Category: Uncategorized

“All is going according to plan, Fearless Leader.” – The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle

I hear Kim won’t go to Heaven – he has no Seoul. 

Various people are good at different things.  Very few people are perfect at everything, except me.  I even have proof: one of my co-workers even told me I was a perfect jerk the other day.  President Trump is actually pretty good at a lot of things.  Top of the list is making a deal, and the top skill in making deals is persuasion.  Trump is generally good at reading the mood of citizens who might vote for him, and setting an agenda that resonates with his voters.

Not even Trump can negotiate with or persuade a virus however, so Trump’s skills will never cure Coronavirus.  Put him in as a leader to drive policy make a functioning economy stronger?  Probably one of the best presidents in the last few decades.  Heck, the money that he’s made mining salt from Leftist tears is probably bigger than the GDP of Bulgaria.

What’s the fastest thing in Bulgaria?  Light.

Put Trump in as a leader trying to rebuild an economy on the edge of a new Great Depression?  I don’t know.  I guess we’ll see on that one.  The fact that he was aggressively trying to reduce dependence on foreign manufacturing even before the CoronaCrisis® was a good start and shows he might have the instincts to make the best out of a bad situation like I did when I cheered up the orphan kid by telling him his favorite beer was gonna be Fosters®.

In an email conversation today, one of my friends mentioned that his biggest hope for Trump was that the chaos that he was inflicting on Washington would “shake up the status quo” and would clear the path for someone new.  Of course the Democrats are nominating Joe Biden, who has been in politics longer than most of the people in America have been alive.  Thankfully, that gives Joe whole new generations of people to sniff.

My friend was looking for someone who might be a better leader than Trump during this current crisis.  It’s not a stretch to say that America is divided, and I certainly won’t win a Pulitzer© prize for that obvious observation.  But when it comes to leading America, which America did my friend mean, and can Joe Biden sniff them, too?

Funny, Joe Biden is always telling girls that their hair smells different when they’re awake.

Americans have obviously been divided before; the years between 1861 and 1865 are a hint that America isn’t necessarily a forever thing.  We’re at a similar juncture here.  But, outside of being a 1970’s folk rock band, what is America, anyway?

America was conceived, at least by the Constitution, as a collection of sovereign States.  The Constitution defined the power of the Federal government, and provided a basis for the States to create experiments with freedom unmatched anywhere in the world.  This was a self-governing freedom that was, above all, based in the rights and responsibilities of the individual.  I’d make a joke about freedom, but the folks in Hong Kong won’t get it.

The ideas that formed this government were based in rights and laws that came from Europe, but they led to true individual liberty here in the United States as well as other countries around the world.

I wrote Europe in the above paragraph, but really those ideas experienced their greatest growth in Great Britain.  Although some of the concepts that led to a free society had a run in Rome, the 2.0 version came directly as a result of the geography of Great Britain.  What made Great Britain historically unique was that it was an island in Europe.  Sure, there are a bunch of European islands, but Great Britain was large enough and cold enough and miserable enough that no one but the Vikings were insane enough to try to conquer it.  But even the Vikings failed and were booted out of England.  All their children were left with were novelty shirts screen printed with: “My Parents Tried to Conquer England and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt.”

I only have one more Viking joke, but I’m gonna skip it – there’s Norway you’d laugh at it.

So, as an island nation, the English were more-or-less safe from actual invasion.  Beyond that, the local Lords got it in their head that if the King go out of line, well, they just might find a new King.  As such, they made (swords are generally a big inducement) King John sign the Magna Carta.  It really was for the benefit of the aristocracy, but some of the points might look familiar:

• Pizza on Fridays if you do all of your chores.
• No taxes unless approved by a new thing called the “parliament,” which put a curb on things the King could do. This was the first real limit on a monarch.
• The right to due process, which led eventually to our concept of trial by jury.
• Bedtimes can be later in the summer since there’s no school.

In a place where people were constantly being invaded into oblivion, blackmailing the King was a pretty bad idea.  In most of Europe, people needed to follow the local King without a lot of question, otherwise when the very flammable Bulgarians invaded, the local King might just ignore them when it came time to borrow matches.  Irritating the Boss if you were being invaded by Napoleon, the Romans, the Poles, or the Ottoman Empire was probably a good way to learn first-hand what the word pillage meant.

This explains Germany.  And Russia.  And France.  And at least two world wars.  And why England was different.   Great Britain had the time and space to develop freedom without the external pressures of imminent invasion.  Even today, if you look at the Freedom House annual report, almost all independent small island states are democracies (LINK) and serve flaming drinks with umbrellas.  The factors that led to Great Britain developing freedom 800 years ago?  They are still in place on these small islands today.

In America, the idea of individual rights and freedom was part of the reason many of the colonists came to the New World.  Well, also indentured servitude, but we try to forget about that part.  And when they got here, if they wanted more freedom?  There was always the chance to move west into an ever-expanding frontier.  If you didn’t like the government, you could probably move faster than it could, even if you were moving west at a walking pace.  Freedom was found in the frontier.

Until there wasn’t a frontier

I hear old coots don’t roll joints, they tumble weed.

Then people gradually to cities.  Cities are islands, but islands of dependency.  The anonymity of a city leads to rudeness.  Rudeness leads to anger.  Anger leads to armies of Karens demanding to see the City Manager.  Eventually?  Laws, Homeowners’ Associations, and YouTube® terms and conditions.

Despite the cities, some people living there still maintain the traditions and beliefs in the individual freedoms and individual responsibilities that helped to create the United States.  These are passed down from fathers to sons, and mothers to daughters.  If living in the cities was the entire cause of the divide, it would be one that could be bridged.  It was in the 1930’s, and even in the tumultuous 1960’s.  But just like my biological dad’s name, address and phone number after my biological mom got pregnant, things have changed.

Into this divide have been added millions of people legally and illegally from foreign countries.  Virtually all of these countries have zero experience with the idea of limited government.  Most of their home governments are so corrupt that they make North Korea look good.  When it comes to a job that allows you to avoid corruption, make sure you choose the right Korea.

At least in 1920’s America, those immigrant children would have been instructed by teachers who liked and respected individual rights and responsibilities in the United States.  Now?  How many teachers in the Los Angeles School District are teaching those immigrant children about limited government?  How many are just teaching the much simpler concept of the United States is the “worst country in the world”?

In a country where one side believes in limited government and personal responsibility, and the other collectivism and unlimited state power, where exactly is that middle ground?

Trump is about the Art of the Deal®, but how do you deal with a group whose beliefs are the opposite of the ideas founded the country and have no desire for anything but the economic benefits of living in the United States?

In a country so divided, who exactly could lead both groups?

If we’re taking applications, I know a guy who might be interested . . .

Dale: You know what the problem is? It’s a Ford. You know what Ford stands for? Fix It Again Tony.
Hank: Dale, that’s a Fiat.
–King of the Hill

If you have nasal congestion and want to blame the monetary system?  Sudafed®.

In 2020, we’re pretty proud of ourselves for making use of virtual reality.  We have students taking virtual classes while never leaving home.  We have virtual assistants.  Heck we even have virtual assistants for people that can’t spell, like that new one from Amazon®, Dislexa™.

As much as we think of virtual reality as a new concept, it’s not.  Much of life throughout recorded history has been conducted using virtual systems.  Some of them are common, like clubs.  You’re either in or you’re out.  The only thing that makes a difference is the virtual acceptance of others.  You were either a Roman Senator, or you weren’t.  You were a member of Legio XIII, or you weren’t.  You were a Roman citizen, or you weren’t.  Just because a virtual distinction of being in or out of a particular club has existed for thousands of years, don’t think that it doesn’t have significance.

The law is another virtual system.  In this case, it exists so we just don’t go killing each other willy-nilly in a never ending cycle of vengeance.  All that vengeance makes a great movie, but it’s pretty rough unless you have a lot of relatives.  But through the invention of law, a virtual system, revenge violence could be avoided.  We voluntarily gave up our right of vengeance to a virtual system so that we could have peace.

Another virtual system is religion.  The exception, of course, is if your religion allows you to draw a series of weird sigils and glyphs on the ground and chant a mysterious incantation dating from the time the Old Ones walked the Earth and make a blood sacrifice.  If you do that, I’ve heard it said you can summon my Ex-Wife.  Nothing virtual about her, and all you have to do to get rid of her is give her half of your stuff.  But most religions are virtual.  Faith itself is a concept that is virtual right on the label.  I’m not discounting religious experiences that people have, (having had profound ones myself) but the systems that are created are in large part virtual.

My relationship with my ex-wife is good.  She texted me the other day:  “Wish you were here.”  She was at a funeral.

What are some other virtual systems we make use of?  What about property lines, last will and testaments, corporations, and, gasp, even government?  These systems have been around for thousands of years, and in the case of religion, certainly longer than that.  But outside of religion, the biggest and oldest virtual reality system we interact with regularly is money.

Wait, what?  Money is virtual?

Yup.

Money has always been and will always be virtual.  “But what about gold, John Wilder?  Gold isn’t virtual!”

Sorry gold is gold, and it’s not worth a lot unless people are willing to trade you something for it.  Gold is just one way to represent it in such a way that it’s hard to fake and easy to divide.  Lots of things have been used as money, from the reasonable (like gold) to the silly (massive coins of copper).  One thing that surprised me in doing research for this post was that the oldest minted coins date only back to about 700 B.C., and were promptly left in car ashtrays all throughout the ancient world.

This coin weighs over thirty pounds, and was used by the Swedish in the 1700’s.  To buy popcorn and a Coke® at a movie, it would take sixty of these coins.  Thankfully, movies had yet to be invented.

There is historical evidence of using sea shells for money in Ancient Asia, Australia, Africa and Arabia and the Americas.  Why?  I’m assuming that was what the vending machines took, but I may be mistaken.  Or maybe it was only used in places that started with the letter ‘A’?  But, as you can see, money didn’t have to be gold, or even a coin.  Money is what we believe money is.

Why does money being a virtual system matter?

Systems based on physical laws like gravity and entropy and time and mass are what they are.  You can invent ways to “overcome” them, like an airplane, but as Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott taught us, “Ya canna change the laws o’ physics, Cap’n.”  The systems are what they are, and ceasing to believe in the system doesn’t change it.  You can’t click your heels to change dimensions and end up back in Oz or the Matrix®.

You heal cuts in the Matrix® by using Neo-sporin©.

Those real systems we run into are required (for the most part) to make our entire Universe run in a way that allows living things to grow.  Change just a few terms, say, Pi=357, or Planck’s Constant=Pizza, and the Universe couldn’t have life at all.  And they behave in rational (though sometimes complex) ways:  it’s not like one out of twenty thousand times when you start a car all the gasoline doesn’t ignite at once blowing the car up, just because.  I mean, if you have dirt on the Clintons or are involved in certain, umm, families that might happen but otherwise it’s a statistical impossibility.  Real systems just don’t work that way.

But money?  We made it up, so it can do whatever we all collectively agree it will do.  And when our belief about those systems changes the entire economy can blow up in just a few days.

I don’t want to scare you, but bankers are messing with fundamental constraints on the monetary system all of the time in 2020.  From 1787 or so until August 15, 1971, the United States operated on some sort of standard based on gold.  The nice thing about gold was you couldn’t just print more of it.  On August 16, 1971, the United States left the gold standard and had a currency backed by – nothing.  Money was already a virtual invention, but Nixon went Full Mario Brothers™ on it.  If you’re a banker, calling someone who plays video games stuck in a fantasy is a bit of hypocrisy.

If you’re really rich, you can afford two-ply.

A currency backed by nothing is called “fiat” money, which is Italian for “Fix it again, Tony.”  No, wait, that’s a car.  “Fiat” in this context is from the Latin for “let there be” as in “let there be money.”  Since the United States dollar isn’t backed by gold anymore, it was just wished into existence.

Essentially, in 1971 the bankers exploited what a gamer would call a “cheat code.”  In a video game, a cheat code might make you invulnerable, or give you infinite ammunition.  That’s what this did – the printing of dollar bills was no longer constrained by how much gold the United States had.  It now had infinite money.

But physical systems like gravity have been around since the Universe began.  It’s well known, and people have been observing what gravity does since they were wearing saber-tooth tiger for evening wear and bathing once a lifetime whether they needed it or not.  Gravity is a real system, and we can’t game it or pop in a cheat code.  Because of that, it’s predictable – a black hole isn’t going to spring into existence for no particular reason the same way a cell phone won’t spontaneously assemble itself out of the spare silicon leftover from Kardashian butt surgery.

And the Universe would explode every twenty years.

Monetary systems don’t behave like gravity, they behave like a video game.  Bankers can change the rules at any time, and I mentioned that bankers can and do drop in cheat codes.  During the Great Corona Panic of 2020, they’re doing it weekly.  They can also reboot the system – that’s what every country ever has had to do to end the hyperinflation that seems to nearly always eventually follow the introduction of fiat currency systems.

And that’s the problem.  As much as economists would like to pretend that they know what happens when you apply cheat codes to the system, they really have no idea what will happen.  It’s like when Albanian lawyers who have an office next to the JCPenny® have a broken copier.  Oh, sure, they can take their hairy, greasy Albanian fingers and poke and prod the copier with their ballpoint pens, but it’s only going to fix the copier if they get miraculously lucky.  It’s far more likely that their grunting and pointing and prodding with only a dim understanding of what gears and rollers are will cause the copier to catastrophically fail.

One time I found our copier full of peanut butter, which is weird.  Normally it jams.

There’s nothing more pathetic than watching Albanian mall lawyers trying to fix a copier.  Unless it’s watching the Federal Reserve trying to fix the economy that’s crippled by debt by injecting more debt.  I mean, the Albanian mall lawyers can at least call a professional to fix the copier after they gum it up.

Who is the Fed going to call?

“I learned of a place where a man can be free.  Free to do what he wants to do.  Free to ketchup his eggs without being hassled by the man.” – Strong Bad

My father-in-law raised dwarf dairy cows for a while.  They gave condensed milk.

Almost everyone reading this post has lived a life of nearly unthinkable abundance.  Did we have everything when we wanted it?

No.

Did we sometimes go without?

Yes.

Did we have to make tough choices because our primary liquid assets included some string, an empty PEZ® dispenser, a coupon for 2 for 1 taquitos at Sven’s Taco Hub, three cases of returnable Coors Light® bottles and a bank account with $3.17 in it?

Yes, though I guess that might be suspiciously specific.

Even as our individual economic conditions may have changed, we have lived in societies of amazing abundance.  At no point in history have so many people been fed to the point that, rather than having too little food, the main food-related problem in the world is that we’re too fat.  I can expect that this sort of conversation could have been had with most of our ancestors throughout history if we took them for dinner at a modern restaurant:

John Wilder:  “Hey, slow down!  You don’t want to get obese.”
Ancient Wilder Ancestor:  “Obese, what’s that?”
John Wilder:  “It’s where you eat too much food.”
Ancient Wilder Ancestor:  “Sounds great.  Let’s get obese.”

The Mrs. asked me to put ketchup on the shopping list, and now I can’t read any of it.

The modern grocery stores have suffered not from a lack of products, but have an amazing variety of choices.  In the ketchup section here in Modern Mayberry, there are no fewer than 21 different options (including different sizes) for ketchup.  It’s a literal wall of ketchup:  spicy, organic, no fructose, already mixed with mayo . . . the list goes on.  I looked it up – a good blogger always checks his sauces.

When I was growing up, there were just four choices if you wanted ketchup:  Hunts® or Heinz™, and you got to pick the little bottle or the big bottle.  That was it, and in my imagination the only people that would pick Hunts© ketchup were trolls that lived under bridges or that couldn’t afford the tasty goodness of Heinz®.  We can have so many choices because while the 1970’s Modern Mayberry was served by two small grocery stores, today it’s served by a Wal-Mart® that has a food section that’s nearly double in size to the grocery stores of the 1970’s.

We have an abundance of choices today.

And I thought it was just people’s data he was interested in.

What does the world look like in a world of shortages?  I think most people can’t even understand what a world like that might look like, but they are beginning to get glimpses.  The toilet paper shortage was so odd a start to COVID-19 shenanigans that it could have almost been written by a comedy writer for a humorous end of the world movie.  Me?  I hope that if the end of the world happens, it starts in Las Vegas, because, you know, maybe it will stay in Vegas?

The toilet paper shortage didn’t impact us, because we generally have an inventory of two or three months’ worth of toilet paper on hand at any given moment.  Why?  I don’t like to run out of things.  It’s the same reason I have spare ketchup in the pantry and a socket set and jumper cable in every car.  I don’t like to let inconveniences become emergencies.

But the prospect of running out of toilet paper became very real for millions of Americans.  And it showed many people for the first time what a shortage was.  It wasn’t like the brand of ketchup you wanted was too expensive, it was that there was no ketchup at all.  And no schedule of when there would be ketchup.  And a line of people panicking about ketchup and buying cases of ketchup because they had heard ketchup was in short supply.

I imagine that people who bought a lifetime supply of toilet paper during the shortage feel a bit silly.  But it’s really a great illustration about how the human mind works in periods of low information.  If everyone knew that the toilet paper supply network was robust, then there would never have been a shortage.  So, that was a short-term shortage caused by panic and lack of information.  I mean, it’s the 3-2-1 rule of New Preppers:  A three dollar first aid kit, two days’ worth of food, and one year’s worth of toilet paper.

But what about longer term issues?

Farmers have plowed vegetables back under into the soil because there was no way to get them to market.  People who have hens to produce eggs have destroyed hundreds of thousands of eggs at the same time my local Wal-Mart® was out of eggs.  Why?  They produced the eggs for the restaurant industry, and there wasn’t a way to package them for individual sales.  It’s like the inverse of communism:  there’s too much food and the system is performing too well.

Cows have hooves instead of feet.  They lactose.

Will that happen with cattle?  I don’t think people will slaughter cattle on a whim, but the entire system is now partially locked up because meat packing plants are shutting down because of the WuFlu.  But even that is a short term problem, since cattle that were going to go off to the feedlots to be prepped for the packing houses . . . aren’t.  This will result in beef prices going up (not enough packing plant capacity), then dropping (lots of cheap cows), and then going up again (cows that should have been put in the pipeline . . . weren’t).

Today my daughter, Alia S. Wilder called me.  She was spooked about beef.  “Should I be concerned?  Should I look for alternate sources of protein?  What should I do?  I saw row after row of empty shelves in the meat department.

“Are we going to be okay?”

Those were good questions, and if Alia is asking them, then you can bet millions of other people are, too.  Even though I feel that the meat shortages are (for now) a short term ripple of the Coronavirus Economy®, I sense that people are getting the idea that at least some of the short term shortages we’re seeing now will build into long term shortages.  Maybe not with toilet paper.  Maybe not (for now) with beef.  But people are worried that it will be real with something, and soon.  And we’re certainly not going to have a shortage of toilet paper jokes.

What happens when we have real shortages because the systems that we relied upon to create the fabulous wealth in the West are irreparably broken because of the economic strains we’ve put on them?

We can look back on a real case study:  Germany just after World War I.  At the end of World War I, Germany had collapsed like my cat Rory on the surface of a neutron star.  The Allied blockade had effectively starved the German people, and chaos was in the air.  Their royalty, Kaiser Wilhelm had given up the throne for the life of a carnival worker who ran the “guess your age and weight” booth.  A new government was formed, and became known as the Weimar Republic.

Go sightseeing in France they said.  Home by Christmas they said . . . .

In 1919, this government’s first job was to “negotiate” the Versailles Treaty.  In actuality, the treaty was dictated to the Germans, who had little leverage.  Their army had been disbanded, and the Allied food blockade stayed in place during the negotiations, so Germany was ready to sign anything, no matter how bad the conditions.

The conditions were bad – the German reparations required by the treaty were huge, more even than the $257 billion (equivalent in today’s dollars) they had actually paid by 1932.  One response was to set up a two-tiered currency system – one backed by gold, and one not backed by gold.  However, the war reparations payments set by the Versailles Treaty had to be backed by gold, so Germany couldn’t just print their way out of those payments.

But they could print their way into poverty.  They used the German marks not backed with gold to buy goods overseas.  The nice thing about that (if you were German) was that you could just print those marks.  Then?  Free stuff.

Until it wasn’t free stuff.  The impact was significant.  In 1921, $1 would buy you 150 German marks.  Two years later, that same $1 would buy you over 25 billion marks.  The result was perverse:  the Germans had no idea how to stop the hyperinflation.  People had become used to it and the government was worried that if they stopped hyperinflating the currency, then the whole system would collapse.

One story I heard was that a man had a wheelbarrow full of money he left outside a store.  When he got back, someone had stolen the wheelbarrow and left the money. 

Germany at that time was an odd place – the factories and farms still existed and all of the physical things required for production were there.  There was still food in the stores, but there was hunger and destitution everywhere:  money had ceased to be of value.  The nonsense of hyperinflation ceased when the adults took over the printing presses and sliced 12 zeroes off of the value of their paper currency.  Since the money was pretend in the first place, the number of zeros is like Beto O’Rourke’s political opinion in Oklahoma:  nearly irrelevant.

I don’t expect that we’ll have Weimar America, but then again the Germans didn’t expect hyperinflation (or the Spanish Inquisition) back in 1921.  Thankfully, we haven’t been through a loss in a devastating war and starvation and the collapse of our government.  But it’s entirely possible that whole categories of stores and even products will disappear.  It’s also entirely possible that the money printing we’re doing in such a big spurt will have a significant impact on prices, squeezing our economy and the world’s economies in ways that we can’t yet understand.

But what I really expect is that we’ll find out soon enough that we can’t print our way to abundance.  Whereas the physical world hasn’t changed much with COVID-19, the systems of companies and people that work together to create and distribute something as simple as a hot dog, hot dog bun, mustard and ketchup (yes, I’m one of those) have to work together with all of the harmony that communists imagine only comes from communism.  It takes thousands of people and a dozen companies to prepare such a simple feast.

Cast out this abomination!

Coordination of that type takes place naturally in a capitalist system that’s running well.  The hot dog maker doesn’t have to coordinate with the bun maker – bun makers make what they can sell, and then buy flour from flour mills.  Who buy wheat from farmers.  Who buy fertilizer . . . and you see I could keep this chain going forever.  The world is a web of interconnections.  When normally self-correcting systems are first deprived of money, then flooded with it, systems and signals break down.

And our world of abundance goes with it unless we have those signals that prices and orders give.  I hate to promise this, but I am certain when I say that we haven’t even scratched the surface of the strange things we will see in the next few years.

But one thing I don’t think we’ll see in a year:  our previous world of limitless abundance and shelves filled with 21 different kinds and sizes of ketchup.   I mean, who even buys Hunts®?

“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.