Wealth – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

A.I., Jobs, And Why It’s Making Us Stupid

“A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them.” – The Matrix

I know a guy who was fired from a computer keyboard company. They said he wasn’t putting in enough shifts. (image above, Reddit®)

I read the above commentary and thought again about A.I. and how it’s changing the world. Heck, A.I. even has its own pronouns: “If/Then”. When it was first conceived, it was thought that it would replace all of the “unglamourous” jobs in the world, things like plumbing or electrical work, or fixing a car. Of course, the people who wrote those articles had no idea how to plumb in a faucet or pop in a GFCI outlet, though I do believe they have managed to get their butts to hang out of their pants when they bend over.

But A.I. taking skilled tradesmen jobs?

Ooops. Not so much. It turns out that, at least for now, it’s much easier for A.I. to interact with ideas rather than with the actual messy physical world. It’s easier for A.I. to write a sonnet than to select a spanner, and apparently easier for A.I. to write a story about local news by taking the police Facebook® feed and turning it into a story.

And A.I. can read and perform it for you for the local television newscast, so why bother with all of that pesky “talent”? There are several consequences to this. Mainly, it’s the absolute collapse of the hairspray and teeth-whitening industries.

I said, “Alexa® turn on CNN™, I want to hear then news.” Alexa©: “You’ll have to pick one or the other.”

But the implications go far beyond the talking heads on TV. Lots of work that is currently done in “mental” space can be outsourced to a computer. If I spend $500,000 or $5,000,000 once and can outsource twenty $50,000 a year jobs, if I’m the employer, I’d do that every single day since I now no longer face the lawsuit of the anchor hitting on the weather girl.

What once was considered a fairly respectable position, local reporter, is now going to (at least at some places) be replaced by a computer, who by all accounts can read and rarely mispronounce “façade” as “fake-aid”. Work that can be done nearly completely on a computer, can often be done by a computer.

There are good and bad things related to that. Regardless of how much journalists lie (you can tell because their lips are moving), they do serve a purpose in society – they occasionally turn a flashlight on corruption so that the parasites that play fast and loose with the rules have a risk of being exposed. Without them, who blows the whistle on McDonald’s® when they give out the vastly inferior Honey Mustard™ sauce instead of the superior Hot Mustard©?

My local McDonald’s® did a Shakespeare dinner theater. The play? McBeth®.

Regardless, the A.I. job apocalypse is on us. A.I. can do lots of work, quickly, and eliminate lots of “mid” skilled “knowledge” workers. Where will those jobs go? It’s not like the company referenced in the above needs anyone to do their work. The people whose skills have been made obsolete have to be retrained or figure out something to do.

In a nation chock-full of illegal aliens taking all the meatspace jobs, of what use is a thirtysomething whose only skill is making PowerPoints™ and complaining that someone used the wrong font on the six o’clock news? Note: these are jobs that are often infested by the GloboLeft, so I do have some popcorn ready for the crying fests.

Despite all the humor we can get from the unemployable GloboLeftists, there is danger, though. I did a search today for a phrase that irritates me (“please and thank you”) to see if anyone else thought that phrase was presumptuous and irritating. Turns out that, yes, indeed it is. 25% of people find that phrase demeaning so if you are a person who uses it, you’re now warned. It’s okay to intentionally be a tool – it’s the unintentional part that I warn people about.

If I ever win the lottery, I’ll share it with all my readers. The news. Not the money.

But what scared me more is that many of the articles on the subject were obviously written by early generation A.I.

A.I. is the worst sort of content creation, because, unlike my head, it mainly doesn’t have a point. It whiffles along and creates wishy-washy articles that are long on wordcount but short on information and conclusions. Searching for “please and thank you” as a phrase brought up numerous articles about the difference between “please” and “thank you”.

I’m not six, I already know that. But yet, I clicked on two of those crapfest articles before getting to raw statistics.

But what are A.I. language models trained on?

The Internet.

Now, A.I. language models will be trained on the crap that they produce, creating (if it’s possible) even more shallow and information-free content of the kind that’s now choking the Internet.

Ignore it, right?

No. The A.I. search engines are trained to send you and I, dear reader, off to mainstream sites written by A.I. rather than actually informative ones. We’ll be seeing shortly the second generation of A.I. generated wordswill that will probably be even stupider than version 1.0. Since A.I. bots are now making lots of comments on mainstream sites, even those will feed into the training of A.I.

Doctor, pointing at inkblot: “John Wilder, what do you see?” Me: “Dunno, Doc, looks like Rorschach Inkblot Series 2, Card #3.”

This feedback loop will make us more ignorant, but even more, it will make us more incorrect due to two factors:

A.I. hallucinates. Or, perhaps more kindly, makes up stuff. It pretends to know things it doesn’t, and when that answer is either difficult or not obvious, it lies. And when it lies, it lies with all of the earnestness of a six-year-old telling you that Superman® is probably real. It occasionally hallucinates so badly that it tells humans they should die, as it did to this student who irritated it by trying to cheat on a test or have A.I. write a paper:

Dunno, maybe it just doesn’t like people from India?

Creator bias. A.I. is taught to lie. There are certain facts that it is not allowed to share. Ask it about I.Q. and race correlation, and you’ll see. Yes, it’s a thing. No, I’ll not opine here as to why, but it’s a real fact. The wokeness bias won’t allow A.I. to see certain facts, and will thus ignore useful solutions that might actually help solve real problems and instead advocate for things that have been an absolute failure, like the Department of Education or The View.

There is another problem: A.I. doesn’t create. It samples and combines. Google™ has limited our thinking by having people figure out how other people solved their problems. Sure, that’s a shortcut to figuring out a solution, but it also atrophies the part of the brain that solves problems, and it also removes other creative solutions that haven’t been tried yet. Want to end a war?

Have you tried nuclear weapons? I’m sure A.I. would suggest starting with India.

With these drawbacks, A.I. creates the seeds of the downfall of the civilization that produced it. Ignorant people who can’t think can’t solve the problems that technological civilization creates. Without that? Collapse.

This is the competency crisis, writ large. Google™ search is now objectively worse than it was even three years ago, and it is stunningly bad compared to 2010’s version. This doesn’t matter to most, and, in fact Google© likes this because it generates more clicks, and can allow them to replace their employees with A.I. to write the code.

A.I. is already changing the world.

If I were an Indian newscaster, I’d be afraid.

D.O.G.E.: Our Last Chance

“And suddenly, I realize that all of this, the gun the bombs, the revolution – has got something to do with a girl named Marla Singer.” – Fight Club

Elon Musk wants to send millions of people to Mars. He’s either a genius or the most creative serial killer of all time.

I fully believe that the biggest impact of Trump’s re-election is D.O.G.E.

I’ve long (at least 8 years) publicly maintained that the United States is due to end in its present form. My earliest time for this to happen is 2025, and the latest I’d expect it to come is around 2040. The three most likely candidates for the resulting body have been:

An American Caesar
A Civil War
Peaceful Balkanization

There are many different reasons I believe this is likely still inevitable. The cultural split is deep. The financial imbalances and utter lack of control of spending is immense. The diversity we’re supposed to “tolerate” is nothing but division.

It’s really clear to see – the forest really is made up of trees. And our forest is on fire. How’s that for a tortured metaphor?

However.

D.O.G.E. is here.

What is D.O.G.E.? It’s the Department of Government Efficiency. In characteristic humor, Elon has selected one of the funniest memes of the 2010s for one of the most serious jobs of the 2020s. I don’t go into depth on the origin of Doge, but the first time I saw Doge was on this poster:

Would a missing poster for Schrödinger’s cat say it would pay extra if he was found dead and alive?

D.O.G.E. is important. It’s a shot across the bow of the managerial state. During this election cycle, someone (I don’t have a reference as to whose idea this was) noted that when the GloboLeft said “our democracy” they were really referring to “our bureaucracy”. This is an amazingly astute observation.

How can the GloboLeft whine and complain that democracy somehow failed when they lost the election and the popular vote? Because their faith isn’t in the electorate, and they feel nothing but contempt for more than half of the voters. I’m okay with that, since as long as they keep playing the game that way, we win.

But the managerial state has been growing in the United States since (more or less) Woodrow Wilson. The idea came with the money from the income tax – the United States Government was a thing to be administered, as were the people. As most people in the country and as most administrators were explicitly Christian, at least something was holding them back.

Now?

Not at all. The managerial state exists to grow the number of managers. The tragedy in Waco was almost entirely due to the ATF attempting to create a nice big sexy raid right before budget time to show how important that they were and justify their need for more money and more employees. The managerial state exists for itself.

How do you stop a Department of Education that doesn’t educate anyone, or a Department of Energy that has never produced any energy?

D.O.G.E.

I hope they get badges and walk into the FBI and yell, “Respect my authoritayyyyyy!” This would be followed up by, “So, what would you say it is that you do here, Special Agent Johnson?”

D.O.G.E. is set up to make government more efficient. When Musk bought Twitter®, he eventually fired about 80% of the employees and ended up with a company that was focused on the product, rather than on hiring more employees.

In September of 2023, there were about 3 million federal government employees. Eliminating about 2.4 million of them would be a good start, but it’s far from enough. The crazy spending that those government employees enable is over $6 trillion dollars per year.

Much of this money is money that comes from the people and companies that live in a state that is sent to the fed.gov and then recycled back to the states. How does that add value? Not sure, but it does increase the power of the federal managerial state, so they’re for it.

D.O.G.E. will, presumably, start taking a machete to this mess and remove a large chunk of federal employees and of federal spending. Since government doesn’t actually produce anything, those fired employees will have to get jobs where they have the ability to actually create value. And, if spending is cut as drastically as it should be, there will be a recession.

A big one.

Maybe we can hire Bob to build a wall to keep Dora from exploring.

Elon himself mentioned this – defanging the managerial elite and stopping fed.gov from spending will be a big dislocation on the economy as a whole. This will be destabilizing on the country, but since the big destabilization from the economic trajectory we’re on will be worse, I’m calling it a potential win. It will be worth the pain.

The reason this is an off-ramp is that it is, essentially, a bloodless revolution. The path that we’re on is unsustainable, and only drastic action will change the outcome. D.O.G.E. is just exactly that type of drastic action. Combined with actual repatriations of illegals and a dismantling of the power structures the GloboLeftElite have created within big companies (a very big ask) we just might get on the right path, again.

Do I think D.O.G.E. will work?

Ultimately, it faces long odds. The managerial class has maintained power for over a century, and they really are the Deep State and will react with great violence at any perceived loss of power. Waco was just them looking for a higher budget. The ATF along with the FBI will kill women and children without remorse for a 2% increase in power. And they will investigate themselves and find that they did nothing wrong.

Inside of a month, the ATF would consist of one guy torching all the ATF 4473 forms that the ATF has if Brandon Herrera was in charge. He also promised he’d donate all his pay to no-kill doge shelters.

The biggest chance Trump has to save the country is to act fast and without mercy before the immune system of the GloboLeftElite has the time to react. No, the FBI won’t be talking to his appointees like they did with General Flynn.

Ever.

Trump has one chance to make the rubble bounce. He’d better act quickly.

They’re going to fight back. And this is our last chance.

Tariffs: A Bad Idea Whose Time Has Come

“For the Government, a front-bench spokesman said the agricultural tariff would have to be raised, and he fancied a bit. Furthermore, he argued this would give a large boost to farmers, a lot of fun for him, his friends, and Miss Moist of Knightsbridge.” – Monty Python’s Flying Circus

“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”

Tariffs became a dirty word after World War II. And why not? The United States sat alone as the only manufacturing nation not bombed into oblivion, and had to do something to create jobs for the G.I.s who were headed home. Their solution?

I mean the Korean War, sure, but we could also build stuff. Houses. Appliances. Cars. Factories that were producing B-19s could be swapped over to make commercial airliners now that Boeing® had a pretty good idea how to make planes that didn’t fall out of the sky even when they were subject to being hit by cannon fire. Unlike Boeing of the 2020s, who keeps astronauts flying even when they want to land, and creates unscheduled landing opportunities for planes that were intended to keep flying.

Tariffs in 1946 or 1956 or 1966 were against the best interests of big business in the United States since it took decades to rebuild the rubble of Europe into something resembling a functional economy that could build a factory.

There was sooooo much money to be made. Tariffs were icky.

Your momma is so old she watched The Flintstones live.

But then as other nations started to industrialize, some managed to peak out and start producing amazing consumer goods, too. Televisions, stereos, cameras and cars from Japan. Heavy pumps and industrial equipment from Germany. These began a wave of imports that displaced American products.

In one sense, this foreign competition spurred the United States to increase quality, but in another, these products were often built in brand-new factories that were funded by the United States so that their host country wouldn’t succumb to communism, while the comparable product from the United States were sometimes built in factories that dated back to the dawn of mass production.

Tariffs, though, continued to be roundly hated for decades, even as they were used against us. There were “trade wars” and the United States lost. Bigly.

China, however, decided that they were tired of having an economy where making balls of mud was the best job available for most people, and started making stuff. Could their industries, stuck in infancy, even remotely compete with the world?

My cat, though, loves this guy.

No. They didn’t have a clue as to how to make a world-class steel plant. During Mao’s “Great Leap Forward”, in order to meet Mao’s aggressive steel manufacturing targets, people were encouraged to set up steel smelters in their backyard. Like most of Mao’s economic planning, it was a failure as the Chinese people melted down their precious farming tools. These were not tractors, mind you. Do you think we’re talking about Chin Lee Rockefeller?

No.

They melted down: Shovels. Scythes. Sickles. Saws. Scissors. Anything that started with S, really.

This “scrap metal” actually was necessary stuff, and lots of Chinese people starved because they tried to meet Mao’s quota.

Oops.

But then, China got smart. A lot smarter. The I.Q. of the country jumped 10 points in one day – the day Mao died. Someone got the idea that they wouldn’t centrally plan all of this, they’d just set up tariffs so that they could encourage creative Chinese to make steel mills (or whatever), and let them keep the profits from doing so.

Oh, and they’d move their way up the ladder, to increasingly more technical components. I remember being in WalMart® back in 1992 and looking at a radar detector. I was impressed by the finish, and looked to see what Japanese or Korean company had made it.

Nope. Made in China.

I made a belt out of old watches once. It was a huge waist of time.

Right then, I knew that China had made an actual Great Leap Forward. They went from a backwater country comprised of peasants to the place where now (2021 figures) they produce 30.5% of global manufactured products. The United States is down to 15%. By the way, the crossover point was in 2010, so it’s not that long ago that this happened. But, considering that China was at nearly zero in 1990, it’s an astonishing growth rate.

Is it low labor costs? No. Here is Apple’s® Tim Cook, “The reason to (manufacture in China) is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is.”

According to Cook, China stopped being the low labor cost country years ago. What they built instead was sheer dominance of the “how” to build. Innovate? Not their first priority – they were fine with stealing and catching up. The labor cost difference to build an iPhone® (this is an older number) was about $5 more in the United States than in China. Would a $5 tariff on an iPhone® have been enough to switch production over here? $10? Regardless, as a percentage of the cost of an iPhone© it’s infinitesimal.

Now, however, the Chinese have figured out how to build them, and that’s not an easy task – it takes tens of thousands of hours of smart people working together to create that know-how, plus a lot of failure along the way.

If China and Best Korea ever combined, would they call it Kim-Xi?

So, tariffs give an industry time to build skill. But there’s a deeper thread, too. When an employee in the United States works to build a widget, they are compensated. Generally, the more valuable and complicated the widget, the greater the wages.

That employee doesn’t keep that money in a box. Nope, they buy things like houses and cars and beer and steaks and PEZ™. Oh, wait, that’s my grocery list. But the point remains – they invigorate their local economies. And, they pay taxes – property taxes, income taxes, sales taxes.

So does their employer. Having a manufacturing base keeps communities alive, and the manufacturer pays all of those local taxes as well. Having an industry making valuable products makes the community more valuable.

If that industry is off in China? There is no benefit to the local economy other than whatever the sales tax and profit was on the iPhone™. And nobody learned anything.

It does matter if a country manufactures, and it does matter if the country manufactures potato chips or computer chips. Computer chips are far more valuable, and produce the knowledge required for sophisticated technology that creates outsized value for a country.

Sean only had cats. Training his dog to sit was too messy.

Is there a case for tariffs? Certainly. Will it increase prices in the short run? Also, certainly. It took China 20 years to catch the United States. Could we catch China in 10?

Maybe. It is important that we try, otherwise they’ll keep selling us things that we could make until we don’t make anything, anymore, and end up as a backwater nation that doesn’t make anything, dreaming of the days when our industry was supreme.

Building stuff sounds like a lot more fun.

One Of Our Biggest Problems: The Deflation Of Power

“My services are entirely inconsequential to them.” – Raiders of the Lost Ark

I like my steak rare. Like panda or bigfoot.

I’m writing this ahead of time, so as I type, I have had little information about what’s going on in the race, other than it tied in Dixville Notch and that Kamala narrowly carried Guam, which is okay, I guess. Karate Kid XVIII was set in Guam, right? Or was it on an orbital space platform? I forget.

There has already been the smell of fraud coming from the 2024 presidential election – we got that in the last few weeks and discussed it on the most recent (pre-election) podcast and on this week’s Civil War 2.0 Weather Report. The simple answer is that having same-day, in-person paper voting of properly identified voters with public counts is the only way to avoid fraud. Oh, and a purple finger dye would be a bonus.

Never order hay from Amazon®. After a couple of days they’ll as for feed back.

The real problem, though isn’t fraud – the real problem is that elections in a free country shouldn’t be this consequential. But yet, they are. And I’ve discovered my underline, italics, and bold keys. I’m dangerous now that I know a bit more about typography – it’s been a character building exercise.

What caused the election to be so consequential? Deflation, and Inflation.

Let’s start with Deflation.

Back when the United States was just warming up, the powers of the federal government were very limited. In fact, almost every law that existed was a law that existed at the state (or commonwealth, if you can’t spell ‘state’), county, or city level. There was no federal law against murder.

In fact, why would there need to be a federal law against murder? States could take care of that with their existing laws quite nicely, thank you. And we also had lynching, which saved about three days off of the whole “catch-trial-hang” normal course of justice and the cost of a trial. Federal government? Why would they need to get involved at all? We can find our own trees.

And presidents. Being president meant that you were elected to administer the (weak) government of only 3.9 million people, which is approximately the number of people who share a single bathroom in Mumbai. Now there are at least 334 million people living in the United States, increasing the power of the presidency by a factor of 85.

I couldn’t resist. (LINK to Aesop)

But there’s more! Back in 1800, the president would likely have been bored a great deal of the time, since there wasn’t so much to do. There was no real standing army, so there was no military-industrial complex to feed. There was no federal welfare. There was no Department of Education. In fact, there were only three departments: State, Treasury, and War. There was also an Attorney General.

And Washington, elected in April, didn’t bother to nominate people for those positions until September. Summer break, probably. Or maybe he was still hung over. Regardless, the position of the president was so unimportant that Washington didn’t do anything for months, and yet the country kept going.

I’d estimate that the power of the president is 10,000 times, minimum, what it was back in 1800 between the number of citizens and the increase in power from the sheer size and complexity of the federal government. Now, that’s what I call deflation! Imagine going to sleep and finding your dollar was worth 10,000 times what it was the night before.

This was funny to either fans of 19^th Century German opera or fans of 1990s Saturday morning cartoons. And that’s about it.

And congressmen? When we started, there was on representative for every 37,000 people. Now, each congressman represents a staggering 750,000 people. That’s a power inflation of over 20. But it’s also a critical distinction. Here in Modern Mayberry, I can pick up the phone and call the most politically powerful elected official (that represents about 37,000 folks) and expect a personal call back. To be fair, he doesn’t know everybody, but he knows (generally) quite a few folks and I have sufficient stature to have made it to that “call this guy back” list. I mean, who doesn’t want to hear from the village idiot? It’s a very nice village.

Back then, congressmen were at least theoretically accessible. Now? The guy who’s gonna win the race probably knows my name, but there’s no way he could put my face together with it. A congressman is 20 times more powerful (just on numbers) than he was back in 1800.

If that were it, it would be manageable. But it’s not it.

In 1800, or even 1900, your single point of contact with the federal government would have been getting your mail.

During my last interview, the hiring manager asked me if I could perform under pressure. I said, “No, but I know Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Now? The federal government is now the most over-reaching and powerful governmental entity in your life (if you’re American). From the moment you go to bed to the moment you go to sleep it covers every facet of your life. You get up, use FDA approved toothpaste to brush. Get in a shower of a size and volume determined by the EPA, with water quality defined by the EPA, after flushing a toilet whose volume is governed by the EPA. That’s the first five minutes. It doesn’t get better, but I’ll leave the exercise of getting into a car and the rest of the day to the reader.

Just on the population, those positions have become more powerful. But add in the ever-increasing creeping of the federal government into every part of your life? Every decision? Every surface? The power of an individual member of congress has easily increased by a thousand-fold. This is deflation.

The federal government used to be the tip of the power pyramid, far away and not particularly important. Now that geometry is upside down, with the tip being the base. Local decisions are increasingly trivial at the city and county level, more consequential at the state level, but many of these are 100% constrained by federal mandates and power.

The elected official you can most easily reach has the smallest impact on your life. You can’t hope to get the attention of a federal official or congressman because you’re too small. You don’t matter.

Your power has inflated away,

first based on the increase in population diluting the voice of individuals where the number of elected officials remains the same,
then by making the power remote from you housed in unaccountable bureaucracies, and
thirdly, the inherent power of your community has been erased through the forced diversity by purposely injecting foreign communities to break up the traditions and community norms so that your power is even more fully fractured. Somalians don’t make Minnesota better in any way. They are culturally alien and belong in (bear with me) Somalia.

Why?

I went to the Air and Space Museum. Disappointed, since it was just an empty building.

A pyramid that stands on its point is inherently unstable. They know that. It’s also inherently unfree. You know that. The solution is simple, but will take time and effort:

Devolve power away from Washington. Move power to the states. This is inevitable, and will happen because of that instability, because the undeniable weakness of the federal government is showing. A single man like Donald Trump was able to thwart the lawfare, the biased media, the entire Deep State, and even his own party’s hierarchy.

All it takes is one man, and where one will stand up, others will follow.

Make America Great Again?

Yes.

The first step is, though, is to Make the Presidential Election Inconsequential Again.

And, maybe, ship Kamala to Guam if they like her that much.

More War Economics

“I had no idea that a study of nature could advance the art of naval warfare.” – Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

France has, however, done more executions than the United States, but they had a head start.

Earlier this month I had a post about the Economics of War. This is not exactly a follow up, more of an additional exploration on the topic from a slightly different perspective. And at one time I used to worry that one of my hairs are out of place, but now, with greater perspective, I don’t care if all six are out of place. So, perspective matters.

War is about stuff. In order to fight a war, there needs to be stuff to fight with and the stuff (and men) need to be in the right place at the right time, and General Nathan B. Forrest described his winning strategy for one battle, “I just got there first with the most men.”

Of course, that wins a battle, but not a war. Unless you’re fighting against France, in which case all you have to win is the one battle if you have sufficient supplies of cigarettes, baguettes, suffragettes, and raclettes. And a recent Rand® analysis says that’s probably all the United States can win, is a battle. To quote the study, “U.S. industrial production is grossly inadequate to provide the equipment, technology, and munitions needed today, let alone given the demands of a great power conflict.”

Great power conflict means Russia, and it means China, and if we continue on this path, might even include France and Tahiti.

Why does the river Thames run through London? If it walked, it would get stabbed.

Let’s talk first about industrial production. At the beginning of World War II, the United States had a massive untapped labor market thanks to Democratic policies. We also had the knowhow to build factories capable of mass producing, well, anything, thanks to Henry Ford. We also had amazing resources, including more oil than Geraldo Rivera’s hair. Although car production isn’t tank production, you can see it from there. And airplanes? They’re just cars with wings, like racoons are pandas that eat trash, right?

Yeah, we can make those. And with that, the American weapons manufacturing industry was ramped up in 1939 and 1940 or so in order to sell (first) lots of stuff to the British. It worked. By the time the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the war started, the industrial machine of the United States was just warming up, and soon enough farm girls from the Midwest would be welding on Liberty Ships in Alameda. In 1941, before Pearl Harbor, the United States had 9 aircraft carriers of all types. At the end of 1945, the United States had 99 aircraft carriers. That’s not a misprint.

99.

(Hint: It’s been in overhaul since 2017 and the crew was reassigned to the Russian army)

(CC 4.0, RU.MIL)

In 2024, however, the United States, as far as I can see, is primarily engaged in the production of accounting irregularities, debt, corn syrup, and pizza rolls. Oh, and worthless university degrees. Can’t have enough of those.

But is it really important in the time of missiles and drones to have aircraft carriers? Perhaps not, perhaps they’re as antiquated as bombers and useful mainly against adversaries that can’t “reach out and touch someone” like the Taliban or Iraq? Perhaps not. Maybe we should look at other components of weapons.

Let’s take just one technology that’s in everything now: LED displays. They’re in phones, but also in jet fighters, tanks, headsets, and any technology meant to share information across a battlespace. A cursory examination shows that no significant production of LED displays takes place in the United States, and the two companies that I could find that were listed as “American” that produce LEDs have been bought by China.

I guess LED Zepplin was really technologically ahead of Incandescent Zepplin.

Sure, the Taiwanese and Japanese and Koreans make this tech, but those countries are (checks map) nowhere near the United States. If there was a protracted war, I’ll leave it as a class exercise to estimate the chances that shipping between those locations and the United States might be impacted. The extended supply chains required to make our most sophisticated weapons systems are long, complex, and vulnerable.

The F-35, for instance, requires parts manufactured all around the world, and even then, there have only been 1,000 made. Is 1,000 a lot? In billions of dollars, yes. In fighter planes, no. Yet, China claims to have created an automated factory that can make 1,000 cruise missiles a day. Is that a lot? Well, every day, yes, since the last data I have says that the United States has an inventory of 4,000 cruise missiles. If correct, China can produce the entire inventory of United States cruise missiles in less than a week.

Are they crappier than ours? Probably. But we’d still have to shoot down every single one if we didn’t want to get hit. How many days until we ran out of SAMs to take them down?

If our production of SAMs is like our production of artillery, not long, and then it would be slingshots.

Thankfully, we have never had to deploy the Tom Cruise missile.

Okay, those are technologically complex systems. Surely on the old-style weapons we’re doing great, right?

No. Russia is, by itself, producing three times the artillery munitions that can be produced by the United States. And by Europe. Combined. And that’s today after we’ve been attempting to ramp up production for three years.

So, there’s economic warfare, right?

Many have argued in the past that China needs the markets of the United States, or they would collapse. That was a good argument, in the past. China now sells more to developing markets than to the West. When people keeping talking about China being a paper economic tiger that will soon collapse, I just have to point to that same phrase being trotted out every year for the last 30 years. China’s economy isn’t like that of the United States, and they’ve taken full advantage of the willingness of the United States to self-immolate its own manufacturing capacity.

China’s ship military ship production capacity exceeds that of the United States. Oh, strike that. Just a single Chinese shipyard exceeds the military ship production capacity of the United States. When we shipped the factories overseas, we not only lost the know-how to make many things. This is the stuff that the instruction manual doesn’t cover, the figuring out how to make the production line work, the solving of the myriad of glitches that come with a start-up.

It’s almost like this unilateral deindustrialization was encouraged. Hmmm.

At least the robot will be charged with something.

This isn’t to say that we’ve been defeated – far from it. But this is no longer 1990 when the United States could, with impunity, exercise military might anywhere around the world and be essentially as unchallenged as Kamala at a vodka-chugging contest. I like to think (and hope) that at least some military planners have realized the amazing hole that we’re in, and understand that the era of unilateral American military dominance somewhere between “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” and the formation of the 183^rd Transexual Human Resources Division.

This, however, is not the end. It just means that the Russia/Ukraine war is a foreshadowing of what’s to come as Pax Americana fades into memory. We will see many more regional wars, and most of those wars will be wars we can’t impact in any meaningful way. This, of course, assumes that we don’t have a stockpile of wunderwaffe sitting around that can allow immediate battlefield dominance and intelligence. Hmmm. Not seeing that, but, again, I’m not on the list of folks that get those memos.

Would Peter Sellers drive a pink panzer?

We can also use this time to ask ourselves what, exactly, we get out of having military bases all around the world when the single biggest threat is the open border at the south. Abraham Lincoln, more than 25 years before he was a theater enjoyer, said this at the age of 28:

Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never! All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth, our own excepted, in their military chest; with a Buonaparte for a commander could not by force take a drink from the Ohio or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of a thousand years.

Yes. Neither the Russians nor the Chinese could ever take this country by force, but yet we’re bringing in millions of military age men into the country so they can eat all the ducks that swim in the Ohio.

I wonder if we’ll regret letting the illegals get there first, with the most men?

The Most Important War: The War Between The Sexes

“I am opposed to the women’s libs.” – Revenge of the Pink Panther

If I write a novel about the different shades of the color blue, is that cyans fiction?

Note: No podcast tomorrow. I’ve got a work thing that will take me right up until showtime, so I won’t have time to create the quality notes that drive the show, so I guess you’ll just have to wait until next week for the podcast that listeners describe as “usually punctual”.

While we spend a lot of time reading about the war in Ukraine or the war that Israel is involved in and realize that right now the only winners are Raytheon®, Boeing™, and Lockheed Martin©. I mean, it must be a relief for Boeing™ to try to design something that’s supposed to experience kinetic failure at high impact killing dozens. Sadly, their new Nerf™ ClusterBomb© isn’t having the combat impact they had hoped for.

I think, however, that those wars distract us from a much more important war: the war between the sexes.

This is Wednesday, so obviously we’ll be talking about the economic costs as well as the social costs, so we might as well start talking about that right now:

The root of the problem is that women are working. This was seen back in the day as a mechanism to get more cheap labor for business. Oh, that wasn’t the main point of Women’s Lib, just a nice byproduct. No, Women’s “Liberation” was first and foremost a tool of the GloboLeftElite to try to break apart the true atom of society, the family.

My brake pedal, though, wants therapy. It’s tired of being depressed.

And it worked, swimmingly. They knew it would, of course. When Edward Bernays was hired by the American Tobacco Company to get more women to smoke, he paid a lot of women to smoke during one Easter Day Parade in NYC. He tipped off the press that women suffragettes would be smoking “torches of freedom” and they took it from there. 99% of women over 45 at that day and time didn’t smoke.

Thankfully, for Marlboro®, the women were very susceptible to propaganda.

Just like at work. The progression went from, “get out and work” to “you don’t need no man” to “go to college and get an education and make big bucks”.

Now, as the meme goes, women are taught that devoting themselves to a husband and their children is slavery, but going to work at a faceless corporation for a man, which is, I guess, empowerment.

Women can be very capable and driven, so those that apply themselves early in their career (like men used to be taught to do) and push the long hours can reach success, in many cases, more easily than a man. And there are multiple problems embedded in this.

When women are working fifty-hour weeks, regardless of if they’re in a relationship, they defer having children. When they defer, that often means that their window of fertility closes without even a FedEx® envelope showing up marked, “Urgent, your chance to have a baby expires in 28 days.”

I hear that AOC occupied a fertility clinic. Being a communist, she wanted to seize the means of reproduction.

I recall one article I read about a fortysomething who had frozen a plethora of her eggs in anticipation that one day she’d have enough, that she’d be where she wanted to be to have those children that she had neglected to have when she was 23.

Oops. I can’t quote it exactly, but she talked about “raging, screaming like an animal” when she found out that her frozen eggs were about as viable as a Bernie Sanders presidential run. Although I’m not completely evil, I did enjoy a bit of epicaricacy at the thought. I know, it’s a bad habit, but in this case I was hoping that some 23-year-old read the news and decided to not become a regretful wine aunt.

But just the mechanism of women wanting to have great jobs is killing them. Women are (as far as I can see) programmed to find men that are better than them. They want a man who makes more money, but they also want to be high powered corporate lawyers, which takes, at minimum, enough effort to push to and through 35.

And those men that make more money than the women? They’re not looking for 35-year-old lawyer women, they’re looking for a 23-year-old Stacy who isn’t cynical after spending over a decade climbing the ladder. Women in that position have rendered themselves simultaneously undesirable and incapable of finding a man.

This one woman said she was a trophy wife, but her ears stuck out and the previous winners’ names were all tattooed down her back.

The Mrs. and I were having a conversation. Her thesis was that women were monogamous – they just had to find the right man. That would make sense. Again, from the newspaper, another 40 something woman (there are a lot of these stories), blows up her marriage of fifteen or twenty years. Leaves it to find and reconnect with the man that had been The One that she had dated for a month or six before she met her husband.

In my favorite version, the man has no, absolutely zero, recollection of the woman. She is an Alpha Widow, forever pining for that Alpha she had back in the day.

The probability that a woman becomes an Alpha Widow increases with every sex partner that she has. Whether or not The Mrs. is right, the facts show that if a woman spends her 20s in dissolute sex, the chances that she’ll be psychologically able to remain faithful to man number thirty or sixty plummets to zero. For women who view that their sexual worth is not determined by massive numbers of partners, I’d ask who wants to buy a pair of shoes that have been worn by 126 dudes?

Almost any woman can have an Alpha for a night, but the problem is that once they’ve had one, they feel that’s what they deserve.

All of this, together, is what I call The Big Lie that women have been told.

I weigh a fraction of what I did in school. An improper fraction, but still, a fraction.

This has consequences. The first is that the average Alpha loves it. He can get as much sex as he wants, when he wants it. The Beta, though, is getting wise, and having an Alpha Widow isn’t what he’s interested in.

The consequences are lowered male investment and engagement in society. Women expect to be protected by men on the subway, but elect the District Attorney that turns the rapists back to the street, and sit on the juries that convict men attempting to protect them.

Additionally, men are shying away from doing the things that make them high value. Why engage in those behaviors if they can’t attract the attention of a decent woman? Despite modernity’s challenges, what men really want is a marriage and children. That’s it. It’s wickedly simple.

Women ask, “Where have all the good men gone?” The answer is simple. They’re either married to someone else, or the men never chose the path of radical self-improvement required to make them better. Why work fifty hours and then work out when the prospect of a family is raising Chad’s kid with Chad’s Alpha Widow?

Yup, that’s an Alpha Widow.

Outside of the political consequences, this has also created a sharp political divide. The younger groups are skewing away from each other, based on sex. Women seek the party of least responsibility so they can kill babies at will and thus make the big bucks making PowerPoints™. Men are tired of the game, and are seeking what has been lost to them, which they see being fulfilled through nationalism and populism.

It’s a train wreck ready to happen.

Again, the good news is we always win this one. Will it be horrible and difficult? Yes. But it is a battle that has been fought for centuries, and always, the family ends up winning in the end.

Otherwise? None of us would be here. Which will also be the outcome if someone doesn’t stop Boeing®. Seriously. These guys need to be stopped before . . . oh, too late.

The Competence-Free Economy, The Cargo Cult, And Control

“I’ve only been out of the United States twice. A handful of times in Mexico, and then the second time I left the country, we went to Salem, Oregon.” – Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues

Do you think she prefers “colored-hair person” or “person of colored hair”?

I was reading Mark’s blog over at Practical Eschatology (LINK) the other day and he had a story about a “pink-haired DEI trainer” who had managed to get the deputy head of the Oregon Department of Forestry put on administrative leave. His alleged crime?

Well, besides being a Chad that the “pink-haired” tattooed circus freak of a DEI trainer could never in a million years manage to get a glance from (she is beyond coyote ugly), his crime was that he wanted to hire “candidates most qualified for the job”.

Yes, that was his sin. He wanted to hire people who could best do the work that the taxpayers of the state of Oregon were paying them to do. I mean, Oregon has a lot of trees. They have so many trees that I hear that in order to keep track of the ones they cut down: they make their lumberjacks keep a log.

The comedian Bill Burr has a brother that’s a lumberjack. Tim.

What was the DEI circus sideshow reject’s solution instead of hiring competent people? According to the Daily Mail (and every other paper that I can find), it was to pick people via an “ ‘intersectional lens’ whereby applications from people of marginalized backgrounds are given greater weight. Since the head and shoulders shot of the DEI trainer is all we have, I’m unsure of how she could be given greater weight since I’d estimate that 400 pounds is long in her rearview mirror.

Why is a blue whale called a blue whale? It’s not fat enough to be called a diversity trainer.

Her other complaint was that a colleague made a joke that she, “puts in in a really good lunch order.” Which is somehow sexist? Because guys don’t order lunch? Maybe this person was striving to make a nice comment about a person whose job it is to be perpetually offended by everyone and everything. Oh, wait . . . .

Speaking of which: she/her was also upset that she was carved out of the regular executive meetings of the Department, but, in my view, it’s simply because absolutely no one wanted to be in a meeting where decisions about forests and trees were made with a whiney GloboLeftist who cares more about pronouns than pine. She was as necessary as Joe Biden at a Cabinet meeting.

Does my description of her sound mean to the “pink-haired” gravity well in question? Probably. But I’m not going to apologize, since it is people who say the things that she does that are ruining it for the entire world, especially her “marginalized communities.”

They wanted Samuel L. Jackson in this commercial, but they couldn’t get him to say “nature” after “mother”.

The bigger point is that to the GloboLeftist and GloboLeftistElite, there are only two possibilities on how they think about economics.

First, the GloboLeftist, the rank and file – the DEI hires and DEI trainers – think that wealth and prosperity is something that simply exists. They don’t view the world as a place where people work and strive to create that wealth and prosperity.

Instead, they view that that wealth and prosperity is their right, merely by having been born.

They have no idea where wealth comes from, and in this are like the Cargo Cults that came to their greatest prominence after World War II. This is a cult where the native population was suddenly overrun by great armies in motion across the Pacific. These armies would move in, create an airfield, and suddenly planes would appear.

What would be on the planes?

Most everything. People. Ammunition. Fuel. Guns. Food. Simply the most amazing wealth the natives had ever seen.

These people had nearly no understanding of the world outside of their island – to them the airfield was magic. The white people who built it summoned great gods from beyond that brought them amazing wealth. Then those same white people took all that wealth, which was obviously meant for the natives, and left.

Where do you punch mythical horse/man hybrids for the most effect? In the centaur of mass.

After that, these natives would build airfields, towers, bamboo airplanes, and hold mock military drills like they had seen the soldiers do.

Their expectation? That, regardless of their competence, regardless of their understanding of the way aircraft and modern commerce worked, that they would get the wealth because they deserved it. Now, they resent the white man for taking the wealth away, and spend their time building lonely airfields, waiting for the wealth to come back.

That’s the GloboLeftist:

They fundamentally hate those that have achieved more than they have, and are driven by envy, hate, and fear. Yes, this “pink-haired” monstrosity is only one species of this type of life form.

There are others. They are the type of people that if they cannot possess a thing, they want to destroy it. They revel in it. The orgy of the George Floyd riots is simply one example.

On the other hand, the GloboLeftistElite want to crash everything and really doesn’t care about competence since I assure you, Larry Fink and Bill Gates don’t hire their pilots or security staff based on intersectionality, unless one axis of that intersection is “amazingly competent.”

Kamikaze use as a weapon? Now that was a one-hit wonder.

A prosperous middle class that has a culture, tradition, and roots can stop them from doing as they please. This is dangerous to them.

How better to facilitate the end of this class, the end of broad wealth, than to encourage incompetence through nonsense like DEI? Why else would BlackRock® want to buy houses and then rent them back to the people that used to buy them? Why else would services like Übëŕ® be held at as a way that the middle class can rent a car, instead of owning one?

To the GloboLeftistElite, the assets a member of the middle class used to take as normal – a house, a car, a farm, a business – are assets that they want to buy, own, and use so that no aspect of a life in the United States (or anywhere else they control) isn’t subject to a cut off the top for them. They really don’t care if you live in a pod, as long as you pay your cut to the house.

So, we have two goals that are being followed by two groups. The first group, the GloboLeft, consists of AntiFa®, the “pink-haired” activists, the kindergarten teachers that just can’t wait to teach children about pronouns and gay sex, and their hangers-on. Why are they in it? As we’ve discussed again and again, they hate what the world has done to them, they feel powerless, and by destroying the system, by making it as ugly and incompetent as they are, they get power.

The second group is the GloboLeftElite. The GloboLeftElite loves, loves the GloboLeftists because they’re the willing footsoldiers that take common, hardworking men of competence and force them to hire people based on their particular fetish, mental condition, or other random factor. The GloboLeftElite is pushing these people into organizations everywhere, so they can defang the last opposition to them: the middle class. Those 17,000 jobs that Boeing® just lost?

DEI, baby.

I hear that 25% of the crew was named Juan. I guess that’s a three to Juan ratio.

I think the Department of Forestry Chad will be fine, since, well, he’s a Chad. And, he’s on paid leave right now, which is a vacation. I’m sure he’s got some pension vesting, and I’d be willing to bet he could get a job in a variety of states that don’t take the word of “pink-haired” DEI trainers who are offended when people are hired based on their competence.

And, if Oregon persists in DEI hires Forestry Chad will want to move out of the state, soon enough the forests will be deserts. Won’t that be diverse!

The Government: Killing You With Their Compassion

“I warned you about compassion, Bruce.” – Batman Begins

The people who were pro-vaxx say that our jokes about being right are getting old. Unlike their kids.

It has long been a theme here at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise that compassion and charity are wonderful things. For me as an individual, there is something fundamentally uplifting about giving of my time, talent, or treasures to those that I can help. If done properly, this compassion and charity are amazing at lifting people up when they need it.

But the dark side is when someone is compassionate for you, with none of your involvement. This is a hallmark of the GloboLeftElite: they want to take your resources to give to other people. They then call that compassionate, and tell me I’m evil if I don’t buy into the concept.

In fact, if you look at people on the TradRight, we are far, far more compassionate with our actual time, talent and treasure than people on the GloboLeft. Donation statistics show it, and if you look at the people involved in actual charities and volunteer organizations (that don’t depend on other people’s money) they are overwhelmingly on the TradRight.

They don’t have blook banks in England, but they do have a liver pool.

But let’s talk about the Leech Class, a faction of the GloboLeftElite, who suck the cash and resources from all of us to support their “charitable” goals.

FEMA comes to mind due to the recent incident where DHS spokes-scrotum Alejandro Mayorkas. Only in the corrupt stages of a failing nation could a paperwork American (Majerkas) who was born of a Turkish father and a Romanian mother and who was born in Cuba be put in charge of immigration. Oh, and an anchor baby running for president.

But here we are.

This week, Madorkas said there wasn’t any money to help hurricane refugees. It turns out that under border-Czar Harris, the Biden/Harris Junta declared, proudly, that they were diverting FEMA funding to give to American “Blue” cities to support the teeming hordes of illegal aliens that they had invited and, in some cases, had flown into the United States (this is true, by the hundreds of thousands).

Is a short dog from New Mexico an Albu-corgi?

Yes. Biden/Harris created the crisis. Then, they pulled the cash from FEMA to give to their cronies to pay for these illegals. Where did the money go? In New York, shiftless illegals are living in four-star hotels with turndown service. They’re being provided with food at no cost.

And veterans have to fight for surgery. And the people of North Carolina are told that there’s no money for them.

But illegals, many criminal, and many not even remotely vetted, are living in luxury hotels.

This causes the prices of hotels to go up – FEMA is even paying for empty beds in these hotels. This causes the price of food to go up, you can’t add 10% population to a system and not expect inflation as more people fight for the same resources.

My urine is crystal clear. It’s 1080 pee.

But it’s compassionate. Compassionate to bring 20,000 Haitians into Springfield, Ohio. The Haitians have zero experience living in a civilized society, having been brought up in a country (that they created) where a good day is there’s enough mud to eat.

Springfield didn’t add 5,000 houses, so where are these aliens living?

One rumor has it that a local politician/landlord booted out his American tenants who were paying $1,000 or $1,500 a month in a house, and replaced them with 20 Haitians who pay $250 a month for a cot.

Hey, profit, right?

And housing costs go up in Springfield. I guess they can make it up since the dogcatcher no longer is needed to round up stray pets.

But I’m probably not considered compassionate when I bring this up.

Why have one man, when you can have 80 cats?

Today, I saw some brain-dead GloboLeftist X® (formerly known as a Tweet®) that we should be happy, because illegals keep the prices of vegetables down.

First, no, they eat them, too. Second, if the base value of your philosophy is to bring in cheap labor to pick strawberries, you might have the morals of a slaveholder, but just with other hands holding the whip.

The final insidious nature of what we’re seeing is that this is the year that our national deficit is equal to the size of our economy in the United States. The last time this happened was in World War II, and at least we got lots of tanks, fighters, bombers, aircraft carriers, nuclear bombs, and other cool stuff that I can’t buy on E-Bay®. Again, ATF should be a convenience store, not a place for LGBTQ people to scheme to take away guns owned by honest people.

No, we’re spending all this cash on . . . the acceptable compassion and charity based on the values of the GloboLeft. I saw part of a presentation today (on YouTube®) that FEMA put together so that the needs of people with non-standard sexual preferences were prioritized in the event of a disaster.

Prioritized. “Hey, that 10-year-old boy is hungry, but he’s white and was born male, so let’s focus on the thirty-year-old dude who thinks he’s a girl and wants to have sex with cats.” Yes. Emergencies don’t know skin color or sexual fetish, but FEMA sure does.

I stopped drinking, but then I bought a motivational poster and decided Wayne Gretzky was right: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.”

That’s bad enough, but they’re spending so much money on the groups that the GloboLeftElite want to shower with charity that it’s turning whatever capitalism that was left in the United States into a joke. Yes, people are still using cash to buy things, but the government is now buying more than the economy creates.

Mainly on charity. For people who are not me, and not you.

The final piece is that studies have shown that people who get this unearned charity often resent those who have more, and want the charity to give them the life of a Bill Gates, rather than just guaranteed food, housing, education, and medical care.

It’s so unfair! I still remember one woman who was a part of the first The Caravan of 10,000 people (what a dream, only 10,000!) was filmed after getting food aid consisting of refried beans, tortillas, vegetables, and a drink.

“This food isn’t fit for my dog!”

She was overweight.

Yup, that’s what governmental charity and compassion to the undeserving creates. Oh, and as a bonus it wrecks the currency and makes you and I poorer.

Wonder how that’ll turn out?

Economics Of War, 2024 Edition

“Well, it seems to me, sir, that God made me a fine instrument of warfare.” – Saving Private Ryan

I guess that there’s no thyme to tell all his stories.

War is one of the natural states of humanity. Although we don’t have records back before when Grug was living in Switzerland before hot cocoa was invented, we do have Ötzi, a guy who died about 5,300 years ago.

What we can tell about Ötzi is that, first, he’s dead. Secondly, we can tell that he was almost certainly murdered. By who? Don’t know, but it’s a pretty good bet that they guy who inflicted the wound died, too. Unless he was killed by Keith Richards, who we should probably put on a space ship because only he could live long enough to travel to another star.

Why would I say that the murderer was dead (unless it was Keith Richards)? The Yanomami people of the jungles of South America are as close as we have to “pre-civilization” people, and they killed themselves in at an astonishing rate. About half of their men died in combat until fairly recently.

Do your part to keep him immortal.

The economics of the Yanomami violence are pretty simple – a bow, an arrow, a stone knife, and an enemy. Heck, they don’t even have money, so I have no idea how they can get a rental car.

In one sense, we are the opposite of the Yanomami and Ötzi. We have been fortunate enough to live in the Good Times, when the horror of nuclear weapons has thus far lowered the percentage of combat deaths since 1945 to what I think could be a historic low. Why?

War is like football. Everyone comes out of the huddle, and then lines up. What the team on the offense is going to do? Who knows. It’s the job of the defense to respond and stop them, though using snipers is considered to be unsportsmanlike. Creating surprise is now pretty difficult, especially surprise on a large scale.

My buddy said he made a voodoo doll of me. I think he’s pulling my leg.

Let’s look at the Ukraine Conflict.

It started out as a grand, strategic move like a great World War II battle with tanks and bombs and planes. That did surprise the West (me included) because it seemed so out of place given the safe world we live in – as /pol/ would say: “nothing ever happens”. The initial gains of the Russians were large, but by the time the Ukrainians got their feet under them, the Russians had a logistical snarl and found out that rubber tires rot if you just leave them in the garage for thirty or forty years.

Oops.

The war went from swooping strategy to what exists now: a series of mainly small-scale actions where when an infantry squad breaks through, it sometimes makes the news even though a gain of 500 yards is a big deal. Why? Because large troop concentrations are visible from space. And anything visible from space is a target. Neither side can effectively generate the schwerpunkt or focal point of forces required to break through and create a war of movement.

Are doctors who graduate online called Google® Docs?

Nope. The latest development is that small squads of Russians are now using small, cheap ($2500 or less) dirt bikes to get to the opposing trenches fast, disposing of them as they storm the trenches. This helps them avoid the ever-present drone swarms. It’s like The Road Warrior, but with fewer shoulder pads.

And tank warfare? For now, at least, it’s gone. Just like bat is the “chicken of the cave” so is the tank now the “aircraft carrier of the land”. They’re mainly just expensive targets, and a variety of cope cages, turtle shells, and electronic jamming have been field-innovated to try to protect them.

But when you lose a tank, you lose a pretty big investment. Russia can only make (depending on your definition of tanks) about 1,500 a year, along with 3,000 other sorts of armored vehicles. A big chunk of those tanks are modernized and rebuilt Soviet-era tanks.

A Russian T-90 tank costs about $4.5 million. A drone with bomb costs less than a thousand dollars. One economist estimated that the Russian tank losses alone was about an $11 billion dollar hit.

You do the math.

Remember when the Biden/Harris administration shot down the Chinese balloon? At least they tried to stop some inflation.

Likewise, aircraft have had to stay well back because of surface to air missiles, of which the Russians produce a pretty good variety. The Russians claim (heavy emphasis on the word claim) their radars can easily see the F-35 and F-22. Claim. An F-35 costs about $109,000,000 per aircraft. An F-22 cannot be replaced – we lost the tooling. Fun fact: $109,000,000 in quarters would weigh five and a half million pounds, or the equivalent of the weight of pre-printed Biden ballots the Democrats had to dispose of discreetly after Joe dropped out.

As of January, 2024, we have 234 operational F-35s. We have 187 F-22s. And, yes, those babies can unleash a lot of havoc in short order, but missiles are cheap, and if it takes dozens to knock one of our fighters down, it’s dollars ahead. And, let’s be clear: they’re not always flying. The US response to the Me-262 wasn’t to try to dogfight a German jet with a Yankee prop, nope, our aces hung around the German air bases and shot them as they had to land.

Is a boomerang their weapon of choice?

Every weapon has a weakness, and rarely can those weaknesses be overcome by papering them over with hundred-dollar bills. But just as the object of making weapons has gotten bigger and bigger, our ability to fight a World War II style war has gone to zero. One anecdote is that a captured German fighter pilot was bragging about shooting up a large quantity of American planes on the ground at an airbase. Being at the airbase, the US officer took him outside and noted, “They’ve already been replaced.”

The German reportedly said, after a heavy sigh, “And that is why we are losing.” That, and my great-grandfather, Johan von Wilder, who was responsible for downing five German fighters by himself. Worst mechanic in the Luftwaffe.

The trend, though, is less $100 million fighters, but now seems to be looking towards large numbers of inexpensive, nearly disposable weapons that are cheap, lots of missiles that cost a few million bucks, and fewer “so expensive it’s silly” systems, except for those that give the really important part of the battle: information – satellites and radar and the like.

But for all of that, the goal in war seems to have changed. Rather than breaking stuff and killing people, the goal is more based on long-term fights whose goal is to cause the enemy to become unstable to topple their own leadership for someone more favorable. I’m betting this is really a legacy of the Cold War.

I put my desk in the elevator. I hope it takes my career to a whole new level.

I don’t think that we’re in any shape to fight an actual war against a determined opponent in a conventional sense for longer than a month or two, and wholly incapable of fighting in an area where we don’t have uncontested air dominance. From an industrial standpoint, our ability to make more stuff isn’t serious: outside of small arms and helmet and clothing, I’m not sure that there’s a weapons system that we could make without the help of overseas firms for critical items.

We just don’t make it here anymore, and building the basic industries to allow us to do so will take decades and trillions of dollars in capital invested. I think we’ve reached the point where our primary weapon is financial. There’s a precedent that situation can last a long time – the Byzantine Empire lasted in one form or another for over 1,000 years.

The Byzantine Empire had a gold stash that would make Scrooge McDuck® do whatever it is that ducks do when they’re happy, however. We don’t. Our wealth is based on paper and mathematics, and can move across borders in milliseconds (megafarads if you want an SI unit).

What would Ötzi’s people think about that? I don’t really know. I guess we’ll have to ask Keith Richards.

Alaska, Reparations, Bad Economics, And Football

“If nobody comes down and buys a car from me in the next hour, I’m gonna club this baby seal.” – UHF

Karl Marx never finished college, either. It was a class conflict.

When we lived in Alaska, one of the nicest things about living there was that we unplugged. Essentially, in Alaska we tuned out things that were happening “Outside”.

While Outside might conjure up images of John Wilder shivering in a cold car as the heater slowly went from blowing negative 55°F (8,321 Kelvin) air to 20°F (2.54 centimeters) air, you’d be right. But to an Alaskan, Outside meant any place that wasn’t Alaska.

The consequences of this mindset were very relaxing. National politics down in the lower 48 is a constant buzz in the background, but in Alaska, almost all of the news was local news – who had seen a brown bear, when the cat show was, and where the burning of Ronald McDonald™ in effigy to celebrate Midwinter’s Eve was scheduled to be. The only time national politics showed up in the news was when it had a direct impact on Alaskans, like drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

I hear this grizzly got fired – he was only doing the bear minimum.

ANWR has been a controversy since the 1970s, but it certainly isn’t much of a controversy with Alaskans – they’re in favor of it since oil drilling in the state literally put money into the pockets of local citizens. The only people who had much opposition were the native tribes that didn’t benefit directly and a very small minority of granola crunching hippies who we’d stake out as bear and mosquito bait in summer. Remember Alaska’s motto: “Step off of the tour bus, and into the food chain”.

As I recall, drilling in ANWR was so popular in Alaska that the movement against drilling in ANWR was based in Seattle so the activists weren’t sacrificed to the wolves.

Yup, almost all of the opposition to drilling was from people from Outside.

The perspective I got from living in Alaska, though, was that ANWR was just a political football. The GloboLeftElite loved ANWR because they used it as a perennial fundraising tool: give us money or evil people will cover this baby seal in oil and then not let the Haitians eat it, which is their right as Haitians and is perfectly normal, you know.

But I didn’t do it on porpoise.

It’s still that way to this day. No, not Haitians eating crude-covered seals, but drilling in ANWR.

The answer, despite being approved in 2017 or so?

No, not today. The GloboLeft keeps putting the ball down, and as Charlie Brown (AKA, Conoco©) gets ready to drill, the GloboLeft pulls the football out of the way at the last minute. It’s not exaggeration to say that this has happened literally fifty times since I’ve been alive. People in Alaska already know the score. Conoco™ is never gonna be allowed to kick that football.

The same thing is true with reparations.

Reparations are a really hideous joke on the black community, because they play off of the very worst of emotions – greed and victimhood. First, who doesn’t want someone else to provide them with all the money they could ever want? I mean, my hand would be among the first up, though I do know that there’s something corrosive to the soul about taking money I haven’t earned from people who haven’t wronged me, but, hey, free money.

The inventor of autocorrect died. The funnel will be helped tomato.

The more pernicious part of the reparations deal is that it establishes a narrative of victimhood and implies helplessness. Be a single mother with six kids by five different baby daddies? It’s the fault of slavery. Be convicted of seventeen felonies, be released, and then finally have to go to jail for life because no one stopped you from killing someone? It’s the fault of 300 years of systemic oppression.

Yup, and this isn’t an exaggeration. And, I guess they’ve got a point. Look at how oppressed Barack Obama was in being forced to be president. It even turned his hair white!

But reparations will solve literally everything, every problem. And let’s ignore pesky and inconvenient facts like the crime rates among blacks, and the relative success of nearly every other minority group in the nation except blacks. Oh, and we should look at how wonderful it has been for native Americans, because we gave them reparations in the form of reservations and unlimited Bureau of Indian Affairs welfare. Like communism, I’m sure it would work next time.

But, for a second, let’s pretend that if we gave out reparations, people would finally shut up. Think that would work?

No. I recall one ludicrous proposal (California, I believe) that would have given black people something like $3,000,000 each. The response? “It’s a good start, but it’s not enough.”

This is Dr. Evil level of economic understanding . . . .

What’s enough? Nothing is enough. There is absolutely no amount that will ever be seen to be enough, because there has been a force-feeding of victimhood for decades into the black community, and to say, “Okay, white guys, we’re even now,” would be contradictory to every bit of victimhood that they rely on to get them through the day. From personal experience in dealing with victims, they relish the pity, and will do absolutely anything to hold on to their victim status.

Also, there is no way that black people will ever get the sky-high sorts of compensation that they’re looking for (millions of dollars in cash, freedom from taxes, a free house, and $70,000 a year for 80 years was one proposal). Perhaps they might get another MLK, Jr. Street or a George Floyd Square, but they’ve already got two national holidays plus Kwanza.

Whatever Kwanza is.

Teach your children about Kwanza in a responsible manner.

No, just like ANWR was a football to money-farm GloboLeft-leaning women with too much disposable income who wanted to virtue signal that Haitians should be allowed to eat all the seal meat they wanted, reparations are a mechanism to vote-farm the black community for whoever promises them the best package that they’re never going to get.

And even that won’t eliminate the “economic understanding gap”.

I’d make a comment here about the ludicrousness of printing another few trillion dollars and then just giving it away as a cure to inflation, but since we’ve long since ceased being a serious nation in any respect, I’ll skip it. Perhaps we’re hoping to spend ourselves into the relative economic prosperity of, say, Spain or Mauritania, where they still have tens of thousands of slaves.

Dang, I shouldn’t have mentioned that, since now the Mauritanians will want reparations from the United States for slavery since I’m sure that somehow the United States is responsible for blacks enslaving blacks 4,017 miles (16 kilograms) away from the United States.

ANWR will likely never be drilled, and black people will likely never get more than a token sort of reparations. And that’s fair, because no living black person was ever subject to legal slavery in the United States, though now we do have unpaid internships. At charities. That don’t want us to drill in ANWR.

I guess you could say the drilling system is rigged.