Category: Uncategorized

“Random chance seems to have operated in our favor.” – Star Trek (TOS)

My high school buddy moved to Chicago and told me it isn’t that violent.  He’s a tailgunnner on a school bus.

Once or twice a year, I decide I’m going to relax with a post.  Instead of the tightly-constructed gems of wit and wisdom, it’s just a list of things I’m thinking about.

• A fish wouldn’t understand what water is, no more than an American would understand what Western Civilization is. Only one of them tastes good with tartar sauce.
• Mark Twain knew that most people can’t tell a good event from a bad one. The best things in my life have come from events that, at the time, felt awful.  Think about a baby just before birth – nice and warm and then twisting and constricting and exposure to cold and harsh light.  How could the baby ever have beer unless it was born??   I’ve learned.  I wait to see what happened before I judge if something is good or bad.  This makes me look like some sort of Zen-master when I’m calm and everyone else is panicking.
• War in the twentieth century was built around maneuver and destruction of the enemy’s capability to fight. War in the twenty-first century will be built around information and the destruction of the economy before the fight can begin.

• The Boy and Pugsley went out to Wal-Mart® today to go shopping. They announced a weird and perplexing list of shortages.  We may have moved into a scarcity economy.  At least we have Netflix®, right?
• Western Civilization (i.e., freedom) has been under attack for over 100 years.
• Mandatory vaccinations were approved by a Supreme Court decision. That same Supreme Court ruled that you could have mandatory sterilization of mentally inferior people.  Be careful what you cite.
• COVID-19 might be the seed for the final breakup of the United States. Just like the sniper said to his ex-girlfriend:  “I won’t miss you!”

• Why does the Left get bent out of shape about Russia? I think it’s because during an interview, Vladimir Putin was asked if a woman could become president of Russia.  Putin responded, “No, because I am not a woman.”
• Antifa® appears to be a group of middle-class kids with daddy-issues who can still afford tattoos, piercings, and black clothing. If they win, I’d love to see their faces as they learn during harvest season that potatoes don’t originate at Whole Foods®.
• 650,000 people moved out of California last year. Number moving to Modern Mayberry?    Good luck, Idaho!
• Would we even know that COVID-19® existed without the media?
• In the minds of most of the Center and Right, Black Lives Matter® is 100% tied to violence and looting.
• What if the role of 2020 is to play, “Think that’s cool, 2020? Hold my beer?” as everything rolls of the edge?    Don’t worry about that or prepare for it.  It’ll be fine.
• The Redpill is a meme from The Matrix (1999). It means that you understand what reality actually is.  Heck those LGBT+ folks won’t take a straight answer.
• Gingko Biloba is a plant that’s not really related to anything on Earth for the last 270,000,000 years. It’s almost as old as your mom.

• Cancel culture is hilarious, since right now it’s eating the Left. Remember what Napoleon said:  “Never interrupt your enemy when they’re making a mistake.”
• Free markets (within a nation) are still better than any alternative we’ve found. Free markets between nations is a neat goal – as long as the nations are free.  But they’re not.
• Joe Biden may be the first politician who thinks they won an election against Ronald Reagan.
• I woke up this morning and my hip hurt, probably for something I did in one Thursday in 2013. Is my hip officially cancelled?

• The most consequential invention of the 2000’s is the iPhone®. It’s also the most destructive invention of my lifetime.
• During my lifetime, it was certain that the Soviets, Japanese, and Chinese would become the most powerful economic power on Earth. Now?  The Soviets don’t exist, and the Japanese have become focused on anime and talking cats.
• Marriage that produces kids and lasts is good.
• The new definition of far-right extremist includes: a desire to be monogamous and marry and have kids, avoiding drugs and porn and alcohol, reading books and hiking.

• The undercover Rightwing political operation to completely discredit Leftists, codenamed: “Just Let Joe Biden Speak” is apparently working.
• Hierarchy is necessary for a civilized society to survive.
• The United States has 140 operational bombers. Not in a bomber wing or squadron.  140 bombers.    60 or so of them (B-52) entered service in 1955 and, although not quite as old as Joe Biden, are pretty old.
• Don’t let Russia determine the 2020 election! Demand Voter ID!

• If COVID-19 has killed more businesses than people, was a lockdown the right call?
• Ever notice that since the British gave up all of their guns, that now teenage kids in Great Britain can get put into jail for offensive jokes that teenage kids make?
• Imagine what seven billion people on the planet could do if they just left each other alone?
• The first rule of being in a gunfight? Have a gun. (Jeff Cooper)

• Long time readers would be surprised to know that I do have appreciation for some metric measures: 9mm, 7.62x39mm, and 5.56mm.
• What happens when rent is no longer deferred and the unemployment checks stop?
• If the aliens ever come? Don’t get on the ships.  How to Serve Man is a cookbook.

“By assimilating other beings into our collective, we are bringing them closer to perfection.” – Star Trek: First Contact

The best thing about being in Antifa®? You never have to worry about taking off work to protest.

I heard with great excitement that Antifa® and #BlackLivesMatter™ had formed a new government. I was excited. It turns out that they sliced out a chunk of Seattle – six city blocks – and declared it the C.H.A.Z. Chaz isn’t just some guy that went to Princeton and polished Buffy while dating Daddy’s Rolls Royce. I mean, polished the Rolls while dating Princeton. But, anyway, it’s not that Chaz.

No. This C.H.A.Z. is the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.

1PM, Wednesday:

I figured if starting their own autonomous zone was good enough for Antifa©, it was probably good enough for me, because what can’t I learn from a group of perpetually pampered trust fund baristas who haven’t managed to learn how to run a checking account?

I called a family council to discuss the decision, all while understanding that the concept of “family” was an outdated concept based on Heterosexual Privilege. In attendance at this first meeting of the as yet unnamed collective was me (John Wilder), The Mrs., The Boy (Home From College), and Pugsley (Snarky Teen Who Is Now Taller Than Me As Of Wednesday).

John Wilder: “Family, I think it’s time to stick it to the patriarchy.”

The Boy: “Pop. I hate to tell you this, you are the patriarchy.”

Pugsley: “Heh heh – you said stick it. Besides, what’s the favorite song of the patriarchy?”

The Mrs.: (Not looking up from the Wall Street Journal®) “It’s Reigning Men.”

Pugsley: “Score one for Mom!”

John Wilder: “No, this is serious. We must strike a symbolic blow for (I paused) something. I guess.”

The Mrs.: (Looking up from reading The Wall Street Journal®) “What are you up to now? Does it involve finally getting the hardwood floors installed or getting the garage cleaned out including that motorcycle of yours that hasn’t started since Johnny Depp ran out of money? If so, count me in. And while you’re at it, please clean the camping gear out of the rec room – there’s enough gear for the 82^nd Airborne to conquer (she paused) Poland. Or France. France would be quicker. They probably wouldn’t even notice.”

I’d love to visit the caliphate on the Seine, especially in spring! (Reprinted with permission.)

John Wilder: “Good. It’s unanimous. I think we should name our new autonomous zone . . . Johnstown, in honor of me, the founder. We could have a symbolic flag. Hey! We could use the Kool-Aid® man. The Kool-Aid™ man could symbolize our fight to crash right through capitalism! Oh yeah!”

The Boy: “Ummm, I think that was already taken. (Thinking.) Oh, no, that was Jonestown, where a group of feel-good San Francisco liberals tried to create a peaceful, racially mixed utopian communal society in the South American jungle. Dad, I don’t think that ended well. And you might want to re-think the Kool-Aid®.”

And they told me my second choice for the name of the collective, Heaven’s Gate, was another bad idea.

John Wilder: (Grudgingly) “Okay, you have a good point. Dang. And Johnstown had such a nice ring to it, like something that a newscaster would say. Okay. How about something more inclusive. What about the Wilder Autonomous Collective.”

Pugsley: “Well, if you want to go Full Soviet, and I don’t ever advise anyone to go Full Soviet, you need a Kommissar, right? That would make it the Wilder Autonomous Collective Kommissarat. But don’t turn around. Der Kommissar is in town.”

John Wilder: “Sounds great! But it’s not catchy enough. W.A.C.K. sounds silly.”

The Mrs.: “Y’all.”

John Wilder: “Y’all?”

The Mrs.: (Not looking up from the Wall Street Journal®) “Well, you must be true to the cultural roots of the collective. So, add Y’all to the end.”

I thought about fighting – no one in the house ever used “Y’all” on a regular basis. But in the interest of encouraging harmony, I didn’t fight.

John Wilder: “So, it’s agreed – The Wilder Autonomous Collective Kommisarat, Y’all. We’ll call it W.A.C.K.Y. for short.”

3PM, Wednesday:

In the interest of creating a truly autonomous collective, the first thing I did was go out to the street. We have a little vault where the water valve is. I turned it off.

The Mrs.: “John, would you call the county? Is there a problem with the water?”

John Wilder: “I turned it off at the street. If we are going to be an autonomous collective, we have to be, well, autonomous.”

The Mrs. would not let me Spice Weasel the water.

The Mrs.: “You’re not cutting off the water when I want to take a shower. What exactly is your genius plan for water?”

John Wilder: “Well, there’s the pond out back. We can bring in water and after we filter it and boil it you can use it for a sponge bath. Sound good?”

The Mrs.: “No. That sounds awful. Go back to the street and turn it back on. Right now. What other nonsense do you have planned?”

John Wilder: “Electricity. We should get rid of it. That’s how The Man gets you.”

The Mrs.: “Unless you are going to harvest the energy of a Pugsley’s teenage angst, you’re not turning the power off on a humid and hot day like this. Look (pointing at my legs) even your ankles are sweating. And that’s with the air conditioning on.”

Well, everyone has sweaty ankles, right?

Chaz is the man, right?

7 PM, Wednesday:

I decided to go door-to-door to my neighbors to ask if they wanted to join W.A.C.K.Y. They declined. I asked them to donate $500 to a fund for their personal defense. They declined. Maybe I need to bring guns and some large people next time to politely convince them of the peaceful aim of our collective? Because of that, I set up a border around W.A.C.K.Y. using a spray-painted line that says: “Do not cross unless you want to be W.A.C.K.Y.”

7 AM, Thursday:

I worked all night long and came up with a list of the W.A.C.K.Y. demands:

• The Modern Mayberry Sheriff’s Department and attached court system are beyond reform. We do not request reform, we demand.  We demand that they apologize for giving me that ticket for rolling that four-way stop back in 2013 even though the judge dismissed it and it cost me nothing.
• In the transitionary period between now and the dismantlement of the Modern Mayberry Sheriff’s Department, we demand that they give us a ride in the Dodge® Charger they got last year. And allow us to turn on the siren.
• We demand that not the County government, nor the State government, but that the Federal government launch a full-scale investigation into why I got that ticket for rolling that four-way stop back in 2013.
• We demand reparations for victims of all people who were unjustly accused of rolling four-way stops.
• We demand a retrial of all balding men who got tickets, by a jury of their peers in their community. Oh, that’s the law already? Never mind.
• We demand decriminalization of almost maybe rolling a four-way stop, and amnesty for drivers generally, but specifically those involved in what has been termed “The Going to Wal-Mart® for Grilling Supplies Rebellion” against the terrorist cell that previously occupied this area known as the Mayberry Sheriff’s Department. This includes the immediate release of all people who grill that are currently being held in prison.
• We demand that the funding previously used for Socialized Health and Medicine, free public housing, and Naturalization services for illegal aliens be given to us as steaks and grilling supplies.

I had The Mrs. post my demands on Facebook®. The only reply that she would share with me was, “Looks like John has a case of the Mondays!”

One advantage of having your own autonomous collective? You never have a case of the Mondays, because life never changes and you don’t get weekends off.

6PM, Thursday:

I look in the fridge. The fridge is mostly full, but the items – a large pot with half a boiled potato, lettuce from the Pleistocene, and something that may be meatloaf or might be celery is on the bottom shelf. It gets worse from there.

The Mrs. is in the other room, so I ask her, “Hey, what’s for dinner?”

The Mrs.: “Well, I was going to go to Wal-Mart® and pick up some steaks and bratwurst and ingredients for a homemade fettuccine Alfredo. But you erected a concrete and steel barricade in the driveway that reminded me of the Berlin Wall, so all I have is pimento loaf and ramen.

They say that communism causes hunger. Now I see the ugly truth. It does. Can anyone spare some steak for the W.A.C.K.Y. people? I really don’t like pimento loaf, which always reminded me of bologna’s pimply friend.

Okay, none of that happened, except for the C.H.A.Z. business in Seattle. That’s real. And the funny thing is that the fictional Wilder Autonomous Collective Kommissarat, Ya’ll was more successful in every way to C.H.A.Z. Here are actual things that have happened at C.H.A.Z. up to this writing:

• C.H.A.Z. ran out of food on day two. Communism in the Internet age is even faster than the old Soviet version. That’s progress, comrade!
• They went from “no police” to having a gang chasing down and beating up people for putting graffiti on graffiti that the gang liked. I’m sure modern, trained police with body cameras would have launched a graffiti artist into the Sun, so he got off lightly!
• They installed a garden to feed themselves by putting dirt on top of cardboard and then putting plastic potted plants on top of the dirt. They put Christmas lights around the garden, I guess because that helps communist plants grow? Regardless, I’m sure they’ll be able to feed at least one of their citizens, if that citizen is wheelchair bound and doesn’t breathe too heavily.
• Issued a list of demands LINK.
• They roughed up local businesses looking for “contributions” of $500 each for “protection.” Is that a daily, weekly or monthly payment? No one knows.
• Someone offered C.H.A.Z a cow. A milk cow. C.H.A.Z. was against this. Why? The cow doesn’t produce soy milk. Also? Milk is rape. Yes. Liberals think that a cow having to have a calf to become a milk cow is rape. You cannot make this stuff up.
• Turned a coffee shop into a “public stage.”
• Created a public speech area as well, because six blocks requires two stages.
• Turned a baseball field into a “relaxation and therapy zone.”
• Turned a wannabe rapper into a warlord who runs the local goon squad. No body cameras or courts. Yay! What an efficient system. Have a gun in C.H.A.Z.? Guess you’re in charge now!
• Instituted borders, even though they think that Federal immigration laws should be abolished.

I based the list of demands above on theirs. It looked like it was written by a group of earnest fourth graders using words they don’t quite understand but who whine at a 11^th grade level.

C.H.A.Z. is more W.A.C.K.Y. than W.A.C.K.Y. ever was.

The only difference is that I know that I’m joking.

“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?