“This film is only for Madagascar and Iran, neither of which accept American copyright law.” – Bowfinger
I’ve heard that if a golf ball lands on a house, it’s scored as a home-in-one. (all memes as-found)
If you were sleeping under a rock (not the iRaq©, which has been officially purchased by Apple®) The United States and Israel dropped a surprise airstrike package on Iran like it was Amazon Prime® Day for regime change.
Supreme Leader Khamenei? Gone.
Nuclear sites? Smoking craters.
Military bases? Swiss cheese.
Iran fired back with hundreds of drones and ballistic missiles at Israel and pretty much every country in the neighborhood from Bahrain to Qatar. I’m especially offended by Qatar, because if a word has a “Q” in it, it should have a “U” as well. Qatar. That’s just wrong, man. It bothers me enough that I think they should kick Qatar out of the UN, but the argument against that is that it’s an unnecessary Qatar solo.
Vlad the Impaler’s favorite joke starts this way: “So this bar goes into this guy…”
Back to the war. Er, special military operation. It’s still early in the game, but in true 2020s fashion, the winners so far seem to be no one except the guys selling missile insurance and the printers at the Federal Reserve©.
Are we done yet? No, we’re not. So, let’s look at The Bad and The Good, at least so far.
The Bad
Energy prices are exploding upward faster than a Houthi suicide bomber on Red Bull®.
Oil is headed toward levels so high I won’t be able to bathe in it anymore, feeling the luxury of 10-W40 as it coats every inch of my skin. I remember when crude oil was cheap enough I could afford to fill my pool with it.
Sadly, those days are gone. Brent crude (a proxy for crude oil that shows up on a ship) is up over 40 percent since the strikes started. Analysts are whispering $110-plus if they have bought futures, and I’ve heard that it might go higher, still.
High energy prices act like an immediate tax increase on everything except paper straws in plastic wrappers in California. Periodically purchased Pringles®? Pricier. Pickles? Pricier. Plaster of Paris? Pricey. PEZ® is even presently a pretty penny purchase.
Oh, wait, pennies are too expensive to make.
I think King Arthur would be interested in this, since at either end they’d need a place to park, which would mean two places called Camelot.
Meanwhile the United States is burning through billions of dollars of precision munitions that take years to manufacture just to turn perfectly good Iranian concrete into expensive Iranian gravel. Concrete costs a few hundred bucks per cubic yard and you can pour a bunch in an afternoon if there are enough Mexicans around.
Our missiles? Millions per missile and the supply line is months to years for even the ones that keep missing the Iranian missiles.
I make it a point never to scream into a colander, since it might strain my voice.
Iran, on the other hand, is lobbing $3,000 drones that somehow managed to damage a $14 billion natural gas facility that took a decade to design and build. We brought a sledgehammer made of gold. They bring the fly swatter made of spite after decades of sanctions required that they work with nothing.
The policy is deeply unpopular with the American public. Polls show most people want nothing to do with this adventure except the tar and feather merchants who are prepping for higher tar prices, but think that feathers may come down enough so they can make a profit.
That face you make when you swap out something 80% of the American public are for versus something that 16% are for.
Iran is sucking all the oxygen out of the room and taking the focus off domestic issues like making beer cheaper or figuring out how to get illegal aliens and H-1B visa holders to stop turning the United States into either Guatemala or Mumbai.
Instead? We are arguing about whether blowing up another desert dictatorship is worth another trillion we do not have, which is gonna go great at the polls come November.
The Good
Every cloud has a silver lining, even when the cloud is radioactive fallout.
This mess is making my prediction (it’s in writing here on the site, but I’m too lazy to look it up) that the national debt doubles every eight years look less like a prediction and more like a weather forecast. In truth, it is that, since I can do math and see that, yeah, every 8 years the national debt has doubled since 1973.
The bright side of this debt? At least half of us get shiny new dollars to spend every eight years instead of those boring old dollars. Inflation is just another word for free money!
Last year, I could walk into the store with $100 and walk out with 50 pounds of ribeye. Not now. They installed security cameras.
I have been rough on Qatar so far, but one citizen from that nation may be of use in regime change in Iran due to the dire straits of the current situation. They should check out Qatar George, he knows all the Kurds.
If we play our cards right, Iran may follow through on its threats to take India, Africa, and the Pakistanis off the Internet, and remove them from all electronic communications. Hey, that is a public service more useful than anything Congress has done in years. No more spam scam calls from overseas call centers.
As a bonus, Pakistan has already hinted that since it cannot hit the United States directly it will nuke India instead if things get spicy. So, what exactly is the downside of that?
India would probably try to scam free Internet from Australia, which would come from a LAN down under.
Another bright spot is that we now know that Chinese air defense systems are as effective as barbells on a space station. Iran uses plenty of Beijing’s hardware and it did not exactly shine against American and Israeli jets. People in Taiwan should sleep easier tonight. If the Chinese who would invade them are equipped with the same made-in-China wonders, the invasion fleet might sink when it hits the water.
Shipping is getting a makeover too. Many tankers are now taking the long way around Africa instead of the Strait of Hormuz. This will be nice because it will allow cheese to age properly on the extra weeks at sea. Real cheddar needs time, and is not a rush job. The downside? Somalian pirates will not be able to steal and hijack as much cargo, so they will be forced to open more Learing Centers®.
Melons have traditional weddings. They cantaloupe.
Finally, what happens if the A.I. boom collapses because the market tanks and liquidity dries up? This is perfect. The Federal Reserve© could print even more money to paper it over. Then they could roll out trackable Central Bank Digital Currency to replace the failed dollar. Who could lose with that? My every purchase monitored for wrongthink while the dollar dies like a good idea on Facebook®.
It’s a win-win for the surveillance state, we’re all poor and can’t have privacy!
The real bright spot after all this is that I did find out the difference between Qatar and Abu Dhabi. In Qatar, watching The Flintstones is not allowed, but the people of Abu Dhabi do.
