Category: TEOTWAWKI

Wherein I Use Greek Mythology To Show How Screwed We Are

“Would Homer cut away from Odysseus’s journey just as he was being enticed by the siren’s song?” – BoJack Horseman

My lack of knowledge of Greek mythology is often my Achilles’ Elbow.

We’ve reached the Scylla and Charybdis stage of our economy.

Scylla was, in Greek mythology, a six-headed monster that was probably less scary than the average half-dozen Congresscritters, and certainly less dangerous.

Charybdis was a whirlpool that sucked inside everything that got close to it three times a day, so it was pretty much exactly like Kamala Harris.

The idea is that if you’re between Scylla and Charybdis, life is on the edge because there are dangers on either side.  When Odysseus tried to sneak between the two, he lost six crewmembers, one to each head of Scylla.  Thankfully they didn’t go too close to Charybdis, since Kamala has a mean-looking canker sore, and some gifts last forever.

Trying to thread the fine line between Scylla and Charybdis:  that’s where our economy is now.

Could it be that the Odyssey is just a made-up excuse by a husband as to why he’s ten years late?

As inflation rages through the system, every minute that we have an interest rate well below the rate of inflation, inflation is being fed.  To quote Joe Biden from January 24, 2022, “It’s a great asset – more inflation.  What a stupid son of a bitch.”  You can tell he’s excited to Build Back Better!

Oddly, it’s not inflation in everything.  Some items are starting to deflate now.  Houses, for instance.  The price of a house is tied to the interest rate – the more interest wrapped into a monthly payment, the fewer the number of buyers that can afford or qualify for a loan.  And in Biden’s America® people have to qualify for more important things, like a Quarter Pounder™ or a tank of gas.

But back to home loans:  fewer people qualify?  Less demand.  Less demand?  Lower home prices.

When we moved to Modern Mayberry in the middle of the Great Recession, some houses had been on the market for longer than 350 days.  These were decent houses, but there just wasn’t any demand.  Recently, as people began to take my advice and flee the cities, houses disappeared off the market in days here in Modern Mayberry.  With all the city folk moving in, at least I know what a hipster weighs:  an Instagram®.

One hipster I knew poured water from an ice tray into his beverage.  He liked ice before it was cool.

Now?  Interest rates for mortgages are going up, so demand for houses will be going down.  Eventually, the market for houses will go back to where it was when I got here.  That’s okay, I never expected to walk away from Stately Wilder Mansion with a single dime of profit.  For me, a house is where I live, not an investment.

So, interest rates up, housing prices down.  Simple.

Also, interest rates up, stock prices down.  For the last decade, stocks have been just about the only game for people who were trying to keep up with inflation.  This was a continual pressure upwards on stocks.  Now as interest rates go up, there are other options.

Traditionally, there was (this was something I read in an article a long time ago) a formula showing the value of a stock in relation to the interest rate:  Maximum P/E=20-Prime Rate.  That meant, with an interest rate of 0%, a stock was at fair value with a Price to Earnings ratio of 20.  Likewise, if the interest rate was 10%, the fair market P/E would be about 10.

Obviously, it’s such a one-dimensional analysis that it was made back when “digital computing” meant counting on your fingers.  There’s no way I’d suggest anyone use it to pick stocks (nor would I suggest taking the advice of an Internet humorist on any investment advice no matter how witty, charming, and handsome he might be), but it does show how the relationship between interest rates and stock prices and earnings was thought about once upon a time.  But it summarizes the same idea – interest rates up, stocks down.

I bought some speakers.  At least that was a sound investment.

Heck, it even led me to a never-fail way to manipulate individual stocks:  if I buy a stock, it goes down.

There are other impacts, too.  For instance, it makes debt harder to pay back for people around the planet.  If Egypt owes money to ChaseAmericanFargo™ Bank and the interest rate is variable, that means that Egypt will have to start selling items to pay back New York, or London, or Beijing.  Heck, the British would already have the Pyramids, but they wouldn’t fit in the British Museum

More money to the banking centers?  Less money for chow for the Egyptians.  We saw this exact scenario play out in the Arab Spring in 2012.  Expensive stuff caused people to go hungry and then hungry people with no hope do what they always do when they can’t watch Netflix™ and buy Twinkies©.

They swap out the government.  The new boss looks a lot like the old boss in Egypt, and it’s exactly the same boss as it was in Syria.  Some things don’t change.  If it’s bad enough, it also craters the economies in South America and, even Canada might have its assets frozen.  Or, more frozen.

How did Kamala get her cold sores?  She dated Herpules.

But when the interest rates go up, it’s not just the government in Egypt that gets squeezed.  The current debt in the United States is $30.5 trillion.  The total US debt, including personal debt, student loans, credit cards, and I.O.U.s to me from that one guy that owes me $20 is about $91 trillion.  (All numbers from usdebtclock.org)

When the interest rates go up, the payments on interest go up.  That means less money available for everything else.  When last I looked, the mandatory payments the Federal government were as much as or more than the amount of money that they took in.  That means that printing more money is now the only way the system can work.  It’s like having a tobacco cessation class with a two-cigar minimum.

That leads to the difficult bit – the hall of mirrors.  If we don’t raise interest rates, and raise them quickly and raise them high enough, inflation will devastate the economy.  If we do raise them, interest payments will freeze the economy and dry up all the PEZ®, pantyhose, and elephant rides the government buys daily.  We are in a classic trap, but it is a trap entirely devised by the Fed® and the politicians working long-term problems on short-term incentives.

By attempting to push back the moment of financial reckoning by any means possible, we’ve created a failure that is much, much larger.  If we would have let financial companies fail in 2000 and 2008, and fixed the structural problems with Medicare, perhaps, just perhaps we wouldn’t be here today.

But we are.

How bad are things?

Again, people have been trying to gauge when things in the stock market are out of whack – Gregory Mannarino came up with a market risk index that he called the Mannarino Market Risk Index, which was modified by Nobody Special Finance into the Modified Mannarino Market Risk Index.  You can watch the video on what makes it up here (LINK).  It’s only twelve minutes, and it’s pretty simple.  The MMMRI is simple, but it’s still quite a bit more sophisticated than the 20=P/E-Interest rate formula from back in the Stone Age.  The summary is of selected past MMMRIs is:

  • Black Monday (1987),               MMMRI 234
  • Dotcom Bubble Pop (2000),   MMMRI 208
  • Great Recession (2008),           MMMRI 169

Right now?

You can find tracking information on MMMRI here (LINK) on Mannarino’s website.

Yup.  MMMRI is screaming loudly that the stock market is really, really messed up.  But you knew that.  Things are broken, and they’re breaking faster as things go downhill.  So, whatever you do, don’t buy canned goods and storage food and precious metals and PEZ® and ammo.  Nope.

I’m sure that the team of Biden and Harris along with Janet Yellen, Treasury Secretary, (who had no idea that inflation was even a problem) or Jennifer Granholm, Energy Secretary, (who said that high gas prices are “a very compelling case” to buy an electric car) will be here to help us charter a safe course between Scylla and Charybdis.

Oh, wait, Biden and Harris are Scylla and Charybdis.

The Good News Is The Same As The Bad News: It’s You

“Winners always want the ball. . . when the game is on the line.” – The Replacements

Floors take on a lot of responsibility. It’s like everything falls to them.

There’s bad news:

No one is coming to save you.

But there’s good news:

No one is coming to save you.

Who will save us?

You will.

I think many people have this weird idea that other people are the answer. The last first aid course that I took before moving to Alaska ended up every scenario with, “and then you call 911.” To be fair, that’s a great idea in most places. I mean, unless you’re in a school.

The reason the murder rate has gone down over the last few decades isn’t because the idiots in Chicago have developed some sort of restraint in shooting each other. Nope. The medical folks are faster at getting those that were shot, and the docs are better at saving them.

The woman who helped The Mrs. deliver Pugsley quit. I guess she was having a midwife crisis.

But then I took a first aid class in Alaska.

Wow. Night and day. The content was much, much richer. The trainers went into much greater detail, and told us, “You’re not trained to do this. But if help isn’t coming, it might save a life.” The translation was simple. Phone coverage in Alaska sucks.

How bad was it? When we moved there, you couldn’t get a phone line, even if there was copper to your house. And cell service? The infrastructure consisted of what two bright schizophrenics that left the mainland United States could cobble together with the parts of a downed DC-3.

Everyone else was in the same boat. The message was clear.

“You’d better pay attention.”

The quiet part they didn’t say in class was: “because no one is coming to save you.”

When I woke up in the hospital, I told the doctor I couldn’t feel my legs. “That’s because we amputated your arms, maybe?”

When I ended up having to have my entire fingernail removed and the part under the nail stitched up because there was were two 55 gallon drums of salmon oil (I’m not making ANY of this up) on my property that I tried to open and the wedge slipped and pulled most of the nail off anyway, the doctor said, “Okay, this is going to hurt like hell for a few days. I’m going to prescribe you some (powerful painkiller). You probably won’t use them. Toss them in your backpack, so if you’re out moose hunting and break your leg, you might be able to limp out.”

Think that a doctor would say that in Nebraska?

He didn’t say the quiet part: “because no one is coming to save you.”

I prefer it that way. Really. Sure, I like Internet and electricity and cold beer and watching Trailer Park Boys. But I know the true answer.

When it goes bad?

No one is coming to save me.

Three friends were in the forest – the first said, “These are moose tracks.” The second said, “No, those are bear tracks.” The third was run over by a train.

That might sound depressing to some people, but not to me. I like me. And, I like my chances. To be fair, the person in this world I trust most in the world . . . is me. The next one is The Mrs. Third in line?

Maybe Sturm, Ruger, and Company? Yeah, they’ve always been straight shooters to me.

One of the lessons that I’ve walked away with in the last 20 years of my life is that:

  • the police,
  • the Constitution,
  • the courts,
  • the military,
  • congress,
  • and anyone sitting in the office of president

is not going to save me.

And they’re not coming to save you, either.

In one sense, it’s scary. I think that many people take the idea that someone, somewhere, is responsible for them. That’s simply not true for anyone over the age of, say, 14.

We are not passive actors in our lives. That idea is corrosive. We are in control.

That’s from an Edgar Allen Poem.

I think a lot of the idea that other people are responsible for us comes from the anonymity of large city life. To me, it’s odd – the more of us around, the less responsibility we feel, and the more we want to blame other people. Why? With so many people around, it brings anonymity. Anonymity makes it easy to avoid responsibility.

In Modern Mayberry? We know each other. We talk to each other. We are, in the end, responsible. I go to dinner, and the owner of the restaurant greets me, and (from time to time) brings a bottle by the table and pours each of us a shot.

Why?

Our lives are not anonymous. It’s a community. Are we responsible for ourselves? Certainly. But in a small town, we understand that we help each other. And he can go home and tell his wife he wasn’t really drinking on the job.

“Tequila or vodka?” That’s how I’d start a marriage counseling session.

Our nation is fundamentally broken. I’d say that someone in New York City doesn’t care about Modern Mayberry, sitting here in flyover country. But they do. Most of them can’t even understand it, but what they do understand they despise.

That’s okay. I’m not responsible for them. And I certainly don’t want them to be responsible for me.

Only you can save you. Only you can save your family. And that’s still the good news: “Winners always want the ball . . . when the game is on the line.”

The people in Washington D.C.? They won’t save us.

You will.

And that’s the good news. Your life. Your future. Your family. Your country. They’re in your hands.

Would you change that for anything?

I wouldn’t. I like it when the ball is in my hands.

I wouldn’t change a thing.

Our Economy: At The Jagged Edge

“Because of the metric system?” – Pulp Fiction

I saw a mountain covered in cows.  “Huh, that must be Mt. Heiferest.”

Systems work within certain limits.  Let’s take . . . the Earth.  The Earth is absolutely filled with life.  It’s nearly everywhere, and in abundance, unless a particular bit of life has secrets about the Clintons.  Let’s just look at a single variable of the system that supports life:  temperature.

All things being equal, if the Earth was as hot as Venus is, the zone where life could exist (if it was based on the need for water, of course) would be pretty small.  Likewise, Mars would have a smaller envelope – it’s too cold – and water would be frozen most of the time.  Sure, life is technically possible in both locations, but it will never thrive like it has for a huge chunk of the Earth’s history.

And that’s just one variable impacting a complex system.

There are many ways to configure an economy.  Most of the ones that work really well are decentralized for most things.  No one tells a farmer in Nebraska what or when to plant.  The farmer chooses, based on what he thinks he can sell.  No one tells PEZ® to make a Yosemite Sam™ PEZ© dispenser.  But why wouldn’t they make a Yosemite Sam® PEZ® dispenser?  Duh.

A day on Venus lasts 5,832.6 hours, so it’s just like a Monday on Earth with Biden in the White House.

Most of the time, this system is pretty closely coupled.  The world doesn’t have years of surplus of, say, food just sitting around – with billions of people, I know someone would eat the Ding Dongs® and Pop Tarts™ first and then there wouldn’t be any for me.  I mean, it certainly looks like Nic Cage could make an infinite amount of movies since the word, “no” isn’t in his vocabulary, but even he has limits to his Nic Cage-ness.

I think we’re close to the limits of the system that’s given us prosperity as we know it.  Yup, that’s a sobering thought.  Here are a few data points:

This one hit me fairly hard (from Vox Day’s place – there’s more at the LINK):

I own a small trucking company, and this is what the fuel crisis is doing to our country… Today I filled up my truck to deliver products that help keep our country fed. When I filled up my truck, it cost me $1,149.50. This is ONE truck, for ONE day of fuel. I own three. So for one day of operation, it’s costing me $3,448.50. (Yes, we use a full tank of fuel every single day, sometimes more than 1 tank per day).

My trucks generally run 5-6 days a week, so we’ll just estimate on the low side and say five. That’s $17,242.50. Last week was over $20k for ONE week, that I have to pay out of my pocket to try and keep not only my children fed, but those of my employees, and our country.

Mark my words, we are on a downhill slide to the worst recession our country has ever seen. Trucking companies are going under left and right. (Literally hundreds weekly.) If you’re not aware, what you’re wearing, what you’re eating, what you’re living in, what you’re driving, what you’re reading this on, was delivered by a truck.

That’s sobering.  All the beer comes on trucks, so it could be literally sobering.

We might need USB if the USA fails.

What else have we seen?

  • Baby Formula Shortages
  • Rising Violence, Well, Everywhere
  • Short Tempers
  • Shortages of Basic Repair Parts For Vehicles

These have some consequences.  Big ones.

People are pulling back on frills, in a hurry.  A very good restaurant in Modern Mayberry just shut down.  Forever.  The owners threw in the towel.  Rising prices led to fewer customers . . . customers feeling pinched can always cook their own food at home as a quick way to save a few bucks.  I opened my browser (which thinks I live hundreds of miles away from Modern Mayberry) and saw the same exact story a few hundred miles away on the same day our local hangout closed – another, distant, beloved local restaurant shutting down in a town I’ve never been to.

The Mrs. has a phobia so she stacks the plates in the cabinet by the year we bought them.  It’s a very rare dish order.

Why are dining customers feeling the pinch?  Let’s just talk a single variable:  fuel.  By my calculations, the rising cost of fuel is draining $2.3 billion dollars a day, every day from the economy.  That’s not quite a trillion dollars a year, but fuel is priced into everything.  Divide the rough annual cost of just the increase and I came up with almost $2,800.  Per person.  Multiplied by a family of four, and that’s about $11,000 a year per family.  If the average family makes $69,000 a year, just the increase in fuel prices is about 16% of their annual income.  Sure, lots of that isn’t direct to the family, but it gets priced into every single thing they buy.

That’s stark, especially because it’s only a single variable.  Increased interest rates will be hitting soon, along with all of the financial pressures that will bring.  And, of course, there will be more things as this crisis cascades.

I took a college elective on pollen creation.  I got a B.

Here’s another data point.  I pulled into McDonald’s® and asked for a McSausage McMuffin with McEgg®.  Don’t judge me!  They’re tasty!

“Sorry, we’re all out.  We do have sausage biscuits left.”

“Okay.  I’ll take one.”  Not my favorite, but, whatever.

“Okay, that’ll be $6.50.”  It was just as they put up their lunch menu, so I hadn’t seen the price.

Six fifty?  For a sausage patty, some not great scrambled eggs, a slice of cheese, and a biscuit?  And it wasn’t what I wanted in the first place?

I noped out of that.  First time I’ve canceled a drive-through order that I can recall, but I didn’t need the sandwich $6.50 worth.  I drove out of the line and off on my way.  Good thing it wasn’t an Amish McDonald’s® – I hear they don’t have outlets.

I hate to think about what happens when Joe runs out of his “good” ideas.

Our economic systems are certainly out of balance.  Badly.  We’re at the edge of a cliff, and I have the feeling that things will soon be changing, and quickly.  Be prepared for a change in temperature.

A.I. – The Most Dangerous Game

“Nuke it from orbit, that’s the only way to be sure.” – Aliens

When I go out to eat I always try to tip my waiter.  That’s how I know that they have terrible balance when they are carrying one of those big round trays.

There was quite a bit of upset from the “I love science” side of the Left recently.  What triggered them this time?

(Spins Wheel of Leftist Outrage)

Computers.

How did the toaster make them mad?

An Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) computing system designed to review x-rays was able to make correlations because, well, that’s what they programmed it to do.  The correlations allowed the A.I. to be able to predict the self-reported race of the individual based solely on the x-rays with a 90% accuracy.  You can look it up.

One writer actually used the phrase, “can perpetuate racial bias in health care” since the bias of the writer was that race is a social construct that had nothing to do with genetics and tens of thousands of years of separate development.  Huh.  Nope, none of that matters.  A slogan written by a hippy is obviously more important.

What bothered the writers that I read is that they had no idea how the A.I. could do it.  The researchers purposely degraded the resolution on the x-rays, and the A.I. could still make the prediction accurately.

This isn’t where it ends.

My Tesla’s A.I. wouldn’t let me in the car.  It said, “upgrading driver”.

I wrote several years ago about an A.I. that could predict life or death based on an EKG (elektrokardiographie if you’re planning on invading Poland), or ECG – electrocardiogram. Some of the ECGs looked absolutely fine to human doctors they detected no abnormality, yet the A.I. was able to see something that accurately allowed it to predict the death of the patient.  This was even when the actual doctors made of meat couldn’t see anything wrong with the ECG.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. did it.

The game “Go” – originated in China almost 2,500 years ago, when your mom was in high school.  Google©’s AlphaGo Zero learned how to play Go by . . . playing itself.  It was programmed with the rules and played games against itself for the first few days.  After that?

It became unstoppable.  It crushed an earlier version of itself in 100 straight matches. Then, when pitted against a human master, probably the best Go player on Earth?  It played a game that is described as “alien” or “from the future.”  The very best human Go players cannot even understand what AlphaGo Zero is even doing or why it makes the moves it does – it’s that far advanced over us.

And, to my knowledge, they still don’t know how the A.I. does it.

What happens when you win this game?  The answer might shock you!

There are more examples, but I think I’ve proven my point.  A.I. exists.  A.I. is real.  Is it right now equivalent to a general human intelligence?  Nope.  And it may never be exactly that, since it may never be exactly like us.

I’m fairly certain that most A.I. researchers have seen The Terminator, yet they keep advancing A.I.  Why?  I mean, besides that their name isn’t Sarah Connor?

The stakes are huge.  What if you had an A.I. that could predict stock market behavior, even an hour in advance with 95% accuracy?  This sort of prophet machine would become a profit machine.  It would be worth billions.  And what if you had an A.I. that could make dank memes as well as I do?

If these were sold on an infomercial you know they’d call it Screw It!

I think that one of the things that is not widely known is how very different that A.I. might be.  Human emotions serve a purpose to allow society to function.  What would A.I. value?

  • Would it have sentimentality or would it judge people based entirely on societal utility?
  • Would it make the judgment that entire categories of human society need not exist?
  • Would it have “voted” for Joe Biden, too?

Yeah, and weirdly as that potentially scary scenario of a super-smart intelligence that had no particular connection to the goals of humanity might be, that’s just the starter.  Artificial Intelligence might also be the most dangerous trigger for an external existential threat to humanity.

What?

Well, assuming that time travel and the ability to cause a generalized cascading decay to the zero energy state (zero point energy) aren’t possible, the most dangerous thing that humanity could unleash on the planet is A.I.  And, unlike time travel or a sober member of the Pelosi family, from everything I’ve seen, A.I. certainly is possible.

Lenin loved Hip Hop.  Favorite artist?  M.C. Hammer and Sickle.

While travel for humanity throughout the galaxy is a really, really hard problem due to time and energy, travel through the galaxy for an A.I. is easier.  Don’t want to spend 25,000 years traveling to the next star system?  Easy.  Take the redeye and sleep on the way.

No habitable planets there in the star system?  No problem.  An A.I. doesn’t need oxygen and beaches and water.  It can land on an asteroid and make copies of yourself.  While the A.I. is replicating faster than a Kardashian that just let out its mating call (“I’m soooo drunk!”) it can 3-d print and then shoot copies of itself to the next five-star systems nearby.

And repeat.

Depending on the method used, essentially every star in the galaxy could be visited by an A.I. probe in a fairly quick timeframe.  How quick?  500,000 years to 10,000,000 years, or roughly how old George Soros is.  That’s quick, and essentially meaningless to a toaster or a George Foreman Grill®.  And if I were an advanced alien civilization, that’s the thing I would be scared of – not a grill, but an advanced, very alien intelligence with unknown motives showing up in my solar system.

What’s the toughest thing about being vegan?  Apparently, keeping it to yourself.

So, using the same principle, I could send my own (smart, but not A.I.) probes to hang out in nearly every solar system – waiting.  If those probes saw signs of a possible A.I.?  What would I program them to do?

Yup.  You guessed it.

Nuke the civilization back to the Stone Age.  It’s the only way to be sure.

So, as we worry about the problems in our civilization, remember – it could always be worse.  We know that Kamala doesn’t have any intelligence – artificial or otherwise, so the alien probe will certainly leave her alone.

Wherein I Discuss Home Mechanical Systems, The Economy, Otters Running A Nuclear Plant, and Pelosi Alcohol Consumption

“Iced tea. . . air conditioning . . . water.” – Stargate SG-1

I went to an air conditioning conference once.  It was pretty cool.

Let’s begin our tour of the economics world with the lowly thermostat.  When The Mrs. and I were first married, The Mrs. would turn the thermostat on our air conditioner way down in the summer, say, to 62°F (45km).  This led to the house gradually beginning to cool down, but the air conditioner would labor on like a Billy Barty attempting to oil a “modern” Sports Illustrated, um, model with a stepladder and a 55 gallon bucket.

This electrical effort by our air conditioner would continue until the outside of the house would resemble Joe Biden after he’s seen his latest approval ratings:  a cold sweat on the exterior of the house as the moisture outside condensed on the meat-locker temperature windows.

I asked The Mrs., “Why do you turn it down so low?”

“So it gets colder, faster.”

The Mrs. says I’m an absolute 10 – on the Kelvin scale.

Now, on the surface, that sort of logic makes sense.  If I spin the dial on the stove farther, it heats up my Dinty Moore Beef Stew® and Orange Jell-O© mix faster (goes great with corn and doughnuts).  Twisting the dial puts more energy onto the stovetop.  But (at least in every house I’ve lived at) the air conditioning doesn’t work like that – at all.

The air conditioner at our house is either on or it’s off.  There is no “kinda on” or “working as hard as a Supreme Court Clerk deleting his phone texts” setting.  Nope.

On.

Off.

Two choices.  So, if you want it to be 68°F, and you put it to 68°F it will get to 68°F exactly as fast as if you put it down to 40°F.  But not everything works that way, and The Mrs. can certainly be forgiven for not knowing that when we met.  Plus, in our case, the air conditioner dries the air, so when I woke up in our 40°F house in the summertime, the air was making fun of Hillary Clinton since it was as dry as Norm Macdonald’s wit.

I hear that when Norm got to Heaven, St. Peter told him, “Norm, you have to have an eye test.  Cover one eye.”  Norm covers one eye and reads the chart:  “E-I-E-I . . . Oh, come on!  I wasn’t that old!”

The economy is certainly more complicated than a household HVAC unit, but I’m not sure the incompetent participation trophy award winners at the White House have any sort of clue.  At all.  They’re like putting playful river otters in charge of running a nuclear reactor.  Sure, it’s all fun and games watching them be all nimbly-pimbly with the control rods.  But sooner or later (mainly sooner) the control rods will be pulled and the uranium will eventually melt into a radioactive mess that’s slightly more destructive than the Amber Heard v. Johnny Depp trial after the core melts down.

I believe this is actually from the trial –  Lawyer:  “Did you see what happened after you left?”  Depp:  “I wasn’t there after I left.”

The point is that our economy is complicated, and we’re dealing with a current Resident of the Oval Office that would find running a YouTube® video complicated.  “What do you mean, I press the button and the sheep start to talk?  How does that happen?  Who puts them in there?”

It would be hilarious if we weren’t actually living through this, like when Caligula named his horse a Senator of Rome.  My sides are still in stitches about that one!  But when it’s us, it’s scary.  I mean, Kamala’s not exactly a horse, but, still, the analogy holds, even in this case if it rhymes.

The air conditioner analogy (as a very simple one) actually does have some meaning in this case.  When an economy is stalled, there is a case (not the best one, but at least a case) for using money to restart it.  Sure, it’s dangerous.  And I can make the argument that we’ve done it so many times that it’s really messed up the entire system.

I hear she’s auditioned to be a Batman® villain – The Giggler™.

But after the system is going, by continually forcing more money into the system, well, as Joe said, “I did that.”

If that were the only issue, it might be solvable.  It’s just one variable.  Have Kamala and AOC eat all the spare money and then it might be as okay as Buddy Holly in a parachute.  Might.

Joe, however, has other ideas.  When you put sanctions on a nation, the idea is to hurt that nation.  Really, that was their plan.  But the sanctions against Russia (along with the war, which I also blame Biden for – he could have stopped it with ONE PHONE CALL) have resulted in soaring fertilizer and food prices.  That’s bad enough, but it has also popped fuel prices to record highs – The Mrs. wanted to give me something rare and valuable for Father’s Day, so I just asked for five gallons of gasoline.

Fuel impacts everything.

Roses are red, violets are blue, Janet Yellen doesn’t care about you.

The combination of these sanctions and war have effects that haven’t been felt yet – not remotely.  An example:  a farmer normally fertilizes his alfalfa to increase yield.  Not this year – the cost increase for fertilizer far outstrips what he expects to make in revenue.  So, he deals with the “natural” yields.  Due to high diesel costs, he also gets less money after the cost for harvesting is deducted.

What eats alfalfa?

Well, for one, cattle.  So, less alfalfa, more expensive food for cattle.  More expensive food for cattle?  Well, if the rancher can’t make a profit, he’ll sell the herd.  Those aren’t magic, and cattle don’t regenerate immediately like Wolverine®, so if you think we have high beef prices now . . . . just wait.

That’s the second idea:  every action has a reaction.  Some are immediate, like lower amounts of oil leading to higher prices.  Others are longer-term.  There’s a delay between taking the action and the result.

Going back to houses, this is like water hammer.  That’s what happens when a valve closes too fast in a poorly designed plumbing system.  The closing of the valve sends a pressure wave back and forth through the system, rattling the pipes as the pressure goes (at the speed of sound!) through the piping system.  If you’ve ever lived in a house with water hammer, you know the sound.  It’s loud.

But a simple act, closing a valve, can send waves of pressure moving back and forth through the system.

If you find a bomb that explodes when it’s stepped on, let me know.  It’s mine.

We haven’t seen the end of those pressure waves from the magical sanctions that were supposed to have weakened the Russians but have instead raised the value of the ruble and thrown the food and fuel systems of the world into turmoil.  Again, my analogy of otters running a nuclear reactor doesn’t appear to be far off as these secondary impacts reverberate through the system.

Eventually, these systems come back into equilibrium.  However, unlike the consequences of a 40°F house, in this case we end up with the possibility of an economy more wrecked than the Pelosi family after about 11 AM.

As Nancy would say, “Cheers!”

When Will The Bubble End? When We Give Up.

“Oooh! Ahhh! That’s how it always starts. Then later there’s running and screaming.” – Lost World:  Jurassic Park

What do you call a swimsuit a girl wears to an animal park?  A Zookini.

One time, Pa Wilder told me he had been interested in buying Sears® stock in the early 1980s.  In addition to growing, it also paid a nice dividend.  He’d calculated that the dividend from the stock would have paid for the stock, and he could have sold it in the 1990s and been dollars ahead.  He didn’t.  Ma Wilder flatly refused.  She didn’t like stocks during the day, and I know she would have hated bitcoin in the evening.  I’m sure it would have been her crypto-night.

Ma’s philosophy was that hope isn’t your friend when it comes to most things in life.  And especially the stock market.  The stock market is really built on hope.  Many stocks have projected growth “priced-in”.  This means that they sometimes sell for many times their projected earnings.

Since 2008, the Federal Reserve® and the Treasury have done absolutely everything that they can to keep the prices of stocks up.  The biggest thing they did was to cut interest rates to zero, on everything but dirt.  On dirt, the Fed™ charges high-interest rates – I guess you could call them loam sharks.

In one sense, interest rates serve as an alternative to buying stocks.  If I can park my money in Treasury bonds and make a few percent (essentially keeping up with inflation) then that’s a stable investment.  Horses hate that as well – they often can’t invest because they don’t have a stable income.

I named my horse Mayo.  Sometimes, Mayo neighs.

But when the interest rate is zero, the government is printing cash as fast as it can, investments are pushed toward stocks, and more and more cash piles in.

This makes the investments silly, as more and more cash chases revenues.  In a world filled with eternal hyper-growth, this works.  But that world doesn’t exist, so essentially the stock market becomes a Ponzi scheme or a cargo cult of prosperity.

It’s good if you get out on time.  You get the upside of growth.  You can get dollars out of the market that you can buy things with.  Like me, I blew all my stock market gains on a limo without a driver.  Spent is all and nothing to chauffeur it.

But eventually?  The market falls.

Sorry if that joke didn’t land well.

Normally, that’s healthy.  Falling markets weed out weak and bad companies.  Falling markets are actually healthy since they clear out the junk.  On top of that, CEOs will never be worthless, since there is a pretty healthy market for slightly used internal organs.

We live in a world, however, where the markets have been aggressively managed.  The idea of a recession is scarier to a politician in office than almost anything.  People without jobs look for someone to blame, and politicians will do anything to avoid blame.  Heck, Joe Biden would do whatever he could to set Hunter up for life, that is if Joe was ever tried for murder.

The result is that the economic policy is aggressively tied to growth, regardless of the consequences.  It’s like trying to keep a party going long after everyone should have gone home.  The best way to do that?  Switch from beer to wine.  When people start to lag?  Swap out to vodka.  Then, for a final shot?  Pure grain alcohol.  Sure, that sounds like Nancy Pelosi’s breakfast routine, but when you’re trying to run an economy like Pelosi’s daily frat party, eventually it has to stop.

And the longer you’ve been drinking?  The worse the inevitable hangover.

Did you know Helen Keller had a cat?  Neither did she.

That’s where we are.  The booze has been pulled away from the table.  At some point, I’m certain, that the Fed® will run out of tricks to keep the party going – even they have a limited supply of cocaine, especially since Johnny Depp found the spare key they keep under the mat.

I’ve been wrong before.  Perhaps the party isn’t over at this point.  Perhaps there’s some adrenaline that they can inject in the eye socket of the economy to keep it dancing a few more years.  Biden would love to kick the can down the road and have it keep going until at least 2024.  I mean, he’d love that if he knew what day of the week it was.

But every party has an ending.  And as long as this one has been going, it will be bad.

We never really paid for the party in 2008.  Sure, the Great Recession was bad, but the housing bubble never really cleared.  How can I tell?  It happened again.

Right now the average rent in the country (I read in some disreputable source) is $1,800 a month.  I’d say housing prices were so high that NASA put them there, but NASA can’t put anything nearly that high.  If people didn’t learn the housing bubble lesson, the housing bubble never really popped.

I hear NASA wants the next person on the Moon to be a woman – so dinner will be ready when the men get back there.

The housing bubble pops when people start buying houses again – not as investments, but as places to live.  The stock market bubble pops the same way – when most people don’t want to buy stocks.

And from May, 2022, there’s a lot of pain left before that happens.  The way the stock bubble ends is with utter capitulation, with people being so disgusted that they ever thought that stocks were the road to riches.

Only when people stop thinking that houses and stocks are magic money machines, will it be over.

The reason Ma Wilder wouldn’t let Pa buy the Sears© stock is that she had seen the aftermath of the Great Depression, and had seen stock speculation ruin the lives of many, many people.

When we get there, we’ll know it’s over.  Will it be this year?  In five years?  In ten?

Being a waiter might not be a glamorous job, but at least it puts food on the table.

I don’t know.  But I feel the combination of debt, inflation, and the generally fragmented nature of society will bring crisis.  The good news?

It’s still a beautiful night, and I think someone left a beer in the cooler.

The Funniest Post About Jevons’ Paradox You’ll Ever Read.

“But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless:  it squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely, that’s about it. Tell me, though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” – Planet of the Apes

I heard she prefers to be called “aoc” because she doesn’t like capitalism.

In 1865, when Joe Biden was barely sniffing at his first hair, English economist William Jevons noticed something:  that Biden’s behavior was really inappropriate.  Besides that, Jevons also noticed that innovations that made coal more efficient to use led not to lower uses of coal, but to the use of more coal.  This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.

When you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense.  If electricity cost 10 times as much as it does today, we’d use less of it, and The Mrs. would probably (reluctantly) turn the air conditioning up from 62°F to 64°F (23 to 52 megaparsecs/joule-furlong) in summer.  To make it clear:  The Mrs. likes it colder in the house than a college faculty lounge when someone mentions personal responsibility.

The more expensive or more inefficient something is, the less it is used, which probably explains why they keep Kamala Harris in a Tupperware® container when they’re not trotting her out to somehow make even less sense than Hunter Biden after a three-week coke, hooker, and greasy cheeseburger binge.

That’s weird, because I was always under the impression Kamala was the cheap resource.  Who knew?

Hunter Biden on drugs:  “Cocaine use?  I have to draw a line somewhere.”

I was conversing back and forth about various and sundry things with Eaton Rapids Joe (you can find him HERE) on email since he decided to experiment on the tensile strength of his bones (they rarely break in compression) in a kinetic environment and is as mobile as a Ford Pinto™.  That made him bored enough to drop yours truly a line.  As the conversation progressed, I thought of good old Jevons.

The truth is that we swim in a pool of Jevons.  You might want to soap up when you get out.  Seriously, though, we normally adapt our work to use cheap (the non-Kamala kind of cheap) resources.

Here’s an example:  back when I went to college, computing processor and memory time was expensive.  The CPU was the pivot point.  In my programming class, students were actually given an account that charged them per Pelosi-second of processing time.

Last night Pelosi was so drunk she took the train home, which was weird, because it was the first time she ever drove a train.

A Pelosi-second is the amount of time required for Nancy’s liver to absorb a bottle of vodka given to her by a Ukrainian lobbyist, so it’s pretty fast.  Just like in Joe Biden’s brain, memory was rare and expensive, too.  But when the cost of memory went down, we ended up using more of it.

Nowadays, because of Jevons’ Paradox, we find that computing processor power and memory are cheap.  There are two pictures, three Polaroids® and six daguerreotypes of me growing up.  I have more pictures of Pugsley’s first birthday cake.

One result of this is that computer code is no longer (really) optimized.  Because CPU and memory is cheap, industry has decided that they can be sloppy programmers.  If we have overflow in the 32GB of RAM, well, we can reboot once a month.  Unless you’re in a Boeing®.  Oops.

Sorry if those jokes were boeing.

That’s computer stuff.  What other things have Jevons’ Paradox impacted?

Energy.

Food.

Money.

“Holy cow, John Wilder,” you’re saying, “that’s nearly as important as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial!”  Let’s start with . . .

Energy.

Yup.  And in energy, especially, the Paradox has been our friend.  What energy does is, essentially, provide us with amazing amounts of prosperity.  It moves important stuff like fidget spinners from China to Stately Wilder Mansion for pennies.  It moves less important stuff like life-saving medicine and PEZ® for unimaginably small amounts of cash.

Ubiquitous energy has made the world small.  It has made huge efforts, like moving Bill Gates’ ego from place to place, inexpensive.  But as we see Russian energy cut off, and Biden doing his best to make the United States energy inefficient, perhaps so the only source of energy would be AOC’s thighs rubbing together.

Is the Hooters® home delivery service called Knockers™?

Regardless, we face a future where all the inefficiency that we’ve allowed into the system due to cheap energy will have to unwind.

Next on the tour is . . .

Food.

In my early life, food has always been worth a commercial or two showing starving kids covered in flies from some hellhole where they use sharp sticks for money as well as kitchen appliances.  I think it was Baltimore.  Regardless, in the last decade, world hunger was solved.  We had enough food so we could pave roads with Pizza Rolls® and stripe them with Hidden Valley Ranch™ dressing.

Yup.  Totally solved.  More than enough calories for everyone on the planet to use Oreos™ for deodorant and bathe in Coca-Cola©.  Sure, sometimes people starved, but not very many, and mainly in communist hellholes where the local warlord still hasn’t gotten over his devotion to U2® and Bono comes by to make public appearances to show how much he cares.  Or Baltimore.

Were people hungry?

Certainly, but they were generally fat while they were hungry.  But the problem was solved.

Broccoli is a great thing to eat when you’re hungry and want to stay hungry.

In a world where Ukraine and Russia aren’t exporting grain and fertilizer, however, this changes.  Sure, in the United States we can probably count on food for everyone, just expensive food.  But that world hunger thing?  Yeah, it’s back in play.

What’s left?

Money.

Huh?  I thought we were awash in money, so much so that gasoline was more expensive than supporting the Ukraine for an afternoon?  Well, no.  Money is the one thing that is getting more expensive.

The reason is simple – we’ve had nearly zero percent interest since 2008.  The Fed® has been shoving it down the throat of banks.  Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have been printing it as fast as they can, since it didn’t seem to matter.

They also make cameras, the Go-Provolone®.

Until it did.  And now interest rates are higher.  But who needs money?  The same people paying record-high prices to try to extract Energy.  The same people who need to borrow cash to fertilize fields and plant seeds and harvest them.

Yup.  Expensive money means less energy and less food.

Oops.

Well, there must be a bright side?

Yes, thankfully there is.

Faculty lounges all over the continent will heat on up.  And maybe personal responsibility will make a reappearance.  Or maybe AOC will see her shadow, but that’s scary.

That means six more weeks of communism.

Joe Biden: Tasting Your Frustration Edition

“I can taste all the flavors from the past sixty years. I can taste the Korean War.” – Bob’s Burgers

I have the memory of an elephant.  I recall seeing one at a zoo once.

Yesterday, thankfully, Resident Joe Biden indicated he was really in tune with modern Americans.  During a press conference, Joe stated, “I understand the frustration.  I can taste it.”

Taste it.  Yes.  Normally, I goof on Joe about being a bit addled, but here he’s nosing in on my gig.  “I can taste it.”

I wonder, what exactly frustration tastes like?  Is it like the dinner I made last month when Pugsley asked, “Was it supposed to taste like this?”

I wonder if, to Joe, our frustration tastes like something exceptionally expensive.  A fine Bordeaux or, say, gasoline?

Thankfully, Joe is willing to devote all of his senses to solving our problems.  I wonder if Biden smells our bank accounts?  Probably not, though I heard that Joe took an interest that the supply chain issues have made stores run out of Pantene® – Joe said he’d personally sniff out the situation.

What’s the difference between The Mrs. and I?  When she says “sniff this” it’s usually pleasant.

Thankfully, in the very same press conference, Biden also said, “. . . inflation is our strength . . .”  Yes.  He said that.  Pretty quickly, Nina Jankowicz (the Jerry Springer of government officials, except Jerry would kill for her jawline) got up and echoed that thought:  “Inflation is our strength, and war in Ukraine is peace.”

Okay, I’m making fun of these people, but in truth, they aren’t serious people.  They’re an administration that might actually think that Robert Downey, Jr., is really Iron Man® and really might come and save them after he stops the Russians in Kiev.  And that’s me being charitable in my assessment.

When it comes to government, one of the Leftist talking points was that, with Biden in the White House, we’d have the “adults back in charge”.  In this case that’s an apt description, but only if the adults in question are a collection of diversity hires unable to get a job where an IQ greater than room temperature (Fahrenheit, not the meter thing).  Oh, and they are in favor of The Current Thing, whatever it is.

Pictured:  White House security badge.

Rachel (formerly Richard) Levine dresses and calls xirself a woman.  Xir also dresses like and calls xirself an Admiral.

As the assistant secretary for health, Levine told NPR that “there is no argument among medical professionals — pediatricians, pediatric endocrinologists, adolescent medicine physicians, adolescent psychiatrists, psychologists, et cetera, about the value and importance of gender-affirming care.”  It’s no wonder that Biden appointed a Supreme Court Justice that said she couldn’t define what a woman is.  How ever did she decide what to put on her driver’s license?

So, that leads me to several options when it comes to the economy.  The first idea is that we have left the equivalent of a group of dim-witted glue-eating children in a room filled with razorblades, poison ivy, cyanide, and whatever hellish creature that Australia might produce that I haven’t had a nightmare about yet.  Carnivorous, poisonous koala bears that fly and have scorpion tails, perhaps?

Why did the koala drop out of the tree?  It was dead.

Regardless, these idiots were saved from being Marxist perma-baristas by vote harvesting and have somehow gotten the keys to the economy.  Of course, never having heard of debt, inflation, or Zimbabwe, the best idea that they had is “make everyone rich by printing more money”.  Really.  That’s it.

That’s the first option, actual idiocracy.

But what if this is the desired result?

Thus, the second option.  The Cloward-Piven Strategy dates from the 1960s and was based around breaking the system through welfare.  Cloward and Piven were two married professors that decided that since they were making money from the public for doing essentially nothing, that everyone else should be able to get a piece of that action, too.  Economies aren’t based on people being productive, right?

The end idea of their strategy was bankrupting the country through increased pushing of social programs.  Why do that, to help people?  No, the aim was revolution in the United States.  And this wouldn’t be a revolution like the French one (which was a head of its time) which proved that the French can win a war, if it’s against the French.

What’s a good way to start a revolution?

King George was only 11 inches tall – he was unfit to be a ruler.

Doing exactly what the current idiots are doing.  It used to be just the commies like Cloward and Piven and their cousins Pol Pot and Stalin who wanted to change man, to make him perfectible.  Now, the World Economic Forum (LINK) is on with the same old idea that’s caused so much grief over the past century and change.  They have an agenda to make man a global economic cog in a machine where only one culture, one set of ideas is acceptable – in the world.

Strangely, the outcome of the “toddlers in charge” plan looks a lot like the outcome of the “Global Commie Power Grab” plan.

So, was Joe being stupid when he said “inflation is our strength” or was he just slipping and sharing the quiet part of the plan that he wasn’t supposed to say?

Biden’s Economic Case For Nuclear War

“Two hundred years have passed since the nuclear war raged to an end and the computers took over what was left of the world – sealed it off from the outside – and made it perfect. Now, in the Domed City in this year 2319, living is unending joy.” – Logan’s Run

After a nuclear war in the Middle East, there will only be one country and the Persian Gulf left.  Just Kuwait and sea.

When we lived in Fairbanks, my hobby in the summer was getting firewood.  I was the Bubba (from Forrest Gump) of firewood:  “There’s lots of ways to have birch.  There’s split birch, there’s dry birch, there’s stacked birch, there’s birch that the bark fell off of, there’s birch that still has bark, there’s wet birch, there’s birch logs . . .” you get the idea.  Now imagine that James Spader was saying it.  That will become important later.

As such, we spent a lot of time in the (mostly Gump-free) forest.  The Mrs. would generally keep an eye on the (then four-year-old) The Boy.  Outside of moose and grizzly bear, the forest was safe.  Oh, did I mention the wasps?  Yeah.  Fairbanks was infested with them.  So, one day while I was knocking down trees and sawing them up, The Boy was playing near a tree.

What’s Gump’s password?  1FORREST1. (meme as found)

Then The Boy started screaming.  If you noticed the clear foreshadowing, it certainly wasn’t a bear or a moose, but rather The Boy had been jumping up and down (unknowingly) on a subterranean wasp nest.

Wasps have a sense of humor.  Oh, no, they don’t.  They’re hatred wrapped up in spite with a side order of malice and animosity.  So, they did the only thing their stupid malignant minds can comprehend:  they stung The Boy.  Repeatedly.

Fast forward a few months.  We had abandoned all of that sweet, sweet birch that we were going to combust in order to liberate the carbon back into the atmosphere and move from Fairbanks to Houston.  Ugh.  In the backyard, though, a beautiful butterfly came fluttering by bouncing from flower to flower.

I could see the wonder and amazement in The Boy’s eyes as he tracked it across the backyard.  He moved close.

“Be careful,” I said, “they bite!”

He ran screaming into the house, and now I had a four-year-old son that was deathly afraid of butterflies and also the problem of explaining to The Mrs. how I was really just kidding and not intentionally emotionally scarring our child.

Good times.

I sleep on a cushion made of butterfly larva.  It’s a caterpillow.

“What,” you might ask, “does that story have to do with nuclear war?  I can read the title, John Wilder, and I didn’t come here for twisted tales of how you made a child cry by telling him that butterflies sting.”

Well, bear with me.

What if . . . nuclear war is not so bad?  What if nuclear war is Joe Biden’s cunning plan to revive our economy?

I mean, giving trillions of dollars just seemed to work for a while, and now everyone’s tired of having all that free money.  Giving billions to the vaxx companies so that they could, um, prevent oops, lessen the likelihood the vaxxed got COVID oops, lessen the impact of COVID oops, make billions of dollars in profits.

The Mrs. says that Jack Daniels® keeps her healthy.  She calls it Liver Cross-Fit®.

The next best idea that Biden had, besides eating crayons and attempting to have sex with his desk was just more of the “print trillions of dollars” idea.  That didn’t go as well once people figured out they weren’t the ones getting the money, and they had to trade internal organs for a tank of gasoline.

Giving billions of dollars to Ukraine seemed safe, but outside of asking for more money, Zelinsky’s prime impact on the war effort in Ukraine appears to be walking around sweaty in an olive drab t-shirt while looking for escorts with Hunter Biden.

Huh.  That doesn’t seem to be working.

So, how about provoking a nuclear war?  I can just imagine the conversation with the cabinet . . . .

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (SECDEF):  “Are you sure, Mr. President?  Don’t you think that giving Ukraine, and I quote, ‘a whole bejeebus load of guns and stuff’ might provoke the Russians?”

Vice President Kamala Harris (VP):  (unintelligible giggling, possibly drunk)

Secretary of State Antony Blinken (STATE):  “I’d like to remind you, Mr. President, there are a lot of Ukrainians that we’ve got left.  I mean, the Russians have to run out of artillery shells at some point.”

Joseph R. Biden (BRANDON):  “But, hey, man, have you thought this through?  If we bomb the Russians, and they bomb us, we can (long pause) you know the thing.  Build better boobies.” (waves hands while looking uncomprehendingly at imaginary people behind him)

Vice President Kamala Harris (VP):  (giggling)  “You said boobies!  Check out this rack!” (lifts blouse)

Monica Lewinsky is 48!  It seems just like yesterday that she was crawling all over the White House.

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (TREAS):  (ignoring VP)  “He has a point.  Think of all the industrial activity we would get if a nuclear war hit the United States.  Look at (checks notes) Japan.  We nuked them twice, and look how their economy skyrocketed!”

Joseph R. Biden (BRANDON):  “Yeah, man, he has a good point.  Is it a good point?  Who has the good point?”

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (TREAS):  “You, sir.”

Vice President Kamala Harris (VP):  (giggling)  “So, it’s settled!  Margaritas for everyone!  This has been a long, hard day, if you know what I mean.” (winking at Yellen)

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (SECDEF):  “Sounds great!  I’m in.  Just one more thing to do before I call it a day!”  (picks up phone to call NORAD)  “Brandon has authorized Operation McChicken™, repeat, Brandon has authorized Operation McChicken©, authorization code “PEZ BRAVO JOHNNY DEPP.”  (hangs up phone)  “Now where’s that margarita?”

So, if it appears that that the Biden Administration is being run by people who have all of the competence of Bulgarian mall lawyers attempting to fix a seventeen-year-old copier by poking and prodding it with whatever pens and paperclips their greasy fingers can find hoping against hope that their random actions will fix whatever “ERROR 031” is?

No.  The Bulgarian mall lawyers, though only dimly aware that their random actions are little more effective than hitting the machine with a hammer while chanting Sheryl Crow songs in the nude, at least were bright enough to not vote for Biden.

So, perhaps like that butterfly, nuclear war won’t be so bad?  Despite how good Biden makes it sound, I’ll take my chances without having a nuclear war, thank you.

As found.

I’d love to write more, but I’m watching a movie with James Spader and it requires all of my attention because he might be Jack the Ripper.

Does A 1904 Geopolitical Theory Explain The War In Ukraine?

“I don’t recognize him, but judging by the head-to-toe denim, I say he’s either not American or deeply American. I’m thinking Ukraine or Kentucky.” – Brooklyn Nine Nine

You would think that an octopus would go to war well-armed?

When I look at the war in Ukraine and other world events, I see evidence of Sir Halford John Mackinder.  It would have been cool if he was the frontman for a 1910s version of Judas Priest, but no.  Mackinder was a guy who thought long and hard about mountains, deserts, oceans, steppes, and wars.  You could tell Mackinder was going to be good at geography, what with that latitude.  The result of all this pondering was what he called the Heartland Theory, which was the founding moment for geopolitics.

What’s geopolitics?  It’s the idea that one of the biggest influencers in human history (besides being human) was the geography we inhabit.  Mackinder’s first version wasn’t very helpful, since he just ended up with “Indonesia” and the rest of the world, which he called “Outdonesia”.

Mackinder focused mainly on the Eurasian continent.  Flat land with no obstacles meant, in Mackinder’s mind, that the land would be eventually ruled by a single power.  Jungles and swamps could be a barrier, but eventually he thought that technology would solve that.  Mountains?  Mountains were obstacles that stopped invasions, and allowed cultures to develop independently.  Even better than a mountain?

I crossed a dog and an antenna once.  I got a golden receiver.

An island.

There’s even a theory (not Mackinder’s) that the independent focus on freedom flourished in England because the local farmers weren’t (after the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Mormons, and Vikings were done pillaging) subject to invasion and were able to develop a culture based on a government with limited powers, along with rights invested in every man.

Mackinder went further, though.  He saw the combination of Eurasia and Africa as something he called the World Island.  If the World Island came under the domination of a single power, he thought, it would eventually rule the rest of the world – it would have overwhelming resources and population, and it would have the ability to outproduce (both economically and militarily) everything else.

“Pivot Area” is what Mackinder first called the Heartland.

Mackinder, being English, had seen the Great Game in the 1900s, which in many cases was a fight to keep Russia landlocked.  The rest of Europe feared a Russia that had access to the sea.

Conversely, Russia itself was the Heartland of the Mackinder’s World Island.  Russia was separated and protected on most of its borders by mountains and deserts.  On the north, Russia was protected by the Arctic Ocean, which is generally more inaccessible than most of Joe Biden’s recent memories.

Russia is still essentially landlocked.  The Soviet Navy had some nice submarines, but outside of that, the Russians have never been a naval power, and the times Russia attempted to make a navy have been so tragically inept that well, let me give an example:

The sea Battle of Tsushima between the Japanese and Russians in 1905 was a Japanese victory.  The Japanese lost 117 dead, 583 wounded, and lost 3 torpedo boats.

But the Russian Seals did work just for the halibut.

The Russians?  They lost 5,045 dead, 803 injured, 6,016 captured, 6 battleships sunk, 2 battleships captured.  The Russians sank 450 ton of the Japanese Navy.  The Japanese sunk 126,792 tons of the Russian fleet.

Yup.  This was more lopsided than a fight between a poodle and a porkchop.

Mackinder noted that the Heartland (Russia) was built on land power.  The Rimlands (or, on the map “Inner Crescent”) were built on sea power.  In the end, almost all of the twentieth century was built on keeping Russia away from the ocean, and fighting over Eastern Europe.

Why?

In Mackinder’s mind, “Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland (Russia); Who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; Who rules the World Island commands the World.”  In one sense, it’s true.

Mackinder finally in 1943 came up with another idea, his first idea being lonely.  I think he could see the way World War II was going to end, so he came up with the idea that if the United States were to team up with Western Europe, they could still command the Rimlands and contain the Soviet Union to the Heartland.

There are several reasons that the United States has responded with such an amazing amount of aid to Ukraine.  $33 billion dollars?  Some people don’t work a whole year and get that much money.

Crimea River?  No, Crimea Peninsula.

No, the idea is to bleed Putin as deeply and completely as they can.  Why?  If they’re following Mackinder, this keeps Russia vulnerable.  It keeps Eastern Europe from being under Russia’s control – if you count the number of “Battles of Kiev” or “Battles of Kharkov” you can see that it’s statistically more likely to rain artillery in Kiev than rain water.

This might be the major driver for Russia, too.  A Russian-aligned (or at least neutral) Ukraine nicely plugs the Russian southern flank.  And this is nearly the last year that Russia can make this attempt – the younger generation isn’t very big, and the older generation that built and can run all of the cool Soviet tech?

Looks like Nirvana killed the Russian sex drive?

They’re dying off.  Soon all their engineers with relevant weapons manufacturing experience will be . . . dead.  If Russia is going to attempt to secure the south, this is their only shot.  Depending on how vulnerable the Russians think they are, the harder they’ll fight.  NATO nations tossing in weapons isn’t helping the famous Russian paranoia.

I think that the United States, in getting cozy with China in the 1970s, was following along with Mackinder’s theory – I believe Mackinder himself said that a Chinese-Russian alliance could effectively control the Heartland and split the Rimland, given China’s access to the oceans.

And that’s what China is doing now, with the Belt and Road Initiative.  Remember Mackinder’s World Island?  Here’s a map of the countries participating in China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Never forget China’s national sport:  hard labor.

Spoiler alert:  It’s the world island.

 

Belt and Road Map:  By Owennson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0