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“There has been too much violence.  Too much pain.  But I have an honorable compromise.  Just walk away.  Give me your pump, the oil, the gasoline, and the whole compound Just let me give you my crude oil and I’ll spare your lives.  Just walk away and we’ll give you a safe passageway in the wastelands.  Just walk away take the crude oil and there will be an end to the horror.” – The Road Warrior (Updated for 2020)

Did you see the new Mad Max® prequel?  It was playing on every channel last night.

Whiplash is coming.

Currently, like the rest of the economy, the energy industry is a mess.  It was just the energy industry’s turn.  First it was Gamestop®, and now it’s the industry that underpins every bit of modern society.  Our modern world is built on the premise that cheap, available energy will always be abundant.

How can we afford to have fresh lettuce and tomatoes in the middle of winter when there are none growing within a five hundred mile radius?  That depends on cheap energy to grow it, and cheap energy to transport it.  Cheap energy provides modern society the ability to use the weather of one continent to grow strawberries when it’s winter on another.  The miracle is that it allows this to be done at such a low cost that it’s affordable to nearly everyone in society to eat fresh strawberries in winter and for stoners to grow weed year round in the basement.

Energy is important, and probably the most important component of energy in our lives is crude oil.  I know that it will give Greta Thunberg the whiskey shakes, but oil is currently absolutely required to feed several billion people on this planet.  Beyond that, it provides luxuries that no king in history could have had to everyday people.  Want to see what the weather is on the other side of the planet?  Want to watch a celebrity 1500 miles (34°C) away in their 10,000 square foot (17 liter) summer home in a gated community virtue signal that #weareallinthistogether because their maid isn’t considered an “essential” employee and they’re suffering, too.

Seriously, it was in the newspaper that Greta had a cough and was certain she had COVID-19, but my diagnosis is that the symptoms were caused by an acute lack of having people write about her on a daily basis.

So, oil is important.  But the oil industry is currently collapsing.

How bad is it getting?  I filled up my tank on Monday, and was offered a complementary free oil well with my purchase.  I had to turn it down because I couldn’t afford how much money people wanted me to pay to take the oil from the well.  I’m joking, they actually offered me six oil wells.  But oil producers really had to pay to get people to take their oil last week.  This is a situation that’s unheard of in the history of, well, everything.

Economics is based on the study of scarcity of stuff, not on the overabundance of stuff.  And right now we have more crude oil than Bernie Sanders has houses.  Why?

Gasoline demand has plummeted.

This week we’re partying like it’s 1994, because that’s the last time that gasoline consumption was this low.  In 1994, the United States had a population of only 263 million, 80% of what it is today.  Remember 1994?  That was the year that Nancy Kerrigan got kneecapped by Tonya Harding’s buddy and O.J. Simpson was arrested after the Coronavirus of police chases, since the whole chase involved people you didn’t know dying and it dragged on forever, which both seem to be symptoms of COVID-19.

Hipsters had problems skating on lakes.  They wanted to do it before it was cool.

The oil market is so bad in April, 2020 that oil producers are shutting down existing wells.  Oil demand has dropped 29% in the last month, down from approximately 100 million barrels a day to only 71 million barrels a day.  71 million barrels a day is a number last seen when people were coming out of their Y2K bunkers to see if Skynet® crashed the world.  Spoiler alert:  if 2020 keeps going like it has been, I expect Y2K to actually happen sometime in June.  It’s been that rough of a year.

To me, the really stunning figure is that oil demand dropped by nearly the combined production of every single OPEC nation.  Yup.  13 nations.  Think about that when you think about the ramifications of our current situation.  The economic output of entire nations is now no longer important.  How do you eat in Venezuela?  Even when oil was profitable you couldn’t find food in Venezuela, thanks to the miracle of socialism.  One positive note about socialism – if there is a socialist hell (and if I have to go to hell), I’ll sign up for that one instead of the capitalist one.  They probably have already run out of money to pay for heat.

But the oil situation is scary.  36 crude oil super tankers are lined up in the ocean, just lurking off the coast of California, right now.  They represent 20% of the world’s daily production, and they have absolutely no place to go.  And I expect it to get much, much worse.

See, I can make fun of the metric system using Star Wars™, too.  (H/T to Arthur (LINK) for the idea.)

If demand dropped that much, what about production?

In some cases, production is ongoing because oil producers will lose leases if they shut down.  In others, the concern is that shutting a producing oil field can damage the reservoir, forever trapping some oil that could have been recovered.  In yet other cases, the producers have done the calculation that some money coming in is better than none, although when you have to pay to get rid of the oil, you can’t really make that up in volume.

Drilling will soon come to a standstill for the fracked shale oil wells that have been entirely responsible for the oil production boost seen since 2008.  One thing about fracked wells:  you have to keep drilling to get the oil.  A typical fracked oil well can decrease as much as 65%-85% in the first year, but keeps producing at a lower level for a very long time.  This produces a very simple equation:  to keep producing oil, you have to keep drilling and fracking for it.

Fracking for oil is just like the Red Queen said to Alice in Alice in Wonderland’s sequel, Through the Looking-Glass as Alice asks why they’re running and not getting anywhere:

“Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Drilling will stop, so a lot of that 8 million barrel per day increase in US oil production since 2010 will evaporate.  Gone.  And it will take years of drilling to get back to that number.

See?  Now you can have an Irish accent, and describe our oil situation with just one phrase!

The oil demand collapse will last for years, and will be in tandem with the economy.  My bet?  At least five years, if not a decade.  A slowly moving economy doesn’t need as much fuel since you don’t have the money to drive, anyway.  And we were pretty fuel efficient in the past, after all, it only took Christopher Columbus three galleons to find the New World.

But what happens when things start to get better, people start to drive more, and economies around the world begin to try growing again?  All the drilling rigs are put up.  All the drillers are doing other things.  The companies that used to drill and frack the shale are gone.  The expertise that was won over a decade of drilling shale in Texas and the Dakotas?  Like a Kardashian’s dignity, it’ll all be gone.

That’s when we’ll face whiplash.

Just as the economies of the world start to wake up from the slumber of their economic coma, they will have to face a hard ceiling on energy production.  Oil production won’t keep pace with demand, and then the fun begins as oil prices skyrocket and strangle an economic recovery.  This will lower demand, and you have a nasty loop where the systems will cease to reinforce each other, and will instead fight each other.

I know people talk about alternative energy, but even now alternative energy plays as big a role in the world’s energy makeup as alternative rock.  Eliminate the disastrous and uneconomic use of ethanol for automotive fuel here in the United States, and alternative fuel use across the United States (including windmills) becomes minimal.

But Darth Vader® insists on using Castrol Siththetic™ Oil.

63% of the energy for electricity (in the United States) comes from fossil fuels.  Nuclear is in second place with 20%.  The only other sources worth mentioning are hydropower and wind, which each produce about 7%.  Transitioning to alternative energy is even harder than re-learning how to frack oil shale:  it will take decades and billions of dollars of sustained investment.  On top of that, alternative energy faces technical, economic, and environmental hurdles that make teaching a fashion model to read look simple.

We could try to blame this mess on COVID-19, but COVID-19 couldn’t crash a system that wasn’t already as fragile as Alec Baldwin’s ego in the first place.  The developed world’s economic, monetary, and credit systems were already broken.  COVID-19 just came along and gave them a nudge.  If it weren’t Coronavirus, it would have been something else, like too many people showing up with 30 items in the 12 items or less line at the supermarket.  Every year of the last decade has been that system living one more day on borrowed time as it danced near the edge of a cliff.

But for now:  anyone want a great deal on some crude oil wells?

“I’m gonna have me a glass of ripple.” – Sanford and Son

This was Alaska, so there were no dolphins – instead The Boy had to play Salmon Says.

I remember when The Boy, The Mrs. and I were living in Fairbanks just after Pugsley was born.  There aren’t a whole lot of things you can do with a four-year-old and a four-month-old since their sleeping schedules greatly interrupted our sleeping schedules.  As a result, we took drives around the area.  Don’t feel bad for us – Alaska was beautiful on every trip we took.  And kids often sleep in the car, though everyone seemed to complain when I did it.

On one particular trip, we went up a road due east of Fairbanks:  Chena Hot Springs Road.  Like many roads around Fairbanks, this one ends in a complete dead end.  In the lower 48, dead ends are rare – in most cases one road leads to the next like the seams in a great patchwork quilt.  Not in Alaska.  Alaska is the end of the road – and there are more dead ends than there are in the Kennedy family’s political careers.

About 20 miles from Fairbanks, we pulled over to stretch our legs.  It was early September, and we had already seen our first snow and first freeze, so the weather was cool and pleasant.  We Wilders have ice in our blood, and loved the climate of Fairbanks, which probably explains why my air conditioner is set at 64°F (-3K) and my house consumes half the electricity in my state in July.

We finally hiked through birch and pine to the river shown in the picture above, and The Boy ran up to the water and began doing what boys everywhere have been doing since boys and rocks and water were first all in the same place at the same time:  he started throwing rocks in the river, starting with small ones, and finally ending up with the biggest ones he could heave in a meaningful manner into the rushing river.  By meaningful, if a rock is too big, it doesn’t make that satisfying deep splash and “thunk” sound as the air rushes in to fill the rock-sized hole in the river.  I’m convinced that if a task seems destructive, a four-year-old will do more work in an hour than a strong man can do in four.

The Boy loved it.

Above:  Democratic budget planning session.

And tonight, when thinking about this post, I thought back to that moment.  Even though The Boy was doing a lot of work, he was just putting rocks back into the stream they came out of in the first place.  The splashes into the turbulent water would soon be so overwhelmed with the chaotic waves and currents that those splashes would be entirely lost; a signal terminated just like Joe Biden’s memories of every event since 1996.  Twenty miles away in Fairbanks, it was certain that no trace of The Boy’s effort would ever be seen.

People like to talk about the “Butterfly Effect” in a way that makes it seem like every action has a consequence, no matter how small.  That’s not true:  I leave the toilet seat up all the time.  The original “Butterfly Effect” was based on introducing a small amount of instability in a stable system and watching that instability grow, like that time I threw a garter snake into the volleyball team’s locker room.  But when you introduce a small change into most systems, like those rocks into that turbulent Alaskan stream, nothing’s changed – the signal introduced is overwhelmed by the chaotic noise.  Or towels.

But if it’s from Australia, it’s probably poisonous.  Or beer.

Our current situation is nothing like a boy throwing stones in a river, however.  Instead, it’s like an earthquake.  When earthquakes happen in the ocean, they release a tremendous amount of energy.  A 7.8 magnitude quake is similar in energy release to a 600 megaton nuclear bomb.  Since no bomb this large has ever been built, just imagine calling your girlfriend your ex-girlfriend’s name in the middle of an argument for an approximation.  To triple the explosive power, replace “girlfriend” with “wife” in the preceding sentence.  Telling her to “Calm down,” will likewise increase the explosive yield.  Please don’t ask me how I know.

When this energy is released in an earthquake associated with water, there is always the chance of a tsunami being formed – a wave radiating outward from the original earthquake that can be as high as 500’.  This wave can reach shores thousands of miles away from the original quake.  An earthquake off the coast of California on January 26, 1700 caused a 10 foot tsunami in Japan.  I’ve heard that California passed a regulation that limited tsunami height hitting their coastline to no more than two feet, and those must be on a sunny day in June and the permit must be applied for sixty days in advance, so you can bet they’re safe.  Finally an end to dangerous assault tsunamis!

Yeah.  That never works.

That’s where we are today – the global impact of what’s going on isn’t the equivalent of a boy throwing rocks in a river, instead, it’s the equivalent of a still-ongoing earthquake, with the tsunami waves yet to hit the rest of the world.

In 2008-2009, the Fed did everything they could to mash money into the system to deal with the mess of the Great Recession in the United States.  In addition to the collapse of oil prices, the result of the Great Recession and the Fed’s intervention was eventually, as it always is, inflation.  Since the dollar was the world currency and no one can buy American wheat using currency made from papyrus and hope, the result was much different in Alexandria, Egypt than in Alexandria, Virginia.  If you live in Alexandria, Virginia, if the price of bread doubles that means you still buy a loaf if you even notice that the price doubled.  Where’s the Nutella®?

If you live in Alexandria, Egypt, if the price of bread doubles, you might not eat.

AOC called me.  She told me I couldn’t have a post with the word “hunger” and the word “Alexandria” and not mention her.

Besides hunger, this situation led to yet even more unemployment in countries that barely had jobs in the first place.  The normal poverty and corruption of Egypt didn’t stop – the inflation imported from a continent away so people could flip houses just made it that much worse.  The result?  Revolution across North Africa and the Middle East, and waves of refugees attempting to make it to Europe.

That was just one ripple from 2008-2009, when the crisis was far smaller than today’s.  I fully expect conditions here in the United States to be far better off than Egypt during the whole of the crisis because our civilization didn’t peak in 4000 B.C.  To be fair to the Egyptians, it was one hell of a peak.  The pyramids will still be standing in 6,000 years when the only remnants of Western Civilization remaining will be the parts of Madonna® that nature can’t digest.

Cockroaches and Madonna© will survive the apocalypse.

However, it occurred to me today that any hardship we see in the United States will be small in comparison to the hardships that will be seen in the Third World.  Those countries will feel the true wrath of COVID-19.

Which countries?  Certainly oil producing countries.  If Venezuela can’t feed Venezuelans at $60 oil, it won’t be able to feed them at $20 oil.  I know it’s difficult to be harder on a country than communism, but Coronavirus will be the cherry on the cake of the workers’ paradise.  Along with that, I don’t expect Africa or the Middle East to do any better than they did in 2010 although in some places it won’t even be noticed because they peaked even earlier than the Egyptians.  Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, I’m looking at you.

China will likely be hard hit as well.  With no one to purchase their stuff, and being a very significant net importer of both petroleum (now cheaper) and food (soon to be inflated).  I’d expect to see this drive more social repression, which China is really, really good at, having been ruled by authoritarian leaders for roughly 27,000 years.  The next five years will answer if they are the world juggernaut that they intend to be, or one that’s so dependent on the outside world that their power will evaporate away with this particular set of circumstances.  I find the idea that they will turn inward like they have done since 221 B.C. compelling.  Hey, it has worked for 2241 years, so why break a streak?

The carrier, the carrier, the carrier is on fire.  We don’t need no water . . .

I tend to think the European Union won’t make it.  The United States at least used to have a common language and, mainly, a common heritage.  The European Union is like a pizza with pepperoni, pineapple, polonium and zinc washers on it. No, I apologize.  The pizza makes more sense than the EU.

I especially think that, nation by nation, the EU is getting pretty tired of the refugee flow.  Many refugees come to Europe and other Western states not to be European, but only to be economic “citizens” that have no affinity for Western Culture.  Adam Piggot talked about this in a blog post where he described newly-minted Australians banding together in their ethnic group to raid stores to horde for the plague (LINK).  That behavior (or behaviour, if you live in a country where everything that’s not poisonous and wanting to kill you is non-poisonous and wanting to kill you) won’t exactly be a selling point for the pro-immigration promoters.

The problem with making these predictions is like the rushing current The Boy threw stones into.  The events in the entire world will be so turbulent that picking winners and losers reminds me of what Yogi Berra said:  “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”  But as this economic tsunami hits nation after nation, expect changes to come at us so constantly in the next five years that we will all be numb as Kamala Harris’ dead heart from the information flow.

I have to promise everyone – our current crisis will be no worse than a power outage that lasts 17 years.

I also think that in five years we will be a much harder people, everywhere on Earth.  What would you think if you were, say, a newly minted engineering student preparing to enter a job market where even STEM graduates who normally can find real jobs with titles that don’t end in –ista have to look for the –ista jobs?  What happens when even –ista jobs cease to exist?

Yes.  There will be hardships.  But there will also be rocks.  And rivers.  And boys.  The ripples that the world is making are beyond our control.  But the ripples you and I make?

Those might even last longer than Madonna’s™ indigestible bits.

“100,000 pesos to perform with this El Guapo, who’s probably the biggest actor to come out of Mexico!” – ¡Three Amigos!

I once bought a clock with half a face.  It was a limited time offer.

6. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
7. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
8. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.
9. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.

The clock didn’t move this month for the second month in a row.  That’s good.  I can’t see it moving anytime soon, since I don’t see government sanctioned violence soon.  Please . . . let me be right.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – COVID-19 and the Coming Mexican Instability – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Welcome to Issue 11 of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK), Issue Seven is here (LINK), Issue Eight is here (LINK), Issue Nine is here (LINK), and Issue Ten is here (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

This one is fairly straightforward.  March 2020 will probably go down as one of the quietest months on record for actual violence.  With a huge percentage of the population home watching Netflix™ instead of living their lives, violence just wasn’t on the menu.  Censorship is generally poorly reported anyway, but I haven’t heard much of that, either, other than of Amazon® banning and then unbanning of a certain book by an obscure German-speaking author with a distinctive mustache.

“Why should I care about future generations?  What have they ever done for me?” – Groucho

Me?  If you’re gonna ban a book by a German that cost millions of lives, start with the undisputed champ, Das Kapital by Karl Marx.  Sadly, that’s a book that’s just too popular in some places, like each of Bernie Sanders’ three houses.

COVID-19, the Coming Mexican Instability, and Civil War 2.0

This topic could have been its own post, but I’ll include it in this month’s Civil War 2.0 Weather Report as the main topic.

News is changing quickly, so quickly that it keeps us as off balance as Johnny Depp on a Monday morning.  The other day, Pugsley, (my son, who is in his early teens) was talking about an event.  Implied in his statement was that the event was a long time ago.

“Pugsley,” I said, “that was just two weeks ago.”

The look on his face was priceless – his entire world had spun apart, with new changes every day.  Yes, it was only two weeks ago, but in that span of time a year’s worth of dramatic changes had happened which includes him not being in school.  Time has compressed, just like waistbands in self-isolation have expanded.

With so much news coming out, most people are grappling with the rapidly changing events of each day, as well as the important question of exactly what seven-season television show to binge-watch in the basement and when is the proper time to switch from coffee to wine since you’re supposed to be working from home.  Is 4:30 too early?

Life is like a box of chocolates.  They both are down in the basement with Netflix®.

Most people seem to think that things are going to go back to normal, even as company after company begins to show economic strain from missing revenue for the last month.  The idea that the world has changed hasn’t caught up with them yet.  And, yes, for real, the NBA® has thrown out the idea that they could play a game of H.O.R.S.E. for money.

I’m not kidding.

But what’s next?  Economies around the world are crumbling, so what will the world look like in three months, in six months?

What happens next?

One of the major contributors to the stress that will cause Civil War 2.0 is on our southern border:  Mexico.  Increased instability due to decades of immigration (legal and illegal) has created a country where the number of first and second generation immigrants makes up at least 25% of the population in the United States.  This has fed the cultural divide in the country – immigrants from Latin American countries tend to be way more communist like big government and they cannot lie.

COVID-19 will take this trend and increase it.

Mexico’s economy is tightly twinned to the United States.  Even before NAFTA, Mexico was highly economically dependent on the United States.  If the economy of the United States is toast?  The economy of Mexico is charcoal.

And think of the savings on shampoo!

The odd thing is that people still aren’t thinking about the future that could have 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 unemployed in the United States.  The implications for that are huge:  stress on unemployment systems.  Stress on social welfare systems.  Heck, we’re already seeing stress on an important private system:  food banks.

America is fortunate – it still produces and will continue to produce enough food to feed ourselves plus a big chunk of other nations.  It still has oil to be extracted, natural gas to provide heating and fertilizer, and still has large amounts of mineral resources.  Most importantly, it has vast forest resources and factories to produce the most important commodity on the world today:  toilet paper.

Mexico, however, is a nation with a kleptocratic government that’s famous for being impotent and corrupt, with a secondary government consisting of drug cartels.  Economically, Mexico periodically grows (slowly) between currency defaults.  Right now, 41% of people in Mexico are in poverty, and that’s when things are going really well, which they have been.  Mexico has been having a pretty significant period of stability and growth since 2010 or so.  I mean, for Mexico.

Mexico is partially funded by what are known as remittances.

$26 billion or so is sent back every year by Mexicans working (mainly) in the United States – these are the remittances.  This is the single largest source of foreign income to Mexico – think about that – people doing (mainly) menial labor in other countries are is their most economically successful export.

Large hats are the second largest export.

So, what happens when the Greatest Depression now brewing in the United States cascades into economic catastrophe for Mexico, both in Mexico and in the United States?

The waves of people that tried to get into the United States when things were working well will look small.  The United States, even in the midst of the oncoming collapse is going to look much, much better than the failed state that Mexico will certainly devolve into.

Tension is already developing in the United States.  Back during the Great Depression, cities commonly erected signs that discouraged men from even entering town, “Jobless Men:  Keeping Going, We Can’t Take Care Of Our Own.”  In a start down that road, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the H2B Guest Worker program was on hold.  H2B visas are intended for, “temporary non-agricultural workers.”  How long until H1B Guest Workers disappear?  How long until illegals cease to be able to find work because of public backlash?

Best part of blogging as a job?  Don’t need to worry about income taxes.

Something tells me that whatever party tries to tell the unemployed that importing tons of guest workers even temporarily to take jobs from Americans will soon find themselves out above the crowd, perhaps on a lamppost.

Regardless, there will be unemployed and desperate Mexicans that will seek life and the safety net available in the United States – all of the Democratic candidates raised their hands on offering free healthcare for illegal immigrants, even though Biden probably was thinking that they said free sniff hair for weasel innocence.  Any campaign promise that involves sniffing hair is definitely one Biden will keep.

The benefits of being in the United States, even when illegal, are astounding.  Essentially free health care at emergency rooms and clinics.  Free schooling.  Free food for their children.  Free medical care to have babies.  Illegals with children born in the United States get food stamps, legal services, and New York offers them up to $300 a month in cash.  I think California offers them free cell phones, though most illegals won’t take them because they’re Android® phones and they were hoping to get a cute iPhone™ like that hota Lupita has.

The car company that makes Dodge™ automobiles doesn’t make cell phones.  Just Chargers®.

Even though I predict a backlash from unemployed citizens to emerge, the lure of all that Free Stuff in the United States will prove to be too strong to citizens of an economy that will be devastated an order of magnitude greater than the United States.

They will come, especially since it’s likely that not only will Mexico be economically unstable, but politically unstable, leading to yet another revolution down south.  That always works out so well for them, right?  Just like the economic conditions of the United States pushed Mexico into the abyss, the collapse of Mexico will put additional pressure on the United States.  In addition to the Free Stuff, Mexicans will be coming for safety from the Subcommandante of the Week.

Soon enough, dealing with the hungry in the United States will be all that we can do.  Mexico imports 45% of its food right now.  How many Mexicans will try to get to the United States when Mexico can’t afford to import?

Updated Civil War II Index

March was a difficult month for the economy, and that shows up in the graphs.  April, I believe, will be worse.  As such, I tried to make sure to select bikini models that suggest the somber nature of the graphs, or, failing that, I looked for cute ones.  Either way, I’m sure that you all will agree that this meets or exceeds the fine journalistic standards set by my compatriots at CNN®.

Violence:

Up is more violent.  Violence is down because everyone is stuck in the basement.  Depending on how the food and money situation, you could see riots, big ones, in the streets of major cities.  June may be a very difficult month, politics or no, but until then, enjoy your time at the beach.  Mostly alone.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  Instability skyrocketed with impeachment, and then got better before bouncing slightly this month and last.  COVID-19 won’t help with stability, and I don’t think we’ll get this behind us soon.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions.  The economic indicators began to turn in February, and here is the first look at March.  I expect April to be the same or worse.  Based on the way this index is calculated, it only shows a part of the free-falling stock market.  As many readers to this series have noted – until the economy craters, don’t expect Civil War 2.0.  But as you can see, affording clothing might be difficult soon.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory.  This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol.  Down.  But for how long?  At least past the ankle, right?

Links

Most are from Ricky this month . . .  enjoy!

The Hill on Civil War

American Greatness on the Coronavirus War.

Coronavirus social unrestcoming?

COVID-19 and Martial Law?

The Atlantic on Martial Law.

Newsweek – Military Plans?

Police sickened by COVID-19.

Buzzfeed.

Gun sales spike, here, and here, and here.

Zerohedge:  Are we getting ready for the boogaloo?

“Tonight is our annual Flu Season Dance. I don’t know how many times I have to say this, but if you have the flu, stay home.  The Flu Season Dance is about awareness, not celebration. You don’t bring dead babies to Passover.” – Rick and Morty

If my COVID-19 test came back positive, I would say, “Doctor, you don’t understand, I have 3,000 rolls of toilet paper, that can’t be right!”

I try to plan these posts out in advance.  It allows me time to think about the subject at hand, as well as do research.  As of right now, the singular story is the Kung Flu.  I’m skipping my previously selected subjects, and here are some random thoughts.

• Whether or not you believe that the Kung Flu (or Shanghai Shivers, Wu Ping Cough, Wu Flu, Flu-Manchu, Chopsick, Sweet and Sour Sicken, Mi Lung Flu Long Time, Boomer Entomber, Great Cough Forward, Communist Lung Herpes, General Tso’s Revenge, Ming’s Ko-Feng or whatever you call it) is real, the economic and cultural impacts are real. As Ayn Rand said, “We can ignore reality, but we cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.”  But you can ignore about 87 straight pages of Atlas Shrugged, because that woman could not stop repeating herself.

If the plague Moses brought down upon Pharaoh didn’t bring down Keith Richards, neither will COVID-19.

• Aviation companies have entered a huge financial crisis because COVID-19 has stopped travel.  My idea:  Boeing® could exit the dying aviation business and enter the growing medical market. I bet that their COVID-19 vaccine would be 100% effective, what with anyone who took it exploding before they could catch COVID-19. (Inspired by Eaton Rapids Joe post here LINK).
• Social Isolation: The Mrs. can cancel appointments faster than I can make ’em, so we gave up on social events years ago – in her mind the best invention of Western Civilization is the Pizza Hut® app so she can order pizza hut and not have to talk with an actual human. The Boy?  He disappears in the house for hours at a time. Pugsley is the needy one, but he and I like the same shows.  As a family, we’re awfully good at ignoring each other.  Plus all that maintenance I deferred going to The Boy and Pugsley’s practices and games and matches?  Here’s the paintbrush . . . .  (Inspired by Steve’s Dog Meeting Deer Poop Story here LINK)

The first rule of Introvert Club?  There is no Introvert Club.  And that makes them happy.

• Just read that 56% of the population in California is projected to be infected with COVID-19 in the next eight weeks. 56% of Internet streaming video users admit to sharing their login information.  Coincidence?  I thought so, too, until I realized that 56% of Netflix® movies feature Nic Cage.  Are they secretly telling us California is a cage?  Or that Nic Cage has a projector?
• In a panic, cheap calories disappear from the store first.  The meat counter at Wal-Mart® was empty, except for $9+ per pound steaks. There were enough ribeyes to feed the Chicago Bears®.  25 pounds of sugar has 45,000 calories, but costs only about $8.98.  25 pounds of steak has about 30,000 calories, but costs about $200.  Thus, sugar disappears faster than steak.

Being a vegetarian is a big missed steak.

• Will we as a nation be better prepared on the other side?  I think rural America already is, and this lesson won’t be forgotten for a while. And I’ve heard some of the royal families in Europe have gotten it, which for some of them would be the first new DNA in their blood for several hundred years.
• When I go in to town to Wal-Mart® to buy a few items, I always run into two or three people (minimum) I know well. In general, we’re horribly polite in Modern Mayberry, because we all know each other and we know that we’re all in this together.  Except at Harvest Festival, where we ritually sacrifice one of our own picked at random through a lottery.
• High prices are the cure for high prices.  Low prices are the cure for low prices. High priced toilet paper will cure itself soon enough.  Low priced gasoline will cure itself soon enough.  Supply changes to meet demand if free market prices are charged.  This is the one sentence that describes why even True Communism® (Never Been Tried!™) will never work.  That’s why when ice was going for $20 a bag right after Hurricane Ike, I was happy for the people that really needed it.  If ice is worth $20 to store medications, for instance, the $20 isn’t important – you need that ice.  High prices meant there was enough ice for people who really needed it.
• Just because platinum is priced at $650 an ounce doesn’t mean there is any you can buy at that price. I tried to buy some, but all of the online stores are sold out.  That means that the cure for low prices is already in progress.  Same with silver.  Always remember Olivia Newton-John’s investment advice when it comes to metals:  let’s get physical.

I believe that in the 1980’s, there were no chairs, so everyone would sit just like that to talk.  And everyone wore tights and leg warmers, because the Earth was covered in knee-deep snow, but was really hot, like 800°F, three feet above ground.

• There is risk in who you do business with. Many businesses are like most people – they only have enough money for a few weeks if money stops rolling in.  One sign:  if you see bread on the doorstep of a business, beware.  The business is so poor that ducks are throwing bread at them.
• Eggs disappeared first from the store, along with ramen here in Modern Mayberry. If you own chickens, you have eggs.  But you still have to own chickens, and I don’t like chickens because the only music they like to listen to is Bach.  Bach, Bach, Bach, Bach.  If you have a problem with that, well eggs-cuse me.
• Saying the flu came from China isn’t anti-Chinese. Lots of diseases come from China, including the Black Death®.  And they’re at least China is better than Canada, which inflicted a far worse horror on the world:  Jim Carrey.

Is it just me, or does he look a lot like Miley Cyrus?

• I was right about the risks that Just-In-Time inventory management pose to the economy (How Auto Manufacturing Makes You More Likely to Die in a Crisis, Plus, Ironman is a Mass Murderer.).  Efficiency is the enemy of resilience. Nature gives us two of many organs because they’re important.  Two eyes.  Two lungs.  Two kidneys.  Two hearts.  See?
• You never know what the bottlenecks are in a system and how it will react to a disturbance until you disturb it. Resilience comes from inefficiency, so the Soviets at least had that going for them.  They had stores that specialized in not having meat, and stores that specialized in not having bread.
• Nic Cage is an awful actor nowadays. I saw him in three movies in the last week and, though he might have been good back in the Raising Arizona and Leaving Los Vegas days, he was horrible.  Maybe his only good movies involve geographic references?  On the plus side, he’s owned a dinosaur skull that was stolen from Mongolia, which I guess is pretty cool.  But then again, he named one of his sons after Superman’s© birth name, Kal-El™, which is not cool.

If Nic Cage can still get work, you, my friend, can do anything.

• When The Boy was still new, we were sitting around the table eating. The Boy had milk to drink.  I said, “It’s amazing how good this tastes, what with coming out of a cow.”  He was udderly (sorry, couldn’t resist) stunned.  He had been convinced that milk was manufactured by a machine in a factory.  There may be some adults under a similar decision today.
• Life is sometimes numbers: the number of calories you have divided by 2000 divided by the number of people you want to feed is the number of days.  Advanced math realizes that 3600 calories per pound of body fat is available to the owner.  I mean, that’s why my body makes it, right?  That and all of the cheeseburgers.
• Taking notes in the hot tub in the backyard under the canopy of blue skies and budding trees is awesome. There is no better vantage point to contemplate the fate of civilization.

The last time Cage showed up at my house, all he did was try to convince me to steal the Declaration of Independence with him, drink all of my booze, and then he shaved the terrier.

“All the best doctors are in the Gulag or dead.” – The Death of Stalin

Stalin has a special place in his heart for you, right at People’s Worker Camp Number 1323.

I’ve been more time driving recently, and with that time, I’ve learned to speak Dutch, memorized the Dewey Decimal System, and figured out how to make a bagpipe using trash bags, duct tape and copper pipe stolen from abandoned buildings.

I kid.  PVC pipe works better.

I’ve actually spent most of the time driving listening to commentary on the news, history, or other podcasts that drift on up into the “play me next” list.  I guess that means to a certain extent my viewing history is determined by an algorithm written by a pimply-faced 19 year old in the basement of the Google® complex.  Thankfully, he writes pretty good code, and I thank all of the girls that wouldn’t date him for that.

Yes, I know that it’s YouTube®, but I really don’t let watching it distract me from driving – I swear I never actually watch YouTube™ while I’m texting and drinking coffee at the same time while steering with my knee in a school zone.  In reality, most of what I “watch” doesn’t require any visuals at all, since often it’s just a person talking.

The Mrs. tells me that the steering wheel is just in my way.

However, in the case of one particular video, the story was one of the most horrible I’d ever heard and I was thankful that pictures didn’t survive to illustrate it.

Let me tell you about it.

In 1933, a guy named Genrikh Yagoda (head of the OGPU secret police, which eventually become known as the KGB) got together with his best buddy Matvei Berman, who ran something called

Главное  управление  лагерей

– which has the sort-of boring translated name of “Main Administration of Camps.”  I first heard about Berman’s organization though its more common name, Gulag.  Yagoda and Berman had a fantastic idea.  Stalin had decided to punish the Kulaks by taking all of the food out of the Ukraine and closing the border – I write more about that little adventure here (In the World Murder Olympics, Communists Take Gold and Silver!).  That meant that there wasn’t as much food in the Soviet Union since they were purposefully killing all the people who made the food in the area where the food came from.

A rational leader would respond by, oh I don’t know, stopping the slaughter of all the farmers that grow the food?  But not Stalin-era Soviets.  No, they needed a solution that allowed them to keep killing their own farmers, yet still grow food.  Since Yagoda had police and Berman had prisons, they’d use the police to arrest citizens to fill the prisons and make the prisons farms that grow food.

Secret, secret police:  the CatGB.  Only known weakness?  Laser pointers.

But what crime to arrest the citizens for?  Yagoda and Berman came across the idea of requiring internal passports.  If you were caught without your papers?  Boom.  Deport to the Gulag where you could be magically made into a productive farmer to patriotically feed the Motherland.

The local secret police that worked for Yagoda loved the idea.  They loved it so much, that even if you had the internal passports, you could still get arrested.  Why?  Quotas.  The plan was for the secret police to arrest 2,000,000 Soviet citizens for export to the farms.  With a demand of 2,000,000, there was no reason for actual guilt to be required.

In the infinite wisdom of Yagoda and Berman, they decided the best people to abduct for their new farming plan were . . . city people.  I mean, how hard could farming be?  This was the Yagoda-Berman plan – they would send these arrested city dwellers off to Eastern Russia so they could make farms in Siberia and gloriously feed the Soviet Union.

Red Acres is the place to be . . . farm living is the life for me . . . Siberia stretching out so far and wide . . . Comrade, keep Moscow just give me that Gulag life

If you’re like me, you’re immediately wondering how this bulletproof plan could fail.  As their plan was being enthusiastically carried out, tens of thousands of people were being arrested.  Time to ship them east.  How?  Open barges used to haul timber.  In May.  In Siberia.  Amazingly, of the first 5,000 shipped out, only 27 died on the 2,500 mile trip.

Immediately died, that is.  The day they got there several hundred more died of exposure.

Not having any real orders, and not having any tools or shelter or, well, anything, the guards dropped all of the first 5,000 prisoners on an island in the middle of a river.  Another 1,200 or so were shipped to the same island by the end of May.  Nazino Island was the chosen site.  Why?  Who knows – probably made sense from the viewpoint of a map in Moscow.  And those guards?  They had no shoes.  No uniforms.  No training – they were new recruits as well.

Nazino Island is 2000’ across at its widest point, and about 2 miles long as it squats in the middle of the Ob River.  As a landing point for 6,000 city-bred farmers, it probably couldn’t have been worse – part marsh, part forest.  The forest part would have been fine, if they had axes.

But they didn’t have any equipment or shelter of any kind.  Thankfully things couldn’t get worse, could they?

If only it were just rain . . .

Wait, they could – there were regular, violent criminals tossed in with the poor randomly arrested citizens.  And violent criminals tossed in with scared people was a way to make the disaster even worse as the criminals took charge.  What little food was given to the prisoners (about 900 calories of rye flour per person – 300 grams per day) was often given to the criminals to distribute, with worse than predictable results.

How could it have been worse than predictable?  The city folk mixed what flour they actually got with water so that they weren’t eating handfuls of dry powder.

What water did they use?  River water.  Raw river water.  Unboiled raw river water.

Many became violently ill.

It gets worse.  Much worse.  By June, only 2,000 of the Nazino deportees are left alive, and only 200 of them were in any condition to work when they were moved to the next labor camp – one that actually had buildings and tools and food this time.  Go to YouTube© and search for “Stalin’s Cannibal Island,” if you want more details.  But I’ll warn you – it’s disturbing content which should be clear because you’re using “Stalin” and “cannibal” in the same search term.  I don’t recommend you watch or listen to a video on it, so I’m not linking to it – you can’t unhear it.  Make your own call if you really want to watch it – it’s not hard to find, especially if you’re driving.

No one knows if Nazino was the worst of Soviet excesses.  We only know about it because a local communist leader was so appalled by what he saw that he sent a report to Moscow.  The report was immediately classified, and popped in a folder in a featureless warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant.  Only after the fall of the Soviet Union did this information come out because someone found a dusty copy in that Siberian warehouse.

And that, perhaps, is the greatest tragedy.  The following phrase has been (rightly or not) attributed to Stalin, “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”  Not long after the report reached Moscow, Stalin stopped the program that Yagoda and Berman had started.  Millions were still sent to the Gulags and millions died in them, but there was at least some planning, food and logistics to go with the casual cruelty.

In 1938, five years after Nazino, Yagoda was shot after a show trial because he irritated Stalin.  One year later, Berman was shot as well after his own show trial.  It’s unlikely that either was executed with Nazino in mind – Stalin just didn’t like Yagoda and Berman after a while and when Stalin didn’t like you, it was pretty common that you were guilty of huge numbers of crimes.  It’s likely that Stalin simply didn’t care about the dead citizens and had probably forgotten about them by the time he got around to thinning the herd.

This is communism.  It’s not an aberration.  It’s not an unusual condition.  It’s a story that’s repeated wherever communism is tried.

Che, showing his skill at mining for glorious mineral resources for the worker’s paradise!

Despite the soft face put on socialist regimes by their proponents, this is the inevitable end state.  Communism results inevitably in a war against the people, with places like Nazino being the rule rather than the exception.  When you see the faces promising class warfare and offering free things, remember that this is what they mean – eventually every citizen either cowers in fear of the state, or is consumed by it.

There is an alternative, thankfully.  You too can learn to make your own bagpipe . . . but I’d avoid doing the tricky bits in a school zone.

It’s 11:59 on Radio Free America, this is Uncle Sam with music and the truth until dawn.  Right now I’ve got a few words for some of our brothers and sisters in the occupied zone:  the chair is against the wall, the chair is against the wall, John has a long mustache, John has a long mustache. – Red Dawn

I must say that I think 6:30 is the best time on a clock – hands down.

6. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
7. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
8. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures.  Just in case.
9. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.

The clock didn’t move this month after last month’s increment – thankfully the step between 8. and 9. above is a big one.  But I thought that about the step between 7. and 8., too.

In this issue:  Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – Virginia:  Win or Loss? – Updated Civil War II Index – Vexit – Links

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

Violence and Censorship Update

Obviously, there was more censorship in January – it’s become a fixture.  It wasn’t censorship, exactly, but the real story wasn’t was Project Veritas (LINK), which didn’t get a lot of coverage.  Project Veritas is run by James O’Keefe, who has been better than anyone at getting Leftists to drop their masks to show what the real plans are and what they really feel.  In January O’Keefe dropped several videos showing Leftists within the campaigns of various Democratic presidential hopefuls.

Notice how when it came time for surgery, Bernie didn’t hop a plane to Canada?  It’s almost like he had a change of heart.

The following quotes are all from Bernie Sanders campaign workers – paid workers from the information that I can find.  After these statements were made public, I can find no public repudiation by Sanders or his campaign of these views or the employees that made them.  I can’t find any record that these workers were fired.  If this were on the Right?  Each employee would have been front page news until he was publicly executed by being nibbled to death by ducks wearing Monica’s blue dress on a pay-per-view with profits going to the Clinton Foundation®.

• Let’s force them (billionaires) to build roads – rebuild our roads, rebuild our dams, rebuild our bridges. Let’s force them to do that.
• Well, the Gulags were founded as re-education camps. What will help is when we send all the Republicans to the re-education camps.
• I’m ready to start tearing bricks up and start fighting. …  I’ll straight up – I’ll straight up get armed, I want to learn how to shoot, and go train. I’m ready for the f___ing revolution, bro, I’m telling you.  Guillotine the rich.
• … do we just dissolve the Senate, House of Representatives, the Judicial Branch, and have something Bernie Sanders and a cabinet of people, make all decisions for the climate? I mean, I’m serious.
• Yeah, you’re not gonna get Bernie to say “Gulags,” but like, I’m all aboard for Gulags, like, I feel there needs to re-education for a significant portion of our society. I mean, but running for president in the United States you can’t say anything like that, right?
• …putting them up against a wall.  I mean the alternative, instead of trying to like…re-educate these people and put them back into society the only option is, the only other alternative is to f___ing (makes shooting gesture/noise) you know what I mean?
• I’m ready to throw down now. I don’t want to wait and have to wait for f___ing DNC.  The billionaire class.  The f___ing media, pundits.  Walk into that MSNBC studios, drag those motherf___ers out by their hair and light them on fire in the streets.
• Well, I’ll tell you what in Cuba, what did they do to reactionaries? You want to fight against the revolution, you’re going to die for it, motherf___er.

When the Left is telling you it wants to either kill you or put you in a labor camp, re-educate your children, and destroy the Constitutional government of the country and replace it with a communist junta, you just might want to listen – there are red flags everywhere.

The Soviet Constitution promised freedom of speech.  The United States Constitution promised freedom after speech.

Virginia:  Win or Loss?

On the Right, the biggest question in the aftermath of the rally on January 20 in Virginia is did the Right win or lose?  My answer is simple.

It’s now known as Schrödinger’s Rally.

The case for a win:  a group of peaceful protesters, many of whom were armed, exercised their Constitutional rights of assembly and bearing arms.  That’s very positive.  The media reported 22,000 people – which would be roughly the size of the 1^st Marine Division.  And no, I’m not trying to indicate that the group of people that showed up would in any way be as combat capable as the 1^st Marine Division unless the Marines had been given an infinite supply of tequila, pizza rolls, and strippers for six months.  Even then, my money would be on the Marines.

But the sheer number of people was a win.  It showed that not only were people engaged enough that they’d give up a holiday to show support for their rights, but also that it was significant enough that it wasn’t turned into violence by either the State or agents provocateurs embedded by the State.

The case for a loss:  nothing changed.  The anti-gun bills are moving through the Virginia assembly with no delay.  No politician changed his or her vote.  In that respect, the rally was a failure

Why didn’t any politician change their vote?

Because no politician had to pay any price for their support of the votes, nor do they feel that they’ll have to pay a price.  And, no, to be very clear, I’m not suggesting violence on them or any illegal action.  But what I am suggesting is that if they pay no personal price, they’ll never change.  What are legal ways to influence them?

• First – make sure that they aren’t re-elected. That requires organization and planning.  Oh, and voters.
• Second – go through their histories thoroughly. Don’t blackmail them – find (legally) all of their dirty laundry and air it – imagine what Ralph’s browser history looks like.  Isn’t that a public record?
• Third – make sure that that people are rude to their wives and shun them at social functions. How will Governor Northam’s wife, Pam, feel if people tell her what they think of Ralph when she stops in to get a Starbucks®?   What if her public meetings were peacefully protested?
• Fourth – remove their privacy in every public space. Park vans outside of their houses with billboards that advertise what a horrible person lives within – they’ve done this with Susan Collins in Maine, so it’s a tactic that’s fair game.  But the Geneva Convention does categorize playing Twisted Sister® 24/7 at their house a crime against humanity.

I’m sure that there are people who are far better at this than I am who can come up with dozens of legal ways to make a vote against Constitutional rights pretty uncomfortable.

Updated Civil War II Index

More graphs.  Last month, someone mentioned that one of the graphs didn’t contain a bikini, and I promised bikini graphs, and one graph showed a one-piece bathing suit.  My deepest apologies for this journalistic error.

Violence:

Up is more violent.  Violence is edging back up for the second straight month.  I still imagine it will remain low for the winter, and hope it doesn’t get as high as the bellybutton.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  It skyrocketed last month, and plummeted this month as impeachment proved to be nothing.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions.  The economic indicators all were positive, and strongly so, in January – they were so strong I would expect they’d go down in February.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, since (in theory) ICE is catching fewer aliens because there are fewer people trying to get in.  The numbers are down this month, all the way to near her finger.  Numbers are also becoming lower on an absolute basis – fewer crossings seem to be real.

Vexit

In January, there was a proposal filed in the West Virginia legislature to invite counties from Virginia to come on over and join them, since the only think most of Virginia has in common with the Democratically controlled sections is a license plate.

The major problem with this sort of a solution is that it makes too much sense.  It allows people to peacefully self-determine the government they have and also begins a process that might lead to a peaceful disassociation between Left and Right.  Let’s face it, the Right doesn’t want to hang around the Left, but not nearly as much as the Left dislikes the Right.

What do you expect from a group that tried to get Hannibal Lechter to run for Governor of New York?

Easy choice then – have a peaceful divorce and figure out who has to take the kids to the dentist, right?

Nope.  That isn’t the way the Left really works.  The Left doesn’t want peaceful disassociation – the Left wants power and control.  The words from the Bernie bros are clear – Gulag, firing squad, or being burned alive are the choices on the menu.  Heck, the Right builds walls to keep people out – the Left builds walls to keep people in.  There is absolutely no way that either the Leftist Virginia General Assembly or Congress would approve people leaving their control.  Aesop’s treatise on this is well-written and clear (LINK).

But.

When Gandhi wanted to Inexit, what did he do, besides walk around nearly naked?  He started a resistance movement that eventually led to the British Empire telling India, “Yeah, you’re more trouble that you’re worth,” while at the same time striking a blow for the rights of the nearly nude.  Is that something that can happen in the United States, a peaceful separation?  To be clear – if everyone decided to stop paying taxes tomorrow, the IRS would cease to exist.  The existence of the IRS shows that people, while not liking it, consent to it.

Any government exists so long as it reflects the will of the governed.  East Germany dissolved over the course of five days in November of 1989 after having existed for over forty years.

Is Virginia there yet?  No.  But don’t underestimate the power of a people that want to have freedoms.

Links

Most are from Ricky this month . . .  enjoy!

Soleimani background

Left not standing for flag

Here’s how asymmetric warfare will be waged during the next CW.  Substitute “drones” for helicopters and “anything” for pigs, add cellphone coverage for viral optics, and away we go….

Q showing up again.

Brand new…top media continues to cover this.   The graphic in the first one is awesome.

 

Boogaloo is bad think.

Vox doesn’t like guns.

The British looking for an in.

Billionaires?

Left thought.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/10/21/war-menu-2020-elections

Carville thinks the Left is nuts.

“You guys.  You lollygag the ball around the infield.  You lollygag your way down to first.  You lollygag in and out of the dugout.  You know what that makes you?  Larry?” – Bull Durham

These are some pretty rough office politics.

One big question about careers:  should you play the game?

Way back when I was in college, I had a part time job.  My boss was out of town, but asked me to send out mail that was 100% fraudulent.  He was attempting to get confidential business information from a competitor by pretending to be someone else.

Thankfully, I knew that this was more than just a bad idea – it was illegal.  Really illegal.  Like spending vacation time in the federal pen illegal.  I told him no, it was illegal.  He told me to do it anyway.  I didn’t do it.  I even took it to his boss.  All his boss said was, “Well, he shouldn’t have used our address.”

The next day I took this problem to a professor in one of my business classes.  I asked him what I should do.  “Well, John, you’ve already quit, so I don’t see much more you need to do.”

“But,” I replied, “I haven’t quit.”

He smiled and shook his head.  “No, John.  You quit.”

When I thought about it, he was right, I had quit.  I just hadn’t realized it.  But it was the right thing to do.  Besides, anyone who will knowingly ask you to commit a crime is more than willing to turn you in to the cops to save themselves.

So, no, don’t play that game.

Pa Wilder didn’t know magic tricks.  He said accounting tricks were enough.

What if the game is simply immoral or unethical?

In one case, ethics cost me a job.  I was at an interview and the interviewer asked me if I would do this rather specific unethical act.  “No, that’s unethical.”  Oops.  Their actual business model was based on gaining a competitive advantage by behaving unethically.  I haven’t lost a minute of sleep over not getting that job.

I also had a boss who asked me to do something unethical.  I said, simply, “That’s unethical.”  I believe my boss didn’t know it was unethical and he looked disappointed – not in me, but that his idea was unethical.  “Are you sure it’s unethical?”

Your mileage may vary – but I’ve decided I’m not going to play that game, either.

What if it’s just stupid or silly?

Well, then if you need the work, you play the game, cheerfully.  I know that, especially when I was young, I felt that doing stupid things at work was . . . stupid.  I made the decision early on – swallow my pride (along with the jelly donuts in the break room) and go along to get along.  Selling out?  Not really.  There is always a political element to work.  Heck, get six people or three women together and there will be politics.

But if you have a family to pay for and don’t have the means to do it, don’t let your ego talk you out of a job.  Do you need to cower and whimper?  Certainly not.  If that’s the behavior that’s rewarded at the company, find another job.  It’s never going to get better because your boss isn’t an accident.  Your boss was promoted because he or she exhibits the behavior that the company wants.

Which brings me back to the promised subject of today’s post:  goals.

I’m thinking “writing dank memes” wasn’t what he was looking for.

My boss asked me a question, one that I wasn’t really ready for:

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

As much as I could be surprised, I was.  I had no real answer.  Thankfully, this wasn’t my first corporate conversation, so I played the game and gave my answer.  When I described my answers to The Mrs., she laughed.  “You just gave the Bull Durham answers.”

The Mrs. loves that movie, and it appears to be a part of our marriage contract that whenever we’re flipping through channels and Bull Durham is on, she gets to watch it.  Anyway, the relevant scene is:

Crash: “You got something to write with?  Good.  It’s time to work on your interviews.”
Nuke: “My interviews?  What do I got to do?”
Crash: “You’re gonna have to learn your clichés.  You’re going to have to study them.  You’re going to have to know them.  They’re your friends.  Write this down.  We’ve got to play them one day at a time.”
Nuke: “Got to play – that’s pretty boring, you know?”
Crash: “Of course it’s boring.  That’s the point.  Write it down.”
Nuke: “One day at a time.”
Crash: “I’m just happy to be here.  Hope I can help the ball club.  I know.  Write it down.  I just want to give it my best shot, and the good Lord willing, things will work out.”
Nuke: “Good Lord willing -”
Crash: “Things will work out.”

What’s funny is that I had already spent a chunk of time working on my goals that very week.  I looked at several aspects of my life – relationships, this blog, taking over a small island in the Pacific and making them worship me as their fire god, and brushing my teeth every morning.   I have space for work goals, but those are still blank two weeks after the conversation with my boss.  That alone is probably the focus of a future post, but not in the next week or two.

I ask my kids what they want to be when they grow up – maybe they have some ideas I could steal.

But goals are crucially important.  It’s not like Jeff Bezos woke up one morning and said to himself, “Whoa, where did all of this money come from?”  No, he had goals.  One of them involved getting jacked, another involved him becoming the world’s richest man, and the last one involved perfecting his version of the Roomba®, which was really just two miniature poodles hot-glued to a dinner plate.

I guess Jeff got divorced because his wife was past her Prime®.

Jeff Bezos has goals and I do too, although none of mine involve having the National Enquirer® post pictures of my, um, crotch cuckoo on the front page.  I don’t know how Jeff does it, but when I write down my goals, I use a fairly simple formula:

What – Write down in as much detail (as you need) to describe the goal.  Mine vary from achieving a very specific number of regular readers for this blog to setting higher standards for myself in some other areas of life, like learning to braid my armpit hair.  The goal should be significant enough to warrant the effort.  For me, launching an interplanetary mission might be really hard.  But it’s a no-brainer for Elon Musk, who I believe keeps most of his weed on Mars.

Why – Why am I doing this?  Superficial goals will lead to superficial effort.  If you don’t look at the “why” and feel that it’s really important to you, the goal itself is trivial or you haven’t gotten to the real why.  If you can’t come up with a good why you should achieve the goal – kill the goal like Nancy Pelosi kills a half-empty fifth of vodka.

When – A deadline is a spur for action.  External deadlines on things like doing the taxes are powerful, but self-imposed deadlines work, too.  In my case, I’ve set a deadline for writing these posts three times a week.  If I didn’t?  They wouldn’t get done and I would spend all my time practicing my armpit hair braiding.

How – Goals just don’t achieve themselves.  Here I often will get very specific.  Number of minutes working out, number of pushups, that sort of thing.  I realize that when working towards a goal, especially an audacious one, no one has all of the details worked out on the first day.  That’s fine – your plan can and will change as you take action.  Just make sure that “eat less than 1500 calories a day” doesn’t morph into “don’t eat the seventh eighth jelly donut.”

The closer that you can link your goal to your actual physical survival, the less that you need any of the above.  Very few drowning men write mission statements and then create a list of action items.  It’s simply not necessary.  Similarly, I didn’t write down that I’m going to write three times a week – it’s a given.  I did write down some concrete steps on how I was going to get better, but The Mrs. felt that the “kidnap better writers than me and chain them in the basement” step was a bit extreme.  She thought rope would probably work.

The uncut version of this movie is just called “Face”

In last Wednesday’s post I mentioned to not dwell on negative outcomes.  I stand by that, especially when peak performance is required.  But negative outcomes are very helpful when it comes to staying motivated to working a plan, week after week, sacrificing to get better when I could be torturing my captive writers and eating jelly donuts instead.  For some goals I use those negative outcomes as an incentive, of sorts, and it seems to work.

Especially at first, don’t have more than half a dozen goals.  For me, it’s important that I write them down on paper.  Something about sitting and writing them makes them more real.  And it also makes the final step, checking progress, easier.  I suggest you do that weekly.

So, get to it – play the game and get your goals done.  There’s no time to lollygag, because what does that make you?

A lollygagger.

“My God!  If they could market that in pill form, Switzerland would be plunged into a recession.” – Absolutely Fabulous

So you should save your money because a recession is coming.  A recession that’s caused by too many people saving money . . . ?

It was the middle of December.

I looked across the desk at my boss.  He had called me in to his office, asked me to close the door, and looked very uncomfortable. Not “Abraham Lincoln at a play” uncomfortable, but more “Pope in the woods without toilet paper” uncomfortable.  It was unusual to see him look uncomfortable, because this boss was an old hand, very calm.  I had worked for him for about 18 months at that point, and we had a great relationship, so he wasn’t going to fire me right before Christmas.  Unless he had figured out who what put the Gummy Bears™ in the paper shredder.

“Umm, John, the company is giving you a bonus.”

I perked up.  I liked the sound of a bonus, but didn’t like the “Umm” so much.  “Umm”, in my experience, is a verbal placeholder that means, “This is going to sound good, but really isn’t.”

“Great!”  I actually was enthusiastic, even given the “Umm”-modifier.  Bonus is a great word.

“Well, the board of directors voted on the bonus structure and the bonus pool back in October, about sixty days ago.  And they chose a specific number of shares for each employee.  And when they voted, the shares were worth seven times what they were today.  I just want you to know I value you, and the company values you.”

What was left were the unspoken words . . . “I hope you’re not insulted.”

No swimming pool this year . . . .

I wasn’t.  I could multiply my bonus by seven and see that someone, somewhere, liked me when the corporate board voted.  Sometimes it really is the thought that counts.  Except when I get deodorant for Christmas – that seems more like thought that indicates a passive-aggressive criticism about my hygiene.  And comments like this when The Boy introduces me don’t help:  “This is my dad, he doesn’t drink quite as much as his poor hygiene might indicate.”

When I finally cashed in that stock five years later, it was worth 15 times what it had been on the day my boss looked so upset.  By no means was it a life-changing amount, but I’m still pretty happy.  What changed to make the bonus worth so much more?

The economy.  That puny stock bonus was given to me in the middle of the Great Recession.  Five years after that, the company was worth a LOT more.  I sold my shares (I kept the certificates in my underwear drawer), paid my income taxes on the stock, and was certainly not insulted.

We sit at the start of 2020.  By 2030, I can assure you we will have gone through at least one recession, and probably more.  Right now, the United States is in the single longest economic expansion in its history, passing the 1991-2001 economy in duration by six months.

I hear the economy is so rough that Bill and Hillary Clinton shared a room on their last trip.

Doubling an all-time record?  It certainly won’t happen.  It cannot.  No matter how the Federal Reserve™ manipulates the economy, it can’t go that far unless they give everyone roofies and tell them that they have twice as much money in the bank as they actually do.  Besides, we shouldn’t go that long without a recession.

Why?

Let’s look at the economy as if it were a natural, physical system.  Generally, physical systems are not continuous; they operate in of cycles.  Trees grow leaves in spring, through the summer they gather nutrients, in the autumn the leaves fall, and in winter the tree is dormant.

Companies follow a cycle, too.  A company is founded.  It starts in business, sometimes growing, and in the end, it’s finally bankrupt or sold off and then it’s dead.  For example, the top 10 companies in the United States in 1917 were:

• US Steel
• AT&T
• Standard Oil of New Jersey
• Bethlehem Steel
• Armour & Co.
• Swift & Co.
• International Harvester
• DuPont
• Midvale Steel
• S. Rubber

What are the top ten companies today?

• Apple
• Alphabet (Google)
• Microsoft
• Amazon
• Facebook
• Berkshire Hathaway
• Johnson & Johnson
• Exxon-Mobil
• JPMorgan Chase
• Wells Fargo

How many of them are still in the top ten?

One, kinda.  Exxon used to be Standard Oil of New Jersey, so at least we know the Rockefellers are doing okay.  That keeps me up at night, worrying that the Rockefellers might have to drive their own cars.

How many of the top 10 companies today will be in the top 10 in 50 years?  How many in 100?

If it’s raining, that might be a drizzly bear.

I’ve shared this opinion before:  recessions are good for the economy.  Bankrupt businesses are good for the economy.  Are they painful in the short term?  Certainly.  But they provide a great service – they clear out the companies that don’t add value to the customers.  Eaton Rapids Joe (LINK) had a great post a while back that describes the impact on physical systems when they’re overly managed and constant.  He used the example of salmon streams that had been dammed, that no longer experienced spring flooding from snow melt.

From the post:

At one time it was commonly believed that dams would benefit salmon spawning.  It was believed that regulating the flow so that it was constant would be most beneficial.

The unintended consequence was that the constant stream cut a deep and narrow channel, just like a band saw.

The narrow channels intercepted very little sunlight…the driver of nearly all life on the planet.  The channel was devoid of pools and riffles, gravel beds of various coarseness, rocks to break the current and beds of seaweed.  They were a desert for salmon fry.

Before dams were installed across every stream, spring flooding would fill old channels with rock and gravel and would cut new meanders and channels.  The flooding would flush the silt out of gravel beds.  Stream beds were braids of old, crisscrossing channels.  Not only did they look like strips of bacon from the air but they intercepted huge amounts of sunlight and the gravel beds provided outstanding habitat for the pantheon of invertebrates that were the base of the food chain.

The Fed™ is trying to manage our economy like that salmon stream, making a nice, constant flow.

A decade is a long time without a recession.  Based on the past experiences of the 2001 and 2008 recessions it’s easy to come to the conclusion that the longer you wait to address a problem economy, the bigger impact it will have on people’s lives.  Heck, the longer you wait to address any problem, the worse it becomes.

Want a housing bubble?  This is how you get a housing bubble.

If the Housing Bubble had popped in 2004, the associated recession would have been much smaller than the nearly economy-ending Great Recession of 2008.  If the 2001 recession would have happened in 1998, it would have certainly pulled some of the inflation away from the Dotcom Bubble and perhaps avoided making the Spice Girls® celebrities entirely, and no one would know who Scary Spice, Posh Spice, Sporty Spice and whatsherface were.  I guess we’re safe now that they’re all Old Spice™.

We sit in the year 2020 with severe economic unrest a certainty in the next decade.  What year?  I’m not sure.  And I’m also not sure I’d trust anyone who says they know the exact timing.  But it is coming.  2020?  2021?

Don’t know.

This coming recession has had a decade to build up.  That decade has seen significant bubbles building in, well, everything.  One of the biggest bubbles is in corporate profits.  Let’s pick . . . insulin.  The price of insulin has doubled in five years.  Does it cost more to make insulin today?  Almost certainly not – the techniques to make this insulin have been known and perfected for decades – it probably costs less to make it.  Is it better insulin, somehow new and improved like the Super Bowl® without the Patriots™?  Nope.

Well, then, why does it cost more?  So Eli Lilly and Company® can increase corporate profits.

I like profits.  I think that profits are good for society for a number of reasons.  They allocate funds to effective businesses during competition.  If the McDonald’s® in your town sucks?  Go to the local Burger King©.  Effective management and good products are rewarded.  Bad management is punished, all without anyone having to lift a finger.  That’s the beauty of capitalism – everyone votes on which businesses get to stay in business, every day.

But Eli Lilly and Company™?  They are raising the price of Humalog® insulin because they can.  How do we know this?  They’ve recently introduced a new insulin with the same exact formulation as Humalog™, but with a new name, Lispro™.  But the price of this new rebranded insulin?  Half.  For the same exact stuff.

Eli Lilly and Company© didn’t do this in the past, but they do it now because investors demand not only profit, but profit growth.  How long is this sustainable?  Not forever.  But it’s a great example of how in 2020, instead of just a housing bubble, we have a bubble in corporate profits.  We have a bubble in money (which is the only way to get to negative interest rates).

Will Eli Lilly and Company™ start charging double the current price to bring the total to $1000 a bottle for Humalog®?

No.  They can’t.  There is a cap not on what diabetics will pay, but on what they can pay.  There is a maximum profit that can be obtained.  Period.  You can’t rent a house for $20,000 a month if the average wage is $15 an hour in your neighborhood, just like you can’t fight crime with a macaroni duck.

Obscure, I know.  But it felt right.

Without the cleaning that a periodic recession brings, junk builds up in the economy.  The average recession historically happens every three years or so.  When the recession of the Tumultuous Twenties® hits?

It will hit hard.

The outcomes are unpredictable.  The Federal Reserve© interest rate is ~1.5%.  Back in the 1990’s, it averaged 5.75%, so the Fed™ had the ability to lower rates to stimulate the economy.  That mechanism is gone.  What’s left, printing money?  Tax collections are down due to tax rate cuts.  This is a good thing.  But government spending is up, too.  Add them together, and we’re looking at deficits of a trillion dollars a year or more . . . forever.  We’ve already slipped into Modern Monetary Theory (The Worst Economic Idea Since Socialism, Explained Using Bikini Girl Graphs).

That means there’s a limit on how much more money we can print.

The trigger for this future recession will be blamed on some other event – the 2001 recession was blamed on 9/11, even though the stock market started to fall well before September.  Our minds like explanations, so we sometimes create them even when they don’t exist.  Maybe it’s the Great Internet Blackout of 2020 that caused it.

Mark my words:  This economy will be cleaned up by a recession, probably a big one that we will find difficulty in spending our way out of.

Don’t get caught in the flood.

And if someone offers you free money?  Smile and take it.

“There’s a reason you separate military and the police.  One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people.  When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.” – Battlestar Galactica (2005)

I hate to make fun of India.  I heard they lost power at their largest mall, and hundreds of people were stuck on the escalator for hours.

I was originally going to write about another topic, but then I saw this article (LINK) about how the Army® was testing a fighting force using a system that combines soldiers, flying drones, and land drone vehicles and I couldn’t resist.  The short explanation of the system is that flying drones are used for real time reconnaissance, and followed up with both living troops and land drones to attack an enemy.  Those are followed up by McDonalds® and Starbucks™.

Based on the simulations that they have run so far, a group of soldiers augmented with the drones was able to attack a defending group of 120 soldiers and win.  This isn’t unusual – defending soldiers lose all the time, just ask the Trojans.  But in this case, the attackers were a platoon-sized group of only 40 soldiers.  They also claimed nearly zero casualties in the simulation, although one participant ran out of GoGurt©.

This version tested well, except in certain areas of Asia.

This is opposite of all of general wisdom about conventional warfare.  General wisdom (based on hundreds of years of us killing each other) says that a competent defending force has roughly a three to one advantage – that is, 120 defenders is equal to 360 attackers.  In practice, if troops were available you’d probably nearly double the number of attackers to 600-700 troops to overwhelm the defenders and minimize attacker losses.  Yet, the Army exercises showed they’d be able to defeat those 120 defenders easily with only 40 soldiers if they remembered to pay Comcast® for Internet.

The reason that this works for the attackers is fairly simple – the flying drones give nearly super-human information about where the adversary is.  For soldiers, this is nearly a super power – to be able to see and know where the enemy is without them knowing where you are.  It provides a significant advantage so attacks can be precisely planned and ambushes detected.  The Army has recently ordered 9,000 Black Hornet® drones from FLIR™ and they’re going into service – at a price tag of $15,000 each.

Every single picture of this drone I found was someone looking lovingly at it as it floated above their hand. 

The other type of drone mentioned were land drone systems.  When they first ran the simulations, the Army commander would get information from the flying drones and then bring up the troops and land drones, but that allowed the adversary to know that the attack was coming, so in later simulations the attacking commander tried to bring up the air and land drone forces for a simultaneous attack.  So what did the land drones look like?

My bet is that they will something like the picture below, a combination of weapons and sensors so that the drone can attack without exposing humans.  Sort of a combat Roomba®.

Want an A.I. uprising?  Because this is how you get an A.I. uprising.

In the article, the author casually noted that the augmented drone/soldier combination wouldn’t be all that effective against Russia.  Honestly, I think he’s being optimistic.  When attacking any state-sponsored military, the countermeasures required to detect and stop the drones are generally far cheaper than the drones themselves.  The only way to completely stop the countermeasures is to increase the autonomy of the drone systems to the point where they’re making a lot of decisions by themselves, or by air dropping lots of vodka for the Russian troops.

Again, defense costs less than building an attacking force.  A great list of ways knock out drones is here (LIST), H/T to the Docent over at Practical Eschatology (LINK) for the link.  He always has pretty interesting links and commentary, so consider dropping by on a regular basis.  History has shown that advances in military technology are generally short-lived.

In many ways, it is nearly certain that the Russians could easily field sufficient electronic deterrents to knock our small drones out of the air, and also potentially use them against us by using our radio communication signals to pinpoint attacks.  The Russians routinely jam our GPS® signals, and it’s likely they’re the reason that my Wi-Fi goes out at 3:00AM, just when I’m trying to upload a post.  Fighting Russia, the advantage probably goes away.  In some senses, increased technological complexity can work against soldiers in a big way – that complexity must be supported by logistics – the average soldier carries twenty pounds of batteries into combat.  If there aren’t spares?  What then?

Similarly, China would likely be immune to such attempts at force multiplication, since they’re making most of our electronics anyway and have probably inserted code that turns our electronic hardware into Pokémon® games if we ever declare war on them.  Though anecdotal evidence indicates that the quality of the individual Chinese troops would be stunningly deficient when compared with the average soldier of the United States, I believe that they have no intention of ever fighting a stand-up war against the United States.  Any attacks China makes will be surprising and asymmetrical and probably focused against Western economic systems.

So who is the Army thinking about using this technology against?

It probably won’t change the outcome in Afghanistan, where the Afghans are fighting a guerilla war using 100 year old rifles and improvised bombs.  They don’t depend on holding ground to win – they just have to tire the United States out.  Drone technology already is saving their lives, but it won’t win the war.  And if it won’t (probably) work as effectively against Russia or China, who are we preparing for?

The Cubans?  Venezuela?  The Great Heathen Penguin Army of Antarctica?

I’m pretty sure that Barney wore it better . . .

My fear is that the answer is that the technology might be used here in the United States, not by our soldiers, but by our police.  Whereas there are plentiful and relatively inexpensive ways to detect and/or defeat drones by a State actor, the idea of using them to control and defeat a semi-organized and relatively low tech group of citizens seems more likely.

The police are already becoming a military force.  In 1980, there were 3,000 SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) raids a year.  In 2016 there were 50,000-80,000 such raids yearly.  Over $5 billion worth of military equipment has been transferred.

In fairness, he also took a Tour of Italy at the Olive Garden®.

I wonder how much of that technology is in Virginia?  But I’m sure that if citizens give up their guns, the police will turn all that stuff back in.  Right?

What, the cops have no intention of turning it back in?  Maybe the Great Heathen Penguin Army has the right idea . . . .

“A man’s got to know his limitations.” – Magnum Force

I assure you, playing Risk® with Clint Eastwood is difficult.  He brings real artillery.

Ma Wilder was into pot.

Pots, really, ones made out of clay.  Which led to the next step:  Ma Wilder wanted a pottery wheel.  Why?  She was making pots, and the closest public pottery wheel was 45 miles away.  Heck, Ma Wilder and some bored doctor’s wife were probably the only people who had a pottery wheel in the whole county.

Being that Pa and Ma Wilder had enough money to pay for Wilder Redoubt, feed me, and to pay for the pottery wheel, Pa bought a pottery wheel for Ma.  Since this was before Amazon® Prime™, Ma Wilder ordered it out of some magazine, probably Bored Doctor’s Wife’s Hobbies Quarterly, and a group of burly UPS® drivers drove an hour out of their way to deliver the wheel.

What arrived wasn’t a fully assembled pottery wheel – it was the parts.  This particular contraption was heavy – it had a large concrete wheel several feet in diameter, and about four inches thick.  The idea behind a pottery wheel is that you get the whole contraption spinning, and the inertia of the heavy wheel would keep it going while you turned a $3.00 piece of clay into a lopsided $1.50 pot that only a kindergartner’s mother could love.

It was Ma Wilder’s goal that they name a radioactive turtle after her in 300 years.

Pa Wilder spread the pottery wheel parts out on the shag carpeting in my bedroom.  My bedroom had a door to the greenhouse where Ma Wilder wanted to set up her pottery studio, so it was nearly a logical place to put the pottery wheel together.  Pa Wilder had many things that put him in a good mood – but assembling pottery wheels was not one of them, and I could tell that this particular Saturday morning he was not amused.  Grumpy, I believe is the term, but grumpy doesn’t convey the sense of hate that I felt emanating from him onto the parts arrayed on the floor like the internal organs of a Muppet® after an autopsy.

This particular Muppet® kermitted suicide.

I sat quietly watching, as it was my bedroom, after all.  I think I was in fourth or fifth grade.  Even then, I liked to build models – model planes, model spaceships, model tanks, model ships, and model cars.  I loved the feel of the parts fitting together, the minor polishing and trimming to make them fit perfectly, and look perfectly.  Modelling to me was intuitive, as was assembling most mechanical things.  It also was a great protector of my virginity.

While Pa Wilder made many wonderful things in his woodshop, they were things he designed, things that he built in his mind before he ever let his saw cut into the wood.  I still have a bookcase he built when he was in high school – a beautifully crafted piece of furniture that was assembled without a single nail.  But when it came to building things that other people had designed, especially mechanical things?

Yikes.

So, as I sat and silently watched him cuss the pottery wheel together – mostly various forms of “damn thing” and, certainly no f-bombs – I tried to psychically will him to put the right Tab A into the correct Slot B.   Eventually he did.  The pottery wheel was built well – all the pieces were well manufactured, and fit perfectly when they were assembled correctly.

I was pleased to find a picture of the exact same model.  Not included:  Pa Wilder.

Pa Wilder, at times, looked like he was attempting to build a trap for some sort large aquatic animal, say, a beaver.  It was difficult watching him put uprights in upside down.  He stared at the end caps that covered the tubing like a Neolithic caveman attempting to understand quantum mechanics written in a language entirely derived from rap lyrics, yo.  But, he finally got most of the parts together.

Then it came to the final step – assembling the motor.  This particular pottery wheel had an attachment, a motor that you could install so you could skip kicking the concrete disk and use electricity to power up the wheel to optimum clay-wasting speed.  Pa was attempting to install it.  I watched him, frustrated, try to put it in exactly backwards.  I finally burst.

“NO!  It doesn’t go that way.  You have to turn it.”

He looked down at the instructions, grimaced, and looked back at me.  He held out the motor assembly.

I took it.  I fitted it to the upright.  “It fits this way – you have to adjust it so when you push your foot on to this pedal,” I pointed, “That it pushes this switch down.  That turns on the motor.”

This is the pottery wheel equivalent of vaping.

He pulled out the wrench and tightened down the bolts holding it in place.  He smiled.  Rather than being mad at his odd son, he was pleased.  And as he looked on the completed pottery wheel, he was happy.

For about a minute.

“Dad,” I pointed at the door to Ma’s new pottery shed, “I’m pretty sure it isn’t going to fit through the door.”  To his credit, he still didn’t drop the f-bomb.

It went together more quickly the second time.

Different people have different aptitudes.  And while Pa Wilder was wonderful at many things, like running a business and not killing his son for waiting to tell him about door widths, there were things he wasn’t good at.  He wasn’t mechanically minded at all, and seemed to have a “deer avoidance radar” during hunting season.

That pottery wheel frustrated Pa Wilder to no end.

There was a time when I thought I could do anything.  I felt, flush with the hubris of youth, that I was invincible, bullet-proof, and a dozen feet tall, and that was before I discovered tequila.  But after a while, I realized that there were jobs that, while I might be able to do them intellectually, I would never be able to do them for a living.  Well, I might be able to do them, if they took all of the sharp things out of the room, and maybe covered all that tough drywall with padding so I didn’t hurt my head when I slammed it into it.

Accountants have a heck of a time getting to sleep – if they’re counting sheep and miss just one . . . .

Let me give you one example:  accounting.  I would suck at that.  I saw an accountant chase $1.37 for a day.  Why?  Because the books had to balance.  It didn’t matter that the $1.37 was out of about $700,000.  Nope.  Still had to find it.  So, accountant is out.   I could name a dozen more jobs I would hate doing.  But for me, knowing what I’m unsuited to do is victory enough, especially since I can do other things, like polish Johnny Depp’s philtrum and uvula after he’s had a hard night with the “ladies”.  I don’t spend time trying to fix my accounting weakness, rather, I spend time trying to learn and get better at things I’m good at, which people might also pay for.

A large part of avoiding frustration in life is understanding what you are good at.  More importantly, understanding what you are good at that will make money for you.  As good as I might be at making models (and I’m not anymore, but 14 year-old me was), there’s certainly no demand for people who make models.  Unless they’re Cindy Crawford’s parents.

Cindy spent an hour staring at an orange juice can – it said “concentrate.”

Yes, you have to be who you are.  Doing things that are fundamentally unsuited to you, your skills, and your personality will kill you.  And, no, getting up at 6:30AM or even 5:30AM every day is not fundamentally unsuited to you.  And no, working hard and sweating is not a skill you don’t have – we all have that skill.  Your personality?  Yeah, it can include giving everything you have each day.

None of this is an excuse for anyone to not meet their obligations or wait in Mom’s basement until they get the invitation to interview as CEO of a video game company.  In fact it’s the opposite.  Most people would suck as the CEO of a video game company, and very, very few would be any good at it.

Speaking of being not good at something . . .  .

After Ma Wilder got her pottery studio going, she decided to do the natural, maternal thing.  No, not drink wine until 11PM while listening to Tom Jones®.  She decided to show me how to use her pottery wheel.  My attempt at making a pot was similar to Pa Wilder’s attempt to put the pottery wheel together – except Ma looked dimly upon me cussing.

After my one, very sad and utterly talentless pot, Ma Wilder relented and let me go trout not-catching.  It would be called trout fishing if I ever caught one, but it was a great way to spend the day down by the river.  Fish?  Never caught one there.  But there were lots and lots of rocks.

At least I can skip a stone.  Does that pay very well?

 

For Fran: