Category: Silly Predictions

Alexander the Great, Smallpox, and Saving Western Civilization

“All we can do, Scully, is pull the thread.  See what it unravels.” – The X-Files

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Alexander the Great and Smokey the Bear had one thing in common:  same middle name.

In 333 B.C., Alexander the Great entered the city of Gordium.  In the city there was a really tangled piece of rope – so tangled that no one could see how the intricate knot was made.  It was ancient.  The legend was that whoever could solve the knot, would become ruler of all of Asia.  We have a similar puzzle in our laundry room, and whoever can sort all of the socks can choose dinner next Wednesday.

Alexander the Great, it is said, fiddled with the knot for a few minutes.  After deciding that was as useless as trying to push a piece of spaghetti, Alexander drew his sword and cut the knot in half.  Problem solved.  Was he worried that the locals would think he was cheating?  Nope.  He had an army.  From this story we get the phrase “Gordian knot” for a problem that can’t be solved under the terms it was created.

I’m just hoping Pugsley doesn’t solve that sock problem by putting them down the garbage disposal.  Again.

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Okay, this isn’t my laundry room.  But I once did own a hat just like that one.

We are in a strange place.  In the nation, and in nations all over the world.  We are all separating.  The world is falling apart.  But don’t consider world civilization a complete failure – remember, the swimming pool on the Titanic is still full after over 100 years so that counts for something.

The unravelling of society, however, can be seen in many ways:

  • Vaccine Believers and Anti-Vaxxers
  • No Brexit and Brexiteers
  • Global Warmists and Climate Deniers
  • Globalists and Nationalists
  • Flat Earthers (they’re all around the globe!) and, um, I guess Sphere-ists.
  • Left and Right
  • Nuclear Power Advocates versus No Nuke Activists

This separation was pointed out to me in an email from my friend who I will call John, because he has an awesome first name, and I promise is totally not my alter ego.  The questions he asks are deep, and the answers aren’t necessarily obvious.  When I finally get to a post based on one of John’s ideas, it might have taken dozens of hours of study and research where I try to prove my ideas wrong with the data.  Occasionally, I do prove myself wrong.  As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.

If you haven’t seen this, it’s Thanksfabulous.

I won’t go into detail on all of the symptoms of unravelling listed in the bullet points above, since if I did I think the post would be longer than Bill Clinton’s address book.  And I could easily add additional topics, like the validity of the Moon landing, homeopathy, and court verdicts like the one showing RoundUp® causes cancer.  But I’ll discuss just vaccines, for an example.

All vaccines are safe and a good idea.  Well . . . maybe not.  I looked first at chickenpox.  Deaths from chickenpox have dropped since the chickenpox vaccine became mandatory from about 100 deaths per year in the United States to (as near as I can find) zero.  But let’s face it – to die of chickenpox a kid has to have a pretty weak system already.  If it wasn’t chickenpox, somebody would have probably popped the kid with a Nerf® gun or the kid would have faced a strong breeze and it would have finished him off.

But let’s assume that the 100 who died were perfectly healthy kids.  The vaccine costs about $300.  Multiply that by the 3.9 million kids born in the United States each year, and the cost of the vaccination alone is nearly $1.2 billion dollars.  Divide by the one hundred substandard kids you would have saved, and that’s (drumroll) nearly $12 million dollars per kid “saved”.  I assure you, you can make a new one for far less than that.

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He also lifts dictionaries to work out.  He says that’s how he gets definition.

The cost benefit ratio is silly.  If anyone said we had to spend a billion dollars to save 100 random kids, we’d never do it – don’t believe me?  Our school buses are made from thin sheet metal by the lowest bidder.  If we spent that same billion dollars on safer school buses, we’d save far more than 100 lives.  I don’t doubt that the vaccine works.

So what?  It’s not worth it.

I moved to the next vaccine:  Gardasil©.  Gardasil™ protects against nine variations of HPV – HPV is the stuff that gives humans warts.  In this case, Gardasil® protects against warts on your naughty bits.  So, I started to research, but I assure you I avoided pictures.  Ewwww.

I attempted to look into vaccine safety for Gardasil©, and found a most curious phenomenon.  When I tried to find information that showed data that put Gardasil™ in a bad light, Google® was useless.  Any query about deaths related to Gardasil® led only to how safe and wonderful it was and how we should probably rub it into the fur of our pets, bathe in it, drink it in shot glasses.

I swapped over to Bing© and got actual answers to the question about Gardasil© safety, learning that there were nearly 63,000 reported adverse reactions to Gardasil™, 317 reported deaths, and a study indicating that maybe Gardasil™ causes infertility in 1/3 of the women that take it.

In fairness, it is thought that the vaccinations of Gardasil© might save 2,900 lives a year from cervical cancer starting sometime in the year 2046.  This sounds like me trying to make a joke, but most cases of cervical cancer won’t hit until a woman hits her fifties, and the vaccinations didn’t start in earnest until just over a decade ago on teenage girls.

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So, what if Gardasil© is the vaccine that causes the zombie apocalypse?  Hmmm?  Didn’t think of that in your double-blind studies, did you?

And I used the word “might” for a reason.  There’s no study that shows that Gardasil® will stop cervical cancer, although I’ll believe scientists are probably right.  But that has to be viewed with a grain of salt, too:  according to one source, the fatality rate of cervical cancer for women who get regular tests is nearly zero, with or without Gardasil©.  I ran the numbers on this one, and on a cost basis it’s better than chickenpox, at only $700,000 per theoretical future life saved in 2046.

Me?  If I ever get a uterus, I think I’d skip Gardasil™, though that won’t be the first thing that comes to mind if I wake up with a uterus.

I’m not an Anti-Vaxxer:  my kids are vaccinated against things like diphtheria, tetanus, measles, mumps, and rubella.  Yes, I’d vaccinate them again.   I think we did opt out of the chickenpox vaccine for The Boy and Pugsley, but I can’t recall.  It seems like there’s a clear cut case for eliminating many diseases, like, oh, polio.  I don’t think the world misses smallpox, either, which was eliminated thanks mainly to vaccines.

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I have another vaccine joke, but it’s like smallpox:  no one gets it anymore.

But anyone who questions a vaccine is branded an “anti-vaxxer” and ignored.  In fairness, many people who question vaccines have valid questions, and want the real information so they can make a choice.  Google®, however, seems to think that sort of question is not valid, and only pointed to pro-vaccine sources in page after page after page of results, no matter how I asked the question.  As Mark Twain said, “Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak because a baby can’t chew it.”

And that illuminates the real problem.

The legitimacy of Big Science is in doubt.  The legitimacy of Government is in doubt.  People are also doubting:

  • The educational system.
  • The United Nations.
  • Mainstream news media.
  • Mainstream entertainment media.
  • The courts.
  • Silicon Valley tech companies.
  • Many (but not all) Fortune® 500™ companies.

And it’s not just in the United States – it’s spreading.  Riots have broken out in Chile, which is the most prosperous nation in South America and has the least amount of income inequality on the continent.  Europe is facing Brexit, the Yellow Vest movement, and the national rejections from countries like Denmark, Poland, and Hungary to unfettered migration.

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I guess Hillary is still looking for Mr. Riot.

The world is unravelling.  One possible reason is we’ve reached the end of the Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) where this sort of social chaos is to be expected.  Another is that we are seeing increasing polarity in public life.  While the Right has moved farther Right, the Left has gone very far Left.  It’s not me imagining this, like it turned out I was imagining Tyler Durden after I started up all of those Fight Clubs®.  No.  This rift shows up in the graphs:

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Politically we are flying apart.  Is part of this demographics?  Certainly.  Immigrants (legal or illegal) to the United States vote overwhelmingly Left.  Why?  It doesn’t matter.  They do.  Immigrants and their children are perhaps the single largest driving force of this polarity shift, but there are other factors.

We’re also becoming more urban – this urbanization leads to a lower sense of belonging, and drives people to vote Left.  Sure, you’re a fan of (INSERT FOOTBALL TEAM HERE), but how many people in faceless condos in Seattle or Salt Lake City or San Francisco know each other?  When I moved to Modern Mayberry, neighbors up and down the street knew I worked at the PEZ® factory before the house deal closed.  Do we know our neighbors like family?  No.  But we know who they are, and know a bit about them.  Urbanized people are more disconnected from their neighbors than rural folks.  That disconnection makes distrust in your neighbor that much easier.

Lastly, the Internet provides a source of information that wasn’t available in the past.  What was only available in libraries and in mimeographed samizdat is now available to everyone.  It’s now possible to research things like vaccines and global warming from your couch, and pull in better data than would have been available to almost any scientist in 1980.  And news?  The Internet has pulled it from the control of the gatekeepers.  When John Podesta’s emails were leaked, I was combing through them, and found many things before the news media did, like the fact that a nice Nigerian Prince wanted to give him a lot of money.

These are the symptoms of a society where the fundamental premise of that society is no longer a given.  The United States has been defined as meeting everything to everyone.  We are finding that those are empty promises – it’s really about power and control.  With the amount of information out there, however, power and control can’t be kept.

How do we solve this puzzle?

Our society, our culture, our trust won’t be regained through Congressional committees or an impeachment.  It won’t be made whole by an election.  And it won’t be healed through movies or television.

Someone, somewhere, is going to have to cut that knot.

34 Random Thoughts About The Economy, Money, and Jobs

“Well, Saddam owed us money.” – Arrested Development

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Maybe I should get more sleep.

It’s nearly Thanksgiving, and the next few weeks will be busy.  Now that The Boy is off at college and no longer engaged in half a dozen activities, we’re down to just having to chase Pugsley around.  Not so busy that there won’t be a full slate of posts – those are planned for the next few weeks, barring a change based on current events or me being distracted by shiny objects.

Today, though, I thought I’d change it up a bit, so here are a few random thoughts on business, economics, and wealth.

  1. The last economic crash was about a housing bubble. The next economic crash will be about our “everything” bubble where money flows faster to chase smaller and smaller returns.
  2. The biggest thing to crash after the next bubble pops will be money. It’s never fun when the value of money drops to zero, since having a little inflation is like being a little pregnant – not much happens at the beginning, but by the end everyone is yelling and screaming and covered in blood.
  3. The next economic crash will be the biggest in our lives.
  4. Or not. I’ve been wrong before.
  5. But I still think 2025 will be interesting.
  6. Most jobs don’t require thinking nowadays – they are a set of procedures and rules based on the lowest common denominator employee. The best jobs like this are at the DMV, which at least allow you to be mean and unpleasant, plus government benefits.
  7. Jobs that don’t require thinking can be paid at the lowest possible wage. If you’re lucky enough to be hired at Old MacDonald’s farm, I hope you can rise to the C-I-E-I-O position, but you’ll have to be out standing in your field.study.jpg
  8. Businesses that do things immorally don’t automatically fail because they do things immorally – many immoral and even evil businesses flourish. It’s only in the movies that the good guys always win.
  9. When I gave career advice to The Boy, I advised him to build expertise and skills in things that couldn’t be done over the Internet or by an outsourced employee working in a country where the native language consists only of vowels, grunts, and humming noises but yet has 355 terms for “waddle”.
  10. Always be worth more to your company than your company is paying you.
  11. “What have you done for me lately?” is a good and fair question from any boss.
  12. The second mouse gets the cheese in the trap. No, I’m not going first.
  13. If it’s choosing between money and honor, choose honor. The bills might be more difficult to pay, but at least you can look yourself in the mirror.  Until the power company cuts the electricity.
  14. Seriously though, choose honor.cat.jpg
  15. It’s the risk that you don’t take that you’ll regret. But you only hear successful people say that.
  16. Never build a business on what you love, since no one cares about medieval Norse poetry. Build a business on what you do that other people love and will pay for.  You’ll learn to love it.
  17. Capitalism works great to allocate spoils in an expanding market. Capitalism fails in a contracting one.  There’s nothing easy about the transition.
  18. Being short of money and optimistic about the future is better than having lots of cash and being pessimistic.rain.jpg
  19. Money can’t make you happy, but you can avoid most of life’s miseries by having a few hundred thousand dollars. Not every one of life’s miseries, but most of them.
  20. Whenever anyone says it’s not about the money, it’s really about the money.
  21. Whenever anyone says cost is no object, you can expect that statement to be proven false once the estimates arrive. Make them pay in advance.
  22. The reward for work well done is more work. This is actually a pretty good deal – we tend to buy video games built around this same premise.
  23. The rewards aren’t linear – the closer to the top, the greater the rewards. But you have to fight the big boss at the end before you retire.
  24. Great bosses are rarer than you might imagine. Most bosses are okay.  Some are awful.
  25. The worst kind of boss is a weak boss. They will praise you when you don’t deserve it and sell you out when you don’t.
  26. Teamwork makes it easy to blame someone else.
  27. In America, when two men meet, they ask “What do you do?” Too often we equate ourselves with “what we do,” while forgetting we get to choose who we are.  Unless you’re Johnny Depp, in which case you are stuck being Johnny Depp.question.jpg
  28. If you find yourself dreading the alarm clock and not wanting to go to work you go anyway. It’s your job.  If it’s too much?  Find another job or retire.
  29. True story: a friend of mine had a sister that decided to retire one day when she was about 30.  She was shocked when the checks stopped coming, she seemed to think that when you retired, the company had to keep paying you.  I think she’s a Bernie® voter now.
  30. Me? I’m trying to start thinking about retirement before my boss starts thinking about my retirement.pounds.jpg
  31. When I was first hired into a job, I heard a statistic that 70% of a typical workday for a typical employee was unproductive. I was shocked that the figure was so high.
  32. Now, after working for years, I’m shocked that the figure is so low. I tried to come up with jokes about lazy people, but they just won’t work.
  33. Meetings often happen just because they’re on the schedule. Look like you’re paying attention and don’t sleep, no matter how quickly it makes the meeting go.
  34. I had a friend who worked at the Unemployment Department who got fired. He still had to show up the next day.

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

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

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

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

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

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Always be careful when Germans research expanding anything.

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

But what is an ECG?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But Google®?  Google™ has proven itself untrustworthy.

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

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

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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

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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 11th, the Right for Ben Franklin to be Naked Whenever He Wants was narrowly defeated by people who had seen Franklin naked.  The 12th, establishing a National Taco Tuesday and Mandatory Metallica® failed initially but was finally ratified in 1994, much to the relief of radio stations everywhere.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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I hear the Slovakian banks moved to digital currency.  They ran out of Czechs.  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).  The conclusion, stated briefly is that our economy and indeed our civilization can be compared to a sandcastle.  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.  Like a sandcastle, if the conditions aren’t just right, the walls of the sandcastle can crumble in a growing cascade.  An even faster way to make the castle fall is to drop a shot put on it.  It’s especially fun if the five year old that made it is still working on it when you drop the shot put.

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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 Olympics®.  Her only defense was, “I identify as 86 years old.”

Unlike a sandcastle, our economy isn’t made of grains of sand of rough uniformity.  If the average person’s net worth of $97,000 was a single grain of sand weighing 0.011 grams, Jeff Bezos’ $110 billion dollars would be a 28 pound steel ball, the perfect size to ruin a kid’s day.  But even that isn’t large compared to a bank.  JP Morgan’s® $2.5 trillion dollar assets when compared to that single grain of sand would weigh nearly 624 pounds.  If I had to pick between lifting 624 pounds of steel or 624 pounds of butane, I’d choose the butane.  Why?  It’s a lighter fluid.

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I imagine this toddler weighs about 28 pounds.  It’s a perfect competition size toddler, depending on the shape of its head, of course.  Sadly, I can’t throw one farther than about 35 feet.

The size and scale of international banks today is huge, and I’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 – it takes me from a weight I don’t notice, to a weight that I’d have to use both arms to lift.  Okay, I’m lying.  Maybe if I put my back into it I could lift it with one arm.

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

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

The reason that they bailed out Continental Illinois© wasn’t that they were good natured.  The reason that the Federal government bailed out Continental Illinois was that they were scared to death – they had no idea what would happen if they just let the bank fail.  Would it bring down the economy?  No one knew – and just like wondering exactly what’s in a hot dog, no one was willing to find out.  And don’t tell me what’s in a hot dog, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.

What were people worried about?

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

A bank failure to most people is nearly risk-free.  The FDIC® (Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation©) extends insurance to cover more money than the average family is worth.  But a small business or farm, even one that doesn’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.  If the next bank doesn’t fail, there are still problems.  The next bank will lend out money only to customers that it knows will pay it back – if it has sustained losses it won’t want to make loans that are risky.  A small town farm bank failure is bad and might devastate a community if it causes other businesses to fail.

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

But let’s go back to JP Morgan®.  How did it get so big?  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 – each bank in each town was an independent entity.  Sure, one person might have owned more than one bank; even dozens of banks.  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 – over 9,000 banks failed during the Great Depression.  Sure, that was devastating, but I would argue that the failure of just one bank, JP Morgan®, 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.

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I was going to add transparent bikini graphics, but The Boy went off to college so you’ll have live with these. 

Is there an argument for large banks?  Paul Krugman thinks so.  And if Paul Krugman is for it, I’m probably against it.  If Paul Krugman said that Wilder, Wealthy and Wise™ was his favorite blog?  I would argue with him, even if it involved a knife fight, which would probably work out okay for me because he’s old and weak and I smell like hamburger.  Krugman’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 Krugman’s drivel is that is that the banking regulators are not working for the Federal government, they are working for the banks.  Most banking regulators want to work for the big banks, because that’s where the money is.  Actually regulating the bank would doesn’t look good on your resume.  This isn’t my imagination:  I actually had this conversation with a banker who had been a regulator.  His conclusion was the only real way to get fired as a Federal banking regulator was to do your job.  Come in late?  Go to sleep at work?  Surf porn on the Federal computers?  All that’s fine.  But ask Wells Fargo® 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?  You and I are paying.  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 it’s obvious what the downside is to having larger banks, since they risk our economy as a whole, and that’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 Can’t Find Fine China after the Apocalypse).  And, make no mistake – the failure rate for all businesses nears 100% over a long enough timeline.  Just ask Tyler Durden.

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I Am Joe’s Inflamed Uvula.

What’s the downside of breaking banks into smaller units, and perhaps limiting their capitalization to what Jeff Bezos keeps in his “spare mistress” account?

  • First, there’s more overhead. You need competent people to run the various independent branches, but what you get is the resiliency of an inefficient system – the risks that will cause all of the banks to fail are remote.  So, breaking apart banks would lead to more jobs for competent people.  Yes, that would lead to lower profits for the banks.  Yes, I’m a capitalist.  No, that’s not bad.
  • Second, if they’re limited to geographic regions, the banks that are in regions that might become economically depressed would have less money to lend. That’s probably okay.  I’m pretty sure I don’t want money from my state going to those heathens in Rhode Island, so I’m okay keeping it nearby.  Besides, if there are good opportunities here?  Money will flow in.
  • Third, smaller banks could That would make investors more likely to keep an eye on their investment.  And if bad things happened?  They’d be limited to failures that we could deal with, like forgetting to pay the cable bill.  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 – that sort of networked information exists now, so it could exist in the future.

I brought up the example of Continental Illinois© bank.  The name wasn’t at all familiar to me, but I did look up what happened to them.  Continental Illinois® was sold to Bank of America™ in the 1990’s.  Bank of America© 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.  Is that a problem?  Is dropping a 624 pound shot put on a sandcastle a problem?

Nah, it’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.

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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:

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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).

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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.

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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:

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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):

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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:

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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

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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[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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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?

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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.

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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?