Category: Wealth

Investing? Invest In Yourself.

“If M.A.D starts making gold out of lead, it will undermine the world economy!” – Inspector Gadget

CAT

I invested in a series of walking trails for mental patients, but it failed.  I guess Psycho-Paths® was a bad name.

By the time the stock market crashed to signal the beginning of the Great Depression, the economy of the United States had already gone through an amazing decade of change.  Electrification was moving rapidly across the country, and prisons could finally retire the acoustic chair.  Radio was a miracle that was now bringing masses of people together as the radio waves propagated across the country at the speed of light.  Natural gas, long a nuisance in the oil patch, was being piped and compressed and shipped across larger areas of the country, bringing instant heat (and some explosions, since they hadn’t added the stuff that makes it smell bad yet) to millions.

Perhaps one of the biggest dislocations was that horses were rapidly being replaced by cars and trucks.  The economy was being motorized.  Some have even come to the conclusion that part of the dislocation in the economy was that the millions of horses required to plow, move freight, and move people weren’t required anymore, leading to an oversupply of horses.  That’s not a situation that lasts long – the oversupply of horses, can, um, be solved.  I mean, too many horses for the barns?  That’s un-stable.

But if once the oversupply of horses is solved what about the oversupply of food for the horses?

Well, what are they going to do with all of that farmland, now suddenly made even more productive through the addition of tractors and cheaply made nitrogen fertilizer?

Produce more.  Which drives prices down.  Which leads to . . .

Deflationary depression.

AMISH

It’s hard for the Amish to travel – their system is a little buggy.

I would say that “for the want of a horse, and economy was lost,” but in hindsight the real problem was the bankers.  The bankers during the 1920’s and 1930’s even developed the first birth control – their personality.  The Federal Reserve Bank® (which is neither part of the government nor really a bank) managed to destroy the economy through poor currency manipulation choices.

Part of the secret of the efficiency of market economies is that there is no controller telling people to start restaurants or PEZ® vineyards or bikini ranches.  The feedback from the economy is measured in customers buying the product, and if the product is good enough, profit encourages people to make it.

The flip side of that is business failure.  I originally wrote that was the down side.  It’s not.  Businesses, in a normal economy, that can’t produce a viable product should fail.  Note that I’m forced to write in a normal economy.  2020 has created the situation where tens of thousands (I’m not exaggerating) of businesses have failed due to the restrictions from the reactions to COVID-19.  It’s even been an international problem – Finland closed their border.  No one will cross the Finnish line.

COVID

The riots in Detroit don’t get many news stories, but I heard the rioters there have caused $20 million in improvements.

That’s not normal, of course.  Hair styling places are failing in the more restrictive states.  In Modern Mayberry?  Not so much.  But in San Francisco?  You can’t get your hair styled, unless you’re Nancy Pelosi.  I guess that the rules prohibiting business operation are only for common people.  St. Nancy can go in and get a cut and a blow dry when no one else can.  Sadly, Nancy wasn’t wearing a mask, which was the only positive thing about CoronaChan since the whole thing started.

In normal times, business thrive or fail, and both of those things lead to a stronger overall economy.  The services and goods that aren’t wanted anymore go away, like Beanie Babies®.  Thank Heavens.  But in these times of artificial economic crisis?  Good, strong businesses fail.

Regardless of the type of crisis we have now, it is upon us.  Whether or not the business would have failed is irrelevant.  The only real question is what happens next.

One thing that is sure, the economy after this crisis passes won’t look like it used to.

I’ve posted about possible good investments in the past – if I were betting, I’d bet that gold in ten years would be a better bet than Netflix® or Tesla™, even if Tesla© starts its own religion, and builds Elon Mosques.  But who knows what the economy will even look like after this crisis?  I can’t guarantee any of it.

TESLA

I hear that Space-X has designed electric grass for Mars.  They call it E-lawn.

So what to invest in?

Yourself.

Time is potentially quite short.  How should you invest your time?  In yourself.

There are so many skills that are required of a human.  PowerPoint® is probably not really high on them, so I wouldn’t spend much time there.

The first place I’d begin to prepare is mental.  In the United States, we have become very used to the most modern conveniences.  Air conditioning when it’s hot.  Central heat when it’s cold.  Even in Modern Mayberry, day or night I can go and get gasoline, a gallon of milk, and some beef jerky.  Fast Internet that allows me to stream a television show that’s been off the air for nearly 20 years.

What happens when you don’t have those things for a day?  A week?  A month?  When you’re used to being able to see what the temperature is in Moscow, Manila, Manhattan or Manchester, what happens when the weather becomes a mystery?

At least Biden can hide his own Easter eggs.

When you’re used to seeing real-time riots in Kenosha or Portland, what happens when you don’t know what’s happening in your own city?

I’m not saying that’s going to happen – the Internet is robust, and the systems we have built for delivering milk, gas, electricity and natural gas have redundancy.

But still, these things are possible.

Have you put your mind in a place where they have happened?  What would you do?  I mean, if your spouse convinces you to go to a psychiatrist, will your couch talk you out of it again?

After the mind, invest in your body.  If you’re out of shape, get in better shape.  Anything will help.  Get out and run.  If you can’t run, walk.  Being able to count on your body is always good – and if you’ve been neglecting it because of work, it’s time to pay back that debt, with interest.  I am fortunate enough to already have the body of an athlete already – a sumo wrestler.

Hmmm.  Maybe I need some work, too.

SUMO

I got a sumo wrestler for Christmas one year.  I had asked for a heavy sweater.

What other ways can you invest in yourself?  There are thousands of skills that are valuable, no matter what the future brings.  Can you do basic medical care?  I’m not asking if you can sew up a lung, but can you clean a flesh wound?  Do you have Band-Aids® and Neosporin™ for a year or two?  Iodine?  All of that is cheap and available now.  Will it be in six months?

The Mrs. bought a book on medicinal plants that showed up the other day.  I was surprised that it didn’t list thyme as a remedy – I heard that thyme cures all wounds.  What kind of books do you keep?

Can you garden?  Annually, The Mrs. spends about $117.53 to grow about seven tomatoes.  I would make fun of that, but I would also say that The Mrs. has learned lots of ways to not grow tomatoes, too.  Her gardening knowledge is better than mine.  It’s a little late to invest in gardening this year, but it wouldn’t hurt to start to understand what it takes.  There’s a whole Internet.  Heck, you could practice by killing some houseplants, like I used to do.

This isn’t a bad time for a hobby.  What kind of hobby?

  • Lots of farms have auctions and I’ve seen farmer forges there.
  • Carpentry, with and without electricity.
  • Small engine repair. Small engines can do a great deal beyond weed eating.
  • Always easier when ammo isn’t so dear, but we are where we are.
  • Making wine or whiskey – both are great for barter, and legal to make in most places.
  • Fixing things around the house. When’s the last time you patched a leaky roof?

I could probably come up with a dozen more in ten more minutes, and I imagine the comments will fill up with them.  Again, in some circumstances, these are nothing more than hobbies, and if you pursue them with a local club or group, you’ll build more community in addition to building yourself.

Regardless of the future we will see, investing in yourself pays dividends.  Plus?  It’s always better to try to grow tomatoes and fail when failure is just results in a humorous story.

Houses, Money, Stocks, and Bikini Girl Graphs

“Can the stock market survive a nuclear holocaust? Yes, says our next guest, and he’ll tell us what stocks to buy and what to sell in the event of a thermonuclear exchange right after these messages.” – Head Office

BIZ

Superman® won’t take Bitcoin as payment after dark.  He avoids crypto night.

“Housing prices only go up.”  I first heard that in the 1990’s when I was buying my first house.  The realtor was quite clear that a house wasn’t just a house, it was an investment in the future.  He had no idea what my kids could do with Sharpies®, hot sauce, and matches.  And that was just the living room carpet.

“The dollar is as good as gold.”  I haven’t heard that one used about the dollar in my lifetime, because the dollar hasn’t been backed by gold since August 15, 1971.

“The stock market is the place to put your money.”  That’s still what people are saying.

One thing that I’ve found throughout my life is that, generally speaking, if everyone believes in it, it’s wrong.  The major exception to this is physics, which explains gravity well enough that almost nobody can argue with it.  I read a book on anti-gravity once – couldn’t put it down.

gravy

I always fall for gravity jokes.

This is especially true in human systems.  If the entire crowd believes it?  It’s nearly certainly wrong.

As mentioned above, a perfect example of this is housing markets.  It was really common knowledge in the 1990’s that, barring a setback in a recession, housing prices always go up.  Buy a house, wait, and sell it 10 or 20 years later, and you’ll make a bundle.

In certain times and places, that’s true.  And during the 1990’s and the early 2000’s, the idea that “housing prices always go up” became firmly fixed in the minds of, well, most everyone.  That made it true, for a while.  As the banks noticed this, they decided that mortgages weren’t a risky investment at all, unlike when I broke COVID-19 lockdown to go play board games.  That was a lot of Risk.

On top of that, banks decided to make changes to the way that they had lent in the past.  Houses were a sure thing, right?  They could make them even safer by creating mortgage-backed securities.  Some of these were really unique.  You could buy the “best” performing loans out of a group of loans.  If there were 100 houses in the group, 90 would have to default on their mortgages before your security was impacted.

This mastery of risk was amazing!  Now all you need are more people to loan money to.  But not everyone qualifies, which is a problem.  They tried offering 0% loans, but there was no interest.

Solution?  Everyone qualifies.  No income?  No job?  No problem.  These were even called NINJA (no income, no job) loans.  The pool of borrowers expanded more rapidly than Joe Biden’s memory loss.  And if we add in refinancing of home equity?

That added even more borrowers!

What could go wrong?

HOUSE

And, hey, housing prices have reached new records.  Certainly they won’t fall?

Well, gravity kicked in on housing prices.  They dropped.  And when they dropped, the entire industry built up around building houses dropped.  And then the industries that supplied lumber, and pipe, and wire, and pavement, and concrete for driveways . . . dropped.

This mathematical fiction based on a delusion created a massive recession.  But, hey, housing prices always go up.

Except when they don’t.

Just like the dollar fell from its perch.  Originally, the dollar was backed by actual, physical gold.  That’s when the phrase, “as good as gold” was first used.  Why?  Because at any moment, you could go and change your dollars into gold.  Walk into the bank with a $20 bill, and walk out with $20 in gold.

This wasn’t always the case, there were periods in the history of the country where this wasn’t so (greenbacks issued during the Civil War backed by the credit of the country), but it was generally the case.  But after Franklin Roosevelt made gold possession by Americans illegal (yes, this happened) then you couldn’t go in and get gold for your dollar.  Once that link was broken, the government was free to print money more or less at will, creating inflation even in a “gold backed” currency.

PURCH2

You can plainly see that women are shorter now that the purchasing power of the dollar has dropped.

Now?  The dollar isn’t worth but a few percent of what it was in 1940.

And other countries realize it, too.  As the multiple trillions of dollars are printed this year to prop up everything from the airlines to the banks to the stock market, the value of the dollar has dropped.  Why?  The rest of the world can count.  There is only so much printing you can do before it starts to add up.

The dollar has dropped 10% in the last three months.

DOLLAR

The dollar’s fall is fast, but not as fast as when I fell into the coffee.  It was instant.

Good as gold?

No.

Which brings us to the stock market.  Money in the stock market is always safe, over a long enough term.  It took six years to recover from the Great Recession.  In real terms (inflation adjusted) it took from 1928 to 1955 for the Dow© to recover from the Great Depression.  It took until 1994 for the Dow™ to recover from the 1964 peak.  So, if you’re good waiting thirty years to break even, the stock market is a sure thing.

BOB

Speaking of up and down – I got a free yo-yo.  No strings attached!

While the economy is still stuck in lockdown in many parts of the country, massive unemployment, and a “riot-a-day” social structure, the Dow Jones Industrial Average® is only down 3%.

I wonder, just maybe, if everyone is wrong?

The Data That Drives Advertising . . . Could Decide The Election?

“Never theorize before you have data. Invariably, you end up twisting facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” – Sherlock Holmes (2009)

FIRST

Mark Zuckerberg has been banning bots from Facebook™ before the election.  Trump has made Mark turn on his own kind.

As I’ve mentioned before, The Mrs. used to be in radio.  On one of her jobs, she did the news, sports, and weather for a collection of stations.  The thing that fascinated me was that The Mrs. was the one that selected which news stories and which sports stories to put on the air, even to the point where she interviewed Senators and Congresscritters as part of the press pool.  The Mrs. might be a wizard, but she couldn’t really select the weather, so the weather was what the weather was.

The Mrs. didn’t like the NBA®, so during basketball season she refused to cover it.  At all.  If you would have listened to her broadcast, you wouldn’t have known that basketball was a sport.  Despite that the NHL® didn’t have a “local” team, The Mrs. covered hockey, even though after a storm the farmers care more about grain wetzky than Wayne Gretzky.

I’ve told that story before, but it’s been some time since I mentioned it so I know it’s new to some of you.  I think now is the perfect place to mention it again.

RADIOF

I used to tell radio jokes, but the reception was poor.

Why?  That will become clear.

But let’s start with this idea – you’re a product.  Almost six years ago I heard a quote in a Wired® article (LINK) about the predictive power of social media interactions:

In the end, the researchers found that with information on just ten Facebook© “Likes,” the algorithm was more accurate than the average person’s colleague. With 150 “Likes,” it could outsmart people’s families, and with 300 “Likes,” it could best a person’s spouse.

Imagine the power.  With enough data, Facebook® could sell data to companies with complete certainty that they’d be able to understand your income level, age, health problems, fears, and what it takes to sell you a product.  By knowing when you went to bed, they’d be able to predict if you were a night owl, though I didn’t predict The Mrs. reaction when I replaced our bed with a trampoline.  She hit the ceiling.

It’s not just Facebook™, and in my mind they’re not even the worst.  I make it a point to never use my work computer for personal “stuff” – I don’t log in for email, social media, or any other site where I log in.  Heck, I made it a point to minimize my surfing to the point where most of my Internet use at work was work related.  I learned that they really don’t like you surfing YouTube™ videos at work during the six hours I spent at a job as an air traffic controller.

ATC

I’ve never been an air traffic controller, but I hear that their motto is:  “If the pilot screws up, the pilot dies.  If the air traffic controller screws up, the pilot dies.”

But one day I went to a weather site, and saw ads about something I’d searched for at home – something I was thinking of buying.

If it were a normal thing, that would make sense.  In this case, it was a fairly obscure outdoor product.  Boom.  Right there on the weather page.  It wasn’t just one product, which would have been a coincidence.  People who are interested in the weather might be outdoorsy, right?

Nope.  It happened again and again.  Somehow, Google® (my guess) had figured out that John at home was the same guy who was using that work computer.  I had noticed years earlier that Google™ gave one set of results on a search at work, and a completely different set on my home computer.  That almost made sense – people at work are usually not looking for the same results as people at home.  For instance, always make sure when you Google™ the actor Gary Oldman that you type in an “r”.

But look at all of the sources of data that exist on you, primarily (but not always) generated via social media.  Just your search history tells the companies serving the Internet a lot about you.  The Mrs. is a writer and was looking for ways people die for a book.  She joked that the FBI® probably would arrest her if anything ever happened to me.  But I don’t trust the FBI™, since the last time I was at the dentist they wanted to do a cavity search.

EVIL

I guess if Google® made Lucky Charms©, they’d be tragically malicious? 

Facebook’s™ statement that with 300 likes they would know a person better than their spouse is nearly six years old.  How much better than that are their computer systems now?  I would imagine much, much better.  Now they have data stretching across years that would likely predict a lot about a person’s outcomes.

Several years ago YouTube® used to suggest me content that was much edgier than I had initially searched for.  It was as if I watched a video about the Right and got fed another that was six steps farther Right than the previous video.  YouTube™ was giving me more and more “extreme” content.  Why?  Because more extreme content drives emotions.  It pops chemicals into my brain and stimulates more viewing time.

YouTube™ was optimizing based on getting more viewing minutes.  The best way to do that?  Show me videos it predicted would increase emotion, especially outrage.  And, as we all know, it’s easier to get strong emotion with anger rather than happiness.

PROTIP

I watch chemistry videos periodically.

For a while, I was on Twitter® – there is still a John Wilder account, but I had some fun with a parody account that was since deleted.  But I noticed the same pattern at Twitter™ – keeping eyeballs through generating emotion.

What happens when you aggregate all of that data?

You can be told a story that’s unique to you.  Immersed in information that is designed to drive your economic behavior – understanding what you’re most likely to spend money on, what time of day to best provide an ad, what phrases cause you to click, and which ones you ignore.

I’ve cut back on social media.  Facebook® is only used on a single browser, and I haven’t opened it in months.  Since I never understood what was fascinating about Facebook™, that’s super easy.  It doesn’t need a replacement.  Likewise, it’s been months since I was on Twitter©, although I do spend some time on Gab®.

I’m cutting back on YouTube™ and moving towards BitChute© – YouTube™ in the last year has been on a tear of censorship and herding – trying to move people farther Left.  Some things are harder to find on BitChute™ – it has the worst search I’ve seen.  But when I can find the people I listen to normally on BitChute®, I go there.

YTRES

Dracula got caught uploading illegal content to YouTube™.  He’s got the problem – a count suspended. 

And browsers?  Have you tried Brave™?

Understand that Google©, YouTube™, Twitter®, and Facebook® (among many!) are creating a product based on you, and attempting to sell you to whoever they can.   Heck, if YouTube™, Twitter®, and Facebook® merged, they would have an amazing amount of data, but they’d be stuck calling themselves YouTwitFace®.

If it were just that, we’ve been facing less sophisticated versions of advertising for years.  As even the Romans said:  “Buyer beware.”

But with this immense power, what are the odds that they are consciously attempting to craft a narrative to change what you believe?  Is there an agenda behind the stories that are presented to you, the way the headlines are written?  Is there an agenda behind the stories that you’re not allowed to see?

ZZHOWE

I wanted to buy a skating rink, but my realtor only gave me a ballpark estimate.

Most people coming to this blog are pretty good at making up their own minds.  But this fall’s election might be based on the votes of perhaps a 20,000 people or less, who have no idea who they’re voting for right now – elections are won by convincing the undecided.

I wonder what narrative Facebook™, Google©, Twitter®, and YouTube™ will try to spin for them?

I’m betting it has nothing to do with hockey.

If You Live In A Big Leftist City – Why Haven’t You Moved?

“I don’t know what you do in New York, but around here we don’t give a man a funeral unless we’re pretty sure he needs one.” – Green Acres

RIGHTMEOW

I think I ran over Schrödinger’s cat. Not sure if I feel guilty or not.

Growing up, Green Acres was one of my favorite television shows. I was far too young to have seen it in the first run, but the local television station showed reruns that were on after the school bus made it all the way to the top of Wilder Mountain. The bus rides were long, but I learned a lot about kindness – one time I saw someone give up their seat for a blind student. In retrospect, the bus driver probably showed poor judgement in letting that blind girl drive.

For those of you that haven’t seen it, Green Acres was about a New York attorney (Oliver Wendell Douglas) that decided he was through with city life. Mr. Douglas quit his big city life and moved to the rural town of Hooterville. The show never discusses exactly where Hooterville is, but the best theory is that Hooterville is in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri.

The show was funny in a way that television isn’t now. Oliver always tried to fit in, but never could quite adjust from his city ways. A lot of the humor was making fun of that disconnect between Oliver and the humorous cast of townspeople, though the relationship between Oliver and his wife was loving, strong, and funny. Here’s a scene when there were looking for clothes to donate:

Oliver Douglas: Why don’t we give away this one?
Lisa Douglas: No that’s the dress I graduated from high school in.
Oliver Douglas: How about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the dress I wore the first day of college.
Oliver Douglas: [holding a black, low-cut dress] What about this one?
Lisa Douglas: That’s the one I got expelled in.

Why do I bring this up?

GREENACRES

If I ever get a barn I’ll make sure I have an Internet router in there, so I can have stable wifi.

This weekend, The Mrs. and I were snoozing and were listening to the Watchdog on Wall Street, a radio show about investment. In the latest episode/podcast (Expedition New York – LINK), the host advocated what he called the Sam Kinison solution. Give good people U-Hauls® so they can leave the cities that are turning into scenes from Mad Max. “The reality of many urban areas is . . . it’s going to take a long, long time to come back.”

“Move.”

I was slipping in and out of sleep, but discussed the show later with The Mrs.

“He’s right you know. The era of law in those big cities is over. The District Attorneys in those large metropolitan areas have been bought and paid for by the far Left (LINK, LINK, LINK and I could go on forever with links). The DAs are no longer concerned with Justice,” I said. “These DAs are concerned with Social Justice. Try to defend yourself in a lot of these large urban monstrosities, and you’ll find out what the inside of a jail cell looks like pretty quickly. And that scares me because my brother got stabbed in jail. We took Monopoly® just a bit too seriously when I grew up.”

“Well, they can’t move here. We’re full.” That’s not exactly what The Mrs. said, but I can’t repeat it exactly since this is a family-friendly blog.

Although The Mrs. isn’t a social butterfly, she doesn’t exactly hate people. And it’s not new people moving to Modern Mayberry that was bothering her. It’s Leftist ideas.

CONAN

I donated $50 to a Leftist group the other day. I hope they find a cure.

“They residents of those cities are the reason the cities are in the condition that they’re in. Then they’ll move here, and want to turn Modern Mayberry into what they left.”

The Mrs. is not wrong. Here’s an example.

My brother, John Wilder had this problem in his midsized town. (Yes, his first name really is John as well. Our parents were caught in a soap opera episode and got amnesia and forgot they had him and named me the same thing by mistake.) He was at the neighborhood homeowners’ association meeting when they were selecting a trash company. They recently had an influx of people from the United Soviet Republic of California who had gotten approval to leave the state from the Supreme Soviet.

“Well,” one transplant said, “we certainly must be environmentally friendly. We should pick the trash company that offers the mandatory recycling. They only cost $35 more a month.”

After about an hour, my brother talked the homeowners’ association into picking the cheaper trash company. Is recycling bad? Not at all. Junkyards have been recycling cars for decades. Aluminum recycling makes beer cans cheaper. But in my brother’s town, the only thing that was really recycled was aluminum – the rest of the trash went into the dump whether or not it was neatly sorted.

That’s what scared The Mrs.

ALUM

I always get sad after crushing aluminum cans – it’s soda pressing.

Modern Mayberry is nice because it doesn’t have those things the big cities have, including all of their problems.

And the economy appears to be in a pretty bad state. The dollar bubble appears to be in the first phase of ending. The gold bubble may be inflating, and inflation will follow a deflation of the dollar, which is exactly as I predicted, but it’s about six months earlier than I had expected.

The median price (right now) for a house in San Francisco is $1,108 per square foot. In Modern Mayberry, I couldn’t find a single house that cost more than $100 per square foot. Sadly, you have to do without all of those San Francisco amenities like people pooping in the streets, riots and the San Francisco 49ers™. On the plus side, the Oakland Raiders® have moved, and if San Franciscans are lucky, what goes to Vegas stays in Vegas.

RAIDERS

This is a true statement.

If I were in Seattle or Portland or New York or any of a dozen other large cities I would be moving if I had children. The best time to move is ten years ago. This gives you time to build the relationships and integrate into the community. In Modern Mayberry, I’m still one of the New Guys, even after a decade.

The second best time is now. The worst time to move is after the bottom drops out and escaping from New York looks like something that even Kurt Russell couldn’t do on his best day.

And, if you decide to move, here’s hoping that you find a place as nice as Hooterville. I hear they have good hotscakes there.

Remember that the worst time to move is one day too late.

NEWYORK

But What If You’re Wrong?

“What if you’re wrong, Evil? What if Dandridge is a vampire and he thinks you know it? Would you walk down that alley then?” – Fright Night

MATH

How many vampires are good at math?  Can I count Dracula?

“Indeed, none but the Deity can tell what is good luck and what is bad before the returns are all in,” wrote Mark Twain.

Yet, so many people are certain that they can determine what good luck is with great certainty.  As I get older, like Twain, I’m not sure that I can tell good luck from bad on any given day.  So, I try to take it as it is.  Rain?  Good.  We needed rain.  Hot?  Well, the air conditioning works.  Snow?  Great – it will kill the insects.  A massive hail of arrows that blots out the Sun?  Excellent.  We can fight in the shade.

I came to this conclusion after one day when I looked backward at my life around the age of 32 – the things that I had hoped for – recognition, money, and a bountiful supply of PEZ® hadn’t made life better.  The things I had tried to avoid – a near zero bank account, 16+ hour days as a single dad with a job, and life without a spouse made me a better man and made me think about the relationships between virtue, money, and meaning.

The time of plenty hadn’t made me better, but the time where I spent six months raising kids by myself before I had a spare $150 to buy a used Fender® and an amp at a pawn shop had.  Huh?  How could that be, especially when I got cheated on the guitar – “no strings attached” had a different meaning in that pawn shop.

BEAR

I gave up and sold the guitar to a guy in town who doesn’t have any arms.  I asked how he was going to play it, and he said, “By ear.”

It was then I decided that getting everything I wanted would have been the worst possible thing for me.  Instead, getting a tougher life made me better.  I was in my 20s when I had that revelation, and it has stayed with me.  It also has led me to always ask myself:

What if I’m wrong?

Not wrong.  But really, really wrong?

In some sense, people might call this indecision, like I don’t know what I want.  I mean, indecision was when I couldn’t decide between churros and sopapillas for desert, which caught me off guard – no one expects Spanish Indecision.  But this is different.  I call this humility.  I might have a clear sense of what I want, but have no real idea what is good for me.  Call it the Twain Zone.

It leads to some interesting thought experiments – what if the exact opposite of what I’m expecting happens?

Historically, I can give numerous examples of surprises that “no one” was expecting – where nearly everyone was wrong.

  • The U.S.S.R. looked strong and invulnerable in 1985. Rocky IV and Red Dawn reflected the public mood that the Soviets just might win.  By 1987, cracks were showing, by 1989 areas were in open rebellion, and by 1991 the U.S.S.R. voted itself out of existence on December 26.  That’s a shame.  I heard that Soviet bread was so good that people would wait in line all day for a single piece.
  • Stock prices have reached “what looks like a permanently high plateau,” said Irving Fisher, Yale economist, on October 10, 1929. October 24, 1929 was Black Thursday, where the market lost 11% in a single day. Oops.  I will say that COVID-19 makes it feel like 1929 – the stock market is tanked and the bars are closed.
  • On August 9, 1974 Richard Nixon resigned, less than two years after crushing his opponent George McGovern 520-17 in the Electoral College, winning every state but Massachusetts, where the penalty for drunk driving is re-election to the Senate.

NIXON

Spoiler alert:  Nixon’s decorating crimes would not stand.  He resigned office and quit eating spaghetti on the same day – it’s all in the pasta now.

In a financial sense, I think everyone reading this post knows that something is horribly wrong with both the currency and the stock market.  The old line attributed to Gary Shilling rings true, however:  “The market can remain irrational much longer than I can remain solvent.”  Just because you or I might have seen that real estate was overvalued in 2006, doesn’t mean that the market did.  Irrationality can persist longer than logic, especially when everyone says, “Real estate?  It never goes down.”

Okay, John, you’ve convinced me.  Now what?

Well, that’s up to you.  I can’t judge your situation unless you send me a few goats, some silver, and a throwout bearing for a 1973 GMC pickup.  But what I was hoping is that you’d look yourself and ask a few questions:

  • If you think that we’ll have unending prosperity and no shortages, what if you’re wrong?
  • If you think that the riots in (INSERT YOUR CITY HERE) won’t reach your neighborhood, what if you’re wrong?
  • If you think that things can’t get better than this mess we’re in, what if you’re wrong?
  • If you think that things can’t get worse than this mess we’re in, what if you’re wrong?
  • If you think that the stock market can’t go up, what if you’re wrong?

WENDYS

I was also wrong about my chiropractor.  I stand corrected.

The situation that the United States enjoyed from 1945 until recently was the most prosperous in (perhaps) the history of the world so far.  A good weather forecaster’s most accurate forecast is to say that tomorrow will be like today, obtuse (as in greater than 90 degrees).  Until it isn’t.  The hot spring day is followed up by the tornado – the winter storm strikes furiously from the north.

So, not knowing where the wind is coming from, I’m okay with it.  Hot today?  I’m fine.  Cold tomorrow?  Great.  Hurricanes?  Wonderful, let’s get to sea in our shrimp boat.

I guess the reason I’m so agreeable when the conditions of the world would indicate that I should be grumpy is that I’ve seen one thing again and again:  when I try to divine the future from my current situation, my track record is horrible, since the returns aren’t yet all in.

8BALL

Okay, I looked it up and the blue stuff is either water or alcohol.  Either way I wouldn’t drink it, since if it’s methanol, you won’t see what hit you.

So, evaluate where you are, ask yourself, “What if I’m wrong?” and live a life worth living.  I don’t get to choose all of the events in my life, but I certainly can choose how I react.

Unless I’m wrong about that.

Capitalism and Crisis

“Four-alarm fire in downtown Moscow clears way for glorious new tractor factory.  And, on lighter side of news, hundreds of capitalists soon to perish in shuttle disaster.” – Airplane II, The Sequel

COMDOG

I know how they feel.  When my alarm goes off late – I end up Russian all morning.

Capitalism is a great system for allocation of winners and losers in an economy.  It does this more or less automatically, because the transactions are voluntary on both sides.  If I want weasel snouts and have money, and you have weasel snouts and want money, as long as we can come to an agreement, we both win.  Nothing better than a warm weasel snout on a cold night.

Capitalism is good at creating rewards for those win-win transactions.  Because it’s good at that, capitalism is probably the best creator of abundance the world has ever known outside of Bernie Madoff.  Capitalism is also set up to be very compatible with those on the Right.

Transactions are based on free will and free exchange of goods, even transactions for things like natural gas.  Here in Modern Mayberry, if I don’t want natural gas, I can cut firewood and burn it to heat my home.  My insurance company would probably prefer me to get a fireplace first.

But natural gas is amazingly cheap because, thanks to capitalism-inspired innovation, it’s abundant.  I would be foolish to try to heat water in my house over a wood stove in summer when I can spend the $12 or so a month for hot showers.  I choose that because of free will, and also because I don’t want The Mrs. killing me in my sleep.  I think that was one of the things on her list before she accepted my marriage proposal – “Does he sleep heavier than me?”

SOCIALISM

Veganism is like socialism.  They’re both fine, unless you like eating.

Capitalism has positive incentives – make someone else happy with the transaction, and you win.  If you do it in a significant enough way?  You can win bigly.  If you don’t win bigly?  You can at least do better than your parents.

That has been the fuel of what we’ve called the American Dream, the idea that you could have your own struggle and the outcome is determined largely based on your effort, along with a bit of luck.  Heck my boss gave me a raise yesterday.  He said he wanted my last week here to be happy.

The United States has been a place of abundance for the last 75 years.  Have there been recessions and setbacks along the way?  Certainly.  Has there been poverty?  Absolutely.  I like to do my best to fight poverty, but I’ve found the homeless aren’t very good at wrestling.

RAMEN

Where can you hear songs about poverty?  Singapore.

One of the things that has been proven by President Johnson’s attempt to make a “Great Society” is that, despite trillions in .gov spending on poverty, it will always be with us.  Even before Johnson’s “Great Society” program, the poverty rate had dropped to below 15%.  That’s why a Mercedes-Benz® and poverty are the same:  Princess Diana couldn’t stop either of them.

Since 1966, poverty has bounced around between 11% and 15%.  Perhaps, in some fashion, these programs have prevented higher levels of poverty during recession?  It is certain, however, that we didn’t even have an official poverty measure until 1959.

The structure of the economy, however, began to change.  A typical factory job, obtainable with a high school degree, provided enough money for a house, car, and necessities for a family.  Note I said job – wives working was something that happened before the kids were born and after they were in school, at least in the growing middle class.  The middle class has learned that, while money can’t buy happiness, poverty can’t buy anything.

Even though a typical family is now supported by a working husband and wife, things had been good.  At least some of the additional wages from both spouses working went to an upgraded lifestyle – capitalism was more than happy to provide new things to buy with the income, like Zima® wine coolers and Dan Fogelberg™ CDs.  Capitalism had taken us from the scarcity and hunger of the Great Depression to abundance and humongousness of actual obesity caused by an abundance of cheap, excess calories.

Although it’s trivially easy to prove that communism is nearly certainly the most evil system ever devised on the planet, capitalism has its faults, too:  Capitalism has no soul.  It is a blind force that will sell you anything, even if it’s something bad for you.  Taken to an extreme, capitalism will provide more than just immoral items, it will provide things that are illegal.  And never mix Islam with capitalism – they don’t like profit jokes.

Capitalism also provides incentives to manipulate.  Advertising does a wonderful service when it makes us aware of new products that can help us, but advertising can manipulate desires, like Edward Bernays’ propaganda campaign to convince women (who didn’t smoke at the time) that smoking cigarettes was exciting and fashionable.  Now?  Type “women smoking” into Google®, and you’ll get 810,000,000 matches.

Another fault of capitalism is that it produces products that are designed to fail.  Want your iPhone® to last five years?  Good luck with a battery that lasts only three.  Apple™ did one better:  it made software changes that slowed older iPhones™ down.  Why?  To get you to buy a new iPhone©.  I did click on one of those, “You just won an iPhone®” pop-ups.  Thankfully, it was just a virus.

IPHONE

It could be yours, for only 36 payments of $375,221.43.

Making your products bad isn’t new.  Lightbulbs, when initially manufactured, lasted too long.  A cartel devised a standard that made sure that light bulbs were constantly failing.  Why?  So you would have to buy more.  Another example?

Two words:  printer ink.

Those failures of capitalism, however, are a symptom of abundance.  People can afford those things, so companies do whatever they can to get as much of their money as possible.

I fear our economy may be slipping into scarcity.  Not next week, not next month.  But as we see increased tensions, the possibility of prolonged outages of things we take for granted are likely.  Higher rates of unemployment are likely, too.

There is a sign that the government attempting to prop up the economy is starting to create disastrous distortions.  From today’s news, this story (LINK) describes how the Federal Reserve’s® pumping of trillions of dollars into the system is having the effect of blowing bubbles in the economy.  Color me surprised.

Abundance of the “one income for a family” type is gone for many professions, if not most.  If the Fed™ decides that it wants to keep blowing bubbles with trillions of dollars just made up on the spot, the result will be inevitable:  a currency reset.

People will blame this on capitalism.  I won’t.  The condition we find ourselves in is the result of decades of currency manipulation.  You can’t print money forever without an impact.  What we will be left with is a contracting economy.  What system works best in an economy that’s getting smaller, not larger?

I know what will be sold – communism.  The reason people keep falling for this one is in times of difficulty is that they believe that it will solve their problems.  The reality, every single time, is that communism will end in murder, scarcity, and hunger – it’s like a game of Russian roulette, but in this game a few hundred million die.  But, hey, maybe this time?

FAILED

Unemployed leather workers have nothing to hide.

Capitalism has been the only reliable way to deal with economic crisis in the past.  The incentives it provides minimized the hunger and the pain of the Great Depression.  But it’s not the “capitalism” we see today.  The people of the United States in the 1930s helped each other, and capitalism was a way to run the economy, not the highest moral good.

Was it a massive Federal program that saved people during the Great Depression?  For the time during the Great Depression, the spending of the Federal government tripled compared to years before the Great Depression.  In my reading, the Federal government enacted thousands of policies, many contradictory to each other.  Unemployment was still 14%+ when World War II started.  The war clearly ended the Great Depression.

But people helped each other back then during the Depression – Great Grandpa and Grandma McWilder even took in kids from families that couldn’t afford to raise them.  The United States was a far more united place, and the shared morality was more than a shared economic morality, like we see today.  Did you get aid only if you were moral and upright, or a widow?

AGAIN

If you get to choose what Hell to go to, pick the communist one.  It will be out of coal and molten sulfur.

Yup.  If you could work, you were expected to work.  But yet, in 1950s America before the advent of our current bouquet of welfare programs, did citizens let people starve?

No.

The best answer is capitalism, but a smaller, more local, and more moral version of it.  Nearly every problem we have in the United States was created by increasing power in a large central state and huge metropolitan areas.

More on that in Friday’s post, where we’ll talk about how the problems created by modern life are more than economic.

Money, Power, Politics, and Soros

“What’s the point of having power if you don’t abuse it?” – Dilbert

GOB

My superpower is hindsight.  But I can see that won’t help us now.

When I was a kid between the ages of 10 and 14, sometimes my dad would take me on his business trips.  They were always to the same city – the capital city of our state.  It was hours away, so it was quite an adventure.  Where I grew up there was exactly one elevator (in a two story building at the college) and one escalator (at the JCPenny®) building within a 130 mile radius from town.  We were so isolated that our Democrats were against communism all the way into the 1990s.

Did I mention I grew up in the sticks?

Pop Wilder was a small town banker, and sometimes the meetings in Capital City were at the Big Banks®, which were inevitably in huge skyscrapers.  It was quite a thrill going up into those buildings.  I’d sit in the lobby on the 20th floor, reading science fiction while Pop did whatever it was he was there for in the meeting room.  One bank in particular amazed me because the bathroom, on the 30th floor, had a full length clear window – you could stand up and pee and stare out at the city below.  There is probably a joke about Big Banks™ in there.  I’ll let you fill in that particular blank – this is a family blog.

These trips were fun.

BANKERS

I kept getting checks from the banks during the COVID-19 social isolation – the kept leaving me a loan.

But one trip, we went to visit the majority owner of the bank that Pop Wilder ran.  I recall this trip rather vividly, since we didn’t go to one of those gleaming towers.  Pop pulled the car into a strip mall.  Not a nice strip mall, but a dingy one in a sketchy area of town.  Pop never talked about why he was having those meetings, so I wasn’t exactly sure why we were there.  Perhaps he was going to sell me for a kid that didn’t keep his room in a condition that was specifically listed as containing elements of a war crime as defined by the United Nations?

Pop and I went up to one of those unmarked doors you see sometimes – just a steel door with a small diamond of glass about head high.  You could tell it was a classy area, because the glass was the kind with the wire mesh inside.  There was a buzzer next to the door, and Pop pressed it.

A voice answered, “Who is it?”

“Pop Wilder.”  The lock on the door made an angry buzzing sound and Pop pulled the door open.  We went up a flight of stairs – this particular strip mall doorway led to a second floor.

MAFIA

The Mafia chemist wanted the brake lines to rust – that way it would look like an oxidant.

I hadn’t seen any mob movies at the age of 12, but after watching them when I got older, the office had that feel.  Run down.  Dingy.  Like the world had passed this neighborhood by on its way to making those gleaming towers that were miles away in the downtown area.

A secretary (they were called that, back then) didn’t say much more than, “He’s waiting.”

I walked into the office with Pop.  The office had a feeling that I associate with movies from the 1940s or 1950s – dark, smoky paneling, a thin, worn carpet.  Even the desk was ancient, but not in the “oh, cool antique” way, but in the “early prison work camp warden furniture” way.

The man Pop was planning to meet sat behind the desk.  He didn’t get up as we entered.  His only acknowledgement that we were there was a glance, like an annoyed man staring at what was on the bottom of his shoe.  He looked, and I kid you not, exactly like Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life.  So I’ll call him that.  After reviewing information on the Internet, I’d estimate his age at that time as about 85.

Pop Wilder:  “Hello, Mr. Potter.  This is my son, John.  I mean, my other son, John.”

Pop didn’t really say that, but it amuses me to write it, since my older brother’s name was John as well.  I guess he was Juan one, and I was Juan two.

Mr. Potter’s gaze fell upon me.  It wasn’t pleasant.  Normally, when I met an adult, they at least pretended to be interested and would ask some questions and make small talk.  Not Mr. Potter.

“Hi,” I said, more to break the silence than anything.

He never said a word to me.  Pop Wilder handed me the keys to the car, and said, “You can go wait outside, son.”  That was fine with me – I had a book.

POTTER

Bad puns?  That’s how eye roll.

Mr. Potter, as I mentioned, was the majority owner of the bank that Pop ran.  Pop and his brother owned a fairly small amount of the shares, but Mr. Potter owned the vast majority of the bank.  From snippets between my parents in those conversations that last the length of a childhood, it turns out that Mr. Potter was far more than an angry bank owner working from a shabby office.  He was actually a kingmaker in state politics.  He was a Democrat, and no one got “the nod” unless he approved.  He had spent decades of his life building up connections with every important person in state politics.

In today’s terms, the big, shining gleaming banks had Money, billions of dollars.  This was the sort of Money that Mr. Potter didn’t have.  Sure, Mr. Potter had millions back when millions meant something, but Mr. Potter also had raw, naked Power.  Want to be governor?  He couldn’t guarantee it, but he could probably make sure it didn’t happen if you made him mad.

Money and Power are different things – most people equate them, but it’s not really so.  Elon Musk has Money, but he certainly lacks Power.  Yes, there’s another fill in the blank joke in there about Tesla™ and power.  If Elon Musk had Power?  They wouldn’t have closed his car factories due to WuFlu. Power is where the governor would have found some way that the factories were found to be “essential” businesses.  Real power is when the governor does what you want before you even ask.

Elon Musk has Money, but as only one out of 157 or so billionaires in California, he doesn’t have Power.  But he does have $46 billion dollars*, so don’t feel bad for him.  *That’s because it’s mainly in stock – a big Tesla™ crash, and it could be discharged.  See, I finally made that electrical joke.

SOROS

Soros was going to organize a riot of amputees, but he was worried it would get out of hand.

George Soros, on the other hand, only has a listed net worth of a little over $8 billion dollars.  But Soros has invested heavily in politics.  He’s created and funded a vast network of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that drive politics globally.  How many connections does Soros have?  According to Discover the Networks (LINK), which looks to understand who funds all of the Leftist organizations, Soros is associated in one way or another with 210 organizations that are hard Left.  How hard Left?  How about “Catholics for Choice”?  It’s like I created a group called “Muslims for Bacon”.

But $8 billion. That seems low.  Can you plot a Leftist overthrow on the cheap?  Not at all.  Soros has spent a staggering $32 billion on his foundations since 1984, including a recent transfer of $18 billion to his Open Society Foundation®.  Heck, it once took Jeff Bezos a whole month to make that kind of money.

George Soros is just like that Mr. Potter I met, but on a global scale.  Just a single one of his initiatives is active in over 120 countries in the world.

SOROS3

I heard that George Soros is the Lucky Charms™ evil twin – he’s tragically malicious.   

What drives that kind of raw lust for Power?  I mean, it must mean something to Soros, since he’s given away tens of billions of dollars to get it.  Soros gives us a clue in his own words in a book he wrote about his favorite subject, himself: “If truth be known, I carried some rather potent messianic fantasies with me from childhood.”  It’s no wonder that Soros looks like the evil Emperor from Star Wars™.

And what drove Mr. Potter?  I have no idea.  It wasn’t luxury – his office reminded me of the chief psychiatrist’s office at the asylum that all of those movie serial killers break out of.  Notoriety?  He had a very sparse Wikipedia page a decade ago – it’s gone.  So not that.  Philanthropy?  Nope, none I know of.

I am always concerned about the motives of people who seek Power over others.  Is it ego?  Is it insecurity?  Is it a genuine desire to help others?

Always remember what Mao said:  “Power flows from the barrel of a gun.”   You can have Money, but when Josef Stalin has the NKVD pick you up, you’ll learn quickly the difference between Money and Power.

SOROS2

Soros has evil lessons with Satan every week.  I have no idea what Soros charges.

While mentioning Money and Power I’d be leaving out one very important part of the equation if I just kept in terms of those two material concepts.

There is at least one other type of Power – and that’s Personal Power.  You can call it Spiritual, you can call it Virtue, or you can call it a dozen other names it goes by.  It’s the Power that comes from standing up for what’s right despite the storms that will come.  It’s telling your boss, “no” when he asks you to do what you know is unethical.  It’s standing up when everyone else in the world seems to be against you, but you know that you’re right.

I’d take that Power over any Power that Mr. Potter ever had.  And Soros? He may gain the whole world, but he’s already lost his soul.

Charles Peguy said, “Tyranny is always better organized than freedom.”  I think this was sometime before his last quote, “Germans, what Germans?” at the opening of the Battle of the Marne during World War I.

Tyranny seeks Money and Power.  Yet?

Freedom keeps winning.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: A Year Down The Road

Count de Monet: “It is said that the people are revolting.”
King Louis XVI: “You said it! They stink on ice.”
–History of the World, Part I

CLOCK

When I copy in these big clocks into my posts, it’s a huge paste of time.

  1. People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
  2. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  3. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  4. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  5. Open War.

We are at step 9. Step 9. is, of course, two minutes to midnight. I didn’t move to step 9. last month because last month, violence was just happening. This month? Violence is being commonly justified by local and state authorities. When protesters a mob tore down a gate to access private property in St. Louis, which set the stage. When the Modern Sporting Lawyer™ and his wife pulled out firearms to protect themselves, the sane world cheered.

MSL

Yes, I recycled this one. Couldn’t resist.

That’s why a District Attorney vowed to find something, anything to charge this couple with. The one thing the mob cannot stand is decent, armed people standing up to the mob. The politicians have made the mob and know that it must be fed.

The fact that CHAZ/CHOP was allowed to exist, with the rampant lawlessness of the mob in charge for weeks was another sign. We are very, very close to open warfare.

I stole the clock metaphor from the (Leftist) Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists©. It’s a good metaphor, because it creates an immediacy. And I can and will go backwards if events justify it, though at this point it seems like no one wants to go backwards.

In this issue: Front Matter – A Year Down The Road – Violence and Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Welcome to Issue 12 of the Civil War II Weather Report. These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month. I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues. Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern.

A Year Down The Road

I started the Weather Reports a little over a year ago because I could see the changes coming faster and faster. I’ve been concerned about the economy since I read The Fourth Turning (The Economy, The Fourth Turning, Kondratieff, and You.) back around the year 2000. When you look at all of the trends – social, economic, political – I could see trouble on the horizon. If you want some in-depth thought on how The Fourth Turning is progressing, Jim over at The Burning Platform (LINK) is your man.

The 2007 housing price collapse wasn’t a surprise to me. When I bought my house, I was (fortunately) in the position to negotiate with my employer that they’d cover any loss on sale if I moved for them. As house prices were going up, up, up . . . they agreed. And why not? It wouldn’t cost them a dime.

It did. My house dropped 20% in price between when I bought it and when it finally sold two years after I moved out. I don’t give myself genius points for this, but when they offered me a loan that was nearly ten times my salary? With no income verification?

Yikes.

The tensions we face aren’t going away anytime soon, in fact they’re not anywhere near their peak. Those same social, economic, and political factors have gotten worse, not better in the last 20 years.

AUGUST

Is anything out of the question?

Will one more year down the road have as much change as we have seen in the last year?

Why wouldn’t it?

Are you ready for that?

Violence and Censorship Update

In the previous posts, it has been either violence or censorship that’s shown up in a month. This month? We get both. I’ll start with censorship.

What’s out? Statues. Toppling statues is censorship – censorship of the past. George Orwell described it well in his book, 1984:

“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute.”

No bit of American history is safe, from George Washington to Thomas Jefferson to Teddy Roosevelt to “American Pioneers”, Spanish explorers, and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Yup. All have to go. And not by vote, not by decision, but by the raw power of the mob.

An episode of the British television classic Fawlty Towers has been removed because of offensive language, and the wind has done gone with Gone With The Wind, which had to be shuttered “temporarily” so that (pulls answer from hat) people won’t be offended.

So, history has been judged to be insufficiently woke.

WOKE

Right now the media is so woke, it’s like they took NoDoze® with coffee and meth to get ready for their Gender Studies final.

YouTube® just concluded its next round of purges. Dozens of large channels with millions of views are now gone. The biggest personality banned was Stefan Molyneaux, philosopher and badthinker. His crime? Not sure. People think it’s because he has had guests (scientists) on in the past that indicate that there might be group differences in cognitive ability. Oops – can’t discuss that idea in 2020.

Among other channels that YouTube® suggested for me and that I listened to from time to time was The Iconoclast, a British guy on the Right who advocated for lower immigration into Great Britain. Now? Gone. Plus? A major newspaper published a story on The Iconoclast’s identity. In 2020, having the wrong views means going without a job.

But that’s not violence, right?

On Reddit®, I heard that over 2000 subreddits were banned. I had been to several of the banned subreddits in the past, and was a bit surprised. One of them, r/consoomers was specifically set up for self-improvement and rejection of globalist commercialism. A little politically incorrect?

Yup.

Now gone. Another dead subreddit is r/The_Donald. It’s crime? Can’t be sure. I think it was too popular, with over a million subscribers. And a group of a million people who like Donald Trump? Triggered!

Reddit™ made rule changes as well. They initially rolled out this new rule for commenting:

“While the rule on hate protects such groups, it does not protect all groups or all forms of identity. For example, the rule does not protect groups of people who are in the majority….”

After someone got on Wikipedia and figured out that, for instance, men are in the minority since there are more women in the world, the rule on protecting people from hate wouldn’t apply to people who were misogynist. Oops. They changed that rule.

But it sure showed what they were intending.

This is the biggest month of censorship against the Right in, well, ever. I expect it to get worse. The idea that Donald Trump could be re-elected is mind poison for the Left. Leftist fetishize politics as a religion – Trump is the ultimate demon. They will do everything and anything so that he isn’t re-elected.

KRAMER

Share this meme and help a Leftist lose sleep so they can stay woke.

I’d spend more time updating you on the violence of the past month, but it’s probably easier to update you on the places that weren’t violent. Modern Mayberry was one. Here, we watch the news and see the world falling apart, and it’s like there’s another country out there.

There is. It’s just waiting to be born.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real time. They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings. As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

June has been the worst month so far – economic, violence, and political instability are all in bad shape. It’s so bad that even the illegals don’t want to sneak across the border.

Violence:

VIOLF

Up is more violent. Violence had been down because everyone was stuck in the basement. I predicted that May would be mellow, and then we’d see the uptick in June. I was almost right, and now June has pegged the scale. This measure because the way it’s constructed, doesn’t go higher than 300. Yes, the Y-axis label shows 350, but that’s because I didn’t notice until I’d put the graph together and it’s 3AM.

Political Instability:

POLI

Up is more unstable. Instability is up only slightly, which might seem weird, but the system is still stable overall. I may look into another graph next month to measure political change, because it sure feels like we crossed over into a regime where big political changes are more likely – and this graph was meant more about the overthrow of a sitting president, hence the peak in December. I expect more instability heading into November, and may make some changes to the inputs next month.

Economic:

ECONF

Down indicates worse economic conditions, and it’s down yet again. I’m hoping this is the worst that we’ll see, but I expect a market crash this month (July) or next.

Illegal Aliens:

BORD

Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Down, probably related to WuFlu, unemployment, and riots. This is at a five year low for this time of year.

LINKS

LINKS

These are from Ricky this month:

Although the US Government has FINALLY stopped paying for the First Civil War…

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/last-person-receive-civil-war-pension-dies-180975049/

…worries about the Second Civil War continue to build….

https://www.theday.com/article/20200616/OP04/200619472

https://prospect.org/politics/americas-civil-war/

https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-avoid-second-american-civil-war-163096

https://floridapolitics.com/archives/345640-darren-aquino-says-its-time-to-pick-a-side-in-coming-civil-war

https://www.thetrace.org/2020/07/gun-background-checks-june-record/

https://www.thetrace.org/2020/06/boogaloo-gun-ammunition-marketing-facebook-instagram/

…which many think can be stopped just by not talking about it…

https://www.omaha.com/opinion/clarence-page-the-current-civil-war-is-fought-on-cultural-territory/article_1661faef-ef9d-5622-88d6-d3308d9fbb88.html

https://www.ocregister.com/2020/06/05/lets-knock-off-the-blithe-talk-of-a-coming-civil-war/

https://goducks.com/news/2020/6/26/general-uo-osu-series-no-longer-to-reference-civil-war.aspx

MSM says Antifa is not a national problem….

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/google-top-stories-featured-false-news-rumored-antifa-civil-war

https://prospect.org/civil-rights/antifa-all-around-trump-media-fox-news-fear-protests/

https://time.com/5008829/antifa-november-4-rumors/

…it’s the Boogaloo Bois that are the threat…

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/style/boogaloo-hawaiian-shirt.html

https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/boogaloo-boys-george-floyd-protests/

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/boogaloo-movement-recent-violent-attacks/story?id=71295536

https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/03/us/boogaloo-extremist-protests-invs/index.html

https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/2020/06/04/armed-white-men-milwaukee-protests-could-far-right-boogaloo/3147128001/

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/19/what-is-boogaloo-movement/3204899001/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/06/16/civil-war-20-the-boogaloo-movement-is-a-wake-up-call-for-america/#3d9f1cb071ab

https://www.voanews.com/usa/race-america/boogaloo-boys-aim-provoke-2nd-us-civil-war

…but Facebook will save us….

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53244339

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/ryanmac/facebook-instagram-profit-boogaloo-ads

https://www.inventiva.co.in/stories/priyadharshini/facebooks-boogaloo-ban-is-it-too-late/

…meanwhile, Small Town America simmers….

https://www.sltrib.com/news/2020/07/01/three-groups-plan-gather/

https://www.gazettenet.com/Sanger-letter-34596978

…and maybe there are investing strategies for the Civil War?

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2020-07-03/trading-and-investing-americas-second-civil-war

The Amazing, Collapsing, Dehydrated Economy! Just Add Water!

“Whenever Corey and Trevor go out with Ricky and Julian, what happens? They come home crying.  Dehydrated.  Mysterious wounds.  They won’t tell me what happened because they’re scared to death of those guys.” – Trailer Park Boys

DEHI

And people say I have a dry sense of humor.

I remember hearing about dehydrated water as a kid – probably the first time was a joke from my science teacher in 7th grade.  He also told us (I’m not making this up) drinking stories.  He taught us that if you go out drinking when you have just donated blood, you get drunker faster.  Who says that middle school science doesn’t teach important life lessons?

But the idea of dehydrated water as a product still got filed away somewhere in the six million neurons I have that are dedicated to 7th grade science.  It’s filed somewhere between “don’t stare at the Sun directly through the telescope again Wilder” and “mercuric oxide might look like cinnamon, but it’s not as tasty.”  And dehydrated water popped into my mind as I was preparing to write this post today.

Why?

The economy of the United States is dehydrated water at this point.  The unemployment rate from Shadow Stats® is somewhere around 35%.  Even the Department of Labor thinks the number of people that are unemployed is somewhere north of 20%.  Heck, I heard a guy was upset about losing his job at McDonalds™ even though he worked for a clown.

BURKA

The head of Old McDonalds® Farm is the CIEIO.

As I first predicted when the WuFlu was just coming over the horizon and the first lockdown hit, this is devastating to the economy.  The difference between 2% growth year over year and -2% growth is enough to cause Washington D.C. to be as uncomfortable as a Joe Biden voter when Joe starts talking about how he thinks that JFK has the plan to save us from the Spanish flu.

I was not surprised by the quick action money shower from the .GOV folks.  What did surprise me is that they used the occasion to juice the economy also by giving money to working people rather than just bailing out banks.  Many people on unemployment are actually making more money on unemployment than they made when working, thanks to the extra $600 a week the .GOV folks are adding to their unemployment insurance check.  Some could be making up to $50,000 a year.  For not working.  But Congress makes $174,000 a year for not working, so there’s still room for career growth!

But the .GOV isn’t just juicing the average unemployed worker.  As noted in a previous post, the Federal Reserve Bank™ is engaged in “plunge protection” where money is strategically pumped into the stock market to keep it from crashing.  That’s generally accepted.  But now?  The Federal Reserve© has been, for the first time in history, buying corporate bonds.

Bonds are really just loans.  A company, say, Apple® decides it wants have more slave labor camps factories built in China.  So, it calls up the Chinese partner, and says that it will pay.  But since the cushions in Steve Jobs’ couch have been raided for quarters already, they decide to borrow money.  You or I would have to go ask someone to borrow money from them.  But Apple™ sells their debt in the form of bonds, or promises to pay the borrowed money back, plus interest.

DYE

When James Bond was offered a sandwich, he had a choice of ham or turkey.  Of course he chose bacon, not bird.

Normally, Apple© would sell those bonds to places like pension funds and 401k’s.  But in 2020, the Federal Reserve™ buys them.  Yes.  One of the most profitable companies in the world gets its debt purchased by the Fed®.

Why?

The stock market needs to be propped up, and so does the bond market.  And after hundreds of millions of loan payments haven’t been made.  Which of those loans are good?  Where is the cash to pay the lender coming from?  No one knows.  No one wants to take a risk.  Money is like me on a vacation day, it just sits there.

Markets are freezing up because the money isn’t moving, because the economy is freezing up.  What the Fed® is doing is artificially injecting money into the market because the market has ceased to work.  It’s like my can of dehydrated water – there’s really nothing in it.  The joke is that you can add a gallon of water to the contents of the dehydrated water can to make a gallon of water.

The Fed® is adding billions of dollars to an empty economy and pretending that nothing’s wrong, that they didn’t just make an economy out of nothing.  “Hey, instant economy.  Just add money.”

KOBE

Planes are different than an economy.  Planes only crash once.

My prediction is that the extra $600 a week won’t go away, unless Congress wants the economy to crater even more before the election in November.  Why?  Since giving away money to people and companies that haven’t earned it is literally the thing Congress loves most in the whole world, I think they will.  And I think they’ll ultimately manage to extend it.  Probably for at least 100 weeks.

We’ve borrowed more in the first quarter than we spent in 2011.  What’s a few more zeros on the national deficit?

But when I wrote that first post about the crash, I was (more or less) assuming we’d be done with the economic mess associated with COVID-Forever no later than July.  I thought that people would, as much as possible, not go licking all the doorknobs that they see and the disease would run out of people to infect.  Yay, normal summer.  And given that, I still predicted at least five years to recover, but more likely a decade.

Nope.  States are re-locking down right now.  States that never experienced the devastating deaths caused by the nursing-home stuffing Governor Cuomo set up in New York are seeing cases rise.

>Uh-oh.jpg

When large segments of the economy simply disappear, you can’t simply replace them with money.  In the end, money has real purposes in the economy:

  • Money provides incentives for good behavior, like starting successful companies and saving. Blowing it all on Three Stooges® videos from Amazon™ is probably not the best investment strategy I ever had.
  • Money provides an allocation of resources throughout the economy without central planning – it’s a way to allocate the productive energy of the economy without a team of Central Politbureau Commissars picking and choosing winners and losers. Congress hates  How can you get votes if you don’t mismanage the economy?
  • Money provides ways for people to trade for “stuff” without bartering. I could trade your (for example) a vast quantity of Beanie Babies® for a pickup truck.  But then you’d be stuck with all of those Beanie Babies™ and have to trade them for the goat milk and pantyhose that you really need.  Unless you can milk Beanie Babies© and then use their skins for leggings?

BEANIE

She was upset when the prices crashed.  I tried to tell her she’s not worthless – her kidneys are worth a lot on the black market.

But money isn’t the economy – money only has value if everyone believe in it.  You can’t just give everyone money and expect that good things will happen.  At some point, people need to make things.  And people need to believe that money has value.

You can’t grow plants with Brawndo©, you can’t fight crime with a macaroni duck, and you can’t rehydrate an economy with money.

But the Fed© is trying to do that.  Not grow plants with Brawndo®.  But make an economy work by sprinkling money on it.

The next phase of our economic crash, however, is default.  Unless the Fed© keeps rehydrating, eventually people will stop paying back money – it will be a Cashpocalypse – borrowers won’t have money, and lenders won’t get paid.  But that’s okay, we can simply have the Fed™ just shower the money onto both of them?

CARGO

The French, of course, had to jump on the Cargo Cult bandwagon, so they called it “Special Cargo Cult”, or S-Cargo for short.

In the 1940s, massive amounts of men and material flowed into the South Pacific so that we could beat the Japanese back from Australia so it could be handed over to the Chinese in the 21st century.  Several cults known collectively as “Cargo Cults” formed.  One speaks about their deity, John Frum, or, as I prefer to think of it, John From Wilder’s house.  (Seriously, they think the name of John Frum came from “John from America”.)

The idea behind these Cargo Cults was that if the natives built symbolic airstrips and symbolic airplanes out of bamboo (or whatever they had) then the flow of cargo that the American and British armed forces brought in would resume.  Then?  Perfect prosperity.  Hurray!

The Fed™ has become infected with the idea that the economy can be summoned.  That’s the definition of a Cargo Cult.

Sadly, I have bad news.  It won’t work.  It can’t work.

You can’t make an economy by rehydrating it with money.  But you can regress an economy.  And you can destroy the belief in the money you’re flooding the system with.

Just because it’s gone exactly the way I’ve thought it would and told you it would, don’t mind me.  In all seriousness, I could be wrong.

But I could be right.  What then?

Have some water on hand?

Your Economy, Featuring: Romans, Rothschilds, and Rioters

“You have two settings-no decision and bad decision. I wouldn’t let you run a bath without having the Coast Guard and the fire department standing by, but yet here you are running America. You are the worst thing that has happened to this country since food in buckets and maybe slavery!” – Veep

DOLPHIN

I had made a mistake and bought too many art supplies.  That was my excess stencil crisis.

Cui bono.  That’s Latin for “who benefits,” and in this case doesn’t have anything to do with the singer for the band U2©, who have been benefiting from everything.  Even my GPS is branded by U2™, and it sucks.  The streets have no name, and I still haven’t found what I’m looking for.

Cui bono.

That quote being in Latin is especially appropriate for today’s post.   Marcus Licinius Crassus (115 B.C. – 53 B.C. – they aged backwards then) goes down in history for creating the first fire department that Rome had.  At his own expense, he recruited and trained a brigade of 500 men who, at the first sign of a fire, would speed toward the smoke and flames.

Crassus would rush to the fire with them.  Once the fire department was on site, Crassus would find the building owner and offer to buy the burning building at an obvious discount.  I am not making this up.  Obviously, the longer the fire went on, the lower Crassus’ offer would go.  Once the property owner had sold, Crassus would give the signal and his fire department would save his newly purchased building.

I’m sure that sometimes the fire got away from him, but most of the time Crassus profited from the deal.  It was a fire sale, right?

ARSON

When I was working as a firefighter, in one building all that was left was the bottom of a shoe – it must have been the sole survivor.

Often, Crassus would then rebuild the building using his army of slave architects and artisans (not making that up, either), and then lease the building back to the original owner.  So, Crassus even had a way to get his money back.  Crassus was wealthy not only by ancient standards, but by any standards.  He’d be worth at least $11 billion in today’s money.

Cui bono?  Crassus.  I looked for a name I could call Crassus, but it was hard to find one, this being a family-friendly blog.  I’ll settle on cullion.

This is an early example of economic plunder.  Legal, yes.  Honorable?  No.

It didn’t stop with Crassus.

UBER

I once paid $20 to meet the Prince, but I partied like it was only $19.99.

When you search the Internet for tales of Nathan Rothschild back in 1815, you’ll find a host of stories that from the scholarship of 2020, don’t seem to be supported.  But what generally seems to be agreed with (even by the Rothschild Archives – LINK) is that during the Napoleonic Era, Rothschild and his brothers across the European continent had a fairly sophisticated system to transfer news and information to each other.

Information is just like a building fire in Rome:  the sooner you catch it, the more it is worth.

What had been vexing everyone in London during June of 1815 was the return of Napoleon from exile and his resumption of power in France.  Since Europe had been fighting alongside Napoleon or with Napoleon for nearly 20 years, people in the United Kingdom were scared to death that a victory by Napoleon could lead to another 20 years of war.  And just like today, no one wanted to watch a re-run.

NAPOLEON

Napoleon broke out of exile because he needed more Elba room.

Lord Wellington had been put in charge of a coalition of armies from across Europe, 68,000 total troops.  Joined by 50,000 Prussians under Blücher (cue obligatory whinny), Wellington met Bonaparte at the small village of Waterloo.  Napoleon wasn’t alone.  He had 73,000 French soldiers, and Wellington had left his panzers in his other coat, so the French fought back like they’d have to shower and give up cigarettes if they lost.

Spoiler alert:  Napoleon lost, but barely.  I think it had to go into at least one overtime, and there were some controversial instant replays.

The story goes that with the Rothschild information network, Nathan was notified about Wellington’s victory before anyone in London.  By knowing that, Nathan could make a killing in the stock market.  How well did he do?  We don’t know.  His courier wrote him:  “I am informed by Commissary White that you have done well by the early information which you had of the Victory gained at Waterloo.”  It is reported (LINK) that the Rothschild fortunes went from £500,000 to £1,000,000 in that year.  So probably pretty well, since I assume a £ is a metric $ or something.

Yes, I know that there are other stories about Nathan’s Big Day Out® that are much more exaggerated, but this one does fine in proving my point:  the best time to make money is in an uncertain market.  Or, as has been attributed to Nathan:  “The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.”  Especially if, like Nathan and Marcus, you can remove the uncertainty and make your bet a sure thing.

ELMO

 I did invest in an Asian/Middle East fusion restaurant called, “Wok Like an Egyptian.”

This went on during Roman times, and it went on during Napoleonic times.  Is it going on today?

It certainly is.  I was having a conversation with a friend of mine the other week, and he works for a company that was funded by a private equity firm.  Per my conversation, they deals that just his company is looking at are in the range of one hundred million to one billion dollars.  Sure, that’s a pretty big range.  But the kicker was this:

“There are pools of billions of dollars waiting for deals.”

What kind of deals?  Deals on great assets in a collapsing economy.

As we look at the wreck that we’re seeing in the economy due to the WuFlu and now the great #BLM (Burning Looting Marxists), what sort of reaction are we seeing?  Does it surprise anyone that 269 companies (LINK, H/T to CA at Western Rifle Shooters) are supporting the (actual, really founded by Marxists, look it up) BLM?

Does it surprise anyone that hundreds of millions of dollars are flooding in to BLM and affiliated organizations?  And I’m not exaggerating the amount – the fund just for bailing out rioters and looters in Minneapolis was over $90 million dollars.  Some people can loot a whole week and not make that much!

The support for BLM could be from one of the following sources, and I suspect that one or more is in play depending on the company donating:

  • Genuine support for civil rights. Sure, I believe that from companies that import goods made by overseas labor treated more poorly than the Wilder family treats our outdoor cat.
  • A cynical ploy signaling corporate virtue to get people to buy burgers. Think of it like an advertisement, but instead of featuring the social justice flavor of the week, it’s BLM this week.
  • Coordinated donations with full knowledge that the money will go toward a Marxist transformation of the United States.
  • Selected by the CEO’s secretary executive assistant at random.

SJW

I never let BLM members into my basement – I don’t want a whine cellar.

Amazon® has really been impacted by COVID-19.  I’m betting that every facet of Bezos’ business has been helped, from their online shopping to their web infrastructure to their movie rental business.  Coronachan has been good to Jeff.  But I don’t blame Bezos for that – I don’t think it was his plan to infect the United States with a virus and convince everyone to stay in the basement for three months and then have seven pages of BLM merch to sell.

Because if he did?  That’s some real Bond villain stuff and I’ve got to say, that’s the most anyone has ever done to try to convince me to buy a Prime® subscription.

Cui bono?  I mean, besides Bezos?

Someone is going to profit from BLM, even beyond the hundreds of millions of dollars donated recently to it, and even beyond the billions of dollars that will go to purchase assets during the crisis.  And it may not be money, or burger sales.  It might be measured in raw power, the power to turn a society towards the Marxist goals of the founders of BLM.

But even Crassus knew that once a fire got started, it just might get away from you.