Wealth – Page 11 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Energy: The Big Picture

“Dr. Norman was experimenting with energy and mass. To make it brief, it got away from him. He found he had made a mass of energy that somehow came alive. It feeds on more energy, and it lives only to feed. I’m afraid it consumed Dr. Norman before he could stop it.” – Jonny Quest

I was once kidnapped by a gang of mimes. They did unspeakable things to me.

Apologies to all on missing the podcast tonight – The Mrs. was feeling great this morning, and then headed south about two hours before the show. Darn her for demanding that she have actual oxygen in her blood. So selfish! Should she feel okay, we’re looking at having a New Year’s Eve show (her idea) on, wait for it, New Year’s Eve. I’m thinking 9pm Eastern, but who knows – her blood is fickle.

So, on to today’s post, inspired by a reader’s comment on email . . .

The most fundamental economic and political choice of our lives is energy. I phrased that intentionally – the impacts of the energy we use as a society are economic. Energy has been political since the 1930s, at the very least.

The idea of energy might be economic and political, but the reality is pure physics. There is no law that Congress can pass that can create more energy – only allow that which exists to be used. And there is no amount of money that can be printed to that can make energy appear where none exists.

Some Leftists say truth is subjective, but let them try to pretend that their house at -40°F is actually 70°F. I guess that you could say that they’re trans-comfortable? No. They’re frozen. Reality is like that. And energy is like that, too. Unlike monetary policy or laws, energy doesn’t care what people want.

The story of energy, though, is the story of human culture.

Energy has been a part of human life since the first waggling finger (thank you, Rudyard, original poem below) burned itself on a fire. Meat tastes good, but tastes better once it has been cooked. It also heated the caves and tents that early man lived in. It was the original killer app – I can guarantee that at some point, a fire in a cabin or tent or cave saved someone who was your direct ancestor.

I hear you can get fired from the keyboard factory if you don’t put in enough shifts.

In the form of crude wood fires, energy did a few things for people, helping to tan skins, cure meats, harden wood, and eventually fuel fires that made the first man-made metals and ceramics. The demand was low, but the impacts were huge. Food, clothing, weapons, and the basis of civilization. You can’t have beer unless you have a beer bottle, right?

Romans used it even more – they had central heating in their villas in Roman Britain, heated baths, and used it in lots of other ways I’m too lazy to look up. One hint: those Roman shields and swords didn’t make themselves. And the iron nails in Jerusalem, circa 32 A.D.? Yeah, those required energy as well.

Romans were amazing at using energy, but most of the energy they used was human; they didn’t exactly have outboard motors on their ships. It was wind or oars. The Romans used fire, but the real energy source for Empire was animal and human. That source of energy was totally renewable – people are born every day, and they eat food that is raised every year.

There are huge implications to this: slave labor was the original renewable energy. Oops! That’s not politically correct, though the World Economic Forum® did take notes.

After the fall of the Roman Empire, people continued to innovate. That’s what we do. Dams provided water power for mills. Mills could grind grain, or they could operate pumps to pull water out of mines. And wind? Windmills could use wind to mill. Duh. It’s in the name.

If a former president didn’t like windmills, could we call him Donald Quixote?

All of that was a necessary predecessor to the real powerhouse: steam. Sure, steam-powered toys had been created 2,000 years earlier, but steam power was needed because of the mines that were needed to get the metals to manufacture electric guitars and iPads® back in the 1600s. Or whatever they did with them. Maybe banjos?

The Industrial Revolution came almost entirely based on the use of energy. The developments in the 1800s changed everything. Transport? Trains. Communications? Telegraphs. Cool products? Factories. Navy? Fast steamships. This is a wickedly small set of examples – the availability of energy changed everything. But at this point, the energy mix changed. Prior, it was mostly wood.

Now it was the age of coal and steel.

The biggest change it created was the ability to have a metric butt-ton of additional people. Energy changed agriculture and changed food distribution. After the Haber-Bosch process allowed for the fixing of nitrogen for increased plant yields (which required another metric butt-ton of energy) but this changed the demand. Coal was still pretty nifty, but it was no longer enough.

Now was the age of oil.

Cars were required to move products. Gas was required for fertilizer, and heating and chemical products.

Tesla® cars are expensive because they charge a lot.

The result of all of this was amazing – an explosion of the numbers of people living on Earth like never before, even in places that could never support them.

Wars were fought over energy. Why did the Germans fight at Stalingrad? Because they were trying to secure oil. There was no hybrid-panzer. The Allies won because there were lakes of oil underneath Texas, mountains of iron ore in Minnesota, and marksmen from Georgia. The biggest contributor?

The oil.

Without it, the Shermans don’t sherm, the Mustangs won’t must, and the carrier fleet are amusing, odd-shaped coral reefs. Oil won World War II. If the Germans had the reserves of Texas under Bavaria, Stalin would have been a minor footnote in history after 1942.

Oil was pretty plentiful as geologists wend around the world hunting for it after 1945. It was found in the wastelands of the Arctic, the scorching deserts of Saudi Arabia, and on the coast of California. Really, anywhere where people don’t want to live in 2022.

The lakes of oil in Texas weren’t infinite. In 1973, Texas removed controls on production. The straws weren’t dry, but the abundance was done. The Arabs also decided that, perhaps, oil was now (for the second time since 1943) the most potent weapon in the world besides nuclear bombs and Leftism was unleashed. The oil embargo showed how much the world depended on oil to make Big Macs™ and G.I. Joes©. One oil shock (combined with Nixon’s taking the United States off the gold standard) was enough to send the economy into the stagflation of the 1970s.

But I heard since he died, he’s a great cook. His pasta is Al Dante.

Oil is why the Cold War ended. Star Wars was an important initiative, but the bigger cause of the failure of the Soviet Union was that Reagan convinced the Saudis to pump oil like it was free. The Soviet economy, dependent on oil revenue to keep their machine going? Done. Oil killed the two out of three of the great empires of the twentieth century.

That brings us to today.

Almost all of the growth in oil production since 2008 was based on fracking. The previous pools of oil were still producing, but the oil companies had to go farther and farther afield, such as deep water miles deep in places like the Gulf of Mexico. Places where getting the oil was expensive – it’s not like we found another several billion barrels in the backyard behind the garden shed. Regular places where oil was were drying up. A game changer was needed. Something different.

Fracking was different. It was difficult, required new technologies, and grew by a factor of ten in only ten years, making the United States a net energy exporter for the first time since before John Kennedy did an afternoon drive in Texas.

Oil is an amazing fuel, and I bathe in sweet, sweet gasoline every night. But to meet the needs of the world, the struggle is difficult. Cheap energy takes huge investment, but that’s not all. It requires the energy source to be there.

The Mrs. says I’m cheap. I’m not buying it.

Our energy has been cheap since about 1920 or so. The idea that it will be cheap forever is magical thinking, unless oil is infinite (it is not). Our choice on energy isn’t economic, it’s based on physics.

And, with everything I’ve read, the physics of alternative energy solutions, especially the “renewable” ones that are touted based on political reasons, result in the energy cost doubling (at least) and that’s after the investment of trillions of dollars to build the necessary energy production facilities and infrastructure. This will likely be the subject of future posts.

I hate to break the Christmas spirit, but it is the single most important question facing humanity today. When the price of energy is low, freedom is high. When the price of energy is high?

Oh, yeah. Slavery.

As promised, here’s Kipling, Gods of the Copybook Headings:

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall.
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn.
That water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision, and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorilas while we followed the March of Mankind.

We moved as the Spirit listed. They never altered their pace,
Being neither clud nor wind-borne like the Gods of the Market-Place;
But they always caught up with our progress, and presently word would come
That a tribe had been wiped off its icefield, or the lights had gone out in Rome.

With the Hopes that our World is built on they were utterly out of touch.
They denied that the Moon was Stilton; they denied she was even Dutch.
They denied that Wishes were Horses; they denied that a Pig had Wings.
So we worshiped the Gods of the Market Who promiced these beautiful things.

When the Cambrian measures were forming, They promiced perpetual peace.
They swore, if we gave them our weapons, that the wars of the tribes would cease.
But when we disarmed They sold us and delivered us bound to our foe,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘Stick to the Devil you know.’

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promiced the Fuller Life
(Which started by loving our neighbor and ended by loving his wife)
Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘The Wages of Sin is Death/’

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,
By robbing selective Peter to pay for collective Paul;
But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: ‘If you don’t work you die.’

The the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tounged wizards withdrew,
And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to belive it was true
That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four—
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

Credentials: Costing Trillions

“Credentials. The only credentials I have is that I’m the only pilot willing to fly you up there. You don’t like those credentials? Walk.” – The X Files

Biden doesn’t think of those kids as hostages, just a captive audience.

Warning up front: I’ve got family obligations on Thursday that involve traveling late, so I might not have time for any sort of post on Friday. If so, be back in full force on Monday.

The Mrs. went into the hospital last year for “having lungs that were as useful as used party balloons”, which I think was the technical definition. In reality, one doctor said he thought she had Legionnaires’ Disease, which is weird because she never hangs out down at the Legion even though she likes mustard and bologna (one of you will get this joke and really, really laugh)*.

The reality of the care The Mrs. got was that she sat in a bed, they gave her some antibiotics, and then sent her home until her lungs looked less like they were filled with Jim Beam® bottles that had gone through a wood chipper. The care was just fine. Then the bill showed up – for two days in the hospital, the cost was about $16,000, which included a (I kid you not) $2,000 COVID test, which was negative.

But it was $2,000.

No, I don’t dress that way.

Again, the staff was nice, the doctor competent, but the real hero was the antibiotics that The Mrs. took. I don’t recall the line item for those, but I assure you, it wasn’t the food that caused her lungs to allow sweet, sweet, oxygen to once again saturate her hemoglobin. It was the antibiotics. I tried to get her to take my homemade antibiotics made of lead, some of the fuzzy stuff I found in the fridge, and several unlabeled vials of chemicals that were in the house when we moved in.

She turned me down. But $16,000? What’s up there?

Well, liability and gatekeepers. The idea is that every job has some liability associated with it. And courts have ruled that if I own a hospital and hire the neighborhood kid who mows my lawn to do brain surgery, that things might not go well. Well, in 2022, they wouldn’t go so well.

In the past, however, being a doctor was a state of mind. The Mrs. gave me a nickname over 20 years ago: John Wilder, Civil War Surgeon. Most of the operations that the members of my family have had, from splinter extractions to blisters to the occasional tracheotomy using a ballpoint pen and some duct tape and super glue have been performed by me. I got my medical degree in . . . nowhere.

What was Morgan Freeman called before the Civil War? Morgan.

In a real sense, almost everything I’ve done was just a matter of first aid, most not really complicated, and all really easy once I determined that no matter how much the other person is yelling, it is good for them and doesn’t hurt me at all. That last sentence will amuse at least three of you, so at least the jokes are getting broader as we go along.

I would assess, that at current prices, that I’ve done at least $4,349,209 worth of medical work on my family. So, enough to buy two Happy Meals© and a Big Mac©. Some of it was especially hilarious, like the time Pugsley (then aged three) slid sideways along a wooden bleacher at a wrestling tournament and ended up with three cords of splinters in his butt. Actual conversation from the bathroom while we were in the handicapped stall (the bathroom was filled with people): “Listen, hold still,” (Pugsley screams as I pluck a four-inch-long splinter out of his butt) “It won’t take long if you stop fighting.”

I did like the comfy chair very much, though.

But if anything goes remotely wrong, my family can’t sue me. When anything goes wrong at a doctor’s office, they can get sued. So an entire labyrinth of credentials has been created. This does two things: it makes sure that doctors have achieved a set credential, and it also assures that doctors are in short supply, and thus their cost is huge.

And that’s the basis of credentialism. From doing hair to doing nails to being a cop or a firefighter or . . . a zillion other professions, there are a myriad of professional credentials required. Heck, there are even credentials required to embalm dead people, and it’s not like they can lose a patient.

Credentialism makes sure that every person involved in every chain has a string of credentials a mile long. I’ve been through lots of training courses where I didn’t learn anything, and (in some cases) an “eight hour course” involves a lot (I mean a loooooooooooot) of breaks.

The credentials are required, of course, so that the company doesn’t lose a multi-million dollar lawsuit, even if they don’t have a practical impact on the job. They’re all made so that in a courtroom a person on the stand can say, “yes, I had the eight hour training on not shoving a cotton swab so far into my ear that I could feel my brain”.

Also, a colon can completely change the meaning of a sentence: “Wilder ate his friend’s sandwich,” vs. “Wilder’s colon ate his friend’s sandwich.” See? It’s the small things.

Certainly, there are professions that require more training. The bridge disaster in Florida shows that people should have training when dozens of people can die in an accident. But, whoops! All the people involved did have training. And, yes, I’d prefer not to go to a doctor who got his training at Doctor Bombay’s Surgery School and Meth Laboratory. Yet, Sam Bankman-Fraud was allowed to steal and/or lose billions of dollars based on being weird, something-something crypto, sleeping on a beanbag, and being able to fool Tom Brady.

Maybe he should have had a credential? “Unable to fool Tom Brady”?

But this design of creating every job with a nearly infinite number of credentials is adding billions of dollars in cost to the systems that we depend on, from filling up a car with gasoline (the tank, not covering the passengers) to buying PEZ© at Wal-Mart®. Some of them add a great deal of value, but some just add friction to the system.

Just like $15,890 of The Mrs.’ bill. And I’m not letting her go down to the Legion anymore.

*This is a reference to a song. It’s by “Bubbles” and you can find it if you search for “youtube mustard and bologna bubbles”. Not one you’d want to play if your office is near HR.

Woke, Broke, Wealth, and Agendas

“Been to Disney World, one too many times, have we, Captain Ron?” – Captain Ron

What’s the difference between an iPhone™ 14 and half an ounce of gold? Half an ounce of gold will still be worth $1000 next year.

Once upon a time, there was a small business. It was run by a man who wanted to make cartoons and money. The cartoons were, mainly, for children, but he branched out. He made wholesome entertainment for families for decades, had multiple television shows, and eventually made a theme park. He was an avowed Christian, and was an ardent anti-communist.

He was moral. He hated pornography. And then he died and was frozen into suspended animation so his reanimated body could conquer the Universe from beyond the grave.

After he was put to “rest”, Walt’s Company was acquired and began to put out R-rated movies, as well as taking very, very un-Christian stances on, well, almost everything.

I’m talking, of course, about Walt Disney. Were Walt unfrozen alive today, I think he’d be shocked at what his company had become. I’ve had a beef with Disney® (the company, not the frozen founder) since before 2000 when they pushed hard to own all of their intellectual property until the heat-death of the Universe.

I have a problem with that, since I think that’s essentially stealing from the public domain, but I won’t go into that right now. Beyond that, there’s the steering of the company into entertainment that Walt would certainly never have greenlit.

In space, no one can hear Walt scream.

Case in point, the latest film from Disney©, Strange World. It’s being hailed as an “alt-family eco-drama featuring an openly gay teen”. I’m out of the “raising pups” stage, but hearing that I knew it was going to be a flop. Why? About a million gays would go see it for the feelz, and the hardest of the hard-core Left who had forgotten to abort their babies. That provides a stunningly small audience.

It is going to lose, by some estimates, up to $150,000,000. The earlier Adventures of the Incredibly Gay Buzz Lightyear probably lost a similar amount.

$300,000,000 in losses between them. I know people that work a whole month and don’t make that kinda cash. So, the guy who was running the company got fired. And then they re-hired the person that initially green-lit the bombs in question, Bob Iger, who had only left the company a little over 11 months previously.

Iger gets rehired, and in the first town hall with employees, says that he’s going to stay the course and continue the LGBT programming that has cost Disney™ $50 million a month for the last six months. And it’s not like there’s no movie audience – Top Gun: Maverick made $1.5 BILLION while Disney© was losing piles of shareholder cash. Disney’s© market value in 2022 is pretty close to what it was 8 years ago – and that’s after billions in profits from Marvel™ flicks.

Hmmm. Why is Disney© so committed to making “entertainment” that people don’t want at a loss of hundreds of millions of dollars because Disney© doesn’t share the values of the parents of the kids the movies were made for? It’s like going to Drag Queen Story hour and asking, “Why do men in lingerie want to spend hours in close contact with children under the age of six?”

Well, certainly Apple© is different, right? I mean they have all the cool iPhones© and iPads® and iPods™ and no real new ideas since Steve Jobs died. Certainly, they’re focusing on making money?

It turns out, they are. Apple® is making a 30% cut off of everything bought through apps from their App Store©. That’s loan-shark level cash. But as soon as Elon Musk took over Twitter©? Well, I’ll let Elon describe it:

And not only that:

Either advertising on Twitter™ makes Apple© money and they’re voluntarily dumping a revenue source because of feelz, or advertising on Twitter® never made them money and they’re removing a woke subsidy.

I wonder which. And speaking of wondering, why the heck is Elon still using an iPhone©, as noted on his Tweet©?

Stonetoss has a comment on the whole situation:

I guess losing Steve Jobs and turning the company over to a committed Leftist like Tim Cook would make Apple® less than a fan of any thoughts other than Leftist thoughts. And Tim Cook is not at all afraid of Elon Musk – Apple is worth $2.3 trillion dollars, which is more than Elon has, even if he looks under the couch cushions.

Who is Tim Cook afraid of? I think the Bee® nails it:

If Xi turns off the iPhone© flow, Apple’s™ cash flow will fail – it’s that simple. I wonder if this would impact the way Apple™ deals with security on their phones? Nah. But Apple is still raking in the cash.

For now.

We’ve discussed Disney® and Apple™. But certainly a fashion company wants attractive people in their ads?

Well, Calvin Klein® has changed a lot in 30 years.

There are some people I don’t want to see in their Calvins®. No! Don’t take them off!

In the final analysis, some businesses make money just to make money. Others make money just to fund their own ideologies, and I’m certain that’s the case with corporation after corporation. I could go on, but will stop here so the post doesn’t get 2,000 pages long.

I think Walt had an ideology, back in the day, but it was one I agree with. I do hope that Walt is eventually unfrozen in a thousand years and comes back with a vengeance and finishes that last cartoon he was working on.

I guess that would be the world’s longest suspended animation.

The Potemkin Economy

“By noon, the submarines Ranger and Potemkin will have reached their designated firing positions. Within minutes, New York City and Moscow will cease to exist. Global devastation will follow, and a new era will begin.” – The Spy Who Loved Me

What do you call a reality show about people with lobotomies? Mindless entertainment.

Grigory Aleksandrovich Potemkin-Tauricheski is famous mostly for what he didn’t do, but more about that in a minute. What Potemkin did do, starting in 1774, was conquer most of what is southern Ukraine, the Crimea, Moldova, and Catherine the Great a bunch of times. The land he mostly took from the Ottoman Empire, but Catherine seems to have invited the conquest. And apparently, Grigory didn’t do it right, because she made him do it again. And again.

I mean a bunch of times. Catherine had a succession of lovers that would put Kamala’s body count in 1992 to shame. Okay, the summer of 1992. Okay. August of 1992. Okay, August 11, 1992. By noon

But when Potemkin wasn’t kicking Ottoman butt or . . . well, the other thing, what he did do was found city after city along the Black Sea coast. You just might have heard of Kherson? Yup. Potemkin founded and named that city. He was even buried there until Putin dug him up and took him back to Russia recently. It’s certain he wasn’t the last Russian to retreat.

But mostly, we remember Potemkin for the phrase Potemkin Village. Where did that phrase come from?

Why did the old lady fall in that well? She didn’t see that well.

Catherine the Great, somewhere between lovers, decided to have a Lord of the Rings-type trip to go see what Potemkin was up to down south, and maybe have Potemkin put something in Mount Doom, if you know what I mean.

That was based on the idea that Potemkin had a lot of the Novorossiyan (approximately the southern area that Putin held before the Russians began advancing to the rear last month) villages built and rebuilt so that he could fool Catherine about how prosperous the area was.

Well, not really. First of all, Potemkin didn’t have to impress Catherine, they’d known each other forever by this point, and she really liked him even though whenever they weren’t together they were boffing enough other people to make Paris Hilton blush. What everyone does agree on is that Potemkin had folks paint some of the village buildings, and they did build a few fake ones, but those were mainly to show Catherine what the area would look like.

So, despite personal bravery, solid administration, building an entire fleet, and being a diplomat worthy of any of today’s age, we remember Potemkin for something he really didn’t do. To be fair Potemkin was the guy that conquered most of the area that Russia and Ukraine are fighting for right now, so there’s a good argument that they should just give it all back to Turkey and be done with it.

Well, at least it’s a seasonal joke.

But it came to my mind when I started thinking about the economy we find ourselves in today – in many ways, it’s a Potemkin economy. FTX®, that wonderful stealer of money and funder of Democrats? It was a financial Potemkin Village. There was nothing really there, ever. A smelly-looking Millenial with his autistic girlfriend who is so homely that she makes Greta Thunberg look like an 8.5 and the rest of the crew literally printed their own virtual currency, and then grifted their way through piles of cash from nations and celebrities and even their own employees.

A Potemkin Village? Sure.

And now Elon Musk is finding that his $44 billion toy, Twitter™ is filled with fraud. First, there are fraudulent users. We don’t have the full number of bots that Tweeted™, but it wasn’t a small number.

Second, there was an algorithm that was built to push the Leftist agenda by artificially drawing people’s attention to things they weren’t organically interested in. As soon as Musk stopped the algorithm in Japan, for instance, politics stopped trending and anime and Godzilla© and sushi topped the list of things that Japanese people were actually interested in.

Third, the advertisers weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Rather than being advertisers that were interested in, oh, say, advertising to customers, they’re fleeing the platform. Why? Because they weren’t interested in selling products, they were really interested in social posturing. They’re leaving in droves – the economic engine of Twitter® appears to have been built on corporate virtue signaling.

Burgers. Right. That’s what they’re selling.

Fourth, the employees themselves seemed to be, at a ratio of at least 75%, useless people with a huge sense of entitlement. How bad are these people? They’re upset that they won’t have free food from in-house chefs. They’ll have to pay for lunch. Maybe they’ll have burgers?

As Potemkin himself might have said, “North Crimean Canal”. Oh, sorry. Potemkin might have told those disappointed Twitterites©, “Crimea River.”

There are more examples out there. By definition, these Potemkin Companies look fine to casual observation until something breaks down. Facebook© started as the darling of the Internet. Then Zuckerberg decided that he’d spend the rest of his life staring out of the world through virtual reality, and spent $36 billion dollars on “the Internet, but with stupid goggles”.

Facebook® discovered a man was building a bomb. The dilemma: inform the FBI, or send him ads for digital timers?

Sure it makes sense to Mark who took the movie The Matrix as a how-to manual, but pretty much everyone else thinks it is . . . stupid. But the scary thing for Mark is it’s making people look at what he really owns. Some folks think it’s just the next version of MySpace©, because the teens have abandoned it and it now consists of businesses trying to sell stuff, mothers trading recipes for what to do with their children’s Adderall© for a quick buzz, and the NSA desperately trying to track everyone.

I guess Facebook© has a lot of servers and stuff, but is their model a Potemkin Company?

And how many other Potemkin Companies are sitting out there, in plain sight, but just not yet recognized? My bet is that there are a lot, especially in the financial sector and tech sectors. One principle that I’ve seen apply again and again is Wilder’s Rule #32: what can be built really quickly can collapse a lot quicker. If Zuck can make $100 billion in four years, he can lose it in four weeks.

The valuation of almost everything in our economy is subjective – it has value because we give it value. Amazon™ was worth $180 last year at this time. It was worth $99 yesterday. It has gone down by half. Amazon© has also announced that they’re going to lay off 10,000 employees in the next month.

Oops. And what else might be a sign of a Potemkin Economy?

I’m sure it’s all legit, right? Thankfully for the Ukraine, Russia sucks at war.

Valuations are built on emotion, and emotion is defined on how pretty something is. Well, at least if we lose the Potemkin Companies and the Potemkin Dollar, we still have our relationship with Catherine the Great Kamala.

Oh, crap. We’re in even worse condition than I thought.

The Funniest Post You’ll Ever Read About: Money. Sex. Football. Corruption. Oh, And War.

“No respected psychic will come on this show. They all think you’re a fraud.” – Ghostbusters II

On one side, we have a liar that preys on unsuspecting youth, and on the other, his son Hunter.

It starts with an election.

I know that I was a bit surprised by Pennsylvania. The candidates weren’t great. The Republicans tossed a greasy TV fraud who, until he started running, believed in everything Woke. Ugh.

His opponent? Sling Blade™, an actually mentally impaired man who had a stroke. Before Sling Blade© had a stroke, though, he was as socialist as Trotsky on the day rent was due.

So, who gets the win? Uhhh-humn.

Can’t you see him on a ticket with Biden?

One little win like that, and sure, it makes sense. People like idiots better than frauds. But it wasn’t one little win. It was everywhere that mail-in or bulk ballot boxes exist and where the Left needed to win elections in order to keep control.

I had done the math after a discussion with a friend. In 2020, mail-in votes were tracked in most places by the party affiliation of who had requested them. Leftists had certainly requested them more frequently, so often made up more than 50% of the total.

Fine. More people on the Right vote on the day of the election, so that makes sense. But when you looked how those mail-in ballots voted in Pennsylvania, Biden got all of the Democrat ballots, plus almost all of the independent vote, plus a chunk of those registered as Republican.

I did these numbers based on NBC© and Newsweek™ data and if the mail-in ballots behaved like other places, Trump was cheated out of around 120,000 votes, more than twice what was required for him to win Pennsylvania.

I was thinking that the Democrats might have been interested in having the Republicans have control of the House in 2023, because then the Left could blame them in 2024 for not having all the answers. Nope. They apparently drank their own Kool-Aid® that this was the biggest and most important election, ever. They cheated. How can we tell?

Everywhere the vote didn’t matter, the Left didn’t spend the time and money to shift the election. Look at New York . . . the last time a Republican won as Governor his name was Pataki, and he was last elected 20 years ago. Before him? Nelson Rockefeller. Yup. New York could be called Blue York. So, letting it shift to the Right was fine. But Michigan? They had to get their governor, Waddles Whitmer re-elected.

Why did they have to get Waddles back in the chair? So that they could keep the voting laws favorable to the Left. That’s it. From the standpoint of the Left, it is literally her only job. In Illinois? The Left didn’t need it, so people could vote however. Besides, Chicago is so corrupt that they could generate however many votes they needed in an afternoon with a bored school secretary and a mimeograph machine.

Even in races that were virtual locks for the Right (which historically underpolls) you ended up with blatant theft. What does Washington have? Mail-in voting.

And they don’t even bother to hide it at times, or, rather, hide it in full view:

So, we have the “What” and the When” – a stolen election in 2022. Again. We have the “How” and the “Where” – mainly mail-in and drop-off ballots. We have the “Why” – to change voting laws so that the Left can maintain power, forever. What about the “Who”?

That’s simple. And you may not like it.

Bert knows. Consider this a warning.

Upfront, this is a developing story, and the following is the best version that I can source right now. Take everything here with a big helping of allegedly, because I can’t independently verify lots of bits.

Let’s go back in time. On April 25, 2019, Biden announces he’s running for President. Thirteen days later, on May 8, 2019 Sam Bankman-Fried launches the FTX crypto exchange. Oh, and his mother? She’s a Leftist political fundraiser and organizer when not teaching law. Sam Bankman-Fried is 27 at this time. FTX makes Sam a multi-billionaire a few months later.

What a coincidence! Leftist needs money to fund Democrats, and immediately becomes a billionaire.

Sam becomes the number two Democrat donor to aid Biden in becoming elected. And Bankman-Fried has donated (according to some sources) over $100 million dollars to the Democrats during the last two election cycles.

How did he make his money? Well, in a lot of cases, he just printed it. In others, he used the deposits of people in (what appears to be) a Ponzi scheme. He got high-profile people to invest big bucks in to his firm, and even pressured employees to invest in his company. This is Sam Bankman-Fried:

I hear his favorite sport is phishing. Also, that’s my grandma’s hairstyle.

So, Bankman-Fried did the usual, by begging for money from famous people. And, he was amazingly good at that. He convinced Tom and Gisele (by some accounts) to give him hundreds of millions of dollars to invest. Want proof?

Is it just me, or does he give off a creepy vibe?

And the rich and powerful are now paying the price. Tom Brady and his ex-squeeze Gisele? They were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I wonder how much they trusted Bankman?

That’s a pretty good hairline for 65.

But Sam Bankman-Fried didn’t date supermodels. Nope. He dated his CTO(?), a 28 year-old Harry Potter® fan. Here’s her picture:

Her name is Caroline Ellison and she’s the reason for Bert’s earlier warning. She manages to simultaneously look like a 12-year-old and also an 80-year-old grandmother which is an odd choice for the girlfriend of a billionaire. Or anyone.

Not gonna lie, I’m hoping both of these kids hit prison so neither of them can take a dip in the gene pool. Me? If I ever get to the tres comma club, I’m gonna follow this man’s example:

But why settle for that, when you can go international? Reports coming in today indicate that tens of billions of dollars were laundered from US government funds sent to the Ukraine. Yup. Money sent to Ukraine was sent, by Ukraine, to FTX, where Sam Bankman-Fried, son of hardcore Leftist operatives, funneled the cash back into the Democratic coffers.

Or, graphically:

If you’re not mad by this point, your name isn’t Tom Brady (hi, Tom!) or you’re not dedicated to the actual rule of law in this country. This is a scandal of global proportions. Again, rumor has it that Sam Bankman-Fried is trying to figure out how to escape the Bahamas to join up with his creepy girlfriend in Hong Kong so they can move to someplace that doesn’t have extradition back to the United States so he can avoid ending up like Bernie Madoff, or, more likely, Jeffery Epstein.

So, if you wanted additional proof of Wilder’s Principle of Greatest Amusement (given the equal likelihood of two events occurring, the most amusing event will happen) here it is. This event has everything.

Mathematically provable corruption and stolen elections. Senile, likely incontinent usurper presidents, Tom Brady, the theft of billions, a brewing world war, the ugliest girl to ever date a “billionaire”, and an actual supermodel. If this was a movie plot, there are exactly zero people that would believe it.

What could make it more amusing?

Okay, that’s close. But, hear me out. What if Sam Bankman-Fried escapes to Venezuela, and Tom Brady joins with a group of Navy Seals to sneak in and take revenge? And Fetterman was really Tom Brady’s brother, who had a pet mouse named George? And then Tom was elected President?

I’d buy that for a dollar.

Election? Worry About This Instead.

“We pay off the debt in buying the company with cash from its ongoing operation and by selling off pieces of the business.” – Barbarians at the Gate

Why do windmills love hard rock? They’re huge metal fans.

Two characters were talking to each other in a Hemingway novel (The Sun Also Rises):

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

Irrespective of who has been in the White House, the debt of the United States keeps growing. Gradually. Okay, not gradually. For the most part, the national debt has been doubling every eight years as Presidents keep spending money we don’t have to get re-elected. Wait, why does this keep giving me flashbacks to my first marriage?

To be fair, it’s never fun to be the President who says, “Alright guys, I know the party has been awesome, but it’s time to stop spiking the punch with grain alcohol, I mean, look at Nancy – her liver must be 143 years old now and her husband is hammered. So, let’s go home before we all have hangovers that will last for a decade.”

I found a twenty on the street, so I decided to do what Jesus would do: I turned it into wine.

Debt is funny. A little is hard to notice. When I was first married with The Mrs., we bought a new car. As in, a seriously new car, from a dealership and everything. The monthly payment was okay. So, a few months later, we bought a second one. These weren’t expensive cars, perhaps (total cost) less than 1/3 of what we made in a year. So, not Porsches™ and Lambos©. Think: small Nissan™ truck.

Ouch. We weren’t bankrupt, but we were having to watch all our expenses each month.

When I paid the last payment for the last car? Life was so wonderful. And as debt dropped, we decided to not get into debt anymore (except for houses). It was amazing. That short-term pain and the little hangover that went with a debt moratorium only lasted a little bit. Life was so much better afterward, and all it cost was half a dozen years of discipline. And those were the last “new” cars we ever bought.

Did you hear about the guy in Mexico who drove his Audi® into a lake? Quattro Sinko.

But on a national level, debt has been piling up. It will destroy the country. Some folks (Vox Day, for instance) has long pegged 2032 as the date when it all cracks up. Me? I called 2026 back in 2018. I mean the United States? Everyone could see the U.S.S.R. breaking up, heck, their flag only gave them a one-star rating.

I might be overly pessimistic, since inertia is powerful and the United States has trillions of dollars in inertia. The first of the two factors that led me to that conclusion were the rising medical costs. Eventually, if they keep rising, an aspirin at a hospital will cost $5,382 after insurance.

I wish that were a joke or an exaggeration. The Mrs. went into the hospital earlier this year, and her COVID test was (allowed cost) $1,000. It was negative.

What’s the difference between an art student and a large pizza? The pizza can feed a family.

Yup. Eventually, the costs of medical care – private, Medicare, and Medicaid are going to eat the entire budget. We’ll become like a country that works all day for Band-Aids™ and Neosporin©. Of course, that’s a ridiculous outcome. People will stop going to doctors first. And they are. And our medical system is a mess (from a financial standpoint).

That, as I said, was the first problem.

The second one can’t be escaped – it’s the interest rate trap. The problem is that the United States has been carrying huge chunks of its debt on short-term rates, having to roll it over every few years (on average).

I bought some dirt at high-interest rates. I guess I should have avoided the loam shark.

The United States gets, generally, pretty favorable interest rates – at least when inflation isn’t running at near-record levels. But what happens when, instead of 1% or less, the payments are 4% or more?

Interest on the debt doubles. Take all of the soldiers, stealth fighters, rifles, artillery, missiles, MREs, and aircraft carriers, not to mention all the crayons that the military eats in a year? The interest payments on the debt will be more than that.

As much as I’d love to blame the Leftists, this isn’t a Left-Right thing, mostly. The healthcare crisis was started by Ted Kennedy (can’t turn away people who can’t pay) in the 1980s, but the Right has had plenty of time to fix it. And they’ve only made “compassionate conservatism” while trying to make a “kinder, gentler country” their watchword while expanding medical programs and creating the worst Frankenstein monster yet – a non-private, non-public healthcare system.

Ted was an awful golf player. He couldn’t drive over water.

And the spending? The Right has spent as much (if not more) than the Left. The biggest stop to that in my lifetime was when the Republicans in Congress pushed Clinton into not spending all the cash, and he agreed so he could get re-elected.

In the end, there are more things than just financial that are tearing the country apart, but financial is enough. Angry, hungry people don’t really care who caused the hangover, they just want the pain to go away. Regardless of how it’s done.

That’s how it ends. Gradually, and then suddenly.

Groundhog Day, But It’s The Economy

“You like Japanese sake, Mr. Bond, or would you prefer a vodka martini?” – You Only Live Twice

The economy also depresses me. That’s why I drink a gallon of water before bed each night – so I have a reason to get up.

First, I want to pop a signal flare on behalf of Big Country Expat. He was bananated off of blogspot®, and now has a new home here (LINK). So, if you were looking for BCE, he’s surfaced. Expect more of these flares in the future, because more folks will be kicked off of platforms as time goes on.

Okay, back to the blogging.

Back in 2018, 2019, there were few reasons to post contemporary economic posts. I could do what I like to do best, sit back, research, think, and give a few strategic thoughts on what I thought the future would bring. There weren’t a lot of stories of an immediate nature. That had been true (more or less) going back to 2010. The motions in the markets were longer, and we could take the time to post the waves, print bikini-girl graphs, and talk about the problems that were coming.

Why is our economy like a strapless bikini? It looks like there’s nothing holding it up.

Now?

It’s that damn movie Groundhog Day. I have folders of graphs on economic doom that, in a normal year, where each would be the biggest story in months. In 2022, those stories are coming out every week. Germany collapsing and all of their people are going to be cold in the 2022-2023 winter? Check. Britain collapsing and the latest prime minister wants to (spins wheel) import 50 million illiterate immigrants that marry their first cousins because that’s what will fix Britain’s problem? People literally saying, “Global thermonuclear war? Bah, that’s not as bad as COVID®.

I’m not even making the above three stories up or exaggerating it in any way. The Babylon Bee in 2022 has become non-fiction. I’m expecting Joe Biden to pull a rubbery mask off his face and reveal himself as the old man who ran the carnival. He would have gotten away with it, if not for those pesky kids.

So, this week I’m just going to rant. On (spins wheel) vodka. “Vodka, it’s not just for breakfast anymore®.”

Our economic system before the Federal Reserve™ was a mess. Why, people had to have actual gold to back money. And if a bank got sideways? It failed. Talk about incentives.

Gold wasn’t the biggest of the pre-Fed© sins, though. Regional banking centers outside of New York were taking a larger and larger percentage of the banking market. That, my friends was a sin. If there’s money to be made off of charging people interest, and a New Yorker isn’t involved, that’s treason.

The Federal Reserve™ Act essentially stopped the growth of banking outside of New York like Kanye West would be stopped from attending a Soros-family bar mitzvah. But that pesky gold remained. So, FDR confiscated it. All of it.

What did Obama use for birth control? His personality.

Why? So he could immediately make the dollar worth less. It was a con. But one he sold because (smoke and mirrors) I have no idea. Seriously. Maybe it was the equivalent of the COVID® panic back then. If the American public had stormed the White House when FDR stole their money, lynched him, and then placed statues of Eleanor Roosevelt’s face on each coast to ward off evil spirits I think we’d be a better country.

But we didn’t.

I’ll skip ahead to 1971. There are plenty of things I could complain about in the decades between the 1930s and 1971, but I don’t think there’s enough vodka in the house (only a few gallons) and my liver has indicated that it can only take these utter financial rants about once a year unless I switch to wine or beer.

But, I tell my liver, we already drank the wine and we’re saving the beer for . . . hmmm. Why are we saving the beer? Shut up, liver.

Regardless of my weak organs, in 1971 Nixon booted the dollar off of any convertibility to gold. That was because the French had figured out the game: they saw how many dollars that we were printing and wanted us to give them gold instead of dollars. Nixon saw right through that (thank you, vodka!) and just said, “We’ll print all the damn money we want to, or I’ll send G. Gordon Liddy to eat France.”

If you ever feel useless, remember this: France has an army.

Of course, inflation followed. Jimmy Carter was an awful president, mainly because he wasn’t aware of what happened, why it was happening, what he could do about it, or . . . wait, this is sounding like Biden, but Carter was actually smart and relatively virtuous.

Then we sailed. Interest rates were raised, stopped inflation, and after two decades of high interest rates the currency stabilized to the point gold prices dropped and the biggest problems the country had were Hillary killing people and Bill Clinton having sex with anyone else besides Hillary.

Ahhh, brings back memories of a sillier time.

Pressure though, was there to inflate the currency. That was built in. Social Security and Medicare

Hang on. Need more vodka for this. Be right back.

Social Security and Medicare require a growing economy. They require more people working than those that are receiving benefits. But tax policy and birth control and Hillary Clinton’s Abortion Clinic® (Motto: No human is too old to abort©!) made it important to import people to pay for this stuff, especially if they’d vote (D) in elections.

That made the economy less stable, rather than more. But the Federal Reserve© retained two controls: printing money, and interest rates. Heck, the Fed© should call it, “This One Weird Trick Allows Us To Print Money Without Printing Money.”

That one weird trick is low interest rates. When people borrow money, it actually is inflationary. I could go into detail, but each $100 you have in a bank can be loaned out. So, if you put $100 in a bank, you think it’s there. In reality, it has been loaned out, so you think you have your $100 at the same time someone else is spending it. There’s more to it than that, but I’m running low on vodka and, last time I checked, you have the whole Internet. I mean, none of it is as funny as this place, but, you know, I have to leave room for other folks.

If you ever try to do yoga drunk, that can put you in an awkward position.

But that brings us to the Great Recession. The Fed™ and Congress wanted everyone to own a home, so they created massive amounts of money through the magic of low interest rates. Poof. Then everyone wanted to buy six or a dozen houses because they never go down in value.

Then it collapsed.

The problem with a debt deflation as the loans collapse is that the cash supply collapses even faster than the Fed© can print it. That’s the Great Recession. So, the Fed™ tried to smooth things out by “dropping money from a helicopter” – which is a direct quote from the Fed© chairman.

It worked. Sort of. When you do things like that, it distorts the economy in a big way. You bail out banks, but cause other people to fail. But those people aren’t congressmen, so, who cares, right?

Again, it worked. Sort of. The problems with Social Security and Medicare remain, and are getting bigger. We’re pretending that those things aren’t happening, just like I’m pretending that having Kamala within a heartbeat of the presidency is something that Jefferson, Adams, or Washington would be cool with.

Then, COVID. Solution? Print money. Now, we’re back to inflation. The solution is simple: raise interest rates to the point where they’re larger than Barron Trump. But we can’t! Back in the 1970s when we played this game the first time, we had functional manufacturing and the undisputed strongest economy in the world. It still almost wrecked the place.

At least Barron will never have microaggressions.

We’ve run out of places to hide. Admittedly, this nonsense has gone on far longer than I expected it could already. We are living in a time and place where we’ll see more changes in a year than we normally see in a decade. Heck, we might see weeks in the near future where we see more economic changes in a week than in a decade.

I’ll admit, I do miss boring at this point. But, I still have you, vodka.

How Did We Get Here?

“Dividing and mutating at the same time?” – The Andromeda Strain

Two guys stole a calendar and divided it equally. They each got six months.

I think it’s fair to look around and ask a very simple question:

How did we get here?

Certainly, the United States is in a heck of a mess in almost any way one can look at it. When it comes to cohesion, half of the country is like dad sitting on his easy chair after a hard day working at the PEZ® mines. The other half just wants to pester him because he doesn’t care enough about The Current Thing. They have been careful to not make dad put the paper down. Yet. Because that’s when the spanking hand comes out.

The ability of our economy to manufacture critical goods has been outsourced around the world, because, let’s face it, no one is better at sewing up a soccer ball than an 8-year-old Pakistani kid. And if we took the time to teach them and spent the money to build the factories, no one is better at making iPhones™ than Chinese women who are locked in those factories who have to put up nets to keep people from actually killing themselves when they try to jump off that same factory roof. I think the Chinese even charge the women an “amusement park ride fee” when they jump.

So, how did we get here?

The United States has always had an ornery streak. I think Andrew Jackson would have happily had every single central banker in the United States executed – of course, the central bankers retaliated by putting his face on the $20 bill, but I assure you they waited until they were certain he was dead.

And, despite what Biden thinks, Andrew was not a member of the Jackson 5.

How, then, do you take a country that has divided in a massive War Between The States, been brought back (mostly) together, and divide the nation again? In many ways the three items I’ll bring up are intertwined and feed off of each other, but I’ll take each one in turn.

Propaganda. The first part is to skew the definition of America. America was a nation even up into the 1960s, where most (85%-90%) of people had a common ancestry in northwestern Europe, with Great Britain having the largest contribution. Scots may have had problems with the Irish, and the Irish with the English, they might have been neutral about the Swiss, and all of them might have been irritated by the French and Germans, but the common bounds of country and culture were there.

What changed? The idea that if you came to America, it would be expected that you would assimilate to America. Sure, your name might have been Giuseppe, but your grandkid’s name might be Colin, or Brandon, or Brayden. You left that old world behind and consciously gave it up for the new culture. The American culture.

“9 or 10? Let ‘em in! 3 or 4? Here’s the door.” will be my presidential campaign slogan.

The first lie is the lie that there is no American culture. I can understand that from the point of view of most of the world. How would a fish know about water when he’s swimming in it? American culture (with due credit to Great Britain for kickstarting it) became the most pervasive in the world, spinning off ideas and music and clothes and food at an amazing rate.

Now, of course, propaganda would tell us that we have no culture, and it is evil for us to expect people who come to our country to learn our language, and respect our culture first. No, that’s inverted. It does no good to a person who would divide a country for that to happen. Instead? It’s evil to ask people to learn English. If they kill chickens to sacrifice to Gorbo and marry off their eight-year-old kids to 32-year-old first cousins? We are expected to celebrate that.

No. That’s an inversion. They came here. If they can’t assimilate into American culture and American norms? Out. And take the chickens.

A friend told me he made a voodoo doll of me. I said, “You’re pulling my leg!”

Other ways that propaganda has hurt America are numerous, probably enough for a book. One that’s still hurting us is the idea that nuclear power is evil. It isn’t. It’s funny that all the Green® power seems to be either more polluting or require those 8-year-old kids in Pakistan to learn how to mine lithium rather than sew up soccer balls to make batteries for cars fueled on pure Hopium. No, if you don’t like oil and gas, the only real solution is either condemning the country to an unending abject poverty or to build nuclear power plants.

The warfare culture post 9/11 has also been difficult. What, exactly, were we doing in Afghanistan after Osama Bin Laden assumed ocean temperature? Don’t know. Why did we go into Iraq? Don’t know. Why did we overthrow governments in Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?

Don’t know. But the propaganda that accompanied all of those divided the country, though it’s not nearly as bad as the race grievance industry that’s been in full tilt in the last two decades – but I’ll save that for a future post.

Pathological Altruism. If I have a puppy, and it piddles on the floor and everyone laughs and it’s cute, well, when it’s a big dog no one laughs. Then the dog wonders why I’m beating it for something I was laughing about. No one wants to be the bad guy and say, “No, you have to be punished for your actions so you won’t do it again.” Everyone wants to give people another chance.

My friend’s house was also hit by the dessert thief. He takes the cake.

A friend of mine had his house broken into. They were able to catch the criminals, and he attended the trial. Result of them stealing thousands and thousands of dollars of his property? A suspended sentence for one guy (who had multiple prior felony convictions) and two years for the other. What message, exactly, is that sending?

The Hart-Celler Immigration Reform Act of 1965 (plus the amnesties that have followed and will follow) are horrifying in their pathological altruism and use of propaganda. The composition of the country has changed – it’s no longer a nation. Where once there was a central culture, now every viewpoint is expected to be equally valid, and (I’m not making this up) the incoming medical school class pledged to honor “all indigenous ways of healing that have been historically marginalized by western medicine.”

Let’s go kill some chickens, because that will get rid of the gunshot wound. Oh, right, don’t forget the Ouija® board.

Corruption. The United States has always been corrupt, let’s get that out first. But the beauty of the corruption early on is that, mostly, it was limited because the scope of the Federal government was limited. Sure, Sheriff Smith over in Mount Pilot would take bribes, but he’d eventually be caught. And did several members of the state legislature take bribes to get the “right” senator into office?

Sure. That happened, too. Three events ushered in eras of nearly unfettered power for the Federal government: the Civil War, the 16^th and 17^th Amendments, and the New Deal. The Civil War ended the idea that the Several States were sovereign – they became mere political subdivisions of the United States. The 16^th and 17^th Amendments made it possible to tax and ended the appointment of Senators. Now, Senators became Representatives with six-year terms, rather than appointed representatives of the Several States – a huge difference.

Fetterman also had a prostate exam the other day – thumbs up!

This level of corruption concentrated power at the Federal level and made the farces we see today where people who are on the Right receive massive sentences at the Federal level for minor crimes, but people on the Left are not even indicted, and almost anyone who has power has a free pass for anything but killing someone on-screen at halftime during the Superbowl™, and that only counts as a delay of game penalty.

I originally had more items here, but had to delete them because otherwise this could become a book. I’m certain, though, that the top three cover it well enough for now. I do think that America is getting ready to get out of the easy chair. And the spanking hand is getting ready.

The One Where I Prove Electric Cars Are A Lie

“For more enjoyment and greater efficiency, consumption is being standardized.” – THX1138

Patton never colored his hair, because my heroes never dye.

Electric cars are a scam. A really, really big one, and in ways that most people aren’t talking about. My original sentence that I typed said, “in ways that moist people aren’t talking about” but I feel moist today, so that didn’t fit. Let me explain. About the cars. Not why I’m moist – this is supposed to be a family-friendly blog.

Electric cars are, in most ways, absolutely inferior to cars powered by Oil, Our Slippery Friend™. Why? The technology is relatively new, the first electric car (really a locomotive, but who’s counting) having been invented only in 1842 in Edinburgh by engineer Robert Davidson. It traveled at the breakneck speed of 4 miles per hour, which is roughly 4 miles per hour faster than Davidson could move after a fifth of something that John Walker® (yes that one) might have been selling back then.

So, it’s not fair to judge electric cars, since they have been only developing for 180 or so years. It’s still an infant technology. Oh, wait.

How can you say it’s not an infant technology? It sucks.

But California has decided to ban the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035. Hurray, California! You’re geniuses beyond imagination! You’ll single-handedly solve global warming.

Or . . . will that pesky math get in the way?

Let’s see – in order to get California girls to the beach, it takes 13.8-15 billion gallons of gasoline. We’re skipping diesel for now, and just dealing with gasoline. I’ll use 15 billion gallons because in the immortal words of the captain of the Hindenburg, “Close enough.”

Let’s do the math.

15 billion gallons of sweet, sweet gasoline is 500 TW-h (that’s terawatt hours, which is the metric equivalent 5,000 bushels per fortnight). California produces in electricity, in total . . . drumroll please, 277 TW-h. So, California produces slightly more than half the electricity needed by its stunning new fleet of cars.

All I can say is that’s shocking!

To keep just the same level of energy production available for homes (because, presumably, all new citizens between now and then will live in tents) that California will need to triple the amount of power it produces. If you count in increased uses for the iAndroid™ Eleventy-X® and GameBoxStation 2000©, the grid will have to multiply by four or five times. And, remember, we skipped diesel engines, so it’s nearly certain that my estimate is low.

And if they tried to make those cars run on PEZ® (normal PEZ©, not PEZ™ made of anti-matter) it would require 278 quadrillion PEZ™, if you assumed that you could burn PEZ™ at the same efficiency that you could burn gasoline. And that would be 278 quadrillion PEZ© a year. Every year.

Hey, if this PEZ™ idea works out I could mint money.

To quote Monty Python on a related matter, “Where’s the fetus going to gestate? In a box?”, we’ve reached a point where politics cease in any reasonable fashion to correlate to reality. As I’ve seen in recent years, California’s electrical grid is in a shambles, so much so that, rather than be blamed for creating the periodic apocalypse-level fires, the various utilities have been hiring homeless people to burn forests so they don’t get blamed for all of the fires.

In reality, it’s not their fault. Californians keep using electricity, but the process for building reliable infrastructure is so Sovietized that to upgrade their transmission lines requires more paperwork than conductor wire, by weight, and takes longer than Biden does to remember that John McCain died half a decade ago. And this is a state that’s going to quintuple energy production?

Using what?

Seriously, where do they think energy comes from? Oh, I forgot. Outlets. “Why do we need more power plants?” I can hear President Kamala asking, “There’s always power when I plug something into an outlet. Besides, if we lost electricity we could watch television by candlelight.” The answer is that the energy has to come from someplace, like the dams they’ve been destroying, the nuclear power plants they’ve been shutting down, or the coal plants that they won’t allow to be built.

Perhaps they could use the power of the Void?

If it were just that level of stupid, it’s survivable. But it’s more than stupid, it’s greedy stupid, and here’s the rub: they’re doing this to soak the folks buying cars.

Let’s take, me. My newest car is (I think) a 2016. It was paid for in . . . 2016. My daily driver is a 2010. It’s got a 130,000 miles on it, and I replaced the engine in it at 115,000 miles, and it cost $5,400. At 5,000-10,000 miles a year? It might last another decade, easily. It’s not complicated, the air conditioner works, and it’s comfortable.

Try that with an electric car, I dare you. My 2010 had the engine blow up. $5,400, plus tax, and I was back to happy motoring. A Chevy® Volt™ had a bad battery. $29,842. Snopes™ even confirmed it was the real deal. But they tried to put a good spin on it. “It was an antique car” that was two years younger than mine, “and the battery technology was old.”

I hope the car bought her a drink first.

I have one car that is now 20 years old. How many batteries would it have had to go through? And you can be certain that the latest bill to replace it would have made the entire car worthless. Period.

This is an odd game. Cars had become very, very reliable, some lasting 300,000 or more miles with only routine maintenance. There’s a reason that, aside from the AK-47, the Toyota® HiLux© is the brand of choice of insurgent armies everywhere. They last forever, and you can mount multiple heavy weapons on them.

That just won’t do. As a consumer, you have to be made to consuuuuume. Me? With my old car, I’ve more than offset the “carbon debt” caused by making it, so replacing it will actually be damaging to the climate (if you believe in that sort of thing). And electricity will have to involve tossing more carbon into the atmosphere and will cost a lot more, so it’s not that, either.

Joe Biden is making helping stop energy usage – every time he’s on TV people turn it off.

No, the root cause is that cars are too reliable and people are using them far too long. If you have a paid-off car, you’re not paying interest. You’re not paying for new car plants. You become an economic black hole and the powers that be will do anything (and I mean anything) to force you to consuuuuume. Remember digital TV? I saw several articles where economists were calculating the economic uplift from forcing everyone to junk their old televisions for new ones.

Let’s consuuuuume! And with electric cars, use ‘em or not, they rot away so you’ll have to pay $29,000 for a new battery or consuuuuume a new car. Emissions? Who cares? We’ve got to keep people slaving away, paying interest, and buying the new thing. Insane? Certainly.

What did Californians use to light their homes before they had candles? Electricity.

Thankfully we have television and commercials. I’m sure that they will be used for good and not to convince everyone that the point of their life is consumption.

Well, I guess now you know why I’m moist. Too much time consuuuuuming.

The Economic End Of Europe

“I don’t get history. If I wanted to know what happened in Europe a long time ago, I’d watch Game of Thrones.” – Community

Why do communist governments always fail? They cease the means of production.

(Memes today are mostly as-found.)

The handling of the war in Ukraine will go down as a historic blunder, rivaled by only a few events in history:

Archduke Franz Ferdinand deciding to go cruising down the road in his ragtop,
Socrates, who in his last words said, “I drank what??” (thanks, Real Genius), and
The forming of the band U2®.

The Western World had already been rocked by the response to COVID-19. The economic shenanigans required to keep the economy on life support had been bad enough. The entire debt-based currency system had been lurching back and forth more than Hillary Clinton after quality time with a bottle of gin and her “Madame President” scrapbook.

And bad things are going around in Switzerland, as we’ll see below. And big trouble may lie ahead for Great Britain:

In truth, the recovery from the Great Recession hadn’t created any real structural changes. The primary mechanism for preventing utter economic collapse was printing bucketloads of cash and shoving it into the faces of the banks so that they didn’t fail in a catastrophic and sequential fashion. It isn’t the only time that irresponsible decision-making was rewarded with buckets of greenbacks, but let’s not dwell on Hunter Biden.

Where are we now?

Europe is facing an energy drought – one that (unless Russian gas shipments are resumed fairly quickly) will result in lowered economic output. How bad? Some have said, “Great Depression bad.” The precursors of this can be seen in the cracks we see developing economically:

If the Pope commanded the cash be transferred electronically, would that have been a PayPal® order?

Now, one thing I do know: religions are really, really good about keeping their eye on their cash. I wonder if there was some reason that the Pope was wanting this financial move? Was it because he like making Papal airplanes? Or, was it because someone had tipped him off?

Why can’t the Pope be cremated? He’s still alive.

People are betting that Credit Suisse® to fail. They’re also betting that Deutsche Bank™ will fail. Why? When banks lend money to people that can’t pay it back, well, unless the Federal Reserve© comes around to stuff the banks full of cash, they fail.

So, COVID-19 hits, governments around the world print cash, but nothing is physically broken. We can (sort of) pretend that the world is fine, and whistle through the graveyard and hope that we can squeak out another year of wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

Then, Ukraine. As I’ve said before, with a sane president capable of making good decisions, this would have been solved with a few phone calls, some Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and maybe a few coupons for 50%-off shrimp at Red Lobster™. Nope. Biden escalated all of it.

And, again, maybe (probably not, but maybe) in a world with an economy that had underlying actual strength, Biden could have pushed it just like he did and not cratered the entire economy of the West.

But he did. And now the consequences cannot be avoided. Interest rates are shooting up.

How high?

Oh, surely we aren’t in a real estate bubble.

Oops. But at least the international community isn’t panicking.

Oh, they are? Well, at least Biden hasn’t sold off our energy reserves in a naked bid to influence the 2022 election.

Oh, he did? Well, at least Biden has a good understanding of how energy markets work, and how supply and demand sets prices.

Oh. Well, I guess that’s really scary. Thankfully, no one is messing around with the fundamentals of reality.

Huh. I guess my dog just quit.

Well, at least The Mrs. and I had a serious talk about the bedroom.

All foolishness aside, if Europe has an energy drought that lasts three years or more (one of the latest estimates I’ve seen) the results will be as devastating as a war. Economies need jobs to produce wealth so people can have wild naked greased PEZ® parties, elephant rides, and pantyhose for everyone.

And, despite the magical thinking of some people on the Left, free anything (not just healthcare) isn’t free. Someone, somewhere, has to work for it to pay for it, otherwise it’s slavery. Which, I think, is fine for Leftists, because they never imagine themselves the slaves.

But I have faith, faith that the Swiss will save us.

The Swiss have a long and proud history. This history goes back to at least 1307, or so the legend goes, to William Tell (the guy who shot the apple resting on his kid’s head). In fact, William Tell and his son were in a bowling league, but the records of what team they were on are now lost to us. We will never know for whom the Tells bowled.