooted to once again drag the culture for profits. I heard that Hollywood was even going to remake a Muslim version of Footloose, but this time without the Bacon.

An example of that is Spain after the conquest of the New World. Spain found itself with immense wealth in gold. How much wealth? So much that the Spaniards decided that they didn’t want to do the day-to-day things in life, and drew workers in from all across Europe to Do The Jobs Spaniards Wouldn’t Do. So much gold flew into Europe that it changed the exchange rate and wrecked the market for gold. After a century of such luxury, the Spaniards ceased to be the conquistadors that boldly conquered a continent with grit and bravado and became a culture that complained when the Dutch help didn’t peel the grapes correctly.

As an example, in one park I found a cannon seized from a Spanish warship during the Spanish-American War. I looked at the engraving on the cannon – it was beautiful. But this cannon, taken from the Spanish in 1898, was actually forged in 1780 or so. The United States was using cannon that were state of the art and sophisticated, with more than a century of technological advances on the Spanish.

Heck, when a friend got at tattoo in Spain, I was shocked. It was really good. Why was I shocked that it was good? No one expects Spanish ink-precision.

The destruction of Empire can flow not only from battle, but also from a checkbook – a financial collapse can be nearly as devastating as a foreign army, as Spain proves. Regardless, when vigor is gone, pessimism prevails, and sacrifice for the common good to a trustworthy state disappears? Why would you want to be a hero, as all of the national myths and heroes are, one by one, destroyed to make way for the new myths of the intellectual class?

Destruction is just around the corner.

If you look closely at this picture, there are no people, only birds, which must mean that Cole felt that the birds would take over the Earth. This is my favorite, because it makes me feel better about how my yard looks.

Cole’s final painting in the series was the Desolation of Empire. The Empire is over. The drama is over. What remains are a scattered people and the ruins of a great civilization. It sounds bleak, but it doesn’t need to be.

The desolation of Empire isn’t the ending for every person in it, it’s just the ending of the golden age of the way things were. Imagine someone near the end of the Roman Empire, worried about what they saw going on around it. Would the Roman Empire collapse? Certainly. Would all of the people die as a part of this collapse? No. But the globalism of the day did.

And the Roman Empire, in its death, set the stage for a new series of cultures all around Europe – from the reuse of Caesar as “Czar” in Moscow to the United States, which consciously adopted many of the symbols of ancient Rome. What was the first name of the United States Army? Under its first commander, Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, it was known as Legion of the United States from 1792-1796.

This isn’t the end of the world, it’s just the end of what we have now, and the end of the United States as we knew her. It’s the beginning of something new as the old structures cease to serve us. There’s a common phrase that I can’t find the source of but that describes the cycle simply and well: “Hard times breed strong men. Strong men breed good times. Good times breed soft men. Soft men? They bring hard times.”

We are in for hard times. But don’t fear. This will make strong men, and, if they are strong enough, a new United States that deserves those strong men.

Eight Phases of Crisis: COVID-19 Edition

â€œYou had aÂ dishwasher box to sleep in?Â I didn’t even know sleep. Â It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.â€ â€“ Deadpool

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.Â I replied, â€œDunno, depends on if you are trying to kill BatmanÂ®â€

â€œGreat, now itâ€™s the end of the world and we canâ€™t get a new dishwasher,â€ The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost.Â Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.Â I call that a win-win.Â Besides, AmazonÂ® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See?Â You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.Â When it was lunchtime, I wasnâ€™t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch.Â Good times.Â I do have a concern â€“ The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, â€œnice buttâ€ so Iâ€™m thinking of bringing this up with HR.Â I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.Â I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derriÃ¨re, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.Â While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people donâ€™t change all that much, even though circumstances do.Â Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.

Okay, Iâ€™ll stop.Â Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.Â I donâ€™t want you to think Iâ€™m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned?Â Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisisâ„¢, a level at which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the other â€“ this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.Â This is like the KÃ¼bler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind.Â Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind?Â Itâ€™s so nice and cheery.Â The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

Who would he assassinate for a KlondikeÂ® bar?Â Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand.Â

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.Â It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I.Â Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say â€œno.â€Â The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment.Â With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?Â We donâ€™t trust the media very much.Â Why?Â They donâ€™t seem trustworthy.Â Example: Â when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNNÂ® says itâ€™s racist.Â When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNNâ„¢ says itâ€™s a wise and prudent move by Chinaâ€™s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNNâ„¢ and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf:Â in the end, wolves really attacked.

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be.Â Itâ€™s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War.Â The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was.Â Itâ€™s the spark that lights the fire.Â When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards â€“ The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently.Â It is disruptive.Â It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system.Â In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant.Â COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy.Â Was it poised for a fall anyway?Â Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts:Â what if we havenâ€™t seen The Event yet?

Iâ€™m not sure heâ€™s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.Â When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch.Â Why?Â Habit, partially.Â But thereâ€™s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesnâ€™t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isnâ€™t a coping strategy, and itâ€™s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.Â Itâ€™s more inertia.Â Youâ€™re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isnâ€™t, part of your mind isnâ€™t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction â€“ COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.Â But that isnâ€™t explained by the reactions weâ€™ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.Â Italy is locked down.Â In two weeks, we will know more.Â In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it.Â But the rules are new, and unknown.Â What to do?Â One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?Â One could Panic.Â Panic is easier, and doesnâ€™t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality.Â So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile youâ€™ve accumulated over time?Â Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain DewÂ®?Â Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you donâ€™t know what to do or have any independent thought?Â Â Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

Not all heroes are able to walk.Â I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.Â Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.Â Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism â€“ realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.Â Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because itâ€™s the right thing to do.

There was a family story â€“ Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.Â She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.Â Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.Â Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.Â Why ration needles and sugar?Â To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part.Â To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasnâ€™t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we arenâ€™t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch NetflixÂ® unless weâ€™re keeping vital industries going.Â Hereâ€™s a link to Aesopâ€™s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).Â Read it all.

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners.Â My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.Â Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.Â In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didnâ€™t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.Â Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, thereâ€™s The Cliff.Â I wrote about it here: Senecaâ€™s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.Â Is it certain that there is one?Â No.Â But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like itâ€™s there.Â I believe we will see it.Â The new normal will be grow from events moving quickly.Â Already at Wilder Redoubt, weâ€™ve had nothing but home cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that weâ€™ll see The Cliff soon enough.Â How deep will it go?Â As Iâ€™ve mentioned before, no one knows.Â The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.Â Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.Â 80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.Â The average monthly car payment is $800.Â Me?Â Iâ€™d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole.Â But the businesses that employ those people arenâ€™t much better off.Â The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.Â The second best restaurant didnâ€™t survive.Â There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this wonâ€™t just be for small businesses.Â I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.Â Overall loss to the economy?Â 40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?Â Sure.Â We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.Â We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up.Â Thatâ€™s the best case.Â And thatâ€™s just in the United States.

Iâ€™m not kidding, thatâ€™s how deep The Cliff is.Â If weâ€™re lucky.

Something, something, Dark SideÂ®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.Â We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.Â Disillusionment sets in when things donâ€™t snap back to normal.Â Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.Â The more government â€œhelpsâ€ during this phase, the worse recovery will be.Â Roosevelt â€œhelpedâ€ so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they canâ€™t help themselves.Â The length of time Disillusionment lasts?Â Months to years.

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.Â Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.Â Rebuilding the economy will take years.Â If we do it right, weâ€™ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly?Â The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.Â Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.Â Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

So, I guess Iâ€™ll get a jump start on rebuilding.Â Dishwashers on the Internet.Â Amazing.Â My only problem is that thereâ€™s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time.Â Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her!Â They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

If . . . Then . . . The Two Words That Allow You To See The Future

â€œAnd so, Arthur, we learned that gambling is bad and yet in a certain sense, isn’t life itself a gamble? Â You can never be sure of anything. Â Like who would have thought that dolphins could go bad and that fish were magnetic? Â Not me, no sir, not me.â€ â€“ The Tick (Animated)

But you were expecting the Spanish Inquisition?

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is most famous for his 2007 book The Black Swan:Â The Impact of the Highly Improbable.Â Itâ€™s a great book â€“ I wish as many people read the book as bought it.Â Then they might have at least understood why home prices plummeted faster than Californiaâ€™s self-respect in 2008-09.Â Heck, if people would just retain a little bit of this book after they read it, theyâ€™d be better off than most MBAs.Â The title of the book comes from Taleb describing Europeans touching down in Australia, and seeing something that they never thought possible:Â a black swan.Â All European swans are white.Â Therefore?Â All swans are white.

Until you see a black one.

Taleb defined his â€œBlack Swanâ€ events as having some important characteristics:

Black Swans are extremely rare. Standard techniques (like normal probability distributions) will never predict them.
Black Swans have huge consequences.
Everybody looks at the Black Swan event (after having gone through it) and concluded it was obviously going to happen.

Iâ€™ll throw out one other idea to mix with Talebâ€™s Black Swan concept â€“ this one was from James P. Hoganâ€™s wonderful 1982 book (that Hogan says helped topple the Soviet Union, and he might be right – LINK) Voyage from Yesteryear.Â In this book, Hogan has a character talk about the difference between a phase change and a chemical reaction.Â When you freeze water or melt ice, itâ€™s just undergoing a phase change.Â Warm the ice up, and you get water.Â Make the water cold enough, and itâ€™ll change back.

Phase changes are simple and reversible.Â Itâ€™s only a matter of energy.Â But burn a piece of paper, and like the girl you had a crush on your freshman year in high school?Â Itâ€™s never coming back.Â Burning the paper is a one way trip.Â Itâ€™s a chemical reaction that you canâ€™t reverse.Â Or a restraining order in the case of the girl.Â It turns out they donâ€™t like you standing outside of their house holding a boom box over your head in real life.

In real life, John Cusack blocked me on TwitterÂ®.Â I probably deserved it.Â I just wanted my two dollars.

Changing the guard from Republican to Democrat and back to Republican is a phase change.Â Same stuff, different day.Â But the American Revolution?Â That was a chemical reaction â€“ after the war we could never go back to being British subjects â€“ the ideas of independence, freedom, and self-governance were too firmly rooted.Â 9/11 was another phase change.Â Despite Wâ€™s desire that we â€œgo on as normalâ€ we never have been normal again and conventional ideas of privacy, freedom, independence, and self-governance are dead.

Oops.

All Black Swans are chemical reactions â€“ they are irreversible, even though people expect a return to the â€œway things wereâ€ it never happens â€“ you canâ€™t unburn the paper.Â The change is a one-way event.Â In one (for me) particularly striking story in The Black Swan, Taleb wrote that his relatives from Lebanon were still waiting for things to return to normal, even though it had been thirty years since the war had ripped Lebanon apart.Â No, they werenâ€™t crack dealers, and they werenâ€™t alone.Â Even as late as 2012, 76,000 people were displaced within Lebanon, waiting for things to get back to normal.

Wuhan Flu, COVID-19, is a Black Swan.Â Itâ€™s not quick and immediate like Pearl Harbor or 9/11 or the Great PEZÂ® famine of 1986. Â Â This Black Swan is unfolding in slow motion across the economy and the world.Â When this is studied in classes in fifty years, the students will think it happened all at once, rather than unfolding, day-by-day over the course of a year.Â In a week, weâ€™ve gone from business as usual to shutting down restaurants.Â Itâ€™s the new normal.Â And yes, I said a year.Â Weâ€™ll be lucky if it doesnâ€™t last a decade.

A woman born at the beginning of the French Revolution would have already had kids by the time Napoleon was booted off stage permanently after Waterloo.Â But history teaches it like it happened during the two minute warning at a football game.

As Iâ€™ve written about before, the economy is facing a crisis thatâ€™s at least twice as big as the 2008 Great Recession.Â The stage was set beforehand for a phase change â€“ from functioning economy to recession and then back again.Â Trump had really juiced the economy in an unusual way:Â clearing out regulations.Â Sure, he pumped money back via tax cuts, but those tax cuts were targeted toward non-millionaire types and businesses.Â This was, perhaps, the most wholesome way to grow the economy â€“ by people making money rather than by government choosing who got to win.Â Bernie, Iâ€™m talking about you.

In due time, we would have had a recession anyway.Â Probably a big one, since the economic expansion has been going so long.Â But just like Wuhan isnâ€™t really the flu, this economic upset really isnâ€™t a recession â€“ itâ€™s far worse.Â DowÂ® 8,000 or less isnâ€™t out of the question on the downside.Â Really.

Itâ€™s that bad.

The government is going to take unusual actions.Â I mean, more unusual than usual.Â Today, it was floated to just start writing checks to most people.Â â€œMillionairesâ€ were excluded.Â Free health care will come on the table soon enough.Â We havenâ€™t even scratched the surface of whatâ€™s going to happen.Â And we will never go back to the way things were.Â This isnâ€™t a phase change.Â Like a board game that you let a toddler open, things just wonâ€™t go back in the box the same way, ever, and all of the pieces are covered in cookie/saliva mix.

Honestly, I donâ€™t miss toddlers, what with them trying to poison you or cut your brake lines or eating all the Cheeze-ItsÂ®.

Once upon a time, I got paid to think about disasters as a short time gig at a company I was working for.Â It was a lot of fun.Â I researched probabilities of things like civil wars and floods and tornadoes and visits from my ex-wife demonic manifestations.Â My life for those months included a LOT of surfing of doomer porn sites and thinking about how the world could go to hell.Â So, I guess that makes me sort-of a retired professional doomer.

And my thinking pattern developed a rhythm . . . If (generic disaster) happened, Then (outcome).

It was thinking about the outcome that was the most fun.Â If a tornado hit the headquarters, Then what?Â Well, based upon the statistics that I could find, it was an average wait of 500 years for a tornado to hit any given spot in the geographic region of the HQ.Â Even for someone as old as Ruth Buzzi Ginsburg, thatâ€™s not very often.Â I tracked down and tried to figure out how much money the company would lose if it got hit by a tornado, volcano, hurricane and earthquake all on the same day â€“ a Torcano Hurriquakeâ„¢.Â After researching with every department, it was concluded that we might not be able to collect on a few hundred thousand dollarsâ€™ worth of payments that people owed us.Â As this company was a multi-billion dollar company where the executives had BMWsÂ® that were designed to stop an RPG strike, that was less than the company spent on Featureless Grey WallpaperÂ® in a year.

Hey, everybody who thinks exactly alike gets a bonus, right?

They didnâ€™t think it was funny when I told them that a Civil War was 10 times as likely as a natural disaster shutting down operations.Â When I showed them the math, they couldnâ€™t argue, but they werenâ€™t happy.Â They didnâ€™t like it even more when I pointed out that they could afford to spend about $100 a year in disaster prep â€“ most of their systems already had offsite backups.Â And no one was even slightly interested in shooting RPGs at the executives.

What the executives were interested in was things that they were used to, floods.Â Torcanos. Hurriquakes.Â Civil War?Â Iâ€™m not sure I even brought up a pandemic, but they would probably have looked at me like I had six eyes.Â â€œJust not credible.â€

No Black Swan event is credible when you try to describe it to someone who is stuck in thinking normally.Â Just like Talebâ€™s relatives looking for stability in Lebanon or me wondering when TSA will stop fondling my man parts, itâ€™s not going to happen.Â But describe trying to get on a flight in 2020 to an American in 1995?Â Theyâ€™d think it was a silly science fiction story.Â If only we could convince the TSA to fondle Lebonese?

Which brings us back to COVID-19.Â How do you discuss it with someone who is stuck thinking normally?Â Itâ€™s difficult.Â Their minds arenâ€™t even playing in the zip code as people who prepare.Â But even to them, it is undeniable that things have changed.Â They just donâ€™t realize itâ€™s like herpes:Â forever.

When I went to school, school lunches were something to be avoided.Â The Lunch Ladies did their best with the USDA Approved sources of, I guess Iâ€™ll call it protein.Â Now, school food is deemed to be a requirement even when school is out of service.Â And they say that there isnâ€™t a hell.

Yes, it was just Spring Break, and the school kitchens were closed.Â And they close during summer, last I checked â€“ every summer.Â But now?Â School food is a must.Â Here in Modern Mayberry, theyâ€™re offering the school lunches for free to anyone who comes to pick them up.Â I think itâ€™s because at least someone in Washington pulled their head away from the bacon-wrapped-shrimp trough long enough to realize that weâ€™re in trouble.Â One of the brighter ones probably had the following thought:

If (Lunches are Free) Then (How Long Until They Become Free Community Lunches)?

If (Free Community Lunches Exist) Then (How Many People Remember Typhoid Mary Was A Lunch Lady Cook who spent 30 years in prison isolation because she wouldnâ€™t stop killing people by infecting them with typhus cooking?).

Oops.

If you cook them too long, they get all crunchy.

Schools are being closed.Â This, in my opinion is good.Â But If (Schools Close) Then (Are Daycares Any Safer?)Â Your takeaway should be this question: Â how long until daycares are closed?Â If they can close the NBA, Then they can close daycares.Â But I repeat myself.

What can you do?Â The best time to prepare was last month.Â The next best time to prepare is now.Â I canâ€™t tell you if you have enough cans of corn in your pantry.Â And, no, thatâ€™s not a creepy metaphor referring to some orifice you may or may not have.Â I mean actual corn.Â Or tuna.Â Still not a metaphor.Â Or mayonnaise.Â Whatever you normally eat, you have some extra, right?

As of now, the supermarkets are functioning.

If (Supermarkets Close) Then (what)?Â The average supermarket used to have inventory for three days.Â The average house, food enough for three days.Â Â Add that up, and American is pretty close to being hungry.Â What happens Then?Â Martial law?Â Food distributions?

If (Your Job Ceases to Exist) Then (what)?

Thatâ€™s the key to preparing yourself, not only physically like those people building blanket forts with a semi-load of toilet paper in their basement as structural wall material, but also mentally.Â To understand whatâ€™s going on, to be one step ahead, you have to imagine what could happen.Â You have to let your mind make it real and run it to a logical conclusion.

Then you have to see if it makes sense.

Okay, not everything bad can happen.Â I mean, cats with thumbs?Â Silly.

When an idea makes sense, follow it through. Â If so, Then whatâ€™s the consequence?Â Donâ€™t limit your thinking.Â Itâ€™s a fun game.Â Sure, sometimes it ends up in global thermonuclear war, but so did The Terminatorâ„¢, and look how much fun that was.Â But when you really think about it, youâ€™ll look to see what happened in the past.Â While the future wonâ€™t look exactly like the past, it will rhyme.Â The cause and effect of many things doesnâ€™t change.

If weâ€™re quarantining, Then we wonâ€™t drive as much.Â If we donâ€™t drive as much, Then we wonâ€™t use as much of that sweet, sweet gasoline.Â If we donâ€™t use as much of that sweet, sweet, gasoline, Then the price of oil, refineries, and oil producing companies will drop and some will go out of business and lots of people will lose their jobs.Â Thatâ€™s exactly what happened last week, and will happen in the next month.

If.

Then.

COVID-19 wasnâ€™t in my projections â€“ I was expecting cake.Â It wasnâ€™t in the mindset of the people of the world.Â Then it was.Â So what happens next?Â What chains will snap, further unraveling our civilization?Â What changes will be permanent?

If you want to keep your doctors alive, Then how will you protect them from COVID-19?
If you want to save the people with the most future, Then how many over 40 will get one of the 60,000 ventilators? Besides me, I mean.
If your customers are being impacted, Then will they fail?
If your customers fail, Then who will pay you?
If government wants to control people and how they move, Then theyâ€™ll start using the tracking information from cell phones.
If the government tracks cell phones, Then why would they ever stop? About the time they stop touching your no-no areas so you can go to Cleveland?
If the clerk at Wal-MartÂ® tells you that â€œtheyâ€ have been telling her to have a minimum of two weeks of food, Then will you listen?
If you hear from another Wal-MartÂ© employee that they are setting up special hours for employees to shop after the store is closed, Then will you pay attention?
If the government starts paying people just to breath, Then will they ever stop?
If I tell you that hope is not a plan, Then will you . . . plan?

We are in a Black Swan event, probably the biggest of your life, and 9/11 was no slouch.Â Neither I, nor anyone else can tell you exactly what the future will bring.Â But as I mentioned in my last post, the universe is a harsh grader.Â The final exam is pass/fail.Â And passing means you live.

Until the next exam.

If.

Then.

COVID-19: A Brave New World

â€œBecause if just one of those things gets down here then that will be all! Â Then all this – this bulls**t that you think is so important? Â You can just kiss all that goodbye!â€ – Aliens

I canâ€™t stand people who are xenophobic.

Corona.Â COVID-19.Â Thereâ€™s a catastrophe always lurking, but itâ€™s never what you think.Â But itâ€™s always something. Â Beer Flu.Â Kung Flu.

Do you understand the magnitude?Â Most people donâ€™t.Â Iâ€™m not even sure I do.

The last few nights here at Stately Wilder Mansion Redoubt have been especially enjoyable.Â I took off some time last week, and plan on taking some time off this week, as well.Â Itâ€™s a great time, especially if youâ€™ve never read Poeâ€™s Masque of the Red Death (LINK).

Rarely do things change so quickly:Â we Wilders were preparing to go to a state-level event where Pugsley was going to compete.Â Competing was an honor â€“ it means that he was one of the very best in the state at competitive freestyle dramatic baking rhythmic knife combat.

The championship was cancelled â€“ 6,000 people in the same place probably doesnâ€™t make sense.Â Why?Â Mathematically Iâ€™m betting that at least one of the competitors or spectators would have been COVID-communicable.Â 6,000 would have been a wonderful place for one person to donate billions of virus fragments to thousands of others, just like one South Korean was responsible for over 1,000 cases.

Ahhh, panda.Â So very tasty.Â I like it with a side of bald eagle.

One of my friends and I were talking before the event was canceled and said to me, â€œJohn, itâ€™s cancelled.Â There is no way thatâ€™s going to happen.â€Â There was no uncertainty in his voice â€“ it was clear he was 100% certain.Â In my mind, I thought that somehow this event would sneak under the radar.Â It did not.Â And in retrospect, I found myself guilty of one of the chief sins of the universe:Â thinking that normal can win in abnormal circumstances.Â Thankfully, the penalty here wasnâ€™t the usual penalty for such a sin:Â death.Â Okay, that was dramatic.Â Mainly itâ€™s feeling stupid.

Pugsley was disappointed since he had his katana sharp, his Hamlet memorized, and his recipe book tattooed on his left thigh, but cancelling the event was the right call.

The Boy was back in town for spring break, so the four of us Wilders are hunkered down in the basement as I write this.Â The other three idiots have been taking turns invading my writing space playing a video game.Â Thankfully, we like each other and have a reasonable supply of deodorant and soap.Â If the soap runs low, I volunteer to try to make some out our fire pit ashes and the cat.

But is it made from cat?

The Boy and Pugsley have been out into the world since COVID-19â„¢ hit more than The Mrs. and I.Â The Boy went back to his college on Saturday.Â They say that the college will open at some unspecified time in the future, but sent a note out that maybe you should think about coming to get your stuff.Â The Boy and Pugsley took a road trip for just that purpose.Â While The Mrs. hasnâ€™t had her job officially cancelled for the foreseeable future, I expect that will be the case.Â I donâ€™t expect either of the three of them to be required to be outside of the house in the month of March except for runs to Wal-MartÂ®.

Okay, it wasnâ€™t that bad.Â They didnâ€™t even ask me for gas money.Â Hey, have you guys seen my credit card?

My job?Â Itâ€™s probably not directly required for the United States to keep going on a daily basis, so I could see myself being restricted to working from home unless I absolutely had to be somewhere to defuse a bomb or perform a circumcision an alien.Â As it is, if I have symptoms of Corona, I canâ€™t come back to work unless Iâ€™ve been cleared via a doctorâ€™s note.Â Assuming I can find one of the six doctors in the county, but, hey, I can sign a signature that might look like a doctor?Â It looks just like an EbolaÂ© virus, right?

Iâ€™ve really enjoyed the time at home.Â Itâ€™s surreal, since as I listen to the Internet radio, I can hear everything crumbling as the news gets weirder by the day.Â I dumped my 401k (the part that was in stocks) into the money market fund this morning on Sunday.Â That means theyâ€™re supposed to dispose of it tomorrow.Â But as the market is lock-limit down already, what does that even mean?Â Can my money even find an exit point?

Iâ€™m betting the Fed dumps a trillion dollars, or maybe even two trillion into the market.

Tomorrow.

Itâ€™s that bad.Â I hope Iâ€™m wrong, but I think itâ€™s going to be October in 1929 bad.

Maybe this will work.Â Seems stable, right?

Itâ€™s obvious that the world around us has already changed.Â As we drove to Wal-MartÂ© on Friday for a scouting expedition, I looked at a parade of businesses that would soon be closed as I drove by them one by one on the street.

Move theater? Whoâ€™s going to go, especially since the movies are crap?
Diner frequented mainly by old people? Â Old couples are going to be self-quarantined watching the Price is RightÂ® until they welcome COVID-19 to escape each other.
Car dealerships? Â Iâ€™d like to buy that new JeepÂ® Coronaâ„¢ Wagon.
Scented candle places? Okay, Iâ€™m not sure how they stay in business anyway in 2020, unless they launder meth money.
Insurance companies?
Laundromats?
Thrift shops?
The VFW?
Churches?
Bars?
Liquor stores? Â Letâ€™s not get crazy here.

People donâ€™t really need those things.Â Except for liquor stores.Â From start to finish, what do people need in a modern society? Â I left off Law Enforcement because they keep people I donâ€™t like away from me.Â Yeah, some of them are tools, but for the most part we really do want them around for a modern society.Â Or, if we donâ€™t have Law Enforcement, a lot more ammo.

But the FBI seems reluctant to stop them.Â Even for speeding.Â

And need is not for the basics of life, it is for the basics of life for a modern society.

Water
Transport
Grocery Stores
Electricity
Their Bank
Pharmacies
Internet
Gasoline/Fuels
Natural Gas

But each of these requires people going to work to make things happen.Â The people who run the water system have to purify the water.Â The farmers have to farm, ranchers have to ranch, and dairy owners have to, um, dairy?Â The systems that provide water, milk, eggs, meat and corn are fundamental.Â They keep us in DoritosÂ® and salsa and Monterrey Jackâ„¢ cheese.

What will keep the system going? Â The city water department needs chemicals, so we need a chemical plant to make chlorine.Â But will we open the potato chip factory, or expect people can figure out how to cook potatoes?Â Will we open the frozen food factory, or assume people can make their own pizza?Â We move from a market economy to one where â€œshortagesâ€ are created based upon allocations â€“ whatâ€™s the best way to minimize the number of people that congregate while minimizing the spread of CoronaChan?

I donâ€™t know.Â Â But I do know that some foods will be considered so frivolous or interpersonal contact intensive that good sense wonâ€™t let them be made.Â Eating at a restaurant?Â That involves additional people, from cooks to servers that are potential additional viral vectors.

And as far as the tip, wash your hands.

What else donâ€™t we need?Â Thatâ€™s a tough question.Â Do we need the latest spring fashions shipped in from China?Â Do we need the latest iPhoneÂ®?Â Do we need Stephen Colbert?Â Definitely not.Â Heck, Iâ€™m not sure we need most of those things on any given day at all, let alone during a catastrophe.

And thatâ€™s just consumer products and a lame late night host.Â How much gasoline do we need if weâ€™re not travelling to and from work?Â Not very much.Â Lots of diesel is needed to move products in semi-trucks and on trains.Â In the United States, about 9 million barrels (42 gallons per barrel) are used each day as motor fuel.Â After Corona?

Three quarters of that?Â Half?

This weekend I would have probably used 30 gallons.Â Instead?Â None.Â Multiply that by millions of people, and gasoline demand is sunk.Â Get ready for the lowest gasoline prices youâ€™ll ever see in your life.Â And, since weâ€™ll not be transporting a lot of â€œstuffâ€?Â The lowest diesel prices, too, and unlike the hoarded toilet paper, theyâ€™ll hit bottom.

Maybe there will be new markets???

I look at this from a standpoint that Iâ€™ve got some food in my house that Iâ€™ve bought for times just such as this.Â I donâ€™t owe much to anyone.Â As Iâ€™ve indicated before, if you have money (and if money is still good, which may not be a given) youâ€™re in for the buying opportunity of a lifetime.Â Want an oil well? Â Youâ€™ll never have a better chance at getting a good one, if you have money.Â Especially the baby oil wells.Â Contrary to popular opinion baby oil isnâ€™t made from babies, but from toddlers.

But itâ€™s the people who donâ€™t have money that Iâ€™m concerned about.Â The theater owner canâ€™t keep the theater going if there are no butts in seats.Â The diner waitress canâ€™t make the payments on their car if they canâ€™t bring plates filled with eggs and bacon with a side of biscuits and gravy to Grandpa Verne.Â She depends on the tips that pay the bank for that car, since Virgil canâ€™t hold a job now that heâ€™s in the county lockup for fighting Clem again.

Most people depend on this weekâ€™s income to pay this monthâ€™s bills.Â Iâ€™ve been there.Â I lived several years of my life one month and one lost job away from bankruptcy.Â Thankfully, now I can live without a month of income.Â Most people canâ€™t.

How does that end up?Â Itâ€™s simple enough to say, â€œWell, let the banks take a hit on a month of payments.Â Theyâ€™re greedy and donâ€™t need that money.â€

But . . . itâ€™s my money youâ€™re talking about.Â My money is in the bank.Â How does Hells WargoÂ® pay me back if my money isnâ€™t collected from the waitress and the theater owner?Â For every transaction, thereâ€™s another party.Â And if you have more money than zero, youâ€™re impacted.Â That money of yours that your bank has?Â You loaned it to them.Â And if the loans that they made donâ€™t pay back?Â What happens then?

Another system failure.Â Iâ€™m expecting that the Federal government will just pony up several trillion to make it all go away.Â They have a printing press, ink, and paper.Â Why not?

It worked out okay for Zimbabwe and Venezuela, right?

From the best available information Iâ€™ve seen slowing down the WuFluÂ® isnâ€™t enough.Â It has to be stopped.Â COVID-19Â® isnâ€™t the flu.Â All available data indicates that it is far more deadly, and far more contagious.

At the high end of mortality, it would kill up to 7,500,000 Americans, assuming half of the people in the US get it.Â What else is a factor?Â How quickly we get it.Â If you want to live, having a ventilator will be an issue for some percentage, say, 5% of people who get it.Â No ventilator for that 5%?Â They die.Â Mortality rate skyrockets without care â€“ itâ€™s the difference between as low as 0.5% (as observed in South Korea) to as high as 5% in overwhelmed countries.

My trigger for â€œnot the fluâ€ is 30,000.Â That seems like a big number, but when you divide it by the number of people in America, itâ€™s really not.Â The flu (as near as we can see today) is a LOT less fatal.Â And, unless I missed a day in kindergarten, 30,000 is a lot less than 7,500,000.

Okay, not me.Â I have to write.Â And I have HBOÂ®.

But until we see how it pans out, I guess I get the big prize:Â spending time with Wilders.Â And Iâ€™ll enjoy spending time with each of them.

Except the cat.

Buy Gold? Is There a Downside?

“Calm down, Doctor. Now’s not the time for fear. That comes later.” – The Dark Knight Rises

When I retire, I’ve discussed with The Mrs. that I just might become a gold prospector. She doesn’t think that will pan out.

What’s happening right now in the financial markets is panic. Panic comes from uncertainty. This sort of thing was seen back all the way to the Japanese financial crisis starting in the late 1980’s. Their banking industry was a mess. Origami Bank folded; First Sumo Bank went belly up. Even Bonsai Bank had to cut some of its branches.

We’re in a different place in the United States in 2020. If I’m right, the world markets are just beginning their trip down. I’m not sure that anything saves them at this point except for raw panic causing markets to plunge enough that Wall Street hedge fund managers have to consider the idea of flying commercial.

Different sectors will be impacted differently by the Coronavirus. Bonus points if you understand that insurance companies make money by investing in stocks and such, and the insurance is just a way to get your money to invest to make profit, until you have a claim. What do you think will happen when insurance companies start taking losses? Extra credit: what do you think health insurance companies will do when faced with huge numbers of patients that weren’t in their projections when they set their rates? There will be several pop quizzes as events unfold. Eventually, though, the class is pass/fail.

I’d like to self-quarantine for, oh, 20 years or so?

We’re experiencing the economic dislocation brought on by the Coronavirus, it seems like a good time to talk about some basic principles. As I’ve noted in previous posts, my expectation is that if we see a panic, that’s the time to buy assets. Crude oil dropped to $30, and if that price stays for six months, oil rig hands will be begging to offload their Ford Shelby GT350® at bargain prices. If it stays that low for a year? Texas oil execs will be offering to sell you their $281,000 Lambo Hürącán Pérförmånté™ for a handful of magic beans.

Which brings us to gold.

I regularly correspond with several folks who are commenters here or fellow bloggers. Feel free to drop me a line: movingnorth@gmail.com. While I look forward to being so big that I say, “I don’t respond to every e-mail but I read them all” and then whipping an unpaid intern while yelling “be funnier!” while I lay in a hammock in the shade not reading your email on the marble patio complaining that the pool’s too hot, well, that hasn’t happened yet.

But a man can dream.

The best thing about the future? No more Bon Jovi.

Anyway, folks that write get responses, and some of them lead to lengthy conversations. One of people is Frequent Commenter Ricky. Ricky sent me a piece he was working on, and I thought it was brilliant. With his permission, I’m using it as a jumping off point to make a few points about our current economy. To the extent it’s not as good as his original, well, that’s on me. I’ll give the intern “motivation” to be better with a few nights in The Box if you guys don’t like it.

Ricky used a metaphor of Back to the Future to explain how currency has moved relative to gold, but I’m going to mangle it right from the start, which is on me, not Ricky. Let’s say that you were going to use the DeLorean® from Back to the Future to go back to the year 2000. That’s a nice, round number. Why 2000? Well, you only wear underwear from Montgomery Wards®, and they went out of business in 2000. So, if your tighty-whities are looking more like exclusive Swiss underwear since they are holier than St. Peter’s Basilica, it’s time for a new pair, and you should probably stock up.

So, off to Wards™, and let’s say you took $300 with you. I mean, it’s not like there’s a Wards® in every timeline, right?

When you get to the mall, you find that there’s a nice coin shop right next to Wards©. You stop in. You see that you can buy, for $300, an ounce of gold.

I hear these were featured in the 1983 Victor’s Secret® catalog, back when men used to just walk around the house proudly in their Wards™ underwear.

What? Why would you do that, man! You were after the gold standard of underwear, why settle for gold?

Because, with that same $300, you could buy an ounce of gold that in March of 2020 is worth $1675. You could buy a LOT of underwear in 2020. So, given the choice, what would you send back from the past? An ounce of gold, or $300 in cash, or $300 in Montgomery Ward© underwear?

Of course, the underwear. But if you’re like me, the number two choice would be the ounce of gold from the year 2000.

Ricky then asks the question:

If you could use that time machine to send yourself a gift in 2030, what would it be?

$1 million in cash?
Or $1 million in 2020 gold?
Or $1 million in underwear. Ricky is sane, he didn’t ask this question.

I can certainly come across a time when, if I bought gold, it would have been a bad investment. On an inflation-adjusted basis, had I bought gold in 1980, I’d be at about a breakeven today – and a breakeven, even including inflation, isn’t a great investment. But at least money wasn’t lost. But that doesn’t mean that gold can’t be a losing investment: had I sold that 1980 ounce in 2000, I would have lost about $1500 in today’s dollars.

Ouch.

If these two married, it would be a constant fight over the hair products.

But why did gold peak in 1980?

The United States was a mess. The market was a mess. The Soviets looked unstoppable, as did inflation. Air Supply was on the radio, until it was declared a terrorist organization in one of the best moves the Reagan administration ever made. Gold looked like a good investment while the world looked like it was falling apart.

Would I buy gold today at these prices of $1600+ an ounce? Probably not. Would I buy gold in six months after the market had crashed and gold was around $1200? Probably then. When (if) gold hits $1000? Certainly. And platinum? Hmmm. That looks interesting.

The long-term trend is clear: countries are attempting to devalue their currencies to make them more competitive, and this will increase as economic tensions increase. The Fed will actively seek to lower the value of the dollar. What does that imply? That the dollar will continue to inflate away until it becomes worth much less.

Ah, the good old days, when Japan was going to take over the world . . . .

But an ounce of gold will still be an ounce of gold, even if we run into problems like Japan had, where Samurai Savings and Loan faced sharp cutbacks, and investigators found that Bank of Sushi was up to something fishy, and in the end customers got a raw deal.

Warning: I’m an internet humorist, not an investment adviser. Most mornings I’m wrong six times before I’ve even had my first cup of coffee. I don’t plan to change any investment position in any listed commodity in the next three days, and haven’t made any changes in the last three days, mainly because I’m lazy.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, #10: Economy on the Brink?

â€œThe reason I’m going to SantaÂ Corona, Steve, is the worst thing that can happen there is that I run out of suntan lotion.â€ â€“ Wonder Woman (1978)

This year, International Womanâ€™s Day was on Sunday, March 8, which is when we moved the clock to daylight savings time.Â So now theyâ€™ll complain that they only get 23 hours for every day, while a man gets 24.

People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.Â Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.Â Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.

The clock didnâ€™t move this month for the second month in a row.Â Will Leftist state governments support Antifa violence this spring and summer?

In this issue:Â Front Matter â€“ Violence and Censorship Update â€“ Virginia:Â Imposing Costs â€“ Updated Civil War 2.0 Index â€“ Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona â€“ Links

Welcome to Issue 10 of the Civil War II Weather Report.Â These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.Â Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK), Issue Seven is here (LINK), Issue Eight is here (LINK), and Issue Nine is here (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

Generally, this section reports on either violence or censorship:Â itâ€™s one of the other.Â This month, itâ€™s both.Â Weâ€™ll start with Violence.Â Arthur (LINK) sent a link to a story that got some coverage â€“ the attempted murder of people just because they supported the other side of the political spectrum.Â To be clear â€“ this man (LINK)was attempting to kill old people who were expressing support of President Trump.Â Thankfully he was incompetent â€“ driving wasnâ€™t something they studied in Marxist theory class.

Iâ€™m amused when the Left talks about â€œRight Wing Extremist ViolenceÂ®â€ because itâ€™s generally either propaganda or a funding ploy by Lefty organizations to frack the pockets of liberal donors on the Coasts who want to be â€œdoing somethingâ€ to stop the HateÂ®.Â At every level in the last four years, Leftist violence has greatly exceeded violence coming from the Right, and if you donâ€™t believe me, I can point to a few congressman who were shot at (and shot) by a deranged Sanders supporter who might beg to differ.

The difference between a Leftist and a puppy is a puppy stops whining when it grows up.

As the country continues to unravel, I expect a significant uptick in violence from the Left.Â If Bernie loses his shot at the presidency, I fully expect that the very first target will be the Democratic Party, with riots in Milwaukee at the Democratic National Convention.Â Leftists hate the Right, but they hate mainstream Democrats even more (see links below).Â And with enough practice, sadly, Leftists might become proficient at hurting people other than their parents.

Moving on to censorship, Leftists should be pleased that censorship is still in fashion.Â Because there isnâ€™t a comprehensive list of bans for YouTubeÂ®, I can only report what Iâ€™ve seen in the news or that were mentioned in passing by other sources.Â Several Right-ish content producers were banned recently, and probably the most prominent one I know of is I, Hypocrite.

When I heard about the banning, I went to his BitchuteÂ® site and watched the video he felt was responsible for his banning.Â It was tame, mainly just him arguing that the Left-Right violence statistics as reported by another YouTuberâ„¢ in a debate were wrong.Â He also spent a great deal of time criticizing his own debate performance and preparation.Â It wasnâ€™t anything out of the ordinary in a typical political debate except he admitted when he was wrong and his opponent had a strong point.

Now his voice is silenced.

YouTubeÂ© has also started demonetizing channels that feature content thatâ€™s favorable to the Right, like Sargonâ€™s channel.Â Sargonâ€™s biggest offense?Â Dunno, having a keen beard?Â I canâ€™t seem to find anything offensive.Â But demonetization is generally just the first step before deplatforming.

On the Twitterâ„¢ front, they recently permanently banned the news website ZeroHedgeÂ© for a tweet popularizing a story that the Coronavirus may have been a result of genetic engineering.Â The most recent mainstream stories Iâ€™ve heard seem to confirm thatâ€™s an opinion thatâ€™s not out of the question.Â So, a news story thatâ€™s (admittedly) fringe?Â Instaban.Â That may be one reason a â€œconservativeâ€ buyer is looking to shake up leadership at TwitterÂ®.Â Iâ€™m not certain that would change a thing, since most â€œconservativesâ€ seem to care more about the opinions of the Left than either the truth or honest dissenting opinions to the prevailing Leftist opinions.Â Crazier parties, right?

Virginia:Â Imposing Costs

Last Weather Report, I wrote about the concept of imposing costs, as in the Right wasnâ€™t imposing costs on the Left.Â Hereâ€™s what I said:

. . . no politician had to pay any price for their support of the votes, nor do they feel that theyâ€™ll have to pay a price.Â And, no, to be very clear, Iâ€™m not suggesting violence on them or any illegal action.Â But what I am suggesting is that if they pay no personal price, theyâ€™ll never change.Â What are legal ways to influence them?Â

First â€“ make sure that they arenâ€™t re-elected. That requires organization and planning.Â Oh, and voters.
Second â€“ go through their histories thoroughly. Donâ€™t blackmail them â€“ find (legally) all of their dirty laundry and air it â€“ imagine what Ralphâ€™s browser history looks like.Â Isnâ€™t that a public record?Â
Third â€“ make sure that that people are rude to their wives and shun them at social functions. How will Governor Northamâ€™s wife, Pam, feel if people tell her what they think of Ralph when she stops in to get a StarbucksÂ®?Â Â What if her public meetings were peacefully protested?
Fourth â€“ remove their privacy in every public space. Park vans outside of their houses with billboards that advertise what a horrible person lives within â€“ theyâ€™ve done this with Susan Collins in Maine, so itâ€™s a tactic thatâ€™s fair game.Â But the Geneva Convention does categorize playing Twisted SisterÂ® 24/7 at their house a crime against humanity.

Iâ€™m sure that there are people who are far better at this than I am who can come up with dozens of legal ways to make a vote against Constitutional rights pretty uncomfortable.Â

Well, someone did come up with a legal and peaceful way to make Virginia State Delegate Mark Levine, Leftist, uncomfortable.Â Levine is the author of the bill to confiscate semi-automatic guns from law-abiding citizens of Virginia.Â Brandon Howard, American, showed up in front of Markâ€™s house.Â With a protest sign.Â And a rifle.Â Hereâ€™s a link to the story (LINK).

In no way did he use his rifle in a threatening fashion, but Howard did protest.

Delegate Levineâ€™s panties got very much in a twist.Â He immediately called the police, but was quite upset to find out that Mr. Howard had done nothing to violate the law.Â Levine was quoted by the article by saying that “. . . if they cannot prosecute him (Howard) because of the way our Virginia laws are, well then that’s the advantage of being a lawmaker. Â I intend to come back to Richmond and introduce legislation to make sure that anyone who threatens a lawmaker at the point of a gun and says I’m coming to your home with a gun unless you change your mind on legislation.Â I want to make sure that person can be prosecuted.”

Mr. Levineâ€™s sense of irony must be broken to not see how his sense of having his rights violated would result in him writing a law to enable cops with guns to stop citizens from peacefully protesting in a way that he doesnâ€™t approve of.Â The research I saw indicates that Mr. Levine has a copy of the Constitution that he keeps in his pocket.Â The only conclusion I can come up with is that Mr. Levine is illiterate?

This will not be the last time that costs are imposed on the Left as they try to restrict rights.Â Assume as the Right gets as sophisticated and as active as the Left in this type of work, it will increase rapidly.

Hank Curmudgeon left a link (LINK) to this guide last month and suggested I print out this figure and include it.Â Iâ€™ll just leave it here, since it seems to fit:

Updated Civil War II Index

More graphs.Â February was a kind month, but the seeds were set for turbulent months to follow.Â In keeping with the journalistic standards of Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise, Iâ€™ll note that I did make sure that all pictures used resulted in no harm or mistreatment of any bikini, anywhere.

Violence:

Up is more violent.Â Violence remains steady.Â My prediction?Â Peaks in June-July-August as political violence coming from the Left peaks.Â That may make a strange graph, but Iâ€™ll do my best to find a fitting match in a bikini if and when it happens.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.Â Instability skyrocketed with impeachment, and then got better before bouncing slightly this month.Â Expect increased instability as we move to November, with August being secondary peak during and after the conventions, and bikiniâ€™s flash red.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions.Â The economic indicators began to turn in February.Â Based on the way this index is calculated, it does not yet show the impact of the free-falling stock market, which (as of this writing) is limit-locked down on the early futures, with oil collapsing to the $30â€™s.Â Expect March numbers to collapse, which is in keeping with the chaotic nature of the way her hair is displayed.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory.Â This is (thanks for the terminology correction, 1chota) a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.Â One would assume weâ€™re catching fewer because there are fewer to catch.Â And those arenâ€™t legs that last forever, since they obviously end in October.

Civil War 2.0 in the Time of Corona

Itâ€™s rare that a society devolves into civil war when everything is going along fine.Â Part of the recipe for trouble is economic instability.Â The second part is hating each other â€“ and we already have that in place.Â What keeps us from killing each other is the day job, and the fact that most of us have all of the TwinkiesÂ® and Ho-Hosâ„¢ and Strawberry Starburst PiÃ±a ColadasÂ© that our sticky fingers and sugar addled brains can pay for with our nearly maxed out credit cards.

But then enters Coronavirus:

Ooh, my little viral crop, my viral crop
When you gonna give me quarantine, Corona
Ooh, you make my economy stop, my economy stop
Got stop the production line, Corona

Never gonna wash, cough it up, such a dirty hand
I always buy the TP, hoard the food that is canned
My, my, my, aye-aye, whoa!
M-m-m-my Corona

The Boy did a fine job photoshopping this.Â I guess he has the knack.

As I write this on Sunday evening, March 8, 2020, the stock market has already tripped a stop-loss trigger before opening.Â Oil prices are collapsing.Â The Everything Bubble is imploding.

Whatâ€™s next?Â If this economy follows every other collapse in recent economic history, job losses start soon. Â Businesses collapse.Â Banks?Â Theyâ€™re in the business of generating profits in good times, while having the government and taxpayers pay for the bad times.Â This is, for some reason, referred to as the free market.

Economic recessions can happen when the economy has been growing too quickly, too long, or both.Â Sometimes they end just because it was time.Â Other times, an event occurs that causes the growth to stop.Â Corona has the ability to be that event, and even if the economy was in peak condition, Corona could have started a recession.

Given a recession, the political landscape will be in turmoil.Â On the Democrat side, Iâ€™m not sure that Bernie can get the nomination â€“ thatâ€™s the conventional wisdom â€“ and I dearly hope thatâ€™s right.Â A hard Leftist leading a country in times of economic trouble always provides the worst solutions, and always prescribes more of the same solutions when they donâ€™t work â€“ itâ€™s like a medieval doctor performing more bloodletting when the first bloodletting didnâ€™t work.Â Itâ€™s that we never did true bloodletting.

Joe Biden isnâ€™t really certain what planet heâ€™s on most days, and Donald Trump will go through him like a velociraptor in a room full of kittens.Â President Trumpâ€™s recent tweet that â€œBiden will be tough to beatâ€ was the 2020 version of â€œdonâ€™t throw me in that briar patch.â€

And thatâ€™s no malarkey, you frog faced bony soldier.

Thatâ€™s my take â€“ but the range of outcomes is so very wide with Corona, itâ€™s nearly impossible to make a good prediction right now.Â Give it two months.Â Then we wonâ€™t have to predict, weâ€™ll know.

Buckle your seatbelt â€“ this definitely increases the odds of conflict happening sooner.

Links

Most are from Ricky this month . . .Â enjoy!

NBC Misunderstands Boogaloo.Â Probably intentionally.Â But they canâ€™t do math, so maybe not intentionally.

Clickbait on Boogaloo.Â Strangely, no Antifa reports?

Salon admits that they feel their side is Leftist.

More Leftists Boogaloo afraid.

Progressive Magazine is worried that Ed Asner is worried about people on the Right having guns.Â Or something.

Globalists want Trump out.

Daily Dot revisits Electric Boogaloo, adds even more stupid than NBC.

Doug Casey talks Fourth Turning.Â Good read.

Vox Magazine thinks Identity Politicsis awesome.Â But only for the Left, not for the Right.

Salon is ecstatic that Bernie is a symbol of people turning hard Left.

Must read:Â Roots of the Divide.

The Left . . . looking for segregation.

What is an American?Â Hint:Â no one can agree.

The Week talks about Ross Douthat having aÂ stupid opinion about the divide in America in a new book review.

Socialists hate the Democrats.Â See, I told you.

Auntie Beeb writes about Sanctuary Counties in Virginia, still butthurt about 1776.

Michael Lind wants bigger government, more control.

The Coming Recession, Explained Using Six and a Half Bikinis.

“Well, just find yourself a man with a spotless genetic makeup and a really high tolerance for being second guessed and start pumping out the little uber Scullys.” – The X-Files

After the next recession, most people will be on their feet in no time, after the bank repossesses the cars.

This wasn’t my originally planned topic. My originally planned topic was a discussion of PEZ® seed pricing mechanisms in 1850’s Great Britain, complete with discussion on how many orphans could be traded per bushel of finished PEZ™. Alas, I’ll have to return to that exciting topic some other time, since the world financial system seems to be imploding.

Okay, imploding isn’t the right word. And it really may not be as bad as it looks.

But today? It looks bad. Maybe not implosion bad, but I heard that some bankers had been discouraged. I guess they lost interest.

How bad could it be?

If it just stays at a financial level, the worst I would expect would be a W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 4 (Great Depression) in the United States, though it might hit a W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Level 5 (National Collapse) in China. You can read all about the W.I.L.D.E.R.™ Levels here (The Lighter Side of the Apocalypse) in an article praised by critics as “one of the best things ever written by a man with such questionable levels of personal hygiene, fashion sense, and grooming.”

In order to understand and guess at the future, let’s take a look at the past. The most recent past economic downturn was the Great Recession. What happened then?

As you can see from this chart, the S&P 500 experienced a big downturn right around the calf and knee area. Feel free to enlarge – just explain that the study of economics is really interesting.

Several things: first, lowered interest rates and the idea that anyone could and should get a mortgage led to a massive mis-investment in housing. Part of the cause were things called stealing and looting mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations. I won’t go into technical details, but it was a way that Harvard® educated MBAs convinced themselves that a strawberry picker making $14,000 a year could afford a $720,000 mortgage (LINK). And, yes, this really happened.

Second, the world was awash in money after the Fed flooded the fields with money after the Dotcom Bubble. Where did that money go? Everywhere. Houses. And . . . oil. Oil prices skyrocketed during that time. Companies rented oil tankers and kept them full, sitting at sea, continually selling futures on the oil in the tanker. They made fortunes by pretending to sell oil. I know that sounds like I’m making an obscure joke, but no, that really happened.

The price of housing hit the financial system like a mousetrap on a cat’s tail. Or a cat with a mousetrap on its tail? Or . . . nevermind. People kept borrowing more on their houses as their houses appreciated. They spent that money on pickups and boats and child care and food and vacations. The people weren’t evil, but they thought that the value of their house could never go down, so the risk was small. Rational people, like bankers, were telling them this. Heck, some even invested in more houses so they could double or triple their magic ATM.

This view of 30 year mortgage rates explains that there have been mortgage rates. Look closely, and you can see them.

Finally, one day the music stopped on the housing prices. Was there a cause in particular? Not really. But the market lost the one thing required to keep it afloat – belief. Every market rises as the beliefs of the participants overcomes the worry of loss. Wow, that sounded poetic and cool. But it’s also true.

In many ways, the stock market is a barometer not only of the actual underlying economic performance, but how people feel about the future. It keeps going up as long as people keep being optimistic and has proven to be a much better barometer of economic activity than the amount of leg hair I grow before each winter and then form into a nice, soft nest to sleep in when it gets cold.

Crude oil prices had Exxon® jumping for joy in 2008!

One thing that brought the mood of people down in 2008 was the price of oil. In the midst of the recession that came from the housing bubble, the secondary oil bubble inflated. Prices increased more than double in a single year – from $70 per barrel to over $140 per barrel at the peak. Oil acts as a tax on everything to do with physical goods. To move a Tom Brady’s booty dinghy from where it’s made in by incontinent baboons in Romania to his rump mechanic in Massachusetts requires energy – energy from oil.

So that’s the “why” for 2008. How does that relate to today?

The Great Recession was brought about by an actual recession – things slowed down in the country because there were only so many houses that could be made. That’s different than today’s trouble. The stock market is tanking not because of a recession, but because the worry about Corona-Chan locking up the flow of physical goods from China. I wrote about that last week (Corona Virus, with a Slice of Recession?).

What have we seen so far?

This was a pretty good miniseries documentary.

The stock market has decreased in value. In general, a stock price has two components – the first is the value of the factories and land and machinery that the company owns. This is boring, it’s like saying a Stradivarius violin worth less than a piece of firewood because the firewood weighs more – in the hands of a genius, the violin can make masterful music, though in the hands of my kids it just made me contemplate the positives of being deaf.

The second and often biggest component of value to a stock is the assumed growth of that stock. This is why older, boring stocks like Ford® are priced closer to the value of the assets they own – no one thinks that Ford™ will end up tripling in size in the next three years. There’s an ex-wife “tripling size in three years” joke, but I’m bigger than that.

But people do think that Tesla© can triple in size in three years. Therefore, people value Tesla™ more than Ford® even though it sells about six million cars a year and Tesla© sold only 370,000 cars in the last year. You’d think that Ford™ would be worth about 10 times what Tesla® is. But in reality, Ford© is valued at $28 billion, while Tesla™ is valued at $147 billion. Is Tesla™ really worth that much? That’s up to Tesla®. But give me $147 billion and I bet I could sell 380,000 cars a year, too. And they would be pretty neat ones and they wouldn’t look like they were designed by a third grader with limited imagination.

Elon took a lot of heat for the Cyber Truck design, primarily because it looks like something that no human would buy. Thankfully, Elon’s next advance will be robotic customers.

Tesla© has convinced people it is almost six times more valuable than Ford©. That’s what I call optimism. Or a con, but at least a con for a good cause (Elon Musk: The Man Who Sold Mars).

Since the stock market is based on optimism, this latest decline in February of 2020 shows that investors are shaken. The world hasn’t (yet) changed but the implications are now becoming concerning enough to cause the market to drop. Is this going to be a big drop, like in 2008, or another head fake?

I can’t be sure. But I do know that this seems like a good time to trot out what I learned the last time the economy went south.

Lesson One:

Market bubbles aren’t rational. Companies rise faster and farther in a bubble without regard to, well, anything. Uber®, which is basically “Taxi App” is worth $61 billion dollars, which is more than Elon Musk spends in a typical year on hair plugs. Uber© lost $8.5 billion dollars last year while generating tons of bad publicity because its founder is a douche and it treats drivers worse than Mongolian bull milkers. There are tons of companies just like Uber™, and all with an idea that they’ll “disrupt” segments of society. Essentially, disrupting involves an app, a smart phone, and booting someone out of a job. Some are, I assume, legitimate ideas that will be profitable in the future. Others are like GoPro™, which is (in Karl Denninger’s words) just “camera on a stick.”

I heard someone call this the Disruption Bubble, and it’s as good a name as any to describe the distortions and irrational money flows as everyone tries to find the next Amazon™, Facebook© or Google®. In a real panic, stupidly valued things like Uber® deflate, and deflate quickly. But companies that are really worth something will fall in value, too.

The best time to buy a company is when it is cheap. It will never be cheaper than when people are panicking like Godzilla® is hungry for Japanese take-out and orders Tokyo. Finding quality companies that are selling at a 90% discount is possible during a real panic.

Lesson Two:

When the market falls, investors have less money. But they still have bills. So what will they do? If this is like 2008, they’ll sell other things. What kinds of things? Cool cars will be cheap, but not everyone is in the market for a Lambo. But gold dropped, too. During 2008, gold went from $1000 per ounce to as low as $720.

You can see the price of gold really drop around the shoulder area, and take off afterwards.

I can’t guarantee that gold will drop, but I’d be watching if you want to buy some – there might be a great opportunity to buy gold at a lower price than the current $1655 per ounce.

Lesson Three:

In past recessions, the interest rate that is charged for the 10 Year T-Bill generally dropped. Why? People wanted to get to a safer asset. That asset has generally been the dollar. The most likely candidates to replace the dollar were the Chinese whatever-they-call-it and the Euro. As China is now in the grip of Corona, it’s not a flight to safety. Every European country with a beach is thinking about dumping the Euro and exiting the EU so they can print wrapping paper and call it money, the Euro isn’t a great one, either. The Swiss Franc is kinda awesome, but they only make so many of those.

Look closely and you can see that the Fed doesn’t have a lot of room to lower rates.

Nope. It’s the dollar. In times of economic uncertainty, the dollar will increase in value relative to other currencies. Does it make sense? Maybe? It seems that the world notices the Navy, Army, Marines, and all of those nuclear weapons and those make the banks in New York seem a bit more secure.

Expect that if this goes like 2008 for a while you can buy foreign stuff like a king. For grins I track the New Zealand dollar – it’s right now at its lowest value in five years. I bet it goes even lower soon, so sheep should be quite a bargain. Remember New Zealand’s national motto: “We’re not Australia.”

Don’t expect to find a great place to get a good yield anytime soon if Uncle Sam is paying less than a 1%, you’re not going to get even that good of a deal. Negative interest rates have already hit Europe, and there’s no reason they won’t hit the rest of the world. Investing in cash in mason jars buried in the backyard might be a good idea. Send me your map, and I’ll keep it safe.

Lesson Four:

No financial collapse looks the same. Each one of them is unique, and this one has been a long time in coming so, if it’s hitting right now, it could be really bad. Each of the above lessons might be wrong, so look for opportunities where you see them, not where an Internet humorist thinks they might be, no matter how charming and freshly showered he might be. Oh, if you have cash, it does no good if it’s in a bank that collapses. Just sayin’.

A friend of mine made the joke in 2008 that “when the tide goes out, you see who isn’t wearing a swimsuit.” There are vulnerabilities that very few people know about right now that will (in hindsight) become obvious in the days or years ahead. Just nod sagely and pretend like you expected it would happen all along. That’s what I’ll be doing.

Wildcards:

Desperate people sometimes do desperate things. As the Soviet Union collapsed, there was some small risk that an official decided he was better dead than not red, and pushed the button. That didn’t happen – in large part because by the time the Soviet Union collapsed, nobody believed in it anymore: it was as tired as Joe Biden’s campaign.

Okay, I’m sorry.

If China were to teeter near collapse, would they decide to launch a regional war to keep the people together so the nation didn’t collapse or fall into civil war? Hopefully not, but the chances of it happening are greater than zero. As you prepare for a world where there is a financial dislocation, don’t forget to prepare for a cultural dislocation as well. Buying food now when it’s cheap and easy to get doesn’t make you a hoarder – it makes you one less person who is drawing on system resources if things go bad. Preparing for bad times when times are good is a profoundly moral thing to do. But don’t forget to complain like everyone else.

Nobody likes a smug prepper.

Disclaimer:

Keep in mind, this is NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. I make fun of Johnny Depp and PEZ® and post pictures of girls in bikinis over economic graphs and am even writing this sober. Consult someone who has those credentials and maybe drinks martinis at lunch since that seems pretty swanky. Also, I don’t own any direct positions in any of the stocks discussed, and don’t plan on taking any positions in them (maybe ever), though I do own a Ford™ truck. I’m betting that maybe some of my 401k money is investing in, well, something and might include these stocks, but I don’t know. Maybe it’s just invested in magic beans?