Silly Predictions – Page 18 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Patrick Henry, The Constitution, and You Can’t Blame The Boomers

“The colonel behind me… that’s Colonel William Aylett. Now, his great-grandfather was the Virginian, Patrick Henry.” – Gettysburg

While salting his food, Patrick Henry said, “If this be season, make the most of it.”

The biggest genius of the Constitution was an afterthought, the result of a protest. Patrick Henry refused to go to the Constitutional Convention held in 1787, convinced that it was merely an excuse to create a strong central government out of the relatively loose Articles of Confederation. And even though it’s my policy to never trust anyone whose name consists of two first names, I’ll admit that Patrick Henry was right.

When the new Constitution was finally released, Henry (among others) complained, mainly that it didn’t contain a bill of rights. The promise was that if the Constitution was passed, the first act would be to create a bill of rights. Unlike a political promise in 2019, the framers actually did what they said, probably because in 1792 a state could have fairly easily left the United States, since at the time that was widely assumed to be a right held by states. The states voted into the agreement, the states could vote themselves out.

The Bill of Rights was passed by the House and Senate, and sent to the states for ratification – 10 of the 12 proposed rights were ratified. The 11^th, the Right for Ben Franklin to be Naked Whenever He Wants was narrowly defeated by people who had seen Franklin naked. The 12^th, establishing a National Taco Tuesday and Mandatory Metallica® failed initially but was finally ratified in 1994, much to the relief of radio stations everywhere.

When does this bill show up? Is it monthly?

One objection to the Bill of Rights was that it was felt that the states could do a good enough job protecting the rights of their citizens – the Federal government didn’t have all that much power, right? Another objection? It was felt that listing the rights would allow people to think that those were the only rights. That second objection is somewhat prophetic, especially since (by my count) nearly every right in the Bill of Rights has been violated at some point.

Me? I’m pretty glad Patrick Henry got the job done – the Bill of Rights has been instrumental in keeping us as free as we are today. My Aunt told me I was related to him somehow, and that’s not hard to believe – he had a total of 17 children, so there have to be a zillion descendants. Being his great-great-great-grandkid isn’t all that rare, though I imagine getting a good night’s sleep at the Henry household was rare – especially for Mrs. Henry. If I were to brag about being related to Patrick Henry, it would be like an iguana bragging that he was descended from a velociraptor. While it may be true, it won’t help the iguana get a part in the next Jurassic Park® movie, especially after what his cousin, Harvey Weinstein did. Most people don’t know that Weinstein is part iguana, on his mother’s side.

I hear that freedom weighs a WashingTon.

If that’s where we ended, with a stronger central government and a strong bill of rights, we’d be fine. We’d have a Bill of Rights that protects Americans from abuse by their government in many different ways. But in the decision of Marbury v. Madison, the newly installed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Marshall, had a tequila-inspired vision that the Supreme Court had the power to invalidate laws that it felt were contradictory to the Constitution.

This is nowhere in the Constitution itself. Marshall made the logical leap that since the Constitution wasn’t a vague set of political principles but rather the supreme law of the land, it had to be followed as if it was a law. So far, so good. If Congress made a law that couldn’t be interpreted to follow the Constitution or the Bill of Rights, the law had to be made invalid by the Supreme Court.

A Supreme Court is just regular court, but with sour cream and tomatoes.

Thomas Jefferson had a different view: he felt that each branch of government had the power to declare acts by the other branches unconstitutional. Presidents have, in multiple cases, not enforced laws they felt were unconstitutional.

Jefferson further felt that states could declare laws that were especially in violation of the Constitution void. The recent legalization of marijuana in multiple states without intervention from the Federal government has proven the principle that Jefferson wrote about early in the life of the country. If it took a Constitutional amendment to make booze illegal, why shouldn’t it take one to make marijuana illegal at the Federal level. How can the Federal government legally make enforceable laws dealing with the amount of decongestant I can buy?

Because power keeps flowing to the Federal government.

The Constitution was written in 1787, and the Bill of Rights was fully ratified in 1791. The words in the Constitution clearly have changed only through the 27 amendments to the Constitution.

Hey! I can write bathroom graffiti that kids can’t understand!

One concept in English Common Law is that of precedent. From Wikipedia®: Common Law Legal systems place great value on deciding cases according to consistent principled rules, so that similar facts will yield similar and predictable outcomes, and observance of precedent is the mechanism by which that goal is attained. The precedent of the Supreme Court is supposed to remain unchanged.

Most of the time, it is.

Yet there have been 141 cases where the Supreme Court changed its opinion and rejected previous Supreme Court decisions. 102 of those cases came during or after 1960: that was about the time that the Supreme Court became activist in finding new “rights” – the right of people to use contraception or be free from hearing a prayer at the start of school. 28 of the 141 reversals of precedent were in just a single ten year period between 1960 and 1969. Earl Warren was Chief Justice during that time.

When the right involves the federal government being prevented from interfering with liberty, I’m for it. But the Warren Court specifically focused on creating new rights and new judicial power and accomplishing goals that the legislatures either at the state or Federal level wouldn’t – the Warren Court was about fairness and equity rather than justice – the Supreme Court decision mandating participation ribbons and allowing soccer into the United States came from the Warren Court.

I had to play soccer with second graders the other day. I really should save up and buy a ball.

Any action provokes a reaction, and the Warren Court specifically was opposed by the newly formed doctrine of “originalism” – the idea that the Constitution means what it says in plain language, and not what you want it to say. If that’s the case, the Constitution just becomes a series of popular (on the Left) interpretations like “the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” should really be read as “the state has the right to arm the police,” and “Congress shall make no law” really means “Congress can do whatever it wants to do this week – it’s having a midlife crisis.”

It can be shown that the 1960’s and early 1970’s was the time that set the stage for every problem that we’re experiencing today. As much as blaming the Boomers is popular (I’m not a Boomer), it’s really not deserved. The Boomers had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time – I can make the case that 1973 was the high-water mark for the economy of the country, and the Boomers did what anyone would do – make the best of their time, while wearing dark socks with sandals and listening to way too much Bob Dylan®.

The real culprits of our situation today are the leaders in charge in the 1960’s. The Greatest Generation really created the Greatest Problems. They fought and won a world war, but they put in place policies that are demographically tearing the United States apart today, and have put our economy at risk through a debt that grows exponentially. The Boomers didn’t take us off the gold standard. The Boomers weren’t responsible for Green Acres® being cancelled.

The Boomers did, though, give us Led Zeppelin. Even better when sung by a rubber chicken being observed by a cat.

The Constitution was awesome for a very long time, but it won’t save us – the Constitution of the Soviet Union provided for “freedom of speech” after it was, of course, reviewed by the appropriate government censor. The next Leftist president will happily appoint as many Supreme Court justices as required to interpret the Constitution to mean whatever the Left wants it to mean. The Warren Court wasn’t an aberration- it was a test case, one that set the stage for the future dream of the Left – complete power.

One thing stands in their way. You.

Virginia in this November’s election shows that the solution isn’t to vote moar harder. Virginia, the state that gave us Patrick Henry, is now permanently Left, with both houses and all top state-level jobs now held by Democrats. The Left wants more and bigger government, the exact opposite of Henry wanted. When I was growing up, and someone wanted to do something, I’d often hear, “It’s a free country” as an answer. That meant, essentially, do whatever you want. I rarely hear that phrase anymore.

However, the Right isn’t done yet. Remember what Janis said –

Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose
Nothin’, don’t mean nothin’ hon’ if it ain’t free, no no

And while you can vote yourself into tyranny, you can’t vote yourself out of it.

Clintoncide, John Bolton’s Waifu, and October Market Crashes: Knock on Wood

“Well, if you want to knock on wood, there’s plenty of that about.” – Space: 1999

And astrology teaches us that 9 planets and thousands of stars have spent billions of years lining themselves up just to let me know that “my energy will flourish in quieter surroundings” today.

I remember sitting in the classroom – the window faced to the south, and it was a cold winter morning. It was sixth grade and I was covered with more insulation than a flamingo in Canada, since the eighty-year-old steam heating system in the school was as reliable as Bernie Sander’s heart. For whatever reason, the teacher was talking about the phrase, “knock on wood.” I think she was doing what she referred to it as “teaching” but I guess we all have our quirks. Regardless, I remember it well. She said that the origin of the phrase “knock on wood” came from the Greeks.

Apparently, the teacher said, the gods really liked to mess with people’s hopes and dreams. If they heard that something was going well for you they would go out of their way to stop you, much like the Clintons if you know about Jeffery Epstein . . . maybe I should just stop there. The idea of saying “knock on wood” was to confuse that practical joker Zeus or make one of him think you were crazy, so that Zeus would just ignore the gibberish that you were saying.

I liked that explanation, at least enough that it stuck with me this far.

I hope she’s not offended. Knock on wood.

When I looked on the Internet, I wasn’t able to find a confirmation of that story. Wikipedia® says that the most likely explanation was ancient German folklore about touching wood to appease the druid tree-spirits. When I looked a little deeper into the Wikipedia© debate page where the nerds discussed what should be on the page, there was more than a bit of confusion among the editors, including one who just kept talking about his imaginary Japanese anime pillow-wife and whether or not you were still a virgin if you had kissed someone who was not a virgin.

You leave Isemi Kukikemi alone! If we had listened to her and John Bolton-san, we would be attacking Iran right now instead of trying to bring our troops home.

The concept and phrase of “knock on wood” or “touch wood” is widespread enough that it appears in cultures from Iran to Brazil, but is mainly centered in European nations. I’ll admit – I use the phrase to this day, probably weekly. In a pinch I’ll use a plastic countertop to replace actual wood. It’s covering particle board, right?

I think that “knock on wood” is just part of a wider body of superstition that’s deeply rooted inside our collective consciousness, and if we didn’t have superstitions, we’d invent them, like I invented that clever superstition to never to shave off all of my body hair and drive backwards naked with a cat while drinking plastic-bottle scotch – unless it’s on vinyl bench seats, then it seems to work out okay.

I made fun of trees once, I guess that was a knock on wood.

I think the reason for this is that life is complex, and so much of the future is uncertain. When I watch the financial talking heads, they exhibit the same behavior. “The market is down 2% on news that Elon Musk had creamed corn as a side dish for lunch.” The market is sometimes down because . . . the market is down. It doesn’t need an actual reason since the pressure on the stock market is made up on many days of an essentially random mix of buying and selling. Sometimes a bit up, sometimes a bit down.

But no one would watch the financial news if they said, “The market is down 2% because the market is down 2%.” In many cases, until the market gets built up so high that it can’t sustain itself anymore (The Funniest Post You Will Ever Read About Angles of Repose, Virgin Physicists, Economics, and Population), the market just fluctuates.

This just in, the market is down because of (shakes Magic 8-Ball®) trade problems with Greenland.

When I was in college I was chatting with a friend about economics lecture he had just seen. A student getting his doctorate in economics was presenting his dissertation to the class. The student was excited when he explained that he had taken the Dow Jones Industrial Average® since 1929. He had removed all of the variation from the market.

“When you remove the all variation from the market data, it turns out it’s . . . constant!” According to my friend the economist seemed very pleased with himself.

My friend raised his hand and asked, “Umm, isn’t everything a constant if you remove all variation?”

Oops. My friend was right – my weight has been absolutely constant if you remove all of the weight I’ve lost and all of the weight I’ve gained. Heck, using that statistical analysis, I’m still at my birth weight. My friend reported that the expression on the grad student’s face looked like he had just swallowed a whole frog after it had been rolled in Johnny Depp’s dryer lint after Johnny dried the cotton diaper he wore when he oil wrestled Nicolas Cage.

I was at dinner last night with Nic Cage. We had steak. The waitress came by – asked him if he wanted garlic bread. He said no. I was shocked – I heard he never turned down a roll.

So, we’re in the middle of October, the ultimate time of superstition. Oddly enough, some of the greatest stock market crashes have happened in October, from the Panic of 1907, the Crash of 1929, Black Monday in 1987, and the Crash of 2002. October was pretty bleak in 2008 as well, as you might remember. Overall, the stock market has gone up about 0.2% (on average) in October since 1950.

As I’ve noted before, markets are systems, and periodic crashes are actually helpful – they lead to removal of inefficient and failed companies that are producing products that can’t compete. The longer and higher the market goes, in general, the greater the correction when it comes. It’s been over a decade since there has been a significant market pullback. It’s up 325% since then.

But like housing prices, markets never go down, right?

Knock on wood.

I’ll leave you with this: It’s the Mighty, Mighty Bosstones, and it’s relevant. Also relevant? It’s not “I never had to knock on wood,” it’s “I never had to; knock on wood.” This song was playing on the radio the night I picked up The Mrs. for our first date, and was playing when I dropped her off after the date. A good omen. Knock on wood.

Too Big To Fail: Banks, Bikinis, Toddler Throwing and an Amy Schumer Joke

Stan:Â Â I got a hundred-dollar check from my grandma and my dad said I need to put it in the bank so it can grow over the years.

Bank Manager:Â That’s fantastic, a really smart decision, young man. Â We can put that check in a money market mutual fund, then we’ll re-invest the earnings into foreign currency accounts with compounding interest aaaand . . . it’s gone.Â â€“ South Park

I hear the Slovakian banks moved to digital currency.Â They ran out of Czechs.Â It’s okay, it’ll be fine.

Last week we talked about the Angle of Repose (The Funniest Post You Will Ever Read About Angles of Repose, Virgin Physicists, Economics, and Population). Â The conclusion, stated briefly is that our economy and indeed our civilization can be compared to a sandcastle.Â Like a sandcastle, the economy is built out of a myriad of individual particles, glued together by innovation, hope, aspiration, and desire to watch free naught movies on the Internet.Â Like a sandcastle, if the conditions arenâ€™t just right, the walls of the sandcastle can crumble in a growing cascade.Â An even faster way to make the castle fall is to drop a shot put on it.Â Itâ€™s especially fun if the five year old that made it is still working on it when you drop the shot put.

Sadly this Canadian shot putter was disqualified after it was identified she was taking age-accelerating drugs to age more quickly so she could qualify for the Senior OlympicsÂ®.Â Her only defense was, â€œI identify as 86 years old.â€

Unlike a sandcastle, our economy isnâ€™t made of grains of sand of rough uniformity.Â If the average personâ€™s net worth of $97,000 was a single grain of sand weighing 0.011 grams, Jeff Bezosâ€™ $110 billion dollars would be a 28 pound steel ball, the perfect size to ruin a kidâ€™s day.Â But even that isnâ€™t large compared to a bank.Â JP Morganâ€™sÂ® $2.5 trillion dollar assets when compared to that single grain of sand would weigh nearly 624 pounds.Â If I had to pick between lifting 624 pounds of steel or 624 pounds of butane, Iâ€™d choose the butane.Â Why?Â Itâ€™s a lighter fluid.

I imagine this toddler weighs about 28 pounds.Â Itâ€™s a perfect competition size toddler, depending on the shape of its head, of course.Â Sadly, I canâ€™t throw one farther than about 35 feet.

The size and scale of international banks today is huge, and Iâ€™ll admit when I put together the weight comparison above, it was the first time that the vast scale of the international banks was even slightly comprehensible, though mind boggling â€“ it takes me from a weight I donâ€™t notice, to a weight that Iâ€™d have to use both arms to lift.Â Okay, Iâ€™m lying.Â Maybe if I put my back into it I could lift it with one arm.

Thankfully, my net worth actually weighs less than pocket lint.

In the 1984, a bank named Continental IllinoisÂ® was failing.Â As the cratering price of crude oil hit, the bank experienced massive losses.Â Fearing a bank collapse, depositors pulled their money, but of course the bank had loaned it out.Â Continental Illinoisâ„¢ was bailed out through a combination of cash infusions ($5.5 billion), emergency loans ($8 billion), and change the Federal ReserveÂ® found in Paul Volkerâ€™s couch cushions.Â In congressional hearings about the matter, a congressman noted that Continental IllinoisÂ© was â€œtoo big to fail.â€Â The phrase had been used before, but this time it stuck â€“ a Googleâ„¢ search for â€œtoo big to failâ€ brings up about 5 million pages, most of which are about Amy Schumer.

The reason that they bailed out Continental IllinoisÂ© wasnâ€™t that they were good natured.Â The reason that the Federal government bailed out Continental Illinois was that they were scared to death â€“ they had no idea what would happen if they just let the bank fail.Â Would it bring down the economy?Â No one knew â€“ and just like wondering exactly whatâ€™s in a hot dog, no one was willing to find out.Â And donâ€™t tell me whatâ€™s in a hot dog, Iâ€™m pretty sure I donâ€™t want to know.

What were people worried about?

I asked my bank teller to check my balance, and he tried to push me over.Â Nah, Iâ€™m kidding.Â He threw a snake at me.Â I should stop keeping my money at the river bank.

A bank failure to most people is nearly risk-free.Â The FDICÂ® (Federal Deposit Insurance CorporationÂ©) extends insurance to cover more money than the average family is worth.Â But a small business or farm, even one that doesnâ€™t have a multi-million dollar net worth, might have enough money moving through the account that a bank failure might trigger that small business to fail since its cash was . . . gone.

If that business had debts to other banks, it would then be in default, and cause a loss at the next bank.Â If the next bank doesnâ€™t fail, there are still problems.Â The next bank will lend out money only to customers that it knows will pay it back â€“ if it has sustained losses it wonâ€™t want to make loans that are risky.Â A small town farm bank failure is bad and might devastate a community if it causes other businesses to fail.

When Continental Illinoisâ„¢ started to fail, it was the seventh largest bank in the nation.Â No one had any idea what its failure would do to the country, so it was not allowed to fail.Â The government looked for someone to buy it, but they had no luck â€“ like a Leftist spending his own money, a buyer for a massive bank that is failing is fairly difficult to find.

But letâ€™s go back to JP MorganÂ®.Â How did it get so big?Â If you rewind the clock, the average size of a bank used to be pretty small, operations used to be limited to a single state, and there were no branches â€“ each bank in each town was an independent entity.Â Sure, one person might have owned more than one bank; even dozens of banks.Â Each bank, however, had to stand on its own.

With that kind of small exposure in both size and location, banks limited the damage that they could do if they failed â€“ over 9,000 banks failed during the Great Depression.Â Sure, that was devastating, but I would argue that the failure of just one bank, JP MorganÂ®, would far exceed the damage that was caused by the failure of those 9,000 banks, each of which certainly weighed less than a toddler.

I was going to add transparent bikini graphics, but The Boy went off to college so youâ€™ll have live with these.Â

Is there an argument for large banks?Â Paul Krugman thinks so.Â And if Paul Krugman is for it, Iâ€™m probably against it.Â If Paul Krugman said that Wilder, Wealthy and Wiseâ„¢ was his favorite blog?Â I would argue with him, even if it involved a knife fight, which would probably work out okay for me because heâ€™s old and weak and I smell like hamburger.Â Krugmanâ€™s argument is, more or less, that bigger banks are more efficient so we should regulate them properly and let them live.

My counter to Krugmanâ€™s drivel is that is that the banking regulators are not working for the Federal government, they are working for the banks.Â Most banking regulators want to work for the big banks, because thatâ€™s where the money is.Â Actually regulating the bank would doesnâ€™t look good on your resume.Â This isnâ€™t my imagination:Â I actually had this conversation with a banker who had been a regulator.Â His conclusion was the only real way to get fired as a Federal banking regulator was to do your job.Â Come in late?Â Go to sleep at work?Â Surf porn on the Federal computers?Â All thatâ€™s fine.Â But ask Wells FargoÂ® to follow the law?

I smell a firing.

Big banks create a risk to the very existence of our current economic system since they have the unique ability to take profits when things are going well, but if they screw up?Â You and I are paying.Â I rate this risk as not as bad a risk as the drunken sailors masquerading as politicians in Washington, but still a pretty big risk.

From the above, I think itâ€™s obvious what the downside is to having larger banks, since they risk our economy as a whole, and thatâ€™s not even mentioning Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs), or fiat currencies (Rome, Britain, and Money: Why You Canâ€™t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse).Â And, make no mistake â€“ the failure rate for all businesses nears 100% over a long enough timeline.Â Just ask Tyler Durden.

I Am Joeâ€™s Inflamed Uvula.

Whatâ€™s the downside of breaking banks into smaller units, and perhaps limiting their capitalization to what Jeff Bezos keeps in his â€œspare mistressâ€ account?

First, thereâ€™s more overhead. You need competent people to run the various independent branches, but what you get is the resiliency of an inefficient system â€“ the risks that will cause all of the banks to fail are remote.Â So, breaking apart banks would lead to more jobs for competent people.Â Yes, that would lead to lower profits for the banks.Â Yes, Iâ€™m a capitalist.Â No, thatâ€™s not bad.
Second, if theyâ€™re limited to geographic regions, the banks that are in regions that might become economically depressed would have less money to lend. Thatâ€™s probably okay.Â Iâ€™m pretty sure I donâ€™t want money from my state going to those heathens in Rhode Island, so Iâ€™m okay keeping it nearby.Â Besides, if there are good opportunities here?Â Money will flow in.
Third, smaller banks could That would make investors more likely to keep an eye on their investment.Â And if bad things happened?Â Theyâ€™d be limited to failures that we could deal with, like forgetting to pay the cable bill.Â Somebody nag me on Friday.
Fourth, it would be harder to borrow a few billion dollars. Okay, this can be solved several other ways for the legitimate requests to borrow a billion dollars, like needing to buy a first edition .

Even with smaller banks, some of the conveniences like ATMs could still remain in business â€“ that sort of networked information exists now, so it could exist in the future.

I brought up the example of Continental IllinoisÂ© bank.Â The name wasnâ€™t at all familiar to me, but I did look up what happened to them.Â Continental IllinoisÂ® was sold to Bank of Americaâ„¢ in the 1990â€™s.Â Bank of AmericaÂ© is the second largest bank in the country.

How to solve the problem of too big to fail?

Make the too big to fail banks even bigger.Â Is that a problem?Â Is dropping a 624 pound shot put on a sandcastle a problem?

Nah, itâ€™ll be fine.

The Global Warming Memo They Don’t Want You To See (Okay, I wrote it.)

“Yes, it keeps me up at night. That and the Loch Ness Monster, global warming, evolution, other fictional concepts.” – House, M.D.

Looks like she uses Coppertone® for her sunscreen.

I intercepted a note from the Global Warming Community(C) to the media using the extremely old technique of making it up. Here it is in it’s entirety, with no further commercial interruptions.

It’s the end of summer, so the Global Warming Community™ would like to take a moment to remind you that hot summer weather is a sure sign of Global Warming®. Cold winter weather is just weather. And if there are more hurricanes, you can bet that it’s a sign of Global Warming©. If there are fewer hurricanes, you can also bet that is a sign of Global Warming™, too.

Firstly, please ignore that our models aren’t even close to accurate:

Please ignore previous climate predictions that had the 97% Consensus© like the one by “42 top American and European investigators,” which stated . . . “The main conclusion of the meeting was that a global deterioration of climate, by order of magnitude larger than any hitherto experienced by civilized mankind, is a very real possibility and indeed may be due very soon.” Please ignore these other predictions, too:

Worldwide famines by 1975. You remember those, right? On August 10, 1969, Paul Ehrlich stated that “The trouble with almost all environmental problems is that by the time we have enough evidence to convince people, you’re dead.” Ehrlich is still alive.
On April 16, 1970, it was announced that there would be an ice age starting in the first third of the new century because there would be enough air pollution to “obliterate the Sun.”
Ehrlich wasn’t happy to have just one spot on the list. In 1970, he stated that there would be water rationing by 1974 and food rationing by 1980. And the oceans would be as dead as Lake Erie. Please ignore the tilapia your wife had for dinner last month.
In 1974, it was noted that sea ice had increased 12% between 1967 and 1972. It was also noted in the article that “This appears to be in keeping with other long-term climatic changes, all of which suggest that after reaching a climax of warmth between 1935 and 1955, world average temperatures are now falling.”
Time® magazine noted in June, 1974, that, “Telltale signs are everywhere – from the unexpected persistence and thickness of pack ice in the waters around Iceland to the southward migration of a warmth-loving creature like the armadillo from the Midwest. Since the 1940s the mean global temperature has dropped about 2.7°”
From the New York Times Book Review, July, 1976: “The Cooling, so writes Stephen Schneider, a young climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., reflecting the consensus of the climatological community in his new book, “The Genesis Strategy.”
From the New York Times, January, 1978 headline: “No End in Sight to 30-Year Cooling Trend.”
1980: Reports were that acid rain will kill us. Please ignore that in 1990 the report came in: acid rain is not really a thing.
June 24, 1988, Dr. James Hansen said, “Our climate model simulations for the late 1980s and the 1990s indicate a tendency for an increase in heatwave drought situations in the Southeast and Midwest United States.” Please ignore that 1988 was the driest year in the upper Midwest in the last 31 years.
In September of 1988, it was noted that “A gradual rise in sea level is threatening to completely cover this Indian Ocean nation [The Maldives] of 1196 small islands in the next 30 years.” Please ignore that the Maldives are still there.
Hansen also noted that “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water (by 2018).” Please ignore that it’s not.
In 2004, one prediction was that Great Britain would be “Siberian” by 2020. Four months to go!
In June of 2008, Dr. Hansen said that the Arctic would be ice free by 2013 to 2018. Please ignore that it’s not even close.
In December of 2008, Nobel Prize Winner® Al Gore noted that the Arctic “polarized (sic) cap will disappear in 5 years.” Please ignore the 14,000,000 square kilometers of ice that was in the “polarized” area. And please ignore all of the other people who said the same thing.
Please don’t go to the CEI blog where all of the above (and more) is documented (LINK).

I wonder if she can say “indeed” as deeply as Brian Blessed?

Please remember how charming the clinically depressed, autistic child suffering from whatever “selective mutism” is and obsessive compulsive disorder. Realize that this is certainly the best leader the Global Warming Community® can offer for climate change because if you make fun of her you’re making fun of clinically depressed autistic that suffer from “selective mutism” and OCD, and to dispute anything she says is hate filled. Please note that the Global Warming Community™ did nothing manipulative or unethical in having a child with mental issues be our spokesperson. Thankfully, the Global Warming Community© has managed to get the Global Warming Agenda® into schools so impressionable children with mental issues can become so upset that they lose 22 pounds due to worry.

Luisa-Marie Neubauer is a “Green” (read communist) who is the handler for Greta Thunberg. The Internet says she works for Soros, but I find that connection a bit tenuous – I think being communist is probably enough.

Please ignore how the primary discussion during climate conferences has been how much money developed countries would have to pay to undeveloped countries. Thankfully, the media has ignored projections that the Paris Treaty™ might cost the United States as much as $2.5 Trillion a year, and only make the climate slightly cooler, as low as 0.17°C cooler in the year 2100 than without the agreement.

Please ignore how many Global Warming™ temperature graphs start in 1978, one of the coolest years on record. This is like picking that day you drank fifty beers and saying you’ve made progress because you’ve cut down consumption by 50%. Please ignore Dr. Roy Spencer’s (LINK) graph, even though it also starts at the cool period in the 1970’s:

Also, please ignore that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s advisor stated about her Green New Deal™: “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Saikat Chakrabarti asked. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” Please ignore that the primary driver for many Global Warming Agenda™ items are about control of people and economies, and if we really wanted to eliminate carbon emissions the Global Warming Community™ would have embraced nuclear power thirty years ago.

Also, Please ignore these Greenland Ice Cores from Joanne Nova’s site (LINK):

Also, please make sure you don’t publish “stop having babies because a person in the United States has a bigger Carbon Footprint™ and adds more to Global Warming© than the wonderful citizens of the third world” articles right next to “we need more immigrants to replace all the babies we’re not having.” It’s okay in the same issue, but not right next to each other.

And whatever you do, please don’t let anyone know that we’re at the characteristic end (more or less) of a typical interglacial warm period (LINK) and that our demise is much more likely to come by ice than fire, unless you read George R.R. Martin (and I must note it takes him about 415,000 years per novel nowadays:

Lastly, please, please, please ignore the fact that the International Panel on Climate Change® came up with the conclusion that variance in the Sun’s output doesn’t impact climate. Yes, even though there is ample evidence that the gigantic thermonuclear reactor in the sky just might have something to do with climate (Climate Change, Solar Output, Ice Ages, The Planet Vulcan, And Old Guys With Beards).

We’ll be back next spring to remind you that if we don’t act in the next (checks watch) five minutes . . . WE ARE ALL DOOMED!

Be Prep-ared

“Be prepared, son. That’s my motto. Be prepared.” – The Last Boy Scout

The most prepared person is my friend, Justin Case.

When I was a kid, camping meant backpacking. I had the good fortune to live in the mountains, where it my daily view waiting for the school bus was what people took vacation from work to see. Heck, it was valuable enough to them that they would buy an SUV to haul a miniature home to come and experience for five days. But to me, that wasn’t camping, that was daily life. It’s amazing how we can become bored by splendor when surrounded by it daily.

Backpacking was camping. When you camp as a backpacker, everything that goes up the hill goes on your back. You are the SUV, which may explain why Pop Wilder put a bumper sticker on my butt.

Okay that wasn’t it, but if it were 2019 the sticker would say, “Hey, vegans, you can thank me for killing that cow that was eating all of your food.”

When you backpack for more than a day or so, you really learn what’s essential. The Boy and then later Pugsley joined the ranks of a familiar organization in hopes of becoming . . . “A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts®” so that they can avenge me after the communists put me in the drive in movie camp. I just know that there won’t be Raisinettes©, because communists hate Raisinettes™.

When The Boy first joined Cub Scouts® (the younger version where parents have to camp with the kids), my brain still equated camping with backpacking. The tent I bought for camping with him? A good four-man backpacker. If you know anything about tents, you know that a four man tent is not big enough for four normal-sized humans. In fact, it was just big enough for me and The Boy and our gear, and it was one you had to get on your knees to crawl inside. To sleep on? Self-inflating sleeping pads.

Honestly, I’ve never camped with anyone that I wanted to kill more. When I was sharing the tent with him, every time I’d start to drift off to sleep, The Boy would shake me back awake. Every time. Why? Because, allegedly, I would snore.

If you have never spent two nights camping with someone who intentionally wakes you up just as you’re getting ready to go into deep sleep, you may not understand that’s the sort of thing that makes you think . . . “You know, The Mrs. could produce a decent copy of The Boy that looks a lot like this one.”

I shouldn’t make too much fun of Charlie Sheen – I hear he’s got a new show set for later this year – Two and a Half Personalities.

Everything I brought camping for that first Scout© trip including the tent and cooking gear fit into one decent-sized backpack. Surely everyone else had the same idea about camping, right? No. When I got there I saw that spacious, palatial multi-room tents with cots, tables, and even sinks was the norm. On one camping trip, the leader even brought a gasoline-powered electric generator for powering his tent. I’m pretty sure at least one family brought a television, but since I was sleep-deprived, my memory might be suspect.

It was at that point I realized that outside of where I grew up, camping meant “living in a fabric palace with every possible amenity known to man.”

Yikes. Eventually I gave up and bought my own fabric palace for camping with the The Boy and Pugsley when they were Cub Scouts©, though I stopped before we bought a generator and sink. But when The Boy moved over to the actual Boy Scouts®? Things changed.

The idea of camping there was that the boys (not the adults) were responsible for their own cooking, cleaning, equipment, and logistics. They planned the meals, they selected the cooks, they divided the work, and nobody considered a fabric palace with a generator – it was not quite the austerity of backpacking, but it was close. One especially nice rule was “no phones” for the kids. As I was an adult leader in this elite paramilitary organization, I got to go camping quite a lot – sometimes over 30 days a year.

My first trip, packing took an hour. My most recent trip, packing took about five minutes – I’ve discovered that if I forgot it? I can live 48 hours without it.

I experimented with gear – what gear made sense, what gear should be thrown out. Thirty days of camping gives a lot of testing time, and do it over the course of several years? Soon enough you’ve put nearly 150 days into the field for gear testing. I learned what was useful, and what was useless. Probably the best lesson was about things that were sometimes useful.

What was always useful? The list is in (more or less) order from “never give up” to “might give up based on the trip.”

Clothing – Fully half the days of the year near Modern Mayberry, if you chose to go camping and it wasn’t raining, you’d need no more than your camping clothes to sleep. Might it be a chilly night on some nights? But you’d be okay. We often forget that the first line of defense against everything from sunburn to bugs to cold weather that we have is our clothing. Clothing also keep us from getting arrested, or at least that’s what my probation officer keeps saying.
Shoes – Foot protection is important – no protection on the feet, you won’t be moving around. Sure, people in the distant past . . . yada yada. It takes years to build up the appropriate calluses on your feet to walk around. Having good shoes is just a trip to buy them.
Tent – I know one leader that made due with a tarp. I know one that only used hammocks. I liked actual tents – it keeps the bugs out. I eventually caved, and in car camping I use a tent that I can stand up in. I know the others could work for me, but that’s what I chose because I’m old. It was also good down to -15°F (-456°C).
Knife – I always carry one. Can cut a rope, I can cut dinner, but I just can’t cut the mustard.
Matches – In the winter, staying warm is a must, and fire can cook food.
Sleeping Bag – I take a sleeping bag, even in summer – worst case, you can sweat all over it.
Cot – I experimented with sleeping foam, and inflatable sleeping pads, but a cot is about the best. Sleeping pads are a pretty close second.
Coffee Cup – Yes, for coffee. But also for soup. Or stew.
Bowl – I started out using a fancy mess kit. I know one person who used a Frisbee®, but I just settled on an unbreakable ceramic bowl.
Cookware – The bowl could double, if it was metal. I’m all for having both a bowl and a cooking pot.
Spoon – Spoons are like bowls on the end of sticks. Amazing that people would invent a smaller bowl to empty a larger one.
Book – I always took one, I always read one. Nice during down time.
Toilet Paper – Better than using poison ivy leaves.
Folding Chair – Sure, silly, but it was always used. You can only stand so long. A stump works, certainly, and when I backpack we’d pull up a log. But chairs are nice.
Light for Inside the Tent – Mainly useful for reading the book.

This was nearly as useless as that glass hammer that I got from E-Bay®, or that wooden frying pan that I got from Amazon©.

What was sometimes useful? The order is less useful here, since depending upon weather or other conditions, some of these would really be essential.

First Aid Kit – I still always carry one, though mine is a bit more tricked out than an over the counter version – I’ve added Super Glue®, butterfly bandages, a foam splint, and blood clotting agent. It’s hard to be John Wilder: Civil War Surgeon® without a bag tools. Did I mention I have a knife?
Bug Spray – Depending on the time of the year, this is really nice to have. I tried not showering as an alternative, but that only works as a people repellent.
Rope – Paracord is about right – you could always use more if you were hauling something heavy, but we never ran into any situation where paracord wouldn’t work.
Rain Poncho – Useful when it was raining, in theory. In practice, when it’s raining and 80°F out, it’s not required unless you happen to be made out of sugar. When it’s raining and 40°F out? It’s a necessity.
Water Bottle – Why isn’t this useful for every trip? Well, most places we went had water. If they didn’t? We brought it. If unlimited fresh water wasn’t the case, I’d revert to my backpacking days where a water bottle and a water filter were near the top of the list.
Saw/Axe/Hatchet – Most fires that we made were out of small wood that we could easily break by hand. We used saws/axes/hatchets more for making things. In deep winter camping, we’d probably want better firewood, so a saw becomes more useful.
Map – This is listed in “sometimes useful” but only when we taught map reading. We never went any place so far off the beaten path where a map was required. If you didn’t have a cell phone? This might be useful once again.
Frisbee/Football – Good times. And football doesn’t mean soccer ball.
Flashlight – When I started camping, I thought this was essential. Between firelight, moonlight, and starlight, rarely did I use a flashlight after the first thirty days.
Cell Phone – Okay, I’ll admit I surfed Drudge® while I was camping. And it’s great to have as an emergency backup, if there’s signal.

I always carry a knife when I have a flashlight – you won’t see me taking a stab in the dark.

What was rarely (if ever) useful?

Compass – Modern GPS technology and cell phones have made this of similar usefulness as a buggy whip. I have several.
Bear Spray – Not very good for spicing up my chili when camping. When hiking, scouts make enough noise that bears are afraid. And my (alleged) snoring would keep any bear away at night.
Wallet – Nothing useful there for camping, unless they need to identify the body.
Keys – Useful before and after camping. Not so much during.

A camping trip isn’t the end of the world, so there are things that we plan to take with us that we consumed during the trip:

Water – Needed. Unless you’re a kangaroo rat. Clean water is of great importance, but maybe we take it for granted – and remember, it’s no substitute for beer.
Food – Unless you have a medical condition, over the course of any short duration, food is not a necessity, it’s a comfort item. We were comfortable campers.
Paper Towels – 99% of cleanup is done with paper towels. Not a necessity. But nice.
Soap – To wash dishes. Or yourself.
Trash Bags – In a pinch, you could use them for rainwater collection, as a poncho, or weave it into a plastic rope to let yourself out of a psychiatric prison again. We just put trash into ours.

“Here’s a lesson to test your mind’s mettle: take part of a week in which you have only the most meager and cheap food, dress scantly in shabby clothes, and ask yourself if this is really the worst that you feared. It is when times are good that you should gird yourself for tougher times ahead, for when Fortune is kind the soul can build defenses against her ravages. So it is that soldiers practice maneuvers in peacetime, erecting bunkers with no enemies in sight and exhausting themselves under no attack so that when it comes they won’t grow tired.”

– Seneca the Dead Roman Dude

“It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.”

– Also Seneca the Still Dead Roman Dude

Roman algebra was boring. X was always equal to 10.

One of the best parts about camping is that it allows you to walk away from 2019. It allows you to leave behind the past and live with virtually no technology younger than 70 years old. Camping pulls you away from most of the meaningless parts of our world, and it’s interesting to see people cope with moving from an environment that manages to provide amusement on demand to one where high-tech includes propane stoves and fire.

One particular campout brings this one to mind – an adult was continually whining about the weather. Sure, it was November, and there was a constant rain. Thankfully, we had an adult whining about the weather every chance he got. Since the boys were off doing their own thing, they weren’t exposed to the negativity – the boys loved it, cooking oatmeal in the rain for Sunday breakfast. Several thought the campout was one of the best they’d been on.

The lesson? You don’t need most of the things you think you need, not even good weather.

Things that you need that you don’t think you need:

Practice – spending that amount of time away from a house taught me a lot about what I need, and what I don’t.
Mental Toughness – The life we have on a daily basis isn’t really normal, especially when compared to the lives people have lived throughout history. We live in luxury, with a great freedom from want, and ample food for everyone: whether it gets distributed is another matter. Living without these luxuries for a week and learning you can be happy with less is a great way to prepare for emergencies.
Amusements – Simple things like a deck of cards can help with the withdrawals from 2019. The next step is meaningfully connecting with people. Crazy idea, that one.
Purpose – Understand why you’re doing all of this. Having a purpose that’s beyond Facebook® is priceless.

Here are some lessons I picked up from Hurricane Ike:

90%+ of people don’t prepare at all until the last minute.
Unless you’ve practiced, you’ve forgotten something. I forgot propane for the gas grill, my neighbor had some. He forgot gas for his car. I had some. Even trade.
Unless your family has practiced, they’ll be mentally weak. Even just a few days without power had people missing it, and in the aftermath of the hurricane, it got hot. With no air conditioning, Houston was just plain horrible. None of us were used to that. Another week of no power and I’d have shipped off the rest of the family to a hotel.

The basics of survival are simple: Air for breathing. A place to get out of the cold. Water. Eventually, food. Survival is hard to practice for – taking a few days off and camping is easy. Taking a month off is harder, and taking a year off is nearly impossible for anyone who has bills to pay. But if you’re ready for a disaster that lasts a month? You’ve already gone to the head of the class. And if you’ve learned to not murder your child because he wakes you up every time you start to snore so that sleep is impossible?

Well, that’s a positive, too.

Remember: just because it hasn’t happened, doesn’t mean it won’t. And when you’re prepared for a range of outcomes, both physically and mentally, you’re ahead not of 90% of the population, but 99%. What will the future bring us? That’s a big question, but if you prepare, remember that practice is a part of the preparation.

As Concerned American always notes over at Western Rifle Shooters (LINK), “This material will be on the final exam.”

The Impending End of The Age of Oil. But Not This Week.

“You have raw emotion deep under your surface. Frack it!” – The Simpsons

From the movie Sad Max®: Beyond Soy Latte™.

Energy rules our world. Advanced civilization depends entirely on the availability of inexpensive energy, and wars have been fought for energy, and lost because of the lack of energy. Every task you or I do during a day is made easier by the availability of that energy. Every task. Even something as simple as a hike in the woods is made easier due the hiking shoes I wear that incorporate polymers and plastics and artificial fabrics made possible through cheap energy and more specifically: cheap fossil fuels. Cheap energy gives us fresh strawberries in winter, and baby oil for sunbathers in summer.

Even though the oil changes are more fun, I imagine the upkeep is more expensive than a Buick®.

I’d even make the case that when energy is cheap, freedom flourishes. Why have a slave? It’s much cheaper to have a gas powered weed trimmer. Slavery is immoral, but cheap energy removes that pesky incentive. Why have serfs? You have to feed them, which is a big drawback. If the Russian Emperor had used tractors instead, he might have lived long enough to be on Dancing with the Czars®.

Cheap energy is freedom.

One of the biggest recurring questions that has popped up (again and again) during my lifetime has been the impending end of the Age of Oil. If you say “impending end of the Age of Oil” in a really deep, booming baritone like Brian Blessed it sounds even cooler. The first time the impending end of the Age of Oil reached mass public consciousness was in the 1970’s, and for good reason. Texas had passed its peak in oil production in 1973, it was thought that every year after would see the production decline.

True Life Snippet From Stately Wilder Manor: Whenever I agree with The Mrs. by saying, “Indeed” she says, “Now say it like Brian Blessed.” And she’s serious. She won’t let me say the word “Indeed” without impersonating Brian Blessed.

How crazy were we for oil in the 1970s? When oil was found in Alaska on the North Slope, several major oil companies put together a four-foot wide (16 meters) pipeline that brought oil 800 miles (6 kilometers) from the Arctic sea down to the Gulf of Alaska. At the time, the project was one of the most ambitious construction projects in United States history, and cost the equivalent of $34 billion 2019 dollars, or about what Elon Musk spends on weed and hair implants in a year. It was expensive, and even in the 1970’s the lawyers and environmental groups had their knives out. In 1970, they were all NIMBY – Not In My Back Yard. In 2020? They’ve gone BANANA: Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone.

Nothing as grand or great as the Alaska Pipeline will ever be built again in the United States.

After the Alaska Pipeline oil started flowing and the United States sweet-talked the Saudis into making oil cheaper than a date with Miley Cyrus, oil concerns continued – with oil companies looking for oil in ever more remote locations, including the a mile under the sea, couch cushions, and the faces of teenage boys. Billions were invested in both conventional oil (think about a Texas oil derrick) or unconventional (think about the oil platform used by a James Bond villain as a secret hideout). Exxon© even spent millions trying to learn how to mine shale, crush it, and cook it so that it could be turned into Happy Motoring™ gasoline, but gave up.

These concerns disappeared in 1999 when it became obvious that if you wanted a barrel of oil, in the future all you would have to do is order one on the Internet via Hotmail® after you looked it up on AltaVista™. At that point The Economist© had a woefully stupid cover proclaiming that oil would be cheap from here on out since it was trading as low as $15 a barrel at that point, even though oil doubled in cost over the year. In 2008, crude oil would hit its (so far) all-time high in 2019 dollars of $173.

On a positive note, with her skin Meg Ryan could now do commercials for Jack Links® beef jerky.

The thought in 2008 was that we were certain to have hit impending end of the Age of Oil (indeed!). How certain? George W. Bush, an oilman president from Texas, was in favor of creating incentives to add ethanol to gasoline, despite the anguished cries of people who would rather have consumed the alcohol directly. Ethanol plants appeared throughout the corn belt of the United States, turning seed, sunlight, fertilizer, and diesel fuel into food. Which was turned into fuel. Farmers loved this.

This led to yet more investment in energy alternatives – schemes to turn natural gas into ammonia for fuel, yet deeper wells into the ocean, fracking, turning coal into liquid fuels, turning “switch grass” into fuel, and any other silly idea that would could come up. People even touted the coming “hydrogen economy” because they forgot that hydrogen had to be made using some other form of energy. The world was needing an energy savior.

Or, could he be the foretold Anti-Cat?

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Apocalypse

Of course in 2008, the trend was clear: impending end of the Age of Oil (indeed!) was upon us. But one of the unlikely saviors had turned out to be real.

In 2012 if you would have asked me, I would have told you that fracking was just a great way to turn money into wasted fuel – it took almost as much fuel to make fracked oil as you got out of it – not a good investment. In 2015, I would have told you the same thing – the fracking companies were losing money like there was no tomorrow – if you had to invest more energy (think Btu or kilowatts) into getting oil out of the ground than it was worth in energy terms, you were just sinking yourself faster by using that kind of energy – it’s like burning your blankets to keep your bedroom warm in winter.

I was putting together my notes for a Big Energy Post in October of 2018, and had even written the first few paragraphs (okay, 500 words or so) when my research was showing something different. I skipped the Big Energy Post and moved on to another topic, since it was clear to me that my preconceived notion that fracking was a waste of energy might be wrong. My research was showing something other than fracking was a waste of energy. It was showing that fracked oil might actually be . . . worth it?

It turns out that when anyone first starts doing anything, they suck at it. And unless it’s me practicing singing, I have learned that if I practice, I’ll get better. There’s even a curve that describes this – it’s called an “S-Curve” or logistics curve or learning curve. When you first start walking, you suck. When you first start driving, you suck. When you first start, well, anything you’re awful at it. Over time you get better, and the more you practice, the more competition there is? The better you get.

If you have hundreds of people practicing something with billions of dollars on the line? They get better. Quickly.

And that’s the story of fracking oil in the United States. Water usage in fracking is down. Chemical usage in fracking is down. Drilling costs, energy expended, and labor per barrel are down. After practicing thousands of times on thousands of wells, companies have figured out how to frack a well to maximize crude oil production and minimize cost (and energy) put into it. One metric I saw showed that fracked oil was now competitive (with a profit) compared with the cheapest oil on the planet – oil from Saudi Arabia. Companies have gotten so good at fracking that natural gas in the United States is essentially free.

I guess I’m not a fan.

Fracked oil is on a trajectory to be competitive with the lowest cost oil produced conventionally any place in the world. And fracked oil has some other advantages – it’s “lighter” than conventional crude – that means it contains more gasoline and diesel, and less of the “heavier” stuff that is harder to turn into gasoline and diesel – think asphalt.

The United States is the largest crude oil producer in the world. I never thought I’d type that sentence and it represent a real fact, but in 2019, it does. The United States is, as promised by every president starting with Nixon, actually, really and for trues, energy independent.

[Edit – Chart added after Lathechuck’s comment]

Was it alternative energy, like windmills? No. Was it the communist fever dreams of The Teen Girl Congress Squad®? No.

Is it “sustainable”? Kinda. It is for a while. There are an estimated (as of 2019) 1.7 trillion barrels of recoverable shale oil in the world, 293,000,000,000 of them are in the United States. At 20,000,000 barrels a day in just the United States, using just United States resources, that’s forty years that we have from 2020 – until 2060 – to find an alternative, like, oh, nuclear. And don’t believe me – here’s an actual clean energy evangelist who finally did that math and discovered . . . windmills are worse than natural gas as far as carbon emissions.

We still face headwinds – economic, exponential growth, two billion people that would love to hop the border to the United States, and communists that want to tear the place down. But oil? Oil isn’t the place to look for an apocalypse, at least this week.

And, trust me, if I hear a whiff that any of the above is wrong, I’ll pop it right back up on this blog as soon as I can confirm.

So, at least for today, Happy Motoring©. We have maybe forty years to fix this, so let’s not waste it. This has obvious foreign policy implications we’ll discuss in future posts. Upside? Why do we care about the Middle East anymore?

Economic Bubbles, Knife Juggling Toddlers, and Sewer Clowns

“Well, I don’t think it’s officially called bubble bath if the bubbles happen accidentally, but whatever, Shawn.” – Psyche

The Four Horsemen of the Wilderpocalypse®, now in living color!

The world is in a weird place. Very weird. And that’s just what it says on my performance review.

What’s really weird is money. Money, capital, whatever you call it, is in a vast oversupply. How much of an oversupply?

Interest rates on about $15 trillion (not that brightly colored wrapping paper some countries naively use for money, but real dollars) is negative. Negative. In my bank account, I loan the bank my money. In turn, the bank gives me a little extra back each month. Not much at all, in comparison to historical standards, but a little.

Alas, there will be no Christmas Goat in Zimbabwe this year.

In Germany, if you loan the government €100 (which is like a metric dollar for feminists) you pay 0.593%, or €0.59 a year for the privilege. If you think this is a really good deal, come on down to John Wilder’s Toddler Knife Juggling School and Bank®. I’ll only charge you €0.25 a year. Plus you get to see videos of all the toddlers learning to juggle knives. I’ll maintain that I’m giving you the much better deal. Well, it’s a better deal depending upon what your insurance deductible is and how coordinated your toddler is.

Heck, keeping the cash in a box under your bed is a better deal than paying the Germans to watch it for you. Why on Earth would you give someone piles of your hard-earned cash and be happy that you got less back,? Well, some pension firms are required to invest in government securities, and some (probably German funds) are required to invest in German bonds. In terms of deals, this is the functional equivalent of a Mafia bargain: “It’s an offer you can’t refuse,” but in this case spoken with an accent like Colonel Klink in Hogan’s Heroes®.

But the shear sum is mindboggling – I could come up with lots of really meaningless descriptions of what a trillion dollars is worth – a football field full of pallets of $100 bills stacked 8 feet high, enough to fill 1.8 miles worth of semi-trucks, almost enough space to hold Charlie Sheen’s spare virus load. So, we as humans can’t really understand a trillion dollars in any meaningful way – and $15 trillion is how much money that’s parked in government bonds earning negative interest. This is a travesty while my toddler juggling students are in desperate need of a prosthetics and eyepatch fund.

Also 50% off vision, but that’s no charge.

When I was just dating The Mrs. (The Mrs. was just The Miss then), we visited her house so her parents could thump me like a melon to make sure I was ripe. In her bedroom I noticed a box of toys. On top was a plastic plane that I assume belonged to her older brother. The plane didn’t look like the one below, but it was of a similar quality – very cheap plastic. If I were buying that toy today, I’d expect it would be $1 or $2. Not much, since it couldn’t be more than five pieces of cheap molded plastic.

I still miss lawn darts. If you’re going to make a hazardous toy, go all out and make it really hazardous.

As I recall, this particular toy plane still had the sticker on it from when cashiers used to manually punch in the prices – not a bar code in sight. The sticker had a price of (I seem to recall) about $7.95. A silly price for a cheap toy today, but in 1978 or so, maybe it was a good deal.

This is what stickers used to look like before iPhones. Or before I was old.

Inflation and Led Zepplin® ravaged the 1970’s, but nobody drank a pony keg and toked up to get psyched up for inflation. A big part of the inflation was the oil shocks as the United States hit (then) peak oil production and OPEC® found they could dictate energy prices. Another big part of inflation was because Nixon pulled the United States off of the gold standard. I know people blame Nixon (and I have done so myself) for taking us off of the gold standard, but the alternative was giving all of our gold to the French. The French. They would have just spent it all on baguettes, berets, cigarettes, and mime school, so it was for their own good that Nixon said, “nope, no gold for you.”

Also, he’s missing track shoes to run from ze panzers.

But as the dollar went from being nominally backed by gold to being backed by governmental promises, there was a messy, messy decade as prices adjusted. I believe this led to many economic horrors. And disco. Eventually the dollar became the currency everyone used to trade with – if you wanted to buy Brazilian waxes and ship them to Japan, the Japanese would have to first trade yen for dollars, and then pay the Brazilians in dollars. The Brazilians would then trade the dollars for more wax, or maybe matches to keep that pesky rainforest burning so it wouldn’t grow back.

The dollar became the required currency for world trade, especially in oil. In the meantime, we had too many dollars chasing everything in the United States, and prices of everything went up. So did interest rates. Pop Wilder once told me that he was going to try to buy a $100,000 Treasury bond when the interest rates peaked back in 1981. He said that it would have paid him $17,000 a year for twenty years, and then would have paid the $100,000 back to him. But, his boss wouldn’t loan him the money while he sold some stock and moved some money around – Pop had the money, but he couldn’t get it that week. That one bugged him for years. He certainly wasn’t planning on paying the Treasury to take his loan.

After the Great Recession, the central bankers at the Federal Reserve® flew around dropping money by buying up mortgage-backed securities. How much? $1.8 trillion at last count – they discontinued the data. And then the Fed went started buying US treasuries so the interest rates would stay low – peaking at $2.4 trillion from a starting point of less than $0.5 trillion.

This was called “Quantitative Easing” since that sounds much more sober than “panicking and throwing money on the fire to try to put it out.” The Fed© pumped through just these two mechanisms over $3.7 trillion into the economy from 2008 to 2015. It’s not like they wanted to keep the party going for a specific president, is it? Nah.

Anyway, the Fed® pumped money, manipulated interest rates, and what happened?

See, it’s topical, it’s current, and it’s a scary sewer clown. Ma Wilder told me these were the three basic elements of humor. Oh, and toddlers juggling knives.

This time, the world currency reacted entirely different – the money was in the hands of the already rich. So what did the rich do? Invested it. Prices went up, but in this case, it was the price not of cheap plastic airplanes, but of investments. Money began chasing profits. As such, the stock market increased a wee amount, going from about 10,000 to over 28,000 today. For those that didn’t major in math, that was an increase of 2.8x. During the same time, the economy grew about 33%, or, 1.3x. Bond interest rates plummeted – that means that bonds were in demand, since it takes a lower interest rate to get someone to buy a bond.

And now you have to pay to buy a bond.

Money has been chasing assets that can be invested in. The stock market. Bonds. Farmland. San Francisco condos. Because of the investor money looking for profits, these have all grown much faster than the price of a Big Mac®, though that seems to be heading up now, too. College and medical costs have gone up as well, but that’s mainly because government gets involved and “helps out” with student loans and generally screws up medical care entirely.

Most of the other things needed for day-to-day living in the heartland haven’t gone up that much – cheaper energy has certainly helped the entire economy. And housing prices in Modern Mayberry have stayed as flat as your sister for the last decade, if not declining a bit.

But the stock market can’t outpace real growth in the economy forever, and the Fed™ has stopped injecting money into mortgage-backed securities, and investors seem to want to by Treasury notes, so the Fed© can stop buying those for a while.

I’m thinking she may do better at math than the Fed®.

To me it seems clear that our economy is in a bubble where investors are willing to spend a lot of money to buy a little bit of profit, or a little bit of interest return. We are in a bubble – a bubble where the assets are those things that can produce income, or at least a return on investment. In this particular bubble, capitalism itself is the commodity that is over inflated, aided and abetted by bankers that seem to want to keep the economic party going forever.

Hey, it’s still working for Zimbabwe, right?

Scholarships to Avoid, and . . . College Isn’t the Best Idea for Everyone

“Now if Eb needs a diploma, he should go to college so he can become a vegetarian.” – Green Acres

Please, calm down. Show me where Bernie tried to touch you.

The Mrs. and I were off to Midwestia State (Home of the Fighting Red-Crested Yaks©) on Saturday to move The Boy into the dorms. The reality is that he had left hours before us and was unpacked by the time we got there and had already managed to flirt with the girl working the dorm desk and lock himself out of his own room for the first time. I saw the look in the eyes of dorm desk girl – “cute, but still a dorky freshman who locks himself out of his room two hours after getting a key.”

I was actually shocked they still had keys – I was expecting that they’d be subjected to retinal checks to get back in their rooms. Until I heard that the floor had a shared bathroom. A co-ed shared bathroom. Imagine being in the midst of a growler when the girl of your dreams drops on by to leave the kids off at the pool? I’ve been married forever, and I like to pretend that’s not something The Mrs. does – at all.

I was surprised. I was unaware that the diet of Deadpool® was entirely comprised of burning tires.

The Mrs. and I were there, really, for The Mrs. and not The Boy at all.

When The Mrs. had talked about The Boy moving away, it had started off with a matter-of-fact statement about “. . . when we drop him off at college.”

I had responded with, “Why would we need to go up there to drop him off? He seems to be perfectly capable of carrying a few boxes to an elevator. It’s not like we’re dropping off Stephen Hawking.” This was, apparently, not the thing to say to a mother getting mentally ready to cope with her eldest son going off to college. It doesn’t help that The Mrs. is also staring down the added mathematical certainty that her youngest child, Pugsley, will likewise be moving out within a handful of years.

She responded with: “Of course we’re going.”

If you can put “icy” into a tone, this one was nearly at absolute zero. I saw the molecules in her exhaled breath stop vibrating as they fell to the carpet and form a nice Ice-9 frost (look it up). I could see that we’d be driving the hours required to get to Midwestia State (Home of the Whimsical Crotch Goblins®) the day the dorms opened.

When I met Stephen Hawking, he told me that there are an infinite number of universes out there, and maybe even one where I was funny. I responded, “Here’s a great joke: Stephen Hawking walked into a bar.” That one really made him mad. Now I have to live in this Universe, where Kardashians aren’t fast food workers.

I can understand how The Mrs. felt. It’s almost always a melancholy time when a child moves out, unless that child is Johnny Depp, in which case his parents were happy to be able to announce to their friends that their house was now aerobics-free as Johnny was now doing Pilates of the Caribbean. I’m sorry. I’ll admit that there were uneasy questions floating through my mind. I thought the questions were about him, but in reality after reflecting, I realized the questions were really about me:

I thought the questions were: “Is he ready? Does he have the tools to go out into the world? Will he make the right judgements?”

It sounds like those questions were about him, but they’re not. Those questions are really about me. A more truthful way to write them is: “Did I prepare him? Did I teach him enough so that he’ll be competent and safe? Is he a good man?”

The only thing I’m sad about is that he thinks steak tastes like chicken.

I think college is a good idea for The Boy, and I’ll get back to his specifics a bit later after Morpheus is done with him.

But I don’t think college is for everyone, and I think it’s really a horrible idea for some people. I learned this from my association with a youth group. I was discussing the future with one young, bright kid – he was a junior at the time, I think. I asked him what his plans were.

“I’m going to become an electrical lineman.” An electrical lineman is the guy who fixes the big wires on the electrical poles so you can charge your iPad© and watch Netflix® – it’s like a superhero who can chew Copenhagen®. It’s technical work – you have to be smart. It’s physical. And most line failures happen during big storms. So when your power goes out for an hour? It’s a lineman who’s out fixing it in the rain or snow or ice or thunderstorm or temporal rift.

I stopped. I was getting ready to give him my “you need to go to college” speech, but hesitated. This young man had thought about it. He loved being outside. He hated paperwork. He was very smart. The average hourly wage for an electrical lineman is $30 an hour for a journeyman. With overtime, he could be making $100,000+ a year in just a few years and live in an area near Modern Mayberry where most of the nicest houses are available for $200,000 or less.

It was a shockingly (intended) good choice.

Being an electrical lineman also offered some other benefits: it’s not a career that you can do online. You have to physically be there. This is nice, so you don’t have to compete with a two billion or so people in China and India like you might if you were being a computer programmer.

This job has another advantage – it requires just enough certification that it shuts down people who would randomly try it, mainly because no matter how crispy the body is electrical companies hate to pay to have them removed. But the young man in question wouldn’t have to compete with illegal aliens, either.

Being a lineman has a third advantage: it is a basic service that you can’t outsource. You can ship a factory nearly completely overseas – I’ve heard of just this happening – but the electrical infrastructure required to run the United States has to be in, well, the United States.

One final advantage: you can start your own company, buy your own truck, and work the hours you want as a contractor to bigger electrical companies. It’s a business where if you want to be a contractor or an entrepreneur, you can be without too much difficulty investment.

The nice thing about working with kids is they often teach you things, too. The standard advice you give a bright kid with good values is go to college. This is clearly the wrong advice for many kids.

A kid growing up today will face more challenges in employment than any generation in history. Competition will take place in ways that I never had to consider during my career. And this is after automation removed thousands of jobs from factories as machines replaced skilled workers. In this new revolution, expertise from “knowledge workers” will be replaced by algorithms and databases that allow, for instance, computers to diagnose skin cancer at a 95% correct rate, versus an 87% success rate by actual human dermatologists. I know it sounds bad for the human dermatologists, but I got a 0% correct rate since all I would do is look at the picture and say, “ewww, gross.” Let’s see a machine beat that.

Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be a doctor.

I’m not sure that there is, in the future, a truly safe job or career to go into, unless we experience Lord Bison’s Deep Fried Econopocalypse® (and if you’re not reading The Bison Prepper, you really should be (LINK)) and then the guy who makes costumes out of leather and football shoulder pads has probably got a good career ahead of him. Owning a scrapbooking store? Maybe not so much.

Okay, I was going for Mad Max Mel, but this works. I hear they worked out their differences and went to Hooters® afterwards. Man, Jesus can put down the wings and Coors Light©.

What are the attributes of a safe job? I mean, assuming Mel Gibson doesn’t show up at your house tomorrow?

Local – If you can’t do it over the Internet, that cuts out billions of people from getting that job.
Certifications Required – A job, like the lineman example, isn’t something that should be done by just anyone – it requires a minimum intellect as well as training and experience. Many medical jobs are similar. I hate the way that we have, in my opinion, over-certified our world. But you can use that to your advantage.
Other Bars to Entry – It used to be that you could give applicants for jobs an IQ test, weed out those that weren’t smart enough, and be fairly sure that you were getting someone who was at least smart enough (or not too smart) for the job. Now? You have to use something that works like an IQ test, like a college degree.
Hard to For A Machine to Do – Blogging. That’s hard for machines, right fellow humans? I have been told that 93.2% of you like to hear that.

But there are ways that even “safe” jobs might be at risk:

Carpenter: Carpentry, in many cases, requires no certification – any illegal aliens have taken many of these jobs in certain areas.
Teacher: Why do we need all of these teachers? We can get a YouTube® lecture up, and have a teaching assistant give the standardized test.
Store Associate: Check out the product features on the Internet – seriously stop. You’re not my supervisor. Leave me alone!
Checkout Clerk: Self-service checkouts are pretty common now. I refuse to use them, period, but I can see that I’m rapidly becoming a minority.
Johnny Depp’s Sinus Cavity Cleaner: Okay, this one is really a safe job.

Okay, I’ll admit, she’d be perfectly acceptable working picking strawberries or in some sort of insect control responsibility.

But there are other problems. I maintain that too many people go to college. In 1959, only about 45% of high school graduates went to college, and only 70% of students graduated from high school. That’s a little less than a third of the US population.

In 2016, 84% graduated from high school, and 70% of those went to college. That’s nearly 60%. If you break down the math, almost twice as many people are going to college as a percentage of people in the United States. There are only two possible conclusions: either people have gotten smarter, or college has gotten easier.

Me? I’m betting that college has gotten easier, since if you poke around a bit you can find that the average grade given to students at Harvard© is an A-. It might just be my opinion, but the only thing competitive about Harvard® might be how much a parent has to pay to get a student accepted.

See, if you build a new building on campus – not a bribe – call it Skank Hoe Hall. But having your skank daughters get in because you’ve bribed a coach? Yeah, that’s a bribe. Allegedly.

I’m pretty sure that the economy has no need of many of these college graduates in any role other than cashiers at Billy Bob’s Wiggle Striptease Hootenanny©. Many of the degrees granted are not really economically valuable – 5% of degrees, for instance, are in “fine or performing arts.” Last time I checked, we here in Modern Mayberry had our quota of mimes filled at our historical demand of zero mimes and there was a bounty on any mime caught within 5000 yards (3 meters) of the county courthouse. There just aren’t very many jobs available in “fine or performing arts” to justify 5% of college students getting a degree in that field. Thankfully, many of them have experience in their true field, food service. I hear that Florida will have a degree in Pre-Barista© next year, so there’s hope yet.

One thing I did note in the hour I spent sifting through the data is that many degrees are more helpful, and, potentially more stable. Health and medical sciences accounted for 10% of graduates, and those jobs are hard to replace with a machine. You have to have people helping people. Robots can diagnose, but at least for now, a doctor has to do the cutting, and a nurse the nursing, until Arnold Schwarzendoctor 2000™ arrives.

That’s a realllllllly long thumb.

I would speculate that we have twice as many people going to college as necessary, and we could replace the expense and time wasted at college for many people simply by allowing employers to give IQ tests. Yes, doctors and nurses need school. But we have approximately 1,000,000% more anthropology degrees than required to maintain our civilization, and an infinite amount of Women’s Gender Studies degree recipients than required.

I advised The Boy on how he could take what he enjoys doing, and turn it into something useful. Don’t compete with billions of people – find ways that you can provide higher value services to people in ways that have to be local and are hard to reproduce. I think he has a pretty good plan.

Given the accelerating pace of change we’ve seen in the last two decades, I imagine that anyone starting a career in 2020 may have to make multiple changes during their life. From what I’ve seen so far, I think The Boy is well prepared for school and the changes that he’ll see in life. I think he’ll do fine. It’s time to let that eagle fly.

Unless it’s Putin’s Eagle.

American Civil War: Four Fates, From Freedom to Soviet Tyranny

“Did we give up when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? No!” – Animal House

On this blog recently someone commented, “When I was a kid, people used to say that ‘It’s a free country,’ but they don’t say that anymore.” I tried it out the other day. The response? “It hasn’t been a free country in a while.” I turned him into the FBI for that kind of hate think.

I was driving in the middle of Midwestia in the middle of a quest that you’ll probably hear about on Wednesday. One of the videos that was in my suggested list was about “America’s Cold Civil War.” This isn’t a review of the video, but it brought up some interesting points. The one I want to make clear to every single person that loves freedom in the United States is: if you’ve ever seen a movie about that rag-tag elements of a group fighting a foe that has nearly utterly defeated them, it’s us. We are the Wolverines.

I get to be Charlie Sheen, mainly because he’s still alive. I think.

I don’t mean to say that to create a feeling of defeat – far from it. But the first step in dealing with a situation is understanding reality. And reality is very simple today. At a minimum, the Left has coopted the following elements of culture in the United States – they have been, over time, “converged” into Leftism:

The K-12 educational system.
Colleges and Universities.
Most Protestant religious organizations.
Most Catholic organizations.
The psychological establishment.
The American Medical Association.
All mainstream news media.
All mainstream entertainment media.
Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
The general officer corps of the armed services.
The courts.
Silicon Valley tech companies.
Many (but not all) Fortune® 500™ companies.

This isn’t an accident, it’s entirely by plan. And not only by plan, it’s by a plan that was entirely shared. From Verified Communist Traitor® Herbert Marcuse, in his book Counterrevolution and Revolt (bold added):

To extend the base of the student movement, Rudi Dutschke has proposed the strategy of the long march through the institutions: working against the established institutions while working within them, but not simply by ‘boring from within’, rather by ‘doing the job’, learning (how to program and read computers, how to teach at all levels of education, how to use the mass media, how to organize production, how to recognize and eschew planned obsolescence, how to design, et cetera), and at the same time preserving one’s own consciousness in working with others.

I could prove all of the above Institutions have been converged through the Long March Through the Institutions and will probably discuss a few of these in the future, because I could do a post on each one. Heck, maybe it would be a great book, but only if I could figure out how to pair hot chicks and communist propaganda.

East German girl swimmers bench pressing 300 pounds in 1976 is completely normal.

But if you doubt me, you have Google® (itself converged) and you can easily verify list above even through the Leftist-bias that’s now on that search engine. I’ll leave you with one more question: why else would Fortune© 500® corporations sign a manifesto saying profits were less important than social goals if Leftists weren’t in control? Because there were extra doughnuts in the breakroom and they were feeling generous?

In almost any context, these organizations reflect the values of the Left, not of the Right. I specifically don’t use the label conservative here – the conservative movement has utterly failed in the United States (to quote absolutely everyone) to conserve anything. We live a country where adults telling four year old boys that being a girl is okie-dokie (and vice-versa) aren’t thrown directly in prison for a decade or more (after a trial, of course) for child abuse. The goals of the above organizations would be cause for mass revolt if they had been publicized in 1990, but now, despite no vote, no public acceptance, each point of the Left has been accepted as the new normal.

And telling a boy that he’s a girl? Oh, wait, that’s brave. Sorry.

Despite all of that, this is not a post about giving up. Screw that. Each day makes me more independent, not less, more wanting to tell the truth.

And if you’re reading this, no one is done here. Freedom is always the underdog. I really wish we’d just stop waiting until 2:00 in the fourth quarter to start playing.

I remember seeing a film in Social Studies in High School about the Korean War. In the black and white film, almost all of Korea had been lost. The film ended right at what is known as the Pusan Perimeter, right where the North Korean Army was about to kick freedom off of the Korean peninsula, forever. It was tough watching that film.

But then we learned what happened next: MacArthur led the naval invasion of Inchon and turned the tide of battle, leading a combined United Nations® force that cut off the North Koreans. This turned the course of the war, and in the process helped to create the free country of South Korea that is a world leader in technology, bad music videos, and wealth creation today.

Spoiler alert: we tied.

Our Pusan Perimeter is now. I had a great boss once upon a time, he would continually remind me, “John, start with the end in mind,” which is #2 of Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. As I look at the state of the Right back in 2016, we were at the Pusan Perimeter. As we as a nation blindly stumble toward Civil War II, I can’t predict the outcome, but I can see the full range of outcomes.

We’ll go from best case to worst case for people who love freedom. Although there are variations, I think I’ve captured all of the big picture end games below.

I named operation Aesop after the Raconteur Report’s Aesop. You can read him here (LINK).

Operation Aesop: Total victory.

What it is: The Right wins. Traditional society is restored. Mothers and fathers in committed relationships are again honored. A Constitutional republic of limited government replaces the democracy of unlimited power. The United States is unified. Think of it as a return to the 1950’s, but with color TV and microwaves.

What it takes: Oh, not much more than the bloodiest war in the history of the country. The only way this results in victory is as Von Clausewitz wrote about in On War: [Accomplishing . . . ] “three broad objectives, which between them cover everything: destroying the enemy’s armed forces; occupying his country; and breaking his will to continue the struggle.”

That’s what happened in the first Civil War. That’s what happened to the Germans and Japanese in World War II. The concept of continuing was even more horrific than the concept of trying to continue to fight. It’s total capitulation. This is actual war until the enemy is not capable of continuing. Not talking heads on a television show. Not voting. Not discussion. Not a “mission accomplished” after five weeks moving across Iraq where the “will to continue the struggle” is still clearly intact.

Outcomes: Some freedoms we see now would be curtailed. Political discourse would be constrained. But teenagers would be pretty polite, again. And you wouldn’t really have to worry about the border.

I’m related to Patrick Henry, or so my aunt told me. I like to imagine Patrick getting a bit tipsy and writing mean letters to Madison about how short Madison was and how Dolly might want to give up on the chew.

Operation Founding Fathers: 50 Independent States.

What it is: A return to base principles. Originally, the United States was conceived as just that, independent free States. The majority of decisions to be made were to be made at the state, and not the Federal level. Each state was to be free to make decisions. Texas could be Texas. California could be Venezuela. Vermont could be stoned. The free decisions of free States was allowed. The free movement of free peoples was likewise allowed. This is returning to that state.

What it takes: Leftist thought is built around the universal adoption of their principles. Individuals in society cannot be left to make decisions, so this is a hateful outcome to the Left. I recall discussing politics with a Leftist when I was younger. The Leftist thought I was on the Right. That, at least they could deal with. When I identified as a Libertarian®? The look of disgust was clear – the Left hated Libertarians™ more than they hated the Right. The Right was merely amused and not threatened by Libertarians©. Maybe it was the Star Wars® shirts and poorly trimmed beards?

That taught me one thing: the thing the Left hates the most is . . . freedom. Liberty. In many ways the Left would rather lose a shooting war and be subjugated to the views of the Right than to be allowed to turn Seattle into the Siberia of the PacNorthwest.

The only way this can take place outside of warfare is a Second Constitutional Convention. I think that alone would lead to a shooting war from the Left and a complete revolt from all of the Leftist institutions shown above. But we can dream that the Second Constitutional Convention would turn out well. If we did it, oh, in the next year. The clock is ticking on this being a viable outcome. It’s probably time to do it now. As in, well, now. Conservatives (not the Right) seem to feel that everything is going to come out fine, so until the wolf is at the door, I don’t think they’ll move an inch.

The problem is that Conservatives (again, not the Right) seem to think that the Left likes the Constitution. Since the Left gained the institutions I’ve listed above, the Left doesn’t care about the Constitution – the Left cares about power. Pure, unadulterated, 18 year old with a 12 pack of Coors Light™ behind the wheel of a 1969 Camero® power.

Outcomes: In many ways this is the best outcome, but in my opinion the most unlikely. This is the only outcome where we can still have the full freedom of political discourse and the full Bill of Rights. I’d love to turn over freedom to choose to a California that can choke itself to death on Leftist feelgoodism while a Rightist Arizona can deny admission to every illegal and return them via a trebuchet if they want to.

I was expecting more girls in bikinis from Bruckheimer, but this is a good start.

Operation Fort Sumter: Going our separate ways.

What it is: Secession. Splitting up. It’s not you, it’s me Oregon. The problem is that unlike in 1860, the dividing lines aren’t so clear. Then there was a line which, if everyone agreed, would have been fine for a split. The North could be the North, the South could be the South. Oops. Now it would be a county by county fight.

What it takes: Just like a psycho ex-girlfriend, if the Right tried to succeed in Texas, the Left wouldn’t accept it, and would demand tanks on the banks Red River by morning, which would be hilarious because tanks don’t float. Unless the secession were overwhelming in number of states, numbers of the armed forces, and nearly immediate, I see only a small path to a peaceful secession. For secession to stick, the Left and Right would have to feel that conquering the other side was more costly than trying to forge a peace.

Outcomes: If secession happened and was maintained, the United States would be irrevocably broken, unless it was re-stitched by a Caesar sequentially conquering the Balkanized United States. Maybe Caesar Pugsley Wilder the First?

Think they need a reason to send you to the Gulag? Sure they do! It’s Monday – that’s good enough.

Operation Gulag in The Dakotas:

What it is: This is the darkest timeline not only for our nation but for our world. And, amazingly, the only timeline (outside of a Second Constitutional Convention) that we can vote ourselves into. It is the Leftist takeover of everything. Although it is sold as a Denmark, in reality Denmark is capitalist with stronger social institutions because Denmark is, well, Danish and I think they put mayo on their fries. In the United States it will look much more like the U.S.S.R. – but not the basketcase 1988 U.S.S.R., but more like the 1932 “starve to death millions of citizens that Stalin doesn’t like” (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!) U.S.S.R.

What it takes: Nothing. We keep going as it is. In less than 20 years, we will be in complete tyranny. The erosion of rights we have seen won’t continue in a linear fashion. It will accelerate.

Outcomes: 1984.

Now we know the stakes.

Big Brother is our friend! And we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

Book Review: Civil War Two, Part II

“Without law, Commander, there is no civilization.” – Bridge on the River Kwai

You’d be surprised at the number of Civil War battles that were fought on National Parks.

We’re at part II of the review of Thomas W. Chittum’s book, Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America. You can find part I here (Book Review: Civil War Two, Part I).

I’m happy to report that I was wrong – you can buy Civil War Two: The Coming Breakup of America on Amazon© on their Kindle® store. Doing a normal search will take you only to the used hard copies, and those hard copies are still only available from resellers.

I encourage you to buy a copy of the Kindle® edition if you’ve downloaded the book on .pdf. I bought one – because it puts money in the author’s pocket. I’ve left a link below, and, as usual, I don’t make a dime if you buy anything linked here. I’ve been thinking about it, but not right now. Anyway, buy it. As of this writing it’s only three bucks. It’s a bargain at that price, so, pony up.

How did I find out that Mr. Chittum’s book was still available on Amazon? Mr. Chittum emailed me and told me so. I’m glad, and I’ve already revised my previous post, as well.

Last week we left off at the end of Phase I, the Foundational phase. This week, we start off at Phase II – The Terrorist Phase. Chittum felt that this phase would last between five and twenty years. It’s been over twenty since it was written. What did Chittum predict?

And we can prevent Civil War II if we just hold hands, because then no one will have hands to hold guns.

More of Phase I.
More riots, driven by ethnic conflict, some of multiple day duration, involving barricades and heavy weapons. This is spot on from Ferguson to Baltimore and beyond, with the exception of heavy weapons, which to my knowledge have not been employed.
Ethnic militias, cults, gangs. I’ve certainly seen the gangs, but if “militias” and cults have been increasing, I’ve missed them.
Increasing talk of secession and civil war. I read once that couples that use the word “divorce” are more likely to have one, so I’ve forbidden the use inside the house. People talk about what they want, and these terms on the tips of tongues from Ticonderoga to Tallahassee to Tacoma to Toluca Lake. Oh, yeah.
Increasing bombing and sabotage against the government. This is another item that seems to be missing – people are mad at each other, not at the government.
Increasing small group attacks.
Small scale ethnic cleansing. I’ve read multiple articles about displacement of one ethnic group by another. The one that comes immediately to mind are blacks being driven out of traditionally black areas in Los Angeles by Hispanics.
Demographic and political Reconquista of the Southwest. In progress, as I keep hearing that schools find the American flag . . . racist?
Food riots as government attempts to shut of welfare. Welfare is in full swing.
Racial factions and politicizing of the military. I have no idea if the military is racially fragmenting. I’m willing to bet this will light up the comment section. But the officer corps seems to be broadly moving left, based on the rumors I’ve heard about elimination of upper ranks due to political reasons. West Point appears to be corrupted to the point a communist graduated. Although they kicked him out, it would appear that Congress has a place waiting for him.
Splitting American institutions based on ethnic or political lines. In progress. When a the FBI® has groups attempting to overthrow the government, and the Boy Scouts™ are admitting girls, the institutions of the country are splitting apart. A little.
Abandonment of certain city areas by the police.
Gangs will have political goals and militarize. Outside of the cartels, if this is happening, it’s not happening publically.
White people begin to wonder if the establishment is working for them. The white vote appears to be polarizing, although I personally doubt we’ll ever see the 90/10 split seen in many minority voting blocs.
An armored car will be destroyed. A child is shown in the media foraging for food in a dump. Neither of these have come true, to my knowledge, but photos of the homeless camps in California are common.

Phase II is where we are now – but it keeps getting worse, seemingly on a monthly basis.

The next phase Chittum outlines is Phase III: Guerrilla Warfare. By inspection, we’re not there. The skirmishes that Antifa© provokes aren’t it – imagine if Antifa™ has weapons and secures an area, killing people in the process – that’s the level of violence expected. This is actual warfare, but limited in time and location. Areas will be lost to the guerrillas. Chittum expects this to be shorter than the current phase, and this lower-scale warfare will last ten to twenty years.

The final phase is Phase IV: All-Out, Continuous Warfare. It’s just as on the label – actual armies moving in the field. This is civil war – and the outcome cannot be predicted, especially if it takes place ten or twenty years from today. Massive forces will be unleased, like never before in the country, and (this is me, not Chittum) we won’t have the structure that provided cohesion after the first Civil War.

Chittum spends some time analyzing the United States and safer places to be, but this is tied back to 1997 demographics and I don’t live in the places he talks about, so, those are interesting primarily due to his analytical methods and I’d suggest you give that a read to see how your mileage may vary. I’d suggest spending time doing your own research on what you feel is a “safe” location. Although finding a safe location might be hard, it’s probably easy to find places that won’t be safe, so you could probably start just by avoiding places that you know will turn into a post-apocalyptic hell-hole in five minutes if the microwave at the 7-11® breaks.

It’s easy to predict places where you’re not safe – you know, the places with bars over the windows and the local priest carries an AR. Think those neighborhoods will be better after the world caves in? Well, I’m pretty sure real estate prices will be down, but that’s primarily due to the wailing coming from the direct pit to hell that will open up after things get bad.

Birthday at Casa Wilder is always exciting!

But how do they go from normal to “pit to hell”, anyway? One particular line from Chittum in a later chapter breaking down stability by using Europe as a model had this sentence in it: “With each and every passing day, more and more Americans of all ethnic groups are perceiving their tribal affiliation as more self-definitive and more important that their common American nationality.”

This is the key to the unravelling we’re seeing in the country right now. The United States transformed from a nation that had little diversity (in 1960, the country was 85% non-Hispanic white) to today, where the country is 60% non-Hispanic white. In 1960, by and large the identity of all the citizens in the country was: American. Americans were of all ethnicities. Were there groups that were excluded? Certainly – Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Civil Rights movement gained popularity by pointing out unfairness in treatment of blacks in America. And America responded – we wanted to believe that being an American could transcend racial differences that seem to rip apart countries across the world. We did our best.

Problem fixed, right?

No. Not as long as each ethnic group defines itself through identity.

Also, the Egyptians should have seen that pyramid scheme from the start.

Chittum hints at the possibility that complete Imperial Conversion might be one way to avoid Civil War, and lists several requirements to complete the transformation of the United States from it’s former form to an Empire. In the end, Chittum feels that Civil War at least provides hope, whereas Empire doesn’t. Chittum even provides (23 years ago) a direct time and place where the Civil War will start – 5/5/2020, in a city park in Los Angeles. For reasons that I’ll get into below, I think this is a little soon.

Chittum’s advice on preparation is pretty common in the prepper world, at least in 2019. Locations near borders along ethnic faultlines are out. Locations that have logistical dependencies (think water) on other locations . . . out. Military bases? Out. Large cities? Out. Near the border of the “new nations”? Out.

Also, have some food and don’t tell other people that you have food. At least enough for your family for a year. Also, a gun and at least 5,000 rounds of ammo. Chittum speaks about gun caliber in general, but I’ve seen the fights that gun caliber selection sets off in the comments section, so I’ll leave that for later when I want to make sure you’re reading. He suggests caching your food and ammo and gun away from the house, and, although I understand his reasons, it’s not something I do, at least currently. As I get older, it’s even less likely. If I make it to a retirement home, I’ll probably hide bullets in my walker.

Finally, Mr. Chittum has a checklist (in no particular order) of things that will be there before Civil War II hits. I’ve put the ones I think have already occurred in bold:

Always remember item 6 – “Wear Pants”

Ethnic classifications become more prominent.
Illegal aliens allowed to vote, even locally.
Attack on the Second Amendment.
Juries that split on racial lines – shows that justice isn’t justice anymore.
Military taking police duties.
Internal (for use in the United States) elite military force.
Mobs in Washington D.C.
Blacks demanding facilities without whites (dorms, etc.).
Replacement of individual rights with group rights – health care, for instance.
Non-governmental organizations acquiring military power.
Real political power shifting to the courts.
Political power shifting to international bodies.
Leftists and minority control spreads of basic institutions.
Secessionist movements and groups seeking autonomy.
Race-based political parties.
No-go areas left to gangs.
Reparations.
Court voting manipulation (against gerrymandering).
Unrest in other multiethnic empires in the world at the time.
“Gated” communities for the wealthy.
Increased media hoaxes.
Increased minorities in the military.
Out of court settlements in cases of racial discrimination (method to transfer money to radical groups).
More restrictions on freedom of speech, including getting speakers fired or SWATed.
Police abandon traditional uniforms for military-style uniforms.
Groups of cops that form to oppose unconstitutional actions. Chittum thought they would be clandestine and ethnic, but the Oath Keepers are neither.
An affirmative action agency (EEOC for instance) to have armed agents.
Dollar collapse.
Geographic segregation and mention of it in the press.
Signs American military dominance challenged in a serious way.
Breakup of Canada.
More Americans moving to Canada than vice versa.
Parallel ethnic political and legal organizations have more power than base organizations.
More help wanted ads requiring bilingual applicants.
Greater role for UN in the world.
Photo of burned out American tank on US soil.

So, of this list, by my count about 18 (your mileage may vary) of Chittum’s 36 item checklist have happened. Some of the above are more important than others.

As noted, I recommend the book. It’s good, and not everything is covered in the 4,000-odd words that are in this review. It’s also a pretty quick read with decent flow.

How has the prediction held out? Certainly, better than any prediction that I did in 1997. I think the biggest missing piece is Leftist ideology. The Leftists have done a really good job of keeping together a rickety coalition of communists, Islamists, racial agitators, and ideologists without ideas. This has led to increased stability that would have been hard for Mr. Chittum to foresee from 1997.

Additionally, the work on prepping has moved on in twenty years. The basics remain the same, but the general philosophy has had 20 years of thought, refinement, and improvement. But we haven’t had 20 years of thought on what will cause a civil war and how likely that is.

But, oddly, the Leftist coalition is keeping the country from splitting into dozens of pieces – right now it’s just two pieces. I think this increased stability has extended the time until Civil War II breaks out. What brings stability down? Economic hardship. The 2020 election.

And there is a price to be paid. Can the Left control the forces of discontent and hate that it has unleased? Can the Right control the forces that are a reaction to the demographic change in society?

Tough questions. (Shakes Magic 8 Ball®)

MAGIC 8 BALL