Category: TEOTWAWKI

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

Inflation, Velocity, and Bikini Economics

“Well, you already know my name.  I come here to, uh, unwind, because my job can be intense. I often dream I’m Clint Eastwood.” – Psyche

A picture from the last Federal Reserve® meeting.

There are several things that are wrecking the economy.  One of them that isn’t Joe Biden (or his sidekick, the Amazing Giggle Girl) is the sheer amount of cash in the system.  M2 is one of the broader definitions of currency – it includes ready cash, savings accounts, quarters under seat cushions, winning lottery tickets, tears from Leftists over Elon buying Twitter™ and, really, anything that can be spent fairly rapidly.

I want to send a shout-out to the guy who plays the triangle in the orchestra. Thanks for every ting!

I’ve brought up before that this measure, M2, has shot up.  It sort of has to – the national debt doubles every eight years so they have to get more and more into the system to build that sort of debt.  Half of M2 has been created since September 2013.  In the United States, we have so much debt you could rename the country “Owen”.

Although (in theory) cash is supposed to grow in tandem with the economy, inflation has been the inevitable result, especially since the dollar is no longer backed by anything other than kind wishes and Nancy Pelosi’s belly button lint.

So why aren’t things worse?

Velocity.

What’s velocity?  A simple definition is how fast cash moves in the economy.  I’ve had a collection of pennies in a piggy bank since I was in junior high.  Why pennies?  I spent all of the dimes, nickels, and quarters on beer when I was underage stuff, so over time, it became a penny fest.  But those 1,000 or so pennies are definitely part of M2, but have had zero velocity since I could drive.

So, inflation happens when you line up bikini girls in order of height?

The $20 in cash I spent at Walmart® moved to the bank, where it was deposited.  Walmart™ then got a deposit and spent it on wages to a clerk.  The clerk then spent it on PEZ®, and then it was recycled again.  That currency had a pretty high velocity, just like that one girlfriend that told me she needed time and distance.  That’s velocity, right?

Some cash moves around.  Some doesn’t.

Here’s the dirty secret of the economy since 2008:  the velocity of M2 has dropped from a “healthy” economy velocity of 1.7 or so to a “piles of cash under the mattress” level of 1.1.

People hang on to both cash and ratty underwear (this is true – one sign of a depression is lowered sales of men’s underwear) during times of uncertainty, and a quick view of the chart shows that despite all of the “quantitative easing” that the Federal Reserve™ has done since 2008, things are still broken.  Cash is sitting in piggy banks, in accounts, and at least some is sitting in dark pools in accounts to prop up the reserves of the banks.

Things get tough right around the elbow.

We’re seeing the stock market dip now, in a system awash in cash.  Why is the stock market dipping when prices of everything are skyrocketing?  What is the dipping sauce, is it ranch?  Why aren’t stock prices going up, too?

Certainly, some companies are having record profits – oil companies, timber companies, fertilizer companies.  But how many people are going to buy luxuries when the price of eggs is $5.00 a dozen and a hamburger costs a kidney “donation” at McTransplants®?

So, is this a kidney Bean?

Inflation causes failure.  At first, it looks good.  It increases some profits, like that fertilizer company’s profits.  Housing prices take off.  Most people enjoy this, at first.

But after it gives, then inflation takes away.  Prices have to go up at the restaurants because beef and broccoli and potatoes go up in price.  Then, people look and decide that they can cook at home for cheaper.  And those higher house prices?  The result is higher taxes on the property.

Now prices at the restaurant have to stay up, because the restaurant can’t make up for higher prices by charging less than it costs to keep the lights on.  But there are fewer customers.

So businesses, especially businesses built on disposable income, fail harder than Joe Biden on a crossword puzzle.  But that’s just the start, at least as long as we keep Joe away from actual decisions.

The scary part (besides Joe hanging with his invisible friend, JoJo) is that no one really knows what happens when all of it unwinds.

Well, it’s sort of like a bikini picture.

What will make the velocity of currency go up?  When people are afraid to hold on to their money because they’re worried that it’s losing value.

But that is (my guess) not quite yet.

I do expect, especially when the stock market unwinds to see a deflation first, across multiple asset classes.  It will be “catch a falling knife” time because in many cases it won’t be clear what is a good bargain, and what’s junk.  In 2008, gold dropped from nearly $1,000 to $710 as the market melted down.

Gold was obviously safer at that time than the stock market, but even it was driven downward – because cash was vanishing from existence as home loans defaulted.  How does that happen?  Remember, if I have $100 in the bank, it’s not really there.  The bank loaned it out.

So, I think I have $100, but so does the person who borrowed it from the bank, so M2 shows that there is $200.  When the loan defaults, there’s only $100.  And it’s $100 the bank is on the hook to pay back to me, so they have to borrow it from someone else.

Yup.  Defaulting loans and business failures cause the economy to contract, even during inflation.  And if that causes the Fed® to print more money?

We’ll be in even bigger trouble.

Update:  our appeal at Google® was approved.  The podcast was restored (LINK).  Our livestream is on tonight (Wednesday at 9 Eastern), at our channel.

The Economic Fate Of The United States: Two Choices

“No, you’ve already made the choice. Now you have to understand it.” – The Matrix Reloaded

I spent hundreds to rent a limo, but there was no driver.  All that cash on a limo, and nothing to chauffeur it.

I did posts about inflation before inflation hit, but I’m not a psychic.  It’s not like I work for ESPN or something.  No.  This inflation was absolutely predictable, and in fact, has been absolutely predictable since 2008.  Ben Bernanke’s Fed© Approved™ solution to the Great Liquidity Crisis during the Great Recession was simple:  print a lot of money.

Make no mistake, the economic problem was big back then in 2008.  I personally saw an entire segment of the economy reach a full dead stop.  Rail cars piled up at the sidings on my drive to work near Modern Mayberry because the railroads had no place to put them – miles of them.  I mean, without rail cars how could new railroad employees train?

Why did this happen?  Nobody knew which banks had money and which ones didn’t.  The trust that underlies the system had been blown up by a series of banks defaulting, with stocks crashing, and bonds plummeting.  Heck, even physicists stopped trusting atoms – they make up everything.  The Fed’s® solution to this lack of trust?  Like I said, print money.

They were sneaky about how they did it – they printed money and gave it to the banks by buying up the awful assets they had on the books.  The money vacuumed up the bad debt like Charlie Sheen on the set of Two and a Half Grams.

Something tells me he’d be a more thoughtful Fed® chairman than the one we have now.

The printing also kicked the can down the road.  We could spend all day about the causes, but the reality is that we are the can that was kicked down the road.  Our current inflation is the result of keeping the party going even when the system should have cleared out the bad debts, cleared out the dead companies, and cleared out the waste that caused the crisis.

Would it have been tough?  Sure, especially on elevator repairmen – but their business is always up and down anyway.

So, now what?

The reality is simple.  As a nation, we face only two choices.

The first choice we could make is to keep doing what we’re doing.  We can keep printing money, and keep pretending that the economic problems are created by the sanctions we put in place over a regional border conflict that we helped create and certainly encouraged.

The result of the decision to keep printing will first be higher prices.  Higher fuel prices mean less driving, but they also mean that the cost of nearly everything you buy costs more:  food, trash service, beer, PEZ®, posters of Elvis (especially posters of the The King after he discovered carbohydrates), everything physical will cost more.

Why can’t Elvis drive his Cadillac™ in reverse?  He’s dead.

Oh, sure, hyperinflation seems like fun at first.  Rising prices, rising wages . . . but the wages never keep up with the prices.  And businesses can’t keep up with the rising costs, so long-term contracts that had been great are now unprofitable.  Bare shelves show up.  People rush to ditch cash to buy stuff because they know that Kraft© Mac n’ Cheese™ is going to be 20% more next week, so canned goods have a better rate of return than the stock market.  Some people don’t like canned food, but for me it’s ate out of tin.

But then banks have finally gotten wise, and we’ll see higher interest rates on car loans, home loans, and student debt.  Higher costs on cars plus higher interest costs mean lower new car sales, especially when people are struggling to find change in their couches to buy Pizza Rolls® and Twinkies™.

Lower new car sales mean fewer new cars made.  Which requires fewer workers.  Which increases unemployment.  Eventually, there’s a recession or depression as economic activity ceases to be meaningful – weird things happen as people resort to a manic level of activity.

The banks finally get wise and loans don’t come with an interest rate, they come with a scheme to create a way that the bank doesn’t go bankrupt as the currency value plummets.  The values are pegged to a commodity (like gold) or an inflation index.  Bankers have been through this before in country after country and know every trick to keep themselves whole.  I assure you, inflation has their interest.

I saw a homeless man talking to his shadow.  That means six more weeks of inflation.

Ultimately, the orgy of printing results in destitution, unemployment, and a political and moral crisis.  How bad is it?  Reminders of the hyperinflation caused by worthless money during the Revolutionary War are still in the Constitution – “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make anything but gold and silver tender in payment of debts.”  I even keep a copy of the Constitution on the wall – The Mrs. calls it the Decoration of Independence.

Wonder why the German bankers are so crazy about not letting the euro hyperinflate?  They’ve been through that before.  And German bankers are generally pessimists, which is why they study Russian.

Sadly, we’re seeing these impacts even though many of the trillions in printing haven’t even hit the economy yet.  Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill hasn’t even hit the economy yet.  Think construction is expensive now?  Wait until there are a trillion more dollar in construction contracts that hit the economy in the next six months.  That will lead to millions of guys standing around trying to look busy.

I wanted to build highways, but I decided not to go down that road.

So, that’s path one – keep going and wait for everything to blow up like slobber from a pasty dingo with a bag of decade-old beef jerky, which seems like an oddly specific analogy, but I have my reasons.  What will be on the other side?  No one can say – often, hyperinflation destroys the entire fabric of the country, making the people desperate, willing to do anything, even watch another Marvel® movie.

There is, of course, a second choice:

Quit printing money.

Stop entirely.

Have the Fed® increase the interest rate to slow down the economy and re-value the currency.  Stop the shenanigans.

The result of that is, of course, also a major recession – probably worse than the Great Recession of 2008.  Possibly as bad as the Great Depression.

There will be plummeting home values as interest rates increase.  There will be unemployment.    But once the debt clears, in a decade or so, what will be left will be an economy that is based, perhaps, on a more fundamentally sound currency, or even one that won’t inflate until it is worthless.  I can dream, can’t I?

It’s not a pleasant idea, going through that pain.  But in the end, it provides a chance for economic prosperity.

That’s it.  Those are really the only choices I see in the economy.  We’ll have to pick one.

I have no faith that the second path will be taken.  Why?  This graph, for one.  Looks like people who like free stuff, vote for people who give them . . . free stuff.

Romney supporters signed their checks on the front, Obama voters signed theirs on the back.

It requires making a hard choice, a knowing difficulty.  It’s like having the discipline to eat the broccoli and skip the ice cream before they wheel you out to read things off the teleprompter.  I have seen no sign of the political class of the United States being willing to make any difficult decision.  I have seen only a little appetite in the general populace to take the tough road.

No, I think we’ll make the first choice.  When inflation gets worse?  My bet is that the reaction of the political leadership will be to send checks to everyone.  Wait and see.

No, I’m not a psychic.  But I wish I was a remote viewer.  I’m still looking for the one from the stereo.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part III

“No dictator, no invader can hold an imprisoned population by force of arms forever. There is no greater power in the universe than the need for freedom. Against that power tyrants and dictators cannot stand. The Centauri learned that lesson once. We will teach it to them again. Though it take a thousand years, we will be free.” – Babylon 5

I like the electronics DIY store – The Ohm Depot.

Part I of this series can be found here (LINK), and Part II can be found here (LINK).

Thinking about dictatorship is difficult.  I was raised in a system that considered dictatorship more or less impossible.  We didn’t even have any jokes about dictators because we didn’t speak Spanish, German, Italian, Russian or Chinese.  I was raised in the wilds where you could be certain that every house contained more firearms than people, usually many more.  And safe?  Doors were rarely locked.

They taught us how to use rifles effectively in school.  I even won the prize for marksmanship in eighth grade, which was a personally autographed photo of Andrew Jackson.  Every boy took the test and got his Hunter Safety card, except me.  I’d had my card since second grade.

The girls?  Who knows what they did while we were shooting rifles, making models, and talking about football.  This class was for boys only, and strangely we didn’t have difficulty identifying what a girl was.  We didn’t even have advanced biology degrees to tell the boys from the girls back then, though I will admit to have been an avid amateur biologist while I was in high school.  And even I could tell the difference.

So, back to the point, dictatorship was something that I didn’t think a lot of.  And there’s no way that it’s a certainty since Civil War 2.0 is still a very real possibility.  That being said, I started to research a bit deeper.  What are the signposts that a dictatorship is near?

A truck carrying Vicks Vap-O-Rub® overturned yesterday.  Thankfully, there was no congestion.

Most of the articles were written by Leftist journalists who wanted to reee! that Trump was the worst tyrant since Stalin’s more evil brother.  One of them was even in a magazine for young adolescent females, whatever those are.

I found one article (Trump era, pre-George Floyd, pre-‘Rona) that had the following conditions (LINK).  I didn’t think the article was great.  But, being written by a writer from India, it was refreshingly free of Trump Derangement Syndrome.  Here is (more or less the list, with some minor edits from me):

  • Control of the Media: CNN®?  Leftist think CNN™ is centrist.  Outside of dissident media on the Internet and (sometimes) Fox©, I think we can firmly check this box.  The denial of Hunter Biden’s laptop, anyone?
  • Rigging of the Electoral System: That is more than self-evident from the strange and obviously fraudulent results of the 2020 election, but it is also 100% admitted by the Left, in Time Magazine, no less.  It’s here (LINK), though it’s now behind a wall.
  • Control of the Judicial System: This is only mostly, since Trump managed to put several justices on the Supreme Court.  All in all, though, the court system has skewed Left for ages.
  • Spying on the Population: This box has been checked since 2001 and the Patriot Act.  Snowden, anyone?
  • Harassing Dissidents: Compare the reaction to people literally burning down cities and staging insurrection in the streets to truckers peacefully protesting.  Also:  say something that is against The Narrative on YouTube®, see how long your account lasts.  As a website operator, I certainly know when I’m over the target because the site catches flak.
  • Suppression of Dissidents – Dissident Protest is Terrorism: January 6th.  End of story.
  • Promotion of Civil Unrest: George Floyd protests were going to happen, regardless of the person.  It just needed an appropriate victim and the video spread far and wide, even though drugs killed St. George of Our Lady of Fentanyl and not a police officer’s knee.  Riots were going to happen – it was part of the plan.

Ouch!

By my count, that’s seven out of seven, and that’s just since December of 2019.  It’s interesting just how much Donald Trump, despite not really achieving much of lasting note, upset the system.  Trump didn’t restore law and order.  Heck, he couldn’t even restore Firefly.  But yet, they were willing to take off the mask just to get him out.

Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!

Or maybe that was the point?

Taking a step back, civilizations have a lifespan.  The following cycle is attributed to Alexander Tytler, a dead Scottish guy.  There are two problems with this:

  • There is no evidence Tytler ever said anything like this.
  • The name Tytler makes me think of an Austrian politician who moved to Germany and was popular in the 1930s and early 1940s and then decided to get breast enhancement.

Okay, deep down, I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old.

The real author of the Tytler Cycle is probably Henning Prentiss, an executive, who is also dead and whose name is not nearly as funny.  The 1943 speech it’s from is here (LINK).

So, here is what Tytler Prentiss had to say:

“The historical cycle seems to be:

  • From bondage to spiritual faith;
  • from spiritual faith to courage;
  • from courage to liberty;
  • from liberty to abundance,
  • from abundance to selfishness;
  • from selfishness to apathy,
  • from apathy to dependency; and
  • from dependency back to bondage once more.

At the stage between apathy and dependency, men always turn in fear to economic and political panaceas. New conditions, it is claimed, require new remedies.”

The end state is what we’re really interested in – the failure of government, the loss of hope, and the dependence on someone, anyone, to save them.  All they have to surrender is control.  And, in the United States that doesn’t necessarily mean the same party – in many ways the GOP is just the “for God’s sake, don’t put me in charge, they’ll expect me to do something” wing of the Democratic Party.

How did the Roman Senate choose a new dictator?  They played rock, paper, Caesars.

The Strong Man himself is certainly out there right now.  He might be unknown to us, but he is building, biding his time.  It’s almost certainly not AOC, since she’s not anyone’s idea of a problem solver unless your problem is needing a Margarita, no salt.  It’s not someone too old like Bernie Sanders who will turn to dust if Sunlight ever hits him – which is why he has coffins in the basement of the multiple mansions he owns.

It’s certainly not the Ad Libber in Chief, since he (like his pants) is in the process of being dumped (you don’t think those releases about Hunter’s laptop are coincidental, do you?).  No, someone young, vigorous, yet already sold to The Narrative.  Dan Crenshaw (World Economic Forum™ Young Leader®), my eye is on you.

But it doesn’t have to be Dan.  Any man who has The Plan, charisma, and reasonable personal hygiene (including regular showers) might become the Strong Man.  It won’t be a woman:  the masculinity of the “tough” solutions will be a part of the sales pitch, along with the ever so regretful admission that temporary controls are needed to restore the abundance of the past.

So, control is surrendered.  Rights are conditional –rights will be honored as long as it is convenient, ignored, or suppressed when not.  The budding Kommissars of Australia provided the poster child for the sudden evaporation of rights when inconvenient for government.  In a continent where every insect is an inexhaustible vat of poison, every animal has fangs and can disembowel a man with a kick, and the nectar of half the plants does things that would make H.P. Lovecraft shudder, who knew that the most dangerous creatures were . . . government employees?

I went to Australia and they asked me if I had a criminal record.  I said, “I didn’t know that was still required.”

Keep this in mind, as well:  The United States government is fine with taking $300 billion of Russia’s funds.  Think the Strong Man would hesitate to confiscate all the funds of a dissident?  Most dissidents I know don’t even have half the nuclear weapons Russia does.

What does the dictator, the Strong Man want to control, then?

Well, all of us.

How does he do it?

Well, the Strong Man can control other things that allow him to control his people:

  • Food
  • Money
  • Pharmaceuticals
  • Media
  • Politics
  • Culture
  • Technology
  • Communications
  • Family Structure
  • Energy
  • Immigration
  • Fertility

If the Strong Man doesn’t like me, he can kill me and replace me with a compliant citizen and use my money to buy himself something nice, like a new watch.  All for the greater good, of course.  Orwell described the real goal of every Strong Man best:  “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Wow – this part got darker and emptier than the space between Kamala’s ears between ideas.  I’ll close with this happy thought:  Bondage leads to faith, faith to courage, and courage to liberty.  And remember, there are large parts of the United States where guns still far outnumber people.  Regardless of the detours we take into darkness, there will always be a light for mankind.

I mean, unless the light is the comet that’s going to hit us.  Oh, wait, I wasn’t supposed to give spoilers for 2023 yet!

Not my original.

Next:  (There will be a delay in this one, perhaps next week, perhaps the week after) Mechanisms of Control