Category: Silly Predictions

I predict: these are the funniest predictions for 2020 you will read in 2020.

“Predictions are hard.  Especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra

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Okay, some people do pretty good predictions.

Once upon a time I tried to do real predictions.  The big downside of real predictions is being wrong sometimes.  I’d much rather be wrong all of the time, like last year (Silly Predictions for 2019. Bonus? Golden Bikini Force.), so here are my stunningly incorrect predictions for 2020:

January

  • The Senate takes over the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump. Because of poor ticket sales, the trial is cancelled, but people who had reserved tickets were given a 20% off voucher for the Nirvana® reunion tour.  I’d love to bum a ride with you guys – I’d call shotgun, but Kurt beat me to it.
  • Joe Biden suspends his presidential campaign for Black History Month© so small black children across the nation can have the opportunity to pet his wet leg hair. When informed that Black History Month is in February, Biden suggests to the reporter that they bare knuckle box, because he’s “tired of your stupid malarkey, 23 skidoo, Tippecanoe and Tyler too!  Cockroaches!”  Biden calms down later after getting some tapioca pudding and watching Price is Right®.
  • Hillary Clinton asks the question, “Do you want to play a game?”

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Chelsea calls Chardonnay “Mommy’s Monica Juice.”

February

  • Ruth Bader Ginsburg sees her shadow on Supreme Court day, assuring us of six more weeks of Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
  • Tom Brady’s body reconfigures itself into a new form on national television during Super Bowl® LIV. His new body appears like a low slung muscular tank, and Brady “throws” passes by expelling the football explosively downfield from a brand new fleshy orifice designed by Bill Belichick, based on the anatomy of a platypus.  Sadly, this doesn’t help the Patriots© at all, since they were eliminated earlier in the playoffs and are not even playing in the Super Bowl™.
  • The New Hampshire Democratic primary is won by Kim Jong Un. Unfortunately, it was actually Hillary Clinton being mistaken for Kim Jong Un after her next round of plastic surgery.  Rumor is she was secretly pleased to be called Dear Leader instead of the usual nautical term, “Seaward.”
  • Brexit happens on schedule, but Boris Johnson’s hair stages its own Borexit and joins the Labour Party.

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I guess technically we’re all undead, but Ruth takes it to the next level.

March

  • Super Tuesday, a collection of 13 primaries is held on March 3rd. The top three Democratic finishers are Johnny Depp, Harvey Weinstein, and a resurgent O.J. Simpson.  Nancy Pelosi states, “We are so proud to have our Democratic values and inclusivity on display in these results.”
  • Patrick’s Day replaced by a new gender and religion inclusive holiday: “Buy Expensive Green Things and Drink if You’re Not a Muslim Day.”
  • Joe Biden again suspends his presidential campaign, noting that he needs to focus on saving lives by using his true talent – being able to detect diseases in women by holding their shoulders and sniffing their hair while standing behind them.

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“Don’t thank me . . . now.  Thank me later.  Want to play with my leg hair?”

April

  • Ralph Northam, governor of Virginia, is discovered eating living children on the front lawn of the governor’s mansion while in blackface. After calls for his resignation, he noted that it was, at most, a “youthful indiscretion.”
  • Ruth Bader Ginsberg develops a desire for human flesh much like Tom Cruise or Keanu Reeves, and soon appears to be no older than about 30.
  • A vortex connecting our dimension to another dimension containing hellish beasts is accidently opened by Pentagon scientists. This is almost exactly like the plot to the Stephen King novella The Mist, though not in a legally actionable way, at least according to my lawyer, Lazlo.

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“How could I make this worse?  Oh, yeah, I’ll go after the guns.”

May

  • Beto O’Rourke, while no longer a presidential candidate, decides to create an anti-gun organization, PistolsMakeScared (PMS®). He noted, “I really needed something to do while my wife has quality time with her boyfriends.”
  • France declares war on Canada on Tuesday morning. France surrenders to Germany later that afternoon, declaring Paris an open city.  The Germans refuse the surrender, indicating they can’t determine the number of troops required to defend France, since that’s never been tried before.
  • Australians will discover a spider that is the size of a cat, is as fast as a mongoose, has a diet of eagles and crocodiles, and is as poisonous as a middle school girl’s Instagram®. They name it “Dave.”

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Pictured:  Australian infant’s crib mobile.

June

  • LGBT Pride Month (June) officially replaced with LGBT Smug Condescension Months (June, July, August).
  • Elon Musk unveils a Kleenex® dispenser that automatically pops up a new Kleenex© every time you take one out at a base price of only $45,000. 25,000 people place a deposit, even though there’s a two year wait.
  • Chick-Fil-A® decides to start serving food on Sunday, adding hamburgers to their menu, and encouraging the worship of Satan as part of a new marketing campaign. “We’ve got to change with the times,” said their new spokesman, Lena Dunham.

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I mean if you have to choose between values and a tasty sandwich . . .

July

  • The Democratic Convention is moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Malmo, Sweden as the Democratic Committee considers it unfair that people outside the United States have been denied a vote. Greta Thunberg, noted school dropout, is nominated.  Her vice presidential nominee, Joe Biden, is quoted as saying, “I’m thrilled to be behind her.”
  • The Republican Convention is held in a hollowed out volcano somewhere in the South Pacific. Donald Trump is nominated as the presidential candidate, and in a surprise move, he is also nominated to be vice president.  “Job’s too easy.  And I need someone whose I can trust to be vice president.”  Trump also adopts a pure white Persian cat with a diamond collar.
  • The 2020 Summer Olympics® open in Tokyo. Bingo is not an approved Olympic sport, primarily because the Japanese are still a bit superstitious about “B-29.”

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We now know what Paul Tibbets would do for a Klondike Bar®.

August

  • Google® is found to be censoring ______, ______ and _____, and working with Facebook™ and Twitter© to also censor _____. It is feared that the election might be impacted because ____ ____ ____, ____ and ____.
  • Elon Musk unveils an electric reusable coffee mug – he calls it Teasla©. Initial claims are that it is autonomous and can be used for both hot and cold liquids.  It also requires the new Teasla™ Supercharger, which can recharge it in 70 minutes using a 50’ by 50’ solar power array costing only $25,000.  The mug weighs 43 pounds.

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(Pssst – it’s in the trunk.)

September

  • For the second straight year, September is again cancelled by general consensus.

October

  • Two televised presidential debates and one televised arm wrestling contest are held. The planned presidential MMA bout is cancelled when Greta Thunberg tests positive for high levels of testosterone.  She is furious, “How dare you assume my gender?  You have ruined my fight plan.”  She then proceeds to spend all of her campaign funds on a live commercial showing her eating seven pounds of mashed potatoes (no gravy) in one sitting while scowling at the camera.
  • Gormongous, Ruler of the Dark Empire, emerges as a dark horse third party candidate after having emerged from the Pentagon’s dimensional experiment earlier in the year. “Everyone can be an American,” he hissed through clouds of sulfurous vapor.  The Ninth Circuit Court ruled that his alternate universe was “technically America” so he was a valid candidate for president, despite him being seven stories tall and covered in an exoskeleton made of material from neutron stars.

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Never take potatoes from a testosterone-raging Swede with fetal alcohol syndrome.  It’s a rule I live by.

November

  • The 2020 presidential election is held on the third. California immediately protests because the Electoral College now has fraternities, and no one asked California to join one so she could go to that cool Kappa Sig kegger and maybe hook up with Montana.
  • Donald Trump wins both the popular vote and the Electoral College. Democratic candidate Greta Thunberg says, “That is not enough – it makes a mockery of our democracy.  You must also defeat me in a best-of-seven game of Jarts®.”
  • Joe Biden celebrates his 78th birthday.  His hair and teeth turn 22.

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Many a G.I. Joe® experienced a fatal chest wound to Jarts™.

December

  • Santa Claus is now required by the 9Th Circuit Court of Appeals to be race, gender, and species neutral when used in any public school setting. Ironically, this has the effect of making most kindergarten pictures of NuSanta™ highly accurate.
  • Gormongous, Ruler of the Dark Empire, decides that he will use the fame from his presidential run to launch a top tier tequila as well as a chain of animal shelter/fast Asian restaurants in the Midwest.
  • Ruth Bader Ginsberg looks down on the lights of the city at night from her perch at the top of the Washington Monument. She smells, senses, and sees the life below her.  The life that she drains, person by person, to prolong hers.  Then . . . a target.  She aims her bat-like wings to take her quickly down the side of the monument, and then to strike.  Ahhh, fresh blood.  Ruth feels the gravity drawing her down as she leaps . . . .
  • National Park Ranger Report, 12/22/20: Bat killed by hawk near Washington Monument.

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To all:  Happy New Year!

Happy Penultimate Day 2019, and the Biggest Story of 2019: Society Unravelling

“Well, I don’t know what you’re talking about, but it sounds damn saucy, you lucky thing!  I know some fairly liberal-minded girls, but I’ve never penultimated any of them in a solar sojourn, or for that matter, been given any Norman tongue.” – Blackadder The Third

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If we have a boogaloo, let’s hope it’s a short one.  I’ve got a dentist appointment next Thursday.

If you’re reading this on Monday, December 30, congratulations!  It’s Penultimate Day!  This is the holiday that the Wilder’s celebrate every December 30.  Why Penultimate Day?  Back on December 30, 2012, The Mrs. wanted a new cell phone.  We drove an hour and a half south to a Best Buy® (the nearest place that sold cell phones) and then didn’t buy a cell phone.  After that, we ate at Olive Garden® and drove home. 

I think this was, perhaps, the disaster foretold by the Mayans that ended their calendar in 2012.  As is inscribed in ancient Mayan on the calendar:  “When the pale people from the north can communicate no more, and instead decided to eat a tasty pasta dish, perhaps with fresh-grated Parmesan cheese (say when!), that shall be the end of time.” 

Or my translation may be off.  Regardless, we are now celebrating our seventh straight Penultimate Day, and as you read this I might be not buying a cell phone, or perhaps having some sort of bottomless salad and breadstick combination at Olive Garden©.  Olive Garden’s™ motto is “when you’re here, you’re family©,” so I borrowed $50 and decided I’d never pick up when they call and insult them behind their back.

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Remember, when you’re here, you’re part of the Olivegarchy.

You can join in on Penultimate Day, too.  Simply go to a place that cells cell phones that is south of your house.  Then, don’t buy one.  Finally:  eat Italian food.  Sure, that’s not the purist version and you might be burned at the stake later for heresy, but, you know, Italian food.

My Penultimate Day post is also the post that I use to look back on the year to talk about the biggest story of the year.  In 2017, it was the verified UFO video from the military (Penultimate Day and The Biggest Story of 2017), in 2018, it was the loss of trust in our society (Happy Penultimate Day 2018, and the Biggest Story of 2018: Societal Trust).  The 2017 link comes with a (very) short story that I wrote in a Marriott® bar.

In 2019, the main story is the unravelling of society.

The main stories in all of the news is about that unravelling this year.  And it’s not just in the United States:

  • Brexit/Boris Johnson in Great Britain.
  • Yellow Vest Protests in France.
  • Hong Kong Protests in Cleveland.
  • Impeachment.
  • Left and Right Polarity.
  • Your family at Thanksgiving.
  • AntiFa® violence in mom’s basement.
  • Popularity of Stories About Impending Civil War in the United States.

We know trouble is coming.  The topic I’ve written about that’s gotten more views than any other this year has been Civil War 2.  How divisive is society today?  In an example of whistling past the graveyard, a hypothetical future conflict has been referred to as Civil War 2:  Electric Boogaloo.  This has shortened over time to just Boogaloo.  This is, of course, is a tribute to that classic of Western cinema Breakin’ 2:  Electric Boogaloo, a 1984 film about breakdancing that I’m sure you all have seen.

Deciding that they’d like to prove my point about the unravelling of society and the Left being a bitter, humorless bunch of that make the people at the DMV look like a jovial group of partygoers, members of the Left have decided that even the term “Boogaloo” is nearly hate speech.  Yeah, I’m not surprised, either.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

William Butler Yeats wrote the above as the opening of a song for the band Iron Maiden®.  Sadly Bruce Dickenson rejected it on the grounds that all of the members of Iron Maiden© took a vote and decided that they would all be born sometime in the future when guitars were just a bit more electric but yet not too boogaloo.

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Yes, Iron Maiden did an 18 minute metal song about a poem written in 1798.  And it was glorious.

Instead, Yeats settled for using those lines for the opening of his poem The Second Coming a hundred years ago in 1919, and during this time he was writing about what he saw as an unravelling:  an unravelling of science, an unravelling of governmental structures, and an unravelling of heterogeneous communities.  He looked back at the deaths caused by the pointless World War I and its deformed stepchild – the Russian Revolution, and saw an ending of one world, and the birth of the next.

These destroyed structures were built on speed and modernity.  What did Yeats see replacing the modern world?

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Kardashians are planning on acknowledging their Wookie heritage in a new reality show.

Yeats continued with a vision as ugly as a Kardashian in a swimsuit:

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

What did Yeats see replacing the modern world?  Mysticism.  Power.  Blood.  He was right.  1919 was crappy, but the 20th Century was about to get a whole lot worse.  He concluded:

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Yup.  Creepy.  And Iron Maiden definitely should have recorded this, whether they were born or not.

Yeats’ vision is what we are living through again right now – the ending of one age, and the beginning of another.  This crisis cannot be driven by food shortages.  There is more food now than at any time in history.  It cannot be wealth – there is more individual wealth in the nations experiencing tumult than at any point in their histories.  It cannot be my hair.  My shiny scalp?  Sure.  Not my hair.

Certainly there are problems – I think that the people the Z-Man (LINK) calls the Dirt People (which almost certainly includes every reader of this blog as well as your constant writer, me) are experiencing an economy driven by and for the Cloud People (the Deep State, the Financial Elite).  Regardless of who you voted for in 2012, you knew that Mittens Romney and Barry Obama were on the same team, and it wasn’t your team.

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This might be where the Z-Man got that meme – at least it was the first thing I thought of.  And it explains sky-high real estate costs . . . .

In the end the reactions we’re seeing in society in 2019 (Trump and Brexit) are just that – reactions to a society that has gone too far Left, too fast.  Leftists never realize that all they have to do to enact their Socialist Utopia® is wait.  Instead, they smell the blood of the Right in the water and decide that it’s time to end the waiting.  Right now!  Because after making the conscious decision to borrow $375,000 for a degree in cooking, they now know that college (and those vacations to Europe on spring break!) is a right and should be free.

What do Leftist want?  Complete control.  When do they want it?  Now.  Impeachment is a technique for power and control, not enforcing the law, since at no point has anyone been able to articulate a law broken by Trump.  Nixon?  Conspiracy to commit a break-in.  Clinton?  Perjury.  Trump?  I still haven’t heard about a law that he broke that isn’t some sort of fashion or etiquette rule.

Trump is not a savior.  Trump is a symptom.  The Leftist reaction to Trump is yet another symptom.  And the inability to wait for an election that is less than a year out is yet another.

The Right is never the instigator of issues like this – there is a reason the Right is called reactionary – it reacts to the Left.  The Right just wants history to stop.  The Left wants change, and will look for any time to work for it – especially when society is functioning well.  The Left is like a wife who sees a fully functioning family, home mortgage nearly paid off, 20 years until retirement and says, “You know what?  Things are going well.  Let’s burn it all down.”

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As long as Stella gets her groove back, that’s all that’s important, am I right?

And the change the Left wants is never gradual – it is Revolution™.  The Left wants to destroy the existing social orders and replace them with Leftism.  As we’ve seen in the past (Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Mangos and A Future That Must Not Be), Leftism always ends in a bloodbath, either as those on the Left kill everyone to the Right of them, or a cagey leader like Stalin kills all of the people to the Left of him.

This is the context we see ourselves in today.  All time high on the stock market, and all time high (excepting 1859) on the polarity seen in the United States.  We are splitting apart.

How does this end?  I think, if past trends for America have been true, there will be freedom.  America may not look like it does today – I think I’d actually bet money that it won’t.  There will be significant changes, and I think it will be very difficult for Washington D.C. to impose its will on Michigan, Montana, or Missouri if the peoples of those states are unwilling.

This is the last post of the ‘teens – my next post will be in the Tumultuous, Turbulent Twenties.  Remember folks, you heard that here first.  But you won’t hear it here last – I’m pretty sure the centre cannot hold . . . but neither will my belt, not after all of those free breadsticks.

Civil War Weather Report #7 – The War In The Right

“You mean the war betwixt the Yankees and the Americans?” – The Beverly Hillbillies

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You can always tell a hungry clock, they go back four seconds.

  1. Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil.
  2. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  3. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  4. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.

I’m holding at Stage 7 this month.  A more formal structure on the Right needs to be in place to get to Stage 8, as the Left has the structure of control in place.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – The War in the Right –– Updated Civil War II Index – Virginia and Demographics – Links

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

ISSUES LINKS

Violence and Censorship Update

Censorship strikes again.  Owen Benjamin, comedian, had dozens of YouTube® videos.  Had.  He also had several hundred thousand subscribers and had accumulated tens of millions of minutes of time spent watching his videos.  I probably accounted for about thirty minutes – YouTube© suggested him to me, and gave him a try, but he wasn’t for me.  He was hardly offensive in the time I saw him.  He was goofy, as in didn’t believe that we’d been to the Moon and was sniffing around flat Earth territory.  Reality or the contrived personality of a comedian?  Beats me, but if I’m ever in a car with him I’m keeping him away from the map.

But people spent tens of millions of minutes (this is not an exaggeration) watching him.  Now he’s gone from YouTube™.  Other channels have been demonetized:  for a channel with large numbers of subscribers, that can mean the loss of tens of thousands of dollars in revenue.  YouTube® is playing for keeps, and some content creators are going to have to try to learn to make espresso if they want a shot at that barista job at Starbucks® in Tempe.

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What’s the difference between coffee and a barista’s opinion?  I asked for coffee.

Even if a channel isn’t banned or demonetized, YouTube® is manipulating search results to mute content it doesn’t like.  Edgy political content it used to send to me as a matter of course in recommendations doesn’t show up in my suggestions anymore – now I get videos on science, stuff that explodes, and how to knit using yarn you spin at home out of cat fur.

The channel “Press for Truth” did an experiment (LINK) where they did a search for “What do the Rothschilds think about Brexit?”  Press for Truth had a video with exactly that title that had over half a million views.  The result?  Press for Truth’s video (when I did the search) was fourth, behind older videos that were (mostly) less popular, but were from “established” news organizations.

I’d be a bit more sympathetic of YouTube’s® actions if we hadn’t seen again and again how the mainstream news organizations will bury news stories that are damaging to the Left (Weinstein, Epstein, etc.).  These same news organizations will also misleadingly phrase stories about people they don’t like.   For example, if I mentioned that bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki just might have had something to do with the Japanese surrender, we’d get:  “John Wilder’s unfounded claims that nuclear weapons had a part in ending World War II.”

Owen Benjamin went elsewhere to stream video, as did all of the other creators that have been banned by YouTube®.  But the new locations are far less lucrative, and have far less visibility.  It’s the electronic equivalent of setting up “free speech” zones.  Leftists make a great deal out of the fact that these are private companies making the censorship choices, but when a private company violates a principle of the Left, like making a Satanist remove a “hail Satan” shirt before getting on an airplane (this really happened)?

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I want nothing to do with the Devil.  I hate dealing with my ex-in-laws.

That’s a public shaming and a lawsuit, baby.

But not by the Right.  Censorship marches on.

The War in the Right

War has recently broken out in the Right.  The Zoomers (say, 1995 births to 2015 births) are now beginning to have their voices heard on the Right as well as the Left.  On the Left, they make up some portion of AntiFa, but on the Right they’re called “groypers.”  Don’t ask why they’re called that, it’s ultimately as meaningless as Madonna’s purity ring.

What the groypers are doing is rejecting the Leftist-friendly premanufactured conservatism that is being pushed at them by Conservative, Inc., as exemplified by Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA®.  At one point, Charlie Kirk said, more or less, that a green card should be stapled to every diploma earned by a foreign student in the United States.  In November, after attacks by the groypers, Kirk relented:

“I said something a couple weeks ago that was not an opinion I still currently hold where I said something about F-1 Visas where I said that F-1 Visas should be given out basically to every single person who goes through the college education system. I was wrong when I said that.”

When asked if he would support a policy that was good for the United States, but not good for Israel, Kirk refused to answer.  Charlie Kirk wasn’t the only victim of the groypers:

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Unlike illegal aliens, E.T. eventually went home.

The Zoomers see that they’re a generation that sees lower job opportunities because they’re facing increased competition by lower-paid immigrants, legal and illegal.  They also don’t see a “conservative” case for making LGBTWXYZ+ a part of the platform, when there is nearly zero support for the Right from that group.

Silencing the groypers won’t make them go away, and is probably not possible – they’re bright and tech savvy in a way unlike any generation before.  Regardless, this is another sign of our nation unravelling.

Updated Civil War II Index

More graphs, with full bikini treatment.

Violence:

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Up is bad.  Violence is finally starting to drop for the winter, though it’s still higher than it was in spring.  Will we have real riots in June, July, and August of 2020, or will the Left take a “wait and see” approach to see if their candidate is elected?  Oh, wait . . . Biden?  Yeah.  They’ll riot.

Political Instability:

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Up is bad, and it is up (a little) this month, and you can see this graph has some very interesting curves.  It’s surprising to me how little, but I think that’s a reflection that, outside of between AOC’s ears, no one thinks that impeachment is going anywhere, and she thinks it’s a gum flavor, like spearmint or peppermint.

Economic:

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Down is bad.  The economic indicators all were positive, and strongly so, in November.  This is likely due to the Coppertone® we applied back to the economy back in October.

Illegal Aliens:

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Down is good, since (in theory) ICE is catching fewer aliens because there are fewer people trying to get in.  The numbers are down this month, and as you can see if you observe around the southern border.  We could drop illegal immigration to zero if all new illegals were forced to watch MSNBC®.

Virginia and Demographics

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The Virginia elections gave control of essentially all statewide institutions to the Left.  From 1952 to 2004, the only Democratic candidate for president to win Virginia was Lyndon Johnson in 1964.  Since 2008, Virginia presidential elections have gone uniformly for Democrats – and now the transformation of the state is complete.  Sure, there are still Republicans there, but from now on they will control nothing.  As I wrote a year ago (Trump: The Last President?), this demographic shift isn’t only occurring in Virginia, but in Texas as well.

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I can see why – old people really give you something to chew over.

As long as the demographic shift of new immigrants (yes, even legal ones) to places like Texas and Virginia continues, this trend is inevitable.  The mathematics are simple – two out of three immigrants vote for Democrats.  You cannot continue to import people who vote for Leftist policies and not expect that they’ll eventually win.  The odd thing is that I’ve seen comments from folks in Texas saying, “It won’t happen here.”  I’m sure that the folks in California and now Virginia might want to have a word with you.

This demographic change will lead to a permanently politically dispossessed class – and a feeling in the Left that the Left can make any law they like.  And that will lead to a very difficult reaction.  Heck, I’d consider moving overseas, but I’m scared of the six month rabies quarantine.  I mean, would I have Internet?

Links

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Please leave links either in the comments below, or feel free to send me an email if you’re shy.  If you email me, I won’t say that the link is from you unless I get permission.  JOKE HERE.

From Vote Harder at The Burning Platform:

Bad Cop One – Taser Torture

Bad Cop Two – Mom Robbed of Bail

Bad Cop Three – No Such Thing as Excessive Force

Bad Cop Four – Growing things?  That’s a raid.

Privacy?  What’s that?

Overdue books?  Jail.  (I have two books that are overdue by thirty years.)

From AC at The Burning Platform:

AntiFa Assassination Guide

Groypers.

From KaD at The Burning Platform:

Al-Cleveland

From “Mygirl…maybe” at The Burning Platform:

More Virginia.

From Hank Curmudgeon:

Where the food is.

From Ricky:

Free Range Love

Food:  Pigs in Danger

Coup?

Nearly a half billion guns in American hands.

Avoiding Civil War – Mises.org.

Robert Gore –Alternative Reality.

Trump.

The Atlantic:  How America Ends.

 

AP on The Atlantic article above.

 

Trump Impeachment/Civil War.

Sessions protests.

 

Chinese Chess Game.

Coming soon:  Weimar America.

 

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!