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?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was a shockingly (intended) good choice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Okay, maybe I shouldn’t be a doctor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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That’s a realllllllly long thumb.

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

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

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

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Unless it’s Putin’s Eagle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Spoiler alert:  we tied.

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

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

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

Operation Aesop:  Total victory.

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

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

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

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

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

Operation Founding Fathers:  50 Independent States. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Operation Fort Sumter:  Going our separate ways.

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

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

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

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

Operation Gulag in The Dakotas:

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

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

Outcomes:  1984.

Now we know the stakes.

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

Book Review: Civil War Two, Part II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Birthday at Casa Wilder is always exciting!

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

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

Problem fixed, right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Always remember item 6 – “Wear Pants”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tough questions.  (Shakes Magic 8 Ball®)

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MAGIC 8 BALL

Book Review: Civil War Two, Part I

“I’ll give you a winter prediction:  it’s gonna be cold, it’s gonna be grey, and it’s gonna last you for the rest of your life.” – Groundhog Day

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There was a dwarf fortune teller that was wanted by police.  The news headline was “Small medium at large.”

One of the comments on the very first issue of the Civil War Two Weather Report (You can find all three Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming, Civil War Weather Report #2, Censorship, Stalin, and a Bunch of Links, Civil War Weather Report #3: Violence, China, and Lots of Links) was a link to Thomas W. Chittum’s 1997 book Civil War Two:  The Coming Breakup of AmericaIt is available as a .pdf here.  Ordinarily I’d point you towards Amazon® so you could buy the book and put money in the author’s pocket, but it looks like the book has been out of print for some time.

Update:  it’s here, Mr. Chittum pointed me in this direction.  Please give this one a purchase – it’s good for Mr. Chittum, and I promise I don’t make a dime off of it.

Chittum had an interesting past before writing this book – he fought in Vietnam for the United States.  Apparently that wasn’t enough and the United States was all peaceful for the next twenty years, so he fought in Rhodesia and Croatia as a mercenary rifleman.  Oh, and he was a computer programmer for most of his life.

The book is now 22 years old, and it makes predictions.  How did it do?  I won’t spoil the plot too much, but Chittum has probably been better at predicting 2019 while writing about it in 1996 than a lot of people have done living in 2016 and predicting 2019.  It was pretty chilling to me to read how much Chittum had gotten right, so I thought I’d review the book.

As the notecards I use for blocking out posts went to three times the number I use for a typical post, I realized that the review would be take (at least) two posts, if not three.  So, here’s part one.  You’ll see part two next Monday.

Early on, Chittum notes that the United States has moved from the status of a nation to that of an empire.  Some might date the beginning of empire to the end of the first Civil War, but I’d say that the United States was, more or less, a single nation up until the 1970’s.  Sure there were regional differences, but the idea of kneeling when the national anthem was played wouldn’t have occurred to anyone but revolutionary Leftists.

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Make the Empire Great Again™!

The United States had a homogeneous culture for 90% plus of citizens in the 1970’s.  The dreams of the civic nationalist were realized in that era that resulted from very low immigration:  all that matters was that people were committed to being the idea of integrating and assimilating into being an American, and it would work out fine.  As long as we were one group that could sit and watch Cheers® or M*A*S*H™ or baseball, and cheer for our favorite teams, we’d be fine.

In the civic nationalist world it didn’t matter that your great-grandparents were Italian immigrants in 1900.  Your grandpa might have been named Enzio, but he went by Ernie and married an Irish gal named Mary.  Your dad played baseball.  Your name is Robert and your sister’s name is Nancy and the only thing really Italian about you is you like pizza.

I’d guess I’d use the participation in youth soccer as a proxy for demographic change.  We all know that soccer was originally invented in Europe so the Germans would have something to do besides invade France and conquer it in an afternoon.  It’s not a traditional game that Americans play.  Oh, sure, the United States women won the World Cup®.  But to be fair, we needed something for our women to do so they didn’t invade France, either.

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Let’s face it, our choice is either World Cup® soccer, or panzers streaking through Paris.  Is it just me, or do the panzers sound more interesting?

But Chittum points out that stability comes from a single group identity.  People being all on the same team makes us stronger, where as many groups make us weaker.  In this light, diversity isn’t Our Greatest Strength™, it’s really a weakness.

And his point is clear – ask a Leftist what it means to be an American, and you’ll likely get a vague statement about all you have to do to be an American is want to be one.  Asking them to learn English and assimilate and fit into American culture is for some reason now considered racist.  From the vantage point of 2019, it’s clear, diversity is our greatest weakness if we want a safe and stable nation.

This is observable in the real world.  Chittum fought in the breakup of the Balkans, and witnessed the breakdown of the Soviet Union.  When the Soviet Union fell, Chittum notes it was about 50% ethnic Russian.  The resulting nation that emerged was about 80% ethnic Russian and is much more stable.  It’s certainly more Russian.

The trends of a nation in peril are observable.  Our police departments don’t look like policemen, they’re now military.  Remember, to a cop, the citizens look like citizens.  To the military, everyone is a potential enemy.

  • SWAT teams raided Amish farms because they were selling unpasteurized milk.
  • Cops get armored personnel carriers like they’re patrolling Syria and not San Francisco.
  • Even local cops in Modern Mayberry wear gloves with hard plastic knuckles during normal patrols.

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When she pulled me over I rolled down the window and said, “What’s wrong?”  Her response?  “Nothing.”

Chittum spends a lot of time on the American Southwest – he figures it will be the trigger to the Civil War.

The original Reconquista took place in Spain as the Spanish expelled the Muslims who had conquered it over the course of six hundred years.  It was slow, but it finished up in 1492.  In the same way, Chittum notes that, although Mexico is a failed state, Mexicans are “retaking” the Southwest in a modern Reconquista that has taken place over decades since 1965, but with 1000% less Muslims.

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Nothing says practical like that hat!

Likewise, Chittum writes that the only solution is to close the border.  Of course he was writing this in 1997 so 22 years have passed.  Right now, at least 40% of the population of Los Angeles is foreign born.  In no way could Los Angeles be considered to be an American city today.  It might even be considered Mexican, as rival Mexican gangs have recently infiltrated the LA County Sheriff’s office (LINK).

Who loves this?  Leftists who wish to topple the United States:  Leftists need the votes.  Ethnic groups like La Raza:  La Raza is the intellectual part of the movement that actively wishes to retake the Southwest.  Multinational corporations:  they like the lower wages.

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Worst, though, are the hipster cops who will only arrest you ironically.

Let’s be clear:  Mexicans are patriots about Mexico.  They love their country – that’s why they proudly carry their flag during protests. Even in 1997, Chittum noted that crime was rampant in Mexico and the border was a mess and it’s even worse in Latin America south of Mexico.  Who can blame them for wanting to come to the United States, especially when some groups spin a fable of an ethnic empire, Aztlan, which is theirs for the taking?

The South and Northeast aren’t much better, and Chittum mentions that the Northeast will experience massive, open violence, which will be unorganized, and savage.  Some of the urban areas might survive as city-states.

California is his odds-on favorite to be ground zero.  Street gangs, as mentioned above, are numerous and founded on ethnicity.  They’ve infiltrated public organizations and the police and even allegedly corrupted members of the Marine Corps (LINK).  It’s this particular “enemy inside” that is troubling.  An external enemy is that can be fought, but when the enemy of the country becomes an internal enemy, it’s much worse – there’s a reason that treason is mentioned in the Constitution.

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Ahh, California, the meth laboratory of democracy.

Chittum mentions militias.  They seemed to have their peak in the 1990’s, and quickly declined after Oklahoma City.  He also mentions “Committees of Correspondence” which were a mechanism for people to communicate with each other because they didn’t have the Internet in the 1760’s to begin to organize against the British, LOL.  The Internet serves this purpose now, with large groups getting information from unapproved sources, and even managing to “privately*” share information.

*Don’t bet your life or liberty on it.

Chittum writes that Civil War Two will be vicious, atrocity filled, and genocidal.  Civilian casualties are to be expected, and many will be on purpose.  Looting will be common.  This is not the usual scenario our military faces in any fashion, so the analyses performed by John Mark (see Civil War II Weather Report: Spicy Time Coming) or Forward Observer (Civil War Weather Report #3: Violence, China, and Lots of Links) aren’t valid.  Civil War Two has the potential to be far worse than any conflict seen in history, as it combines both ethnic division along with ideological division – it’s like the Russian Revolution times Rwanda to the power of Somalia.

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I’ve been stuck in the same phase for . . . oh . . . twenty years now.  Maybe one day I’ll grow out of being a 12 year old.  I’m not telling you how long it took me to get to that phase!

There are four phases according to Chittum.  The first phase of the problem is what he refers to as Foundational.  He said in 1997 the Foundational phase was already complete.

  1. Tribalization of society – have different rules for different ethnic groups, push people to identify as something other than “American.”
  2. Power shift to unelected administrators, judges, board, commissions, and public servants.
  3. Since 1972, wages been stagnant, or, when compared to medical care or education, dramatically falling.
  4. The core of many large cities has been abandoned – think Baltimore or Detroit.
  5. Massive and sustained immigration, falling of standards and conditions in some locations to those similar to undeveloped countries.
  6. Racial organizations in police – militarization of police, which are both covered above.
  7. Treaties are more important that state sovereignty.
  8. A consistent and strong drive for gun control.
  9. From Antifa© to MS-13 to the Crips, these are in place.
  10. Mass media participation in the polarization. The mass media has already picked a side – Left.

We can see what Chittum says is behind us.  Next Monday we’ll look (from his vantage point in 1997 and ours in 2019) to see what else he’s predicted, and how far along we are.

Sweet dreams!

Social Security Won’t Sink Us. But The Ship is Still Going Down.

“Here comes an overweight cat with dollar signs for eyes and a hat that says “Social Security” pouring a bucket that says “Alternative Minimum Tax” over a sad Statue of Liberty holding a “democracy” umbrella.” – Family Guy

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There’s this joke I heard about Social Security, but no one will get it.

When I was in junior high, our history class ended up with a long-term substitute teacher, Miss Vargas, for over a month.  Most substitute teachers just handed out word-search puzzles where you tried to pick out names of conquistadors, Thanksgiving foods, conquered Mayans, and famous cats that belonged to the Mayflower Pilgrims.  Since Miss Vargas had us for weeks, however, she actually had to teach.  Thankfully, she had a lesson plan.

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Not an original.  I could not resist.

She was a nice substitute teacher so our class didn’t beat up on her that much.  We could tell, however, that, whatever her degree was in, it wasn’t history.  Given the time and place I was going to school, it seemed like she was likely a chemically-damaged refugee from the 1960’s, and likely a former Leftist hippy.  Since we had caught her on some (rather) basic mistakes about American history, we weren’t shy about questioning the things she said.

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Not to mention when Abraham Lincoln “freed the penguins, dude” after signing the Treaty of Ghent at Woodstock.  At least class was interesting.

The lesson (at some point) took us to the New Deal.  The format of the homework should be familiar to anyone who was in school when mimeographs were a thing (look it up).  There was a term, and then the student was supposed to write down the definition.  It was a fancy way to force eighth graders to learn to skim texts for key words written in bold.

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But the smell . . .

One of the terms was Social Security.  I dutifully looked through the text until I found the boldface words Social Security.   In it was the definition that it was (more or less):  An insurance program founded to provide benefits to retired and disabled people.

The teacher, not feeling like grading the homework, decided to go through the definitions with us.  After Social Security she wrote on the board, A program created to redistribute wealth in the country.

With all of the righteous indignation an 8th grader who had fully consumed the Kool-Aid® of the Official Story™ of the Government-Approved© textbook, I proceeded to correct Miss Vargas.

She didn’t back down, and maintained that was the purpose.  Obviously, the event was significant enough that I still remember, and as I grew older I realized that, well, the burned-out hippy was right.  Social Security is a wealth redistribution scheme.  Heck, you can tell the program is socialist – it’s right there in the name.

The program was started in the depths of the Depression and rewarded those who hadn’t paid in with benefits they hadn’t earned.  I’d whine more, but that happened 80 years ago, so it’s like Madonna complaining about her virginity – that ship sailed a LONNNNNNNG time ago – nearly as long ago as when the Japanese bombed the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria at Pearl Harbor.  I know that you’re expecting that this is some sort of rant about how Social Security needs to be taken down because it’ll wreck the economy.  It isn’t a rant, and Social Security won’t wreck the economy.

According to the latest data I could find (there’s probably newer, but 2013 was close enough and I’m travelling) but an average couple, making an average wage paid in about $600,000 in Social Security taxes during their career and would receive roughly $600,000 in benefits – the system was in balance.  Of note, it’s kind of cute because the graphic assumed it was a man married to a woman and not an immigrant trans-porpoise which I understand is now required in California, as long as the porpoise signs a pledge to drive a Prius® and not to use straws.

Ahh, nostalgia for simpler times.

Social Security was roughly in balance in 2013, and could be put back into balance fairly easily with minimal effort, even though we’re facing a demographic bulge as the boomers retire.  As long as we can convince them all to take up chain smoking and they decide that anti-chemo is the new anti-vax, we’re fine.  Theoretically, there are the accumulated savings that Social Security has had during all of those years it was in surplus, but the reality is that all of those funds are just IOUs from Congress sitting in a filing cabinet in West Virginia in a converted National Guard Armory behind Buddy’s Chicken and Black Lung Shack®.  Doris has the key.

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It might look nice, but it still smells like the DMV and low motivation.

Yeah, the money going out of Social Security has already exceeded the money going in to Social Security, but it’s manageable.  A few tweaks to the tax, and a few tweaks to the benefit (two-for-one coupons at Burger King™ instead of money every other month) and it will work out.  Social Security, despite being a piggy bank continually raided by Congress for my entire life, won’t hurt us, at least not by itself.

That’s the good news.  I fully expect that if the only major obligations that the government had were defense, transgender reassignment surgery, and Social Security, we’d be fine.  Heck, even welfare for dachshunds that can’t find a job because of terrier privilege wouldn’t break us.  Even if Congress approved the Ocasio Cortez Guided Missile©, which is designed to approach every target from the Left, has a warhead that does nothing but make babbling sounds, and costs a billion dollars a missile, we’d be fine.

What will break us?

Medicare® and Medicaid™.

Those are the M&M®s that will crater our financial system.

From the 2013 data, the average couple could will pay in about $110,000 in taxes during their lifetime for Medicare, but will take out nearly $400,000 in benefits.  Where does that benefit come from?  I’d say our tax dollars, but let’s you and I be real – not one dime of deficit spending has ever come out of your pocket or mine directly in taxes.  It’s all borrowed into existence at this point.

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I was going to save this graph for Halloween, since it’s scarier than most zombie movies. 

From this projection, you can see that by 2024 Medicare plus Social Security will make up 12% or so of the GDP.  Add in 2% for Medicaid costs, and you’re up to 14% of the GDP.  Add in 4% for the projected interest payments due on the national debt, and that’s 18%, folks.  That leaves 2% at most for all of the rest of the spending on the economy before we run out of tax dollars.  But the rest of the spending (on things like defense) generally runs about 10% of GDP.  Through the magic of math, that means that we’ll need another 10% of GDP.  Just raise the taxes, right?

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Even during the “90% tax rate” 1950’s, the proportion of the GDP taken in taxes wasn’t any higher than today and resulted in more loopholes than there are bacon-wrapped shrimp at a congressional lobbyist’s party.

That means the Federal government spending alone will consume 30% of the GDP, of which at least 10% will be deficit spending.  Given a projected GDP of $26 trillion in 2024, that is an annual deficit of $2.6 trillion.  The deficit this year is projected to be $1 trillion or so, which is more money than some people make in their entire lifetime, so imagine one 2.5 times larger.

Through some sort of magical incantation worthy of Houdini’s proctologist, money has been pulled out of somewhere (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs) and hasn’t created massive inflation.  Yet.  I guess that in Zimbabwe they managed to just print money like we’re doing now to get out of the problem.

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See, you too can be a trillionaire!

So, in the end, Miss Vargas was right.  Social Security was the start of a program that will do a great job of income redistribution, from a wealthy and prosperous society, to a society where everyone can be a trillionaire, and a good nickel cigar only costs a few hundred billion dollars.

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Thankfully Lincoln posed for this after getting back from Woodstock and before he retired to Gettysburg to make movies with George Lucas.

Black Holes, Money, Population, and 2050

“Using layman’s terms:  Use a retaining magnetic field to focus a narrow beam of gravitons.  These, in turn, fold space-time consistent with Weyl tensor dynamics until the space-time curvature becomes infinitely large, and you produce a singularity.” – Event Horizon

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I tried to explain the budget to my ex-wife, but she couldn’t grasp the gravity of the situation.

Right around the year 2002, I first heard of a geophysicist named Didier Sornette.  Sure, you say, with a name like that, he’s French, how smart could he be?  Well, let’s get this straight – I still blame the French for cigarettes, Leftism and the metric system, but Sornette is an original and first-rate thinker, even though the actual pronunciation of his name is probably “Dipstick Snort” because the French haven’t in the last 1600 years mastered spelling a word with any relationship to the way it is actually pronounced.  In addition to Sornette, the French gave us Sophie Marceau, so there’s something they did right.

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Even though Sophie Marceau played a villain, Bond© thought spending time with her was 00heaven.

Sornette is a geophysicist by degree.  He initially studied the physics of earthquakes.  Earthquakes, Sornette noted, don’t come about due to any single failure, but as a result of the microscope failure under pressure at LOTS of different places that at some point becomes critical.  The pressure builds up, and it’s not the first little crack in the rock, but rather the aggregate cracking that eventually releases the stress.  It does that all at once.

Sornette thought that he could use math to describe the behavior of rocks, and model it so he could understand earthquakes better.  He worked for twenty five years on doing this, and found that there was a mathematical “signal” was present before the earthquake occurred.  It wasn’t useful for predicting exactly when the earthquake would occur, but like everybody with a new tool, Sornette looked around and wondered where else it might be applicable.

Sornette looked at the financial system, specifically stock markets.  He noticed that stock market crashes looked a lot like earthquakes.  And, unlike earthquakes, financial crashes could devastate the world globally.  He switched his focus to that, using math to model the financial bubbles that led to the high values that then came crumbling down when the market finally crashed.

In 2001, he decided to take this modelling a step further.  What if, he asked (along with fellow researcher Anders Johansen) we try to model not only the financial system, but world population, too?

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Okey, I’m betting Anders Johansen-a duesn’t ictuoelly telk leeke-a zees. Prubebly. Bork Bork Bork!

The result was the paper Finite-time singularity in the dynamics of the world population, economic, and financial indices, or FEEnite-a-time-a singuolerity in zee-a dynemeecs ouff zee-a vurld pupuoletiun, icunumeec, und feenuonceel indeeces in Swedish.  That’s a really long title that could have been shortened to, Yo, something weird is coming, and I don’t mean your mother.  You can find a copy of the paper here (LINK).  It shows a May 29, 2018 date, but I don’t think there’s been any changes to it since its initial publication in late 2001.  I’ll warn you – there’s a wee bit of math involved.

The paper starts with the statement that for most of the known history of the human race, our growth rate hasn’t been exponential, it’s been far faster than that.  It took 1600 years to go from 300 million people in year 0 Anno Domini to 600 million.  To get to a billion total only took 204 years.  Double to two billion?  We did that in 1927.  Three billion in 1960, four billion in ’74, five billion in ’87, six billion in ’99, and seven billion in 2011.  Now as I write this in 2019?  7.7 billion people.  And only forty people are friends with you on Facebook®.

What allowed this population growth?  Knowledge.  The revolutions in agriculture (the first one, which I wrote about here:  Beer, Nuclear Bikinis, and Agriculture: What Made Us Who We Are), industrial, fertilizer, medical, and information have allowed the population growth to accelerate like it has.

Sornette and Johansen studied several data sets.  Population was one set, and another was the economic growth rate of the United States, as measured by the stock market.  Even though the Dow Jones Industrial Average© (DJIA) didn’t exist before Dow married Jones, several economists have created data on what the data might have looked like.  Is that a bit of a guess, like your mother’s weight since there aren’t scales that big?  Sure.  But, as we will see, it might be close enough.

Math is funny.  When you divide something by zero, you get infinity.  Several mathematical functions that describe things going to infinity do exist – we call those singularities.  The funny thing is that they appear to exist not only mathematically, but in real life as well.  They have real properties that we can predict, measure, and see.  One popular example of a singularity is the black hole.  Some scientist said, “Okay, gravity sucks, like your mom.  But what if something had so much gravity that it trapped even light, like your mom?”

That concept blew their minds, but it was there in the math in 1916 when Karl Schwarzschild solved Einstein’s equation and divided by zero.  A black hole is a singularity based around gravity – where gravity is so intense that we have no real understanding of what happens inside, like God divided by zero, liked what he saw, and said, “Yeah, this is the ultimate practical joke.”  But singularities aren’t limited to stuff that would only interest starship crewmembers.  Other singularities regularly occur in physical systems.  Earthquakes.

Stock market crashes.

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A scientific discussion of gravitation inside a black hole.

This wasn’t the first time someone calculated the date of a singularity based on population.  In 1960, the prediction was published in the journal Science that the population singularity would hit on (somewhat tongue and cheekily) Friday, November 13, 2026.  Didier and Johansen relooked at the data, and came up with an equation that they felt gave a better fit.

Their date for the singularity?  2052, +/- 10 years.

They then looked at the data (keep in mind, this was in 2001) and modeled the behavior of the DJIA©.  What did they find?  A singularity in 2053.

That was too close for coincidence.  Two different data sets show the same predicted end date?

Thankfully, Sornette and Johansen are wrong, right?  They certainly didn’t predict that the DJIA™ would be as high as 27,000 in 2019?

In fact, their prediction (in 2001) was that the Dow would hit 36,000-40,000 by 2020.  They did leave some weasel space, noting that, “. . . the extrapolation of this growth closer to the singularity becomes unreliable . . .”

It’s say that they were pretty close, and far closer than I was in the year 2001 when I would have predicted the aggregate stock value of the DJIA© in 2020 would be worth a less than a handful of ramen noodles and ten rounds of .22 ammo.  So they were far closer than I was.

One thing Sornette and Johansen noted was that the minor ups and downs would be of less consequence the closer we move to the singularity point.  What happens each week is less important than the overall trend, so the data errors associated with “creating” a Dow Jones™ index before there was one probably isn’t too much of an error.

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Here’s 100 years of stock market data, now with snarky comment. 

Another conclusion of the equations is that population, technology and wealth is intertwined.  The number of people that the world can hold is very much tied to technology.  When modelling prehistoric population, no fewer than three technological ages – have to be mathematically introduced:  hunting, followed by farming, followed by primitive technology are required to accurately model the actual population.

But when these intertwine, does the increased population lead to the technology, or do they feed on each other causing an explosion?

They feed on each other, causing an explosion in technology and population and wealth.  More people lead to more wealth.  More people leads to more technology to feed people which leads to even more people which produces more wealth which leads to . . . more people.  The end dates are similar because the functions of wealth and population are related.  You can’t have the super-exponential growth without the interactions.  Sornette and Johansen came up with approximately 2050 for the end date.  Ray Kurzweil (futurist) predicted the technological singularity would hit around 2045, which is pretty close.

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Bill Gates gave up lap dancing and stripping after pulling a hamstring at a bachelor party, and he had to settle for his second love – computers.

But what happens next?  What happens if and when the singularity hits?  The authors indicate we’re probably in it a transitional phase already – the population growth rate peaked in 1973, and so did the world per capita energy use.  Sornette and Johansen came up with some silly ideas of what’s next, but let’s be real:  no one can predict what happens after a singularity – dividing by zero changes every rule.

We have no idea what happens inside a black hole.

I know that many of you sense the same thing that I do – we are changing at a pace that is already fast but that seems to accelerate:  it’s faster every year.  This is the case, and I don’t anticipate that things will slow in the next decade or two.  Beyond that?  It’s anyone’s guess.

Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to Didier Sornette?  He runs a group called the Financial Crisis Observatory in Zurich, where they try to observe financial budget growth in real time.  It’s here (LINK) and worth a few minutes of review.

So, if they’re right, it’s the best time to be in stocks, at least until the singularity occurs, the population collapses and the robots decide that to get rid of their pets . . .

Dow chart from here:  (LINK)

China – What’s the deal?

“What does that mean?  ‘China is here.’  I don’t even know what the hell that means.” – Big Trouble in Little China

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Had enough Mongols?  This is how you avoid Mongols, unless the 9th Circuit says you have to let them in.

I’ve had my eye on China for quite a while.  It knows why.

Anyway, China has in the past 50 years transformed itself from an example of the nation your parents warned you about:  “See, eat your peas and study hard, you don’t want to be like China,” to a country competing for prime representation in the International House of Pancakes®.  Okay, I made that up.  I don’t even know if they have Frosted Flakes™ in China, let alone pancakes©.

For four thousand years, China looked inward.  Only conquered twice, by the Mongols and by the Manchu, the 20th Century was a succession of weak leaders until the communist takeover at the hands of Mao Zedong.  Mao seemed content to play with the Chinese people and the Chinese economy like a Doberman’s chew toy until his death in the 1970’s.

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AOC will never be a doctor – she’s committing political Mao-practice.

Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, looked around at the huge Doberman spit-covered collectivist mess left by communism, and decided that something had to change.  After visiting the United States, he decided that China needed way to get convenient chocolate milkshakes like that one Jimmy Carter got him at McDonalds®, and began reforming the economy based around market lines.  You know, capitalism.

Capitalism worked amazingly well at saving a communist economy.  Shocker!

The collective ingenuity of over a billion Chinese coupled with capitalist incentives and totalitarian controls has led to growth.  The economy of China in 2019 is 91 times larger than it was in 1978 when Deng’s reforms began.  Some before and after pictures become relevant at this point:

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Okay, I’m exaggerating.  But not by much.

What China has effectively done is make its citizens nearly 100 times richer since Star Wars® first came out.  Perhaps more impressive is the amount of expertise that has been imported to China.  By making first cheap junk in the 1980’s to radar detectors in the 1990’s to iPods® in the early 00’s to iPhones™ today, China has imported not only the technical know-how of cutting edge technology is design, it understands better than any other country in the world on how to build most things.

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See, I told you I wasn’t exaggerating much.  Two day shipping really changed their lives.

An engineer in California (who may or may not even be an American) designs the iPhone©.  In China, they figure out how to build it.  That know-how isn’t in a manual, it’s built up in thousands of mistakes that require solutions to produce a finished product.  All of those solutions are known by the workers and engineers in the factory, and used to make production lines that much faster.

In this way, China has traded lots of cell phones for zillions of dollars that we just printed up out of thin air, sure, but it’s also trained itself on how to be an industrial superpower.

Industrial.  But what about military?

No.  China has seen our military and has no ambition that it can in the near future compete with American military power.  Unlike the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the United States Congress, China has no desire to fight World War II again.  While the United States has fought in numerous conflicts in the last fifty years, China has fought in exactly one, an incursion into Vietnam back before Reagan was president.  The Chinese make the Italians look like Patton with Pizza.

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So, rumor is that they also have a tricycle attack brigade, but they were at nap time.

If I were Chinese President Xi Jinping, I would have no illusions about my military.  Even if it fielded better tanks and planes than the United States, it still would come up short because outside of games of Call of Duty®, the Chinese military has no experience.

Instead:  “China will use a host of methods, many of which lie out of the realm of conventional warfare. These methods include trade warfare, financial warfare, ecological warfare, psychological warfare, smuggling warfare, media warfare, drug warfare, network warfare, technological warfare, fabrication warfare, resources warfare, economic aid warfare, cultural warfare, and international law warfare…” (United States Army Special Operations Command, 2014)

In particular, China has focused on trade.  In the last five years, China has started an international cooperation scheme called the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).  This has led to (so far) agreements with over 68 countries.  The stated objective of BRI is that it is meant to produce closer ties and stronger trading arrangements between China and the rest of the world.

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See, need some place to keep my stuff – Mom’s basement is full.

BRI consists of at least a trillion dollars of planned Chinese spending, and by spending, I mean loans.  China will loan countries money to develop infrastructure – pipelines, roads, harbors, PEZ® mines, railroads, industrial parks, electric power grids, and airports to better move people and goods throughout the world.  Certainly China won’t take advantage of the loan conditions if a country has trouble repaying it?

Actually, so far not really.  In only one case has China seized assets, and the rest of them it has either renegotiated debt payments or forgiven them entirely.

So what is China doing?

It came to me one night while I was thinking about the blog and just drifting off to sleep.  Thinking about this like a banker looking to gain leverage wasn’t the right framework.  China isn’t building this trading network to compete with the United States.  China is building this framework for life without the United States.  BRI replaces our markets, and replaces what we’re shipping to them.  But there’s more.

When you look at what China has, it is people, industrial capacity, and ingenuity.  China needs raw materials.  It’s short on food.  It needs oil.  By making inroads into Africa, China has started new mines, run by Chinese administrators and Chinese miners.  China has built, using Chinese laborers and Chinese steel, new railroads in Kenya.

And all of this BRI stuff isn’t paid for in dollars.  China has seen that the United States has managed to pay for debt in dollars it printed.  If China can be the dominant country, it can pay for things in Kenya with Chinese money printed by China itself, rather than have to make iPhones® and send them to iNdiana© in exchange for dollars.

Perhaps it’s just the economy of the United States that China expects will be gone?

Beyond that, closer economic ties with a country that could dominate your economy certainly isn’t dangerous, is it?  They’d never use their influence to change your laws, or influence your movies, right?

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Set from the 2010 remake of Red Dawn before China demanded they not be the villain.   Hmmm.

Belt and Road graphic (pre-meme) By Owennson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=78386561