Mechanisms Of Control: Financial

“You must not take the Controller away. We will all die! The Controller is young and powerful. Perfect!” – Star Trek, TOS

Song lyric idea:  “The Beautiful Sheeple, The Beautiful Sheeple . . .”

Currency started out innocently enough.  If I wanted to sell my wheat and then buy some beer, well, I could trade my wheat to the brewer.  But what if the brewer had all the wheat he needed, but needed, oh, hops?  My wheat would do him no good.  There is evidence of a guy making beer in the Bible, after all there’s a book in the New Testament named Hebrews.

I could try to trade my wheat to the guy who grew hops, but if he didn’t need any wheat, what was I to do?

The problem that currency solved was a simple one – how do I trade with someone who doesn’t need what I have?  How can accountants get into amusement parks?  How can ATF® agents do, well, anything since absolutely no one has any use for them?

The solution was some sort of medium of exchange.  In one sense, it’s magic.  As long as everyone believes, it works.  When used judiciously (i.e., backed by gold on demand) it transforms into something that is hard to manipulate – what we’d call money.

How do you greet a German wheat farmer?  “Gluten tag.”

When backed by nothing, (like now) it’s simply cash or currency.

The history of the last fifty years (and the last twenty, especially) has been the history of printing currency out of nothing and then giving it to a few small groups, and then they use the cash to buy up everything.

Once a group owns everything, there’s no reason for them to worry about profit:  they already own all the things worth owning.  That’s BlackRock©.  The Aptly Named® Larry Fink runs it, and it’s no longer about profits, it’s about control based on his ideology.

What does Fink expect you to do when it’s cold?  Huddle around a candle.  What about when it’s freezing?  Maybe then Larry will let you light the candle.

People (last I checked) still drive cars driven by sweet, sweet internal combustion engines.  Those internal combustion engines (for the most part) require sweet, sweet crude oil to be turned into gasoline and diesel.  Yeah, ethanol exists and so does biodiesel, but those can’t pull the load, and ethanol actively takes food out of the supply chain.

What if, however, the United Nations leaned on banks to get them to stop the supply of oil by choking off the supply of cash to oil producing nations?

If it wasn’t clear before, it should be clear now:  it’s not about humanity or human rights – it’s about control.

Is the reason Saudi Arabia has so much money all the oil cash, or that they won’t let their women spend it?

Please don’t believe me, believe them when they say it.  Here is the head of the Bank of International Settlement (BIS) saying that “central banks will have absolute control over all money (sic)”.  This is in how each dollar (or whatever unit) is used, what people are allowed to buy, and what people are prohibited to buy.

Why do Central Bankers drive Ferraris®?  Because you’re okay with a Fiat©.

One thing I know that they’d love to do is to make money evaporate to force people to spend rather than save.  This can be done with electronic currency, and I expect they will do it to make sure that people can’t save and are forced to work every day of their lives.

Even more than now.

  • 35% of Americans think they’ll max out at least one credit card this year.
  • 38% are using their cards for expenses that they never used a card for.
  • 62% are considering a “side-gig”, even if they already have a job.

-Fintech Times, July 25, 2023 (LINK)

Things are looking down for many Americans.  When it comes to the point of using credit cards for financing life, it’s getting rough – I know, I was in that trap when I was in my 20s.  I’ve seen it here in Modern Mayberry where the labor market is now getting tighter, and more people are looking for work.  Employers can now be a bit choosier, which will put downward pressure on wages.  The reason for this is simple:  people aren’t going to McDonald’s®, they’re eating at home for half (or less) the price.

Another sign of control:  in a recent month, 1.2 million “native or heritage”, (i.e., Americans actually born as Americans from American parents in America) lost their jobs.  They were replaced by 600,000 immigrants.  Low-cost labor is still being imported, and putting even more wage pressure on the middle and lower classes.  The Biden administration even ordered that some of the gates in “The Wall” be welded open, which defeats the whole “wall” idea.

Looks like that Bill Gates was in charge of the wall, too.  Look at all the Windows®.

To paraphrase William Jennings Bryant (among others), it is difficult to get a person to voice dissent when their next meal requires them to agree.  That, then, is the nature of control of economic systems as demonstrated by BlackRock®, the BIS©, and the World Economic Forum™ – the desire is to make it so that the average person cannot resist without being kicked outside of the system that provides food, shelter, and the occasional luxury.

I’m sure it would be easy to start your own Central Bank . . . oh, maybe not.

Even that deal is in danger:  the desire to dramatically change the way that people work and live is on the table for these groups.  Who, exactly, do you think wants you to live in a pod and eat the bugs, and not own anything?  Owning everything that matters isn’t enough – they want to own everything, and make your ability to have anything depending on you giving them all of yourself.

Even your thoughts.

And to think, all we really wanted was a beer.  I guess it was pretty expensive.

Electric Cars and Rainbow Unicorns

“It’s logical to assume that something within this zone absorbs all forms of energy whether mechanically or biologically produced. Whatever it is, it would seem to be the same thing which drew all the energy out of an entire solar system and the Intrepid.” – Star Trek, TOS

Electric cars owners should never go down a dead end street – there’s no outlet.

As I have written time and time again, the future of energy is the future of humanity.  Cheap, safe, limitless energy is the dream, and that energy is one component of a future that is not nasty, brutish, and short, like George Soros.  Because the Leftists have tried to propagandize the subject, they’ve done a great job at muddling the thoughts on what in the end is actually the engineering question that drives the economic engines of the world.

Let’s remove the confusion on the term “energy source”.  Electricity, for instance, isn’t an energy source, since it has to be created in some fashion, such as by windmill or coal-fired power plant, nuclear power plant, or tiny faeries hooked up to electrodes while being chained to beds in the basement of Disney® . . . oh, I’ve said too much.

I heard a fairy tale about politics once.  It was Grimm.

Electric cars, then, are dependent upon getting their electricity from somewhere upstream.  Electricity is an energy carrier, not a source.

On the other hand, crude oil is an energy source.  The refining process doesn’t take up too much energy, and the sweet, sweet hydrocarbon molecules in a gallon of gasoline were there (mostly, some have been rearranged a tiny bit) in the refining process.

So, let’s define energy sources as energy, in crude, raw, or potential form that can be manipulated for use and that we get more energy out than we put into it.  So, crude oil is definitely an energy source in most conventional and fracking situations, producing up to (depending on how you count it) sixteen times as much energy as used to get it out of the ground and turn it into 89 octane.  I will say if we converted the entire economy to biofuels emissions would go down and we could starve at the same time!

Biofuels are entirely questionable, and most of them are poor when compared to gasoline as an alternative, returning just a little bit over break even for both biodiesel and corn ethanol.  These products exist as fuels primarily because Lefties like ruining the economy and the RINOs know that farmers vote.  Thus, there are tax incentives in place to force the use of biofuels.

“But we could make houses out of it.”  “No, you have to bury it.”  “But we could make furniture out of it.”  “No, you have to bury it.”  “But we could heat houses with it.”  “No, you have to bury it.”  “I’m beginning to think you don’t like people.”

The dream of the Left (at least this version, Arthur Sido has another one here: LINK), then is to get rid of all of the cars to replace them with “clean” electric vehicles.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) wants to get electric cars and trucks (EVs) to 45% of the vehicles on the road by 2050 according to their Net Zero Scenario.  45%!  The insanity doesn’t stop there – the IEA expects that alternative vehicles will reduce gas and diesel use by 30% by 2030 – seven years into the future.

That’s a stunning number, because the average age of a car in the United States is 12.2 years.  I guess I’m pretty close to average, because the average Wilder fleet ages is 11.5 years.  That means that the 30% of the car and stock in existence today needs to be replaced by 2030 with electric and hydrogen vehicles.  I have no idea where the IEA is getting its dope, but they must get really good stuff.

>Be forest.
>Exist.  Die.  Kill mankind by raising temperature 0.0001
°F.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 100,000,000 years ago.

That would mean, though, that conventional vehicles that run on sweet, sweet oil and diesel will have to be phased out starting very soon.  Further, the remainder of the vehicles the IEA are hydrogen-powered.  Now the Hindenburg wasn’t hydrogen powered . . . .

Now, checking back to energy sources versus energy carriers, hydrogen is just an energy carrier.  It has to be generated somewhere.

One of the first problems is that EVs are wickedly expensive compared to actual cars since they require massive amounts of material to replace the empty gasoline tank of an internal combustion car.  The question is, where do those materials come from?  If, all of a sudden, millions of EVs need to be made, the prices for the materials that go into them will go up, too.

>Be forest.
>Burn.  Kill mankind by melting 200 gallons of ice.
>Wonder why this didn’t happen 200,000 years ago.

According to the IEA itself, demand for lithium alone will be 4,000% greater in 2050 than it is today.  Cobalt increases would be 2,000%.  The increase in availability alone is questionable.  Resources show up in clumps – I can’t go in my front yard and look for gold, it is where it is.  And when Leftists dream of this wonderful economy that they’re creating, they ignore the environmental costs waste of mining all this stuff – how much will that create in greenhouse gasses plant food?

It’s clear, once again, that these plans aren’t serious.  China is producing a stunning 30% of greenhouse gasesCO2, while the United States produces about 15% of human made CO2.  Why do we fixate on the United States?

First, Leftists have to pretend, really hard, that global warming climate change has replaced what real humans call weather.

Second?  The Chinese are already communist, so let them do whatever.  The people who have to have their economy ruined while they chase unicorns and rainbows rather than actual engineering solutions to actual engineering problems will have their economy destroyed.

Or maybe they’ll just buy beachfront property at a discount?

Or was that the plan all along?

At the beginning of this, I said the future of energy is the future of humanity.  That’s just a bit inaccurate – the future of energy is the future of free humans and our economy.  Me?  I have my own plans.

Unfrozen Caveman Interview

“Hey, business is business. You use a gun, I use a fountain pen what’s the difference? Let’s put it in my terms: you’re in a hostile takeover, you snatch us up for some green mail, but you’re not expecting some poison pill to be running around the building, am I right?” – Die Hard

Sorry I edited out Worf.  He was such a prima Dorn-a.

I’m here with my friend, Coroc.  Coroc was frozen in an accident in the year 5000 B.C. which may or may not have been related to the first recorded time a man said, “Oh, yeah?  Hold my beer.”

Coroc was thawed after his body was found while a construction crew was excavating the foundations for a McDonald’s® that was being built in Kharkov.  Coroc has since gotten a degree from Harvard® Law and an MBA from Wharton© and has also killed an elk with a pocket knife in the parking lot of a Wendy’s™.  I’ve asked him for an interview so I could get in a few questions about his unique experiences in dealing with business and economic situations.

John Wilder (JW):  Coroc, I image the world is much different than when you were frozen into a block of ice near Kharkov 7,000 years ago.  What’s the best new invention that you’ve seen?

Coroc IceBeer (CI):  PEZ®.  It is a light and fruity brick of flavor that explodes in your mouth like Magorthath’s axe explodes the skulls of his feeble enemies.  It makes me laugh, but not too much, for that is womanly.

JW:  Your last name is IceBeer.  Did you have beer back then?

Coroc:  If we didn’t have beer, there would have been many maidens left unplowed, if you know what I mean.  So, yes.  Beer is, how you say, awesome, although I can assure you we would not have had any of that Bud Light™.  We would rather have consumed the flat body of a badger that had been walked on by many horses and then left out on the ground for a week.

A crying Möbius strip walks into a bar, crying.  The bartender asks, “What’s wrong?”  The Möbius strip says, “Where do I even begin?”

JW:  Whoa, that escalated quickly!  Let’s change the subject a bit.  When dealing with a middle manager that didn’t give you the appropriate chance for advancement, what did you do back then?

Coroc:  This happened many times.  When a leader was too old or feeble, we would simply say, “You, you are not fit to lead!  Go and gather berries with the women or I will split your skull with my axe.”  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

JW:  What happened if you fought?

Coroc:  Well, depends on if you win or lose.  Lose?  No problem, since you were dead.  Win?  No problem, since you took his women, took his hut, and took his things.  Only a real problem if his women were named Karen.

JW:  Sounds violent.

Coroc:  Yes, it was the original hostile takeover.

I don’t like sweeping.  Floors are beneath me.

JW:  Did people ever not have jobs?

Coroc:  No.  Everyone had a job.  Need someone to go hunt?  Yes.  We always needed that.  Need someone to go and fight the idiot tribe next door that wouldn’t turn their music down after eleven?  Yes, men needed.  Need someone to fish and drink beer?  Yes.  Always needed.

JW:  What if someone didn’t want to help out?

Coroc:  I don’t understand.  I already told you about the hostile takeover.

JW:  Let’s shift gears.  Here in 2023, we have a complex economy that uses electronic ledgers to keep track of the movement of goods and services and the payment from one country to another.  This is enforced with many central banks working together to balance the flow of currency from one country to another.  How did you do that, Coroc?

Coroc:  Crom.  I thought 7,000 years would have made you people smarter.  In my time, in Scythia, we had horses.  We had women.  Fiery, lusty women with big manes of blonde hair, massive thighs that they could crack walnuts with.  Strong, birthing hips.  We rode our horses, took our axes, and made piece with other tribes.

JW:  Don’t you mean “peace” instead of “piece”?

Coroc:  No.  They gave us a piece.  Simple.  And no problem with Human Resources, since we treated every tribe exactly alike.  And there was no corporate debt to worry about.

What do you call a heavy metal band with financial problems?  Megadebt.

JW:  When it came So you didn’t have to worry about interest rates?

Coroc:  The only interest I had was in the rate my enemy would die so I could hear the lamentation of his women.  I think that was our major metric on our KPI, the relative volume of the lamentation of the women.

JW:  What about your stock market?

Coroc:  It was pretty stable.  You can only eat so much steak per day.  We kept a close eye on our stocks.

JW:  What was your retirement like?

Coroc:  Retirement meant, mostly, hanging out with the gods once you died in battle.  It was a pretty good plan, leave 5% of your lootings in a plan, get 2.5% tribal match.  And there was free healthcare!  If you had poor health, we didn’t care.  See?  Free.  Simple.

JW:  So, were you ever plagued by guilt over your colonizer attitude?

Coroc:  (Sadly)  Yes, we were sometimes feeling guilty of our ability as colonizers.  There are only so many men that we could use to fight, so our ability to conquer even the feeble toothless enemies we had was limited.  Why, some years we would only vanquish a few kingdoms and petty princelings.

Is the sculptor of his statue a Khan artist?

JW:  Was there much poverty in your tribe?

Coroc:  We had a great poverty prevention program.  It was called starvation.  Worked wonders.

JW:  Last question, what about inflation?  Did your tribe ever see inflation?

Coroc:  Only under one leader who tried to make smooth round rocks currency.  Worked horrible, pretty soon everyone was strong, though, infinite amount of small round rocks back in Scythia, so it was great leg day.

JW:  What happened to that leader?

Coroc:  Hostile takeover.

The Great Rollover

“Like I told my last wife, I says, “Honey, I never drive faster than I can see. Besides that, it’s all in the reflexes.” – Big Trouble in Little China

I tried to buy a hamburger with cheese, but they wanted cash instead.

Yellow Freight® shut down.  They had been around for 99 years, starting business way back in time when Bernie Sanders was trying to ruin Austro-Hungarian Empire or Bulgaria or wherever he came from.

Yellow Freight© was an old company and 30,000 people lost their jobs.  What went on?  Well, Yellow© borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars emergency ‘rona bucks.  When they went bankrupt, they had an outstanding loan balance (backstopped by you and I) of $729.2 million.  During the two and a half years that they’d had the loan, they’d paid down $54.8 million in interest.  They’d also paid down $230 in principle.

Not $230 million.  Not $230 thousand.  $230, so I’m guessing their strategy was to pay it off at $10 a month, which would ensure that they’d pay off the loan in roughly the year 6,079,523.

Oddly, no one would take a risk on refinancing a company that had such powerhouse earnings, and so all of the people who used to have pensions with Yellow™ found out that their pension value would be paid out at the same rate as the loan was being paid out, and it’s pretty hard to split $10 among 30,000 people each month.

I hate to point fingers, but whatever executive thought orange was yellow just might be at fault.

Most of the 30,000 folks from Yellow Freight© will find another job – truckers are still in demand, and other companies have picked up the slack so far.

This isn’t the first.  Just like the banks who had money in Treasury paper took a hit (Silicon Valley Bank®, I’d be looking at you if you were still here) because the “super-safe” bonds making 1% were worth a lot less when interest rates went up to 4%.  The FDIC™ requires the banks that they insure to report data.  It’s kinda scary when the FDIC© uses the X® (the social media company formerly known as Prince) to notify banks (and the American public) that banks might be in trouble again.

I guess no one is making them account for their problems?

The same thing is, perhaps, happening to the dollar itself – today lost its AAA bond rating from Fitch™ and is now producing AA bonds.  Still a good rating, but it’s a big hit from “nearly perfect plus has nuclear missiles” and the first step to becoming a “drunk wine aunt country that can’t afford to take vacations”, like Uzbekistan.

As I’ve written before, it’s awesome to have “the reserve currency”, since that means you can print all the cash you want and spend it on things like iPods™ from China, Hello Kitty™ slippers from Bangladesh, and tequila from Mexico (what’s known as a “Hunter Biden Saturday Morning Special”).  Losing it means a loss of that ability, and all of a sudden you have to work for all of that stuff rather than just printing cash.

Hunter Biden’s credit card company called him about suspicious activity.  Seems that someone made a payment.

That’s difficult, because there’s always competition in having the reserve currency.  One competitor, of course, is precious metals.  Another is land.  My father-in-law liked to say, “if it blows up, at least you still have the hole.”  After the debt ceiling deal (translation:  spend as much as you want until after the general election), the debt shot up, climbing $1.8 trillion in just two months.  I mean, that’s a crazy number, we don’t even give that much to Zelenskyy in a year!

I know mortgage payments are going up, but just try telling a homeless person how lucky they are.

Eventually that has an effect on all assets.  Although Darth Powell doesn’t exactly have the understanding of how home prices work, it is closer to say that at the same payment at a 7% mortgage rate, you can afford a heck of a lot less home than you can afford at 2.7%.  Unless wages go up or BlackRock© decides to buy houses because they ran out of illegal aliens to import this month.

Or, if the bankers get absolute control over who uses what cash and when.  That’s the goal.  Will that happen if things are going well, and we’re surrounded by prosperity?

Of course not.  In order to get control, the idea is chaos, uncertainty, war, and mayhem.  If you’re old enough, how do the 2020s compare to the 1980s?  The 1990s? The 2000s?  In nearly every way that doesn’t involve ludicrously cheap televisions, each of those decades was objectively better.  I’ve noted before that Peak USA probably hit somewhere before I was born to when I was a little kid.

Why do central bankers never travel together?  They’re a bunch of loan wolves.

I’m normally a fan of the idea of ineptitude being responsible for at least being some contributing factor to the problems that we have, but when I look at the gross mismanagement of the economy for decades it almost seems like it’s planned.

But I’m sure I’ll hear Bernie lecturing us all that socialism and more government is the way out from the balcony of one of his three houses soon enough.  After all, it’s worked out pretty well for him, what with him never having had an actual job and all.

You know, this costs money, but I’m just thinking of the joy of all of those people in India when they get unexpected packages.

Aliens: The Fakest Thing Ever?

“Crazy people can be very persuasive.” – The X-Files

Do werewolves live in warehouses?

I’ve enjoyed Scott Adams for years – the first time I saw his strips were on office photocopypasta in the 1990s where his brand of humor really hit home with folks at the place I was working.  So, he’s an awesome cartoonist, and very funny.  We’d say things like, “Dilbert’s just like me!” but then realize that we were in color and three dimensional.

Adams also picked Trump as a walk-in winner in 2016 way ahead of the crowd, but was dead wrong on the ‘Rona and the Vaxx®, so he’s not an oracle or a cult leader.  But he does have interesting thoughts and I like reading him, and his podcast, while not good as mine, seems to have attracted a slightly larger audience.

So, when he tossed these Tweets® (or are they Xeets™ now??) up I thought I’d share them.  Here are the rest:

I’ll admit, I’ve been fascinated by UFOs (the old name before they got fancy and started calling them UAPs) since I was a kid.  I’ve been following the unfolding story since the “Tic-Tac®” videos came out in 2017 because any version of an answer for what was observed was interesting.  Either the United States had amazing tech beyond anything, .gov is faking it, or it was something that fell into that big bucket of “aliens and demons and interdimensional beings – oh, my!”

Scott presents the idea that this subject is being brought up at the very moment that lots (and I mean a record number) of other things are brewing in the news:

  • We live in a nation at the brink of civil conflict,
  • White House Resident Joe Biden is facing a presidential scandal, with amazing evidence, that is the biggest since Watergate,
  • We might be seeing a soft coup against Biden right now as the Left wants to jettison him for someone else,
  • (Not anyone else, since no one wants Kamala),
  • Adding a janitor at Mar-A-Largo© to the list of people who are indicted along with Trump because he helped move boxes (really),
  • Hunter seems to have lost more cocaine,
  • Prices for luxuries like food have jumped, and are set to jump again as the Ukraine Conflict enters day 5,000, and
  • Payments for interest on the national debt are starting to be higher than Johnny Depp.

What’s the difference between Hunter Biden and his prostitutes?  His prostitutes probably pay at least some taxes.

Is there something to distract us from?  Yup.

Everything.

Why?  Because that list above isn’t even close to being complete.

This is the danger.  Scott describes it as a secret war, but I’m not sure that there are even two sides, since the FBI, CIA, and most other (but not all) organizations are tied back to supporting the Left.

I bought my ex a big diamond ring.  She said, “Thanks, but we really need a new car.”  Me:  “But they don’t sell fake cars.”

So, is all this fake, the biggest and fakest thing ever?

I don’t know.  It would make sense that it was.  The Soviets Russians seem to have their “it’s all a lie” face on and China’s doing, well, whatever it is that China does when no one’s watching.  Maybe hate-eating a box of Twinkies®?

And as we see all of the shiny, sparkly news going on, keep in mind the important things – your faith, your family, and your friends.  There’s a lot of news that we get that we simply cannot do anything with, that for many of us is nothing more than a signal of what’s going on in the greater world.

We need to come together, find like-minded folks who share your values, and be ready for the changes that are coming in the world, because if they’re using aliens to distract us, well, they must be very scared indeed.

I’m glad that Hillary didn’t win, because then so many people would have moved to Benghazi, because at least there she’d leave them alone.

Don’t let it make you fret, and certainly don’t let it control your mood.

Because Scott is right from the standpoint that we have to keep living our lives, yet keep an eye out for the real story.

So enjoy that kitten while you can – they grow up so fast.

Don’t Ask Why People Are Poor. Ask Why They’re Wealthy.

“Some actually value wealth of knowledge over material wealth, Harper.” – Andromeda

My butler just quit his job here at my stately home.  He said he refused to be ordered around in that manor.

I find it sort of hilarious that economists spend a lot of time fretting about what causes poverty.  I love economics, but often think that they create pocket universes to study that have no real connection to the here and now.  I think that’s called sniffing their own . . . uh . . . emissions.

But sometimes it’s not just economists who ask the wrong question.  As bad as they are, the worst offenders are politicians.  Let’s start with the dumbest question that has been asked in my lifetime (at least in the United States):

“What causes poverty?”

That’s letting Whoopi Goldberg loose in a chocolate factory stupid.  It doesn’t help the chocolate and leaves Whoopi sticky and needing an insulin shot.

But why is that a stupid question?

Because poverty is the dominant condition of humanity everywhere since we didn’t have two rocks to fight over.  People throughout history have been devastatingly, living in mud hut, sleeping in straw beds filled with more bedbugs than straw.  Mary and Joseph had to walk uphill, both ways, to get to the manger.

That’s a joke that keeps you coming back for myrrh.

Only in rare times, and only for a small percentage of the population of the world have some humans felt prosperity.  Fewer still have felt prosperity for most of their lives.  Fewer still experienced enough wealth in their society for them to think that wealth was normal, and poverty was the exception.  We call them Pampered Coastal Elite Leftists.

Why?  Because every farmer in the Midwest, every rancher in the High Plains, and every shrimper in the Gulf (among many, many others) knows how close they are to failure, and how close poverty is, especially if a free-range Whoopi Goldberg is free to eat and trample their crops.

Ma Wilder was impacted by the Depression (she was a lot older than my biological Mom, I was adopted) to the point that, living up on Wilder Mountain she’d save aluminum foil and old pickle jars and have enough food for six months because, “You just never know when you’ll need it.”  It was kinda cute until she made us re-use Q-Tips®.

The Wolf is always at the door.

I couldn’t find the wolf, which I guess makes it a where-wolf.

So, the question to ask isn’t “what makes people poor”.  We can see that as all the systems around us break down like they are now when morons are at the helm.

We should ask the important question:  “What makes us wealthy?”

That’s a much better question to ask, since LBJ’s War on Poverty has just subsidized being poor and created a permanent underclass of voters for Leftists to farm, dependent on the Left for a constant stream of handouts.  If you were late to Leftist language class, that’s their word for “compassion”.

So, what makes us wealthy?  I can only go from history in those places where the world has deviated from the “nasty, brutish, and short” version of life to that “shining city on the hill”.  What matters?

The first thing that comes to mind is Liberty, tempered with Virtue.

When a kangaroo gets hurt, it requires a hop-eration.

Liberty is important, but Virtue tempers Liberty and creates a boundary, otherwise Opium and Fentanyl Den™ would be the new Waffle House®.  Or is that the existing Waffle House© after 2am?

What Liberty does is provides options, for millions of people to make individual decisions on how to better serve fellow citizens.  Virtue means that they shouldn’t destroy their fellow citizens in the process, since that’s generally bad for business.  I guess that cigarette companies have found that it’s okay if you kill them slowly after decades.

Not only that, it’s regulation.  Who loves regulation?  Big companies.  Regulations make it hard for small companies to start, make it hard for them to compete, but increases their profit margin.  I mean, I would have loved to compete with Pfizer® with my “Super Saline Covid Injection” that didn’t cause myocarditis, but they would probably want to make sure mine was entirely WD-40® free.

Which would still likely have been better for people than the mRNA Vaxx.  But who is counting?  Not the CDC®.

What else?

I hear Senator Mitch McConnell stole my rabbit.  Mitch better have my bunny.

Intelligence.  If you ask ChatGPT® about the correlation between intelligence and national prosperity it blows a fuse.  Bing™ chimes right in:  “There is a correlation between IQ and economic prosperity.  A one point increase in IQ is associate with a 4% increase in welfare for the average country.  High IQ is associated with high per-capita GDP and fast economic growth, as well as more equal income distribution.”

Ouch!  That’ a truth bomb that most folks don’t want to hear.  IQ is not really something that anyone can change for the better.  Sure, I can drink a few shots of Jim Beam® and take mine down, but what I’ve got, is what I’ve got, from birth.

But smart people in an economy can keep a more stable economy, and can better grow a complex economy than a group of people who don’t know what vowels are.  Sure, I’d like to think that groups of dumb people could get together and solve the nuclear fusion problem, but I’ve met dumb people – they can’t figure out how to split a restaurant tab without a knife fight then a follow-up sacrifice of a live chicken to Gorto the Destructor god.

Or I could have just said, “Imagine Haiti” and everyone would know what I meant.

Why is Haiti spelled without an “e”?  Simple.  They hate e.

Again, I’m not blaming Haitians for making Haiti, well, Haiti, but if you want to cry, go look over the difference in income between Haiti and the Dominican Republic.  I’ll save you the time – the Dominican Republic has nine times the per capita income, despite being on the same exact island.  The data I found (on the ‘net, mind you) has the Dominican Republic has an average IQ of 80.  Haiti has an average IQ of 67.

Haiti has an average intellectual capacity (if this data is correct) at the level where Social Security would consider them disabled (on average).

Having great resources?  That doesn’t appear to help.  It’s the System.  It’s the People.  If Hong Kong and Singapore can create wealth out of zero resources in a location that almost anyone in the United States would consider so crowded they’d have to make an appointment to change their mind, it’s not space, it’s not stuff.

We can change our laws to allow more Liberty and increase Virtue and reverse the trends away from the nonsense of the last fifty years that encourage large corporate growth at the expense of the People.

But if we change out our People?

Who are we?  Will we see the continuation of turning our cities into Haiti on the half shell?

Studies of the genetics of dead Romans (LINK) showed that “intelligence increased from the Neolithic Era (Z= -0.77) to the Iron Age (Z= 0.86), declines after the Republic Period and during the Imperial Period (Z= -0.27).”

Why did Rome fall?  Many reasons.  It lost Liberty, it lost Virtue, and it replaced Romans with people who weren’t Romans.

Wonder if we’ll learn this time around?

How Feminism Is Destroying The West, One Virgin At A Time

“Wait a minute. Connie Swail? Don’t you mean The Virgin Connie Swail?” – Dragnet (1987)

I slept with a rich girl who was a bit of a tramp once.  Got lobsters.

I’ve had several posts about how sex and economics are intertwined more tightly than a bachelor weekend at Bill Clinton’s place.  It is one of the more misunderstood parts of what is slowly destroying the family in the West.  This, in turn, will gradually destroy the economics of the West.  Without the culture of the West, the West effectively disappears.

This post will be pretty heavy on pictures and memes, almost all of which are as-found.

Let’s take a step back to 1776.  I would love to do that in reality, and (in future posts) we’ll look to see how close we are to that.  But back to the people that were there the first time.  They were, mostly, pretty young.  Sure, there were old dogs like Ben Franklin, but Jefferson was only 33.  Madison, who would steer the Constitution to completion just over a decade later, was only 25.

Man, John Marshall must have had a hard 20 years on him.

Men were young (even though, yes, the paintings above weren’t done in 1776), yet doing amazing and important things.  George Washington was 57 years old at his inauguration, which is astonishing since our likely presidential candidates in 2024 will be a combined 741 years old.

Back then, most men could find a woman and get married, sometimes once or twice (when wife 1.0 died in childbirth).  This led to a certain stability, combined with the family economic structure.  In this case, most families were Corporate Families – everybody worked, and everybody pitched in to keep things going.  The reason that schools had spring breaks wasn’t to go to drink tequila in Cancun and go “woo” but to help plant.  Summers were off to work the farm.  And fall breaks were necessary for the harvest.

Kids were small farm implements, which is why families had lots of them.  Divorces:  uncommon.  Religion:  common. 

Sadly, not a bikini graph.

In my lifetime, the Wilder Family has generally always existed in the tan area, including great-grandparents with a male breadwinner, though Great-grandpa and great-grandma McWilder ran an inn near a railroad where they only rarely killed and ate unsuspecting guests.

The golden age of the Male Breadwinner model was between 1900 and somewhere between 1960 and 1970.  I’d note that around 1920 when women got the right to vote that the decline in Male Bread started, though it really began in earnest at the Great Depression.

At least Canada knows the score.

During World War II, there was a need for female labor as many men were given multi-year European and Pacific Island vacations. When the war was over, the decline continued at the same pace as the dual income model became the norm.

Until feminism and Leftism infected society at large leading to the steepest decline in stable family economic structures.  This predated the economic decline of the United States, which I date to 1970-1973.  Gee, I wonder if they could be related?

Now, Dual-Earner is the predominant economic model, with Female Breadwinner starting to make itself known.

New York Times Headline, 2025:  Fathers’ Day:  Women and Minorities Most Impacted.

Are there any economic or societal consequences to this change in the economic composition of the family?  Why, yes.  It’s killing society.  It’s killing the kids.

The kids even have a name for it:  No Girlfriend, No Work.  There are other names, such as No Heir, No Work.  It seems that young men have become utterly uninvested in society because they don’t have a girlfriend, nor the prospects of one.  Things like Tinder® haven’t helped.  As noted below, one young man was on Tinder® 3 and a half years.  Nearly 40,000 swipes.  2 matches.  Zero dates.

What?  What’s going on?

In their youth, women are all fighting over the smallest number of men, the 9’s and 10’s.  Since on a slow night, a 9 man will hook up with a 5, the 5 now thinks she’s worthy of at least a 9.  Consider a 5 man?

No way.

This is not unique.  This is not cultural.  This is built into the innate preference of women to date up for offspring, and men to create as many offspring as they can.  Here’s an example out of China (LINK) where an (American) teacher gave varying treats to a mixed class of boys and girls.  On the first day, the girls got to pick first, and picked the best treats.  The girls shared only with the two most popular boys, ignoring all of the rest.  On the second day, the boys got to pick first, randomly.  The treats were randomly distributed among the boys, so the girls interacted with all of the boys and everyone was happier.

When women pick, the distribution is (at least) skewed like the graph below, if not more skewed.

Most 22-year-old girls can have an 8+, if it’s 2am and the 8+ is drunk enough.

What are the results?  Virginity in boys (not girls) is rising.  Dating is going down among people who should definitely be dating.

As difficult as that is for guys, women use it as a golden ticket (again, in their early 20s) for fun and prizes:

But when these same women hit their thirties, the game is over.  The 9s and 10s are either married to 9s and 10s, or they’re dating 22-year-olds.  Just ask Leonardo DiCaprio.

Leo’s max age for dating is 25.  And he’ll get 25-year-old 9s and 10s until he’s 75.  Look at Al Pacino, who can barely walk:

I’m sure they’re super compatible, since she was born when he was only 53. 

The woman who was in dozens if not hundreds of relationships in her 20s with the hottest of men will only settle in her mid to late thirties with a man who meets her qualifications.  Those men who would have met those qualifications, being fit, making great money?

They’re married.  They have kids, and that 5 (or less than 5) would rather be a drunken wine aunt then settle.  Women use youth, beauty, and relative chastity to capture worthy men.  If those are wasted on huge numbers of Chads?  Off to the wine and cat farm with an empty womb.  And the military will fight for that “right”, too.

I’m old enough to remember when the military was supposed to kill foreign enemies, not American babies.

Just like most things, this has a very, very simple solution.  To be clear, the solution will be implemented when the circumstances require it.  Oddly, the women will be happier, too.  And we can finally stop listening to women complain about body shaming.

Life Choices Are Resilience Choices: When One Income Is More Than Two

“An idea is like a virus. Resilient. Highly contagious. And even the smallest seed of an idea can grow. It can grow to define or destroy you.” – Inception

I’ve heard that King Charles at his coronation vowed to keep his armies in his sleevies.

During the Great Recession I read an article about the economic resilience of families.  I can’t find it, since I’ve slept several thousand nights since then.  Heck, I’m not sure even Frequent Commentor Ricky could find it.  The conclusion of the article was interesting to me – two-earner families were actually less economically resilient than sole-breadwinner families.

The article went on to explain that in most two income families, the families weren’t stashing tons of money away, but rather spending at about the level of the two incomes – nicer cars, shinier PEZ®, more velvet Elvis paintings.  They were operating on a similar margin as a typical sole breadwinner.  The big difference was in flexibility.  If one member of a two-income family became unemployed, it was often a hit of 50% or more of the family income.

This may be the best painting ever done – the Mona Lisa could not show such elegance.

Sure, losing 50% of family income sounds bad, and I’m sure it is.  The flip side, however, is that if the sole breadwinner lost a job, that family lost 100% of their income.  That sounded worse to me, but those families performed better during hard times.

Why?

It turns out that a dual income family was already operating at nearly 100% efficiency.  The mortgage, the cars, the PEZ®, the private schools, whatever expenses they had were based on Mom and Dad going out and making nearly their theoretical maximum incomes.  To lose half of that is devastating, unless they had saved some of that cash.

It turned out that in economic hard times, the assets that people buy often go down in value.  So, during the Great Recession, people bought hella-nice houses complete with granite avocado sharpeners and walk-in nail-trimming rooms that they could just barely afford the payments on.

But during an economic downturn, the price of the McMansions® went down.  I talked to several folks during the Great Recession that dual-incomed themselves into bankruptcies as they lost jobs and had to walk away from expensive houses in half-finished subdivisions to move across the country to places that they didn’t want to live.  Ouch.  One dude I knew was bitter for just this reason.  I think he was a tool anyway, but this magnified it.

I guess my regular ladder went for a pack of cigarettes and never came back.

Sometimes this economic stress ends in divorce as Dad loses his mojo and Mom loses a bit of respect and better-deals Dad.  This isn’t an indictment of women, more so a realization of the fact that women want (in survey after survey) to have a man that’s more economically successful than them, despite them wanting equal pay.

Contradiction?  Yeah.  But still and amazing stress on a family.

And they want a man who is sensitive but who will also take charge. 

On the other hand, I knew some single income families (intact families) where Dad lost his job, and Mom went into the labor force, Dad took a job to get by, and the family didn’t skip a beat in making payments.  Did things like daycare go up?

Yup, unless Grandma could help out or Grandpa could use the kids as help down at the still.  But the families weren’t flying so close to the flame, so they made it, and in most cases Dad found something again, maybe not as good as before, but close enough so Mom could cut down on hours or quit her job entirely.

I’ve made many, many, many arguments against efficiency.  This is another one.  It’s also insidious because that quest for economic efficiency ends (often) in weakness.

This idea that women should go out into the labor force, make as much as men, and thus make their families more vulnerable to economic dislocation caused by (spins wheel) inflation, COVID, immigration, or recession has been propagandized into the population for decades.  There is hardly any little girl that wasn’t exposed to the idea that she shouldn’t go out and be just as good as a man and that she had some sort of duty to work because, well, because women.

It’s powerful when that’s the propaganda that millions in Gen X and later grew up with.

Chuck Norris told a joke about Jada Smith.  Will Smith then slugged Jada.

To be fair, there are some amazingly capable women that I know who have had very strong careers, executive level stuff, who have kept it together and been great moms, to boot.  In most cases, though, if those women quit tomorrow their family could do fine on their husband’s income.  But that’s not the norm.

As we move into a time of greater economic instability, this will have the impact of making families more dependent on government, because efficiency is the enemy of independence.  This may very well be the plan – dependent people are easier to control.  When the next meal is dependent on pleasing power, people tend to stop testing boundaries, tend to be pushed to conform to power.

The opposite of efficiency is resilience, finding our own way economically, becoming independent rather than dependent.  This is difficult when focused on trying to meet the ideals of a society bent on consumption at all costs.

That’s a big one.  I guess my faith in huge manatee has been restored.

Economically, this flies in the face of propaganda we’ve seen for decades.  It flies in the face of the desired outcome to treat people as economic units whose purpose is to create money to pay of a debt so large as to be unimaginable by any person alive atop a technological framework that is increasingly prone to failure.

Resiliency is our future, the only future outside of living in the pods and eating the bugs, which is a perfect life for an economic unit, but no life for a man.  The end part of the 2020s will be (my guess) the biggest change that we’ll ever see in our lives, which includes the time when we added those extra four digits to the zip code.

The only solution?  Resilience.

Bud Light: “You Never Go Full Bud Light.” Ben And Jerry’s: “Hold My Beer.”

“Lt. Uhura, you’ve interrupted my song. I’m sorry, but there’ll be no ice cream for you tonight.” – Star Trek, TOS

I hear that they’re going to release their famous, “Everyone I don’t like is Hitler” flavor.

I think I might have had Ben & Jerry’s® ice cream once, probably 20 years or more ago.  It was not especially memorable.  I think the flavor was something like, Kill Those Who Worship Jesus Crunch, but I sure couldn’t taste the hate.  It was more of a pistachio flavor.

I can certainly remember the first company that I said, “I’m not going to buy your stuff because you hate me”, and that was Levi Strauss & Co.© products, including anything made by Dockers™.  Why?  They committed to the abolition of private gun ownership sometime in the 1990s or early 2000s.  Although I hadn’t heard the phrase BFYTW, it was my BFYTW moment.  I resolved to not buy things from people who hated me.

Sadly, Levi’s® is still in business.

On Monday, I wrote about the Frankfurt School, a dedicated group of commies that dedicated their lives to destroying all that is good and wholesome in the world in order to replace it with soulless communism.  I imagine they were great at parties.  Monday’s post, rather, was about how there was a continual attack on the people of the West about their history.

The funny thing about being exposed to the idea that there are a group of people that hate America and all it stood for is that their power diminishes.  Yeah, subtle propaganda still works even when you know about it, but in 2023 the propaganda is so unsubtle as to be confused with a Brawndo® ad.

It’s got what plants crave:  it’s got electrolytes.

You can’t unsee the propaganda.  And, you’re soaking in that propaganda.  Here’s the latest two minutes hate, delivered right on time for your 4th of July pleasure by Ben & Jerry’s™:

Ben and Jerry saw an ice cream truck in their neighborhood and ran it down.  “What do you guys want?”  “Nothing, we just wanted to tell you we’re vegan.”

Yeah, you read that right.  They just Bug Lighted® themselves.  They were trying to

I wandered over to the Twitter® comment section on this, and it was bloodier than people being stuck between Hunter Biden and a pile of cocaine.  It was worse than that, even after you factor in the mass of venereal diseases that must be the only things holding Hunter’s underwear together.  After looking through them at length, I found zero comments supporting whatever Leftist social media genius that they left with the password on July 3.

But social media from large conglomerates like Unilever®, which owns Ben & Jerry’s©, don’t do anything that isn’t planned.  Bud Light’s® problems aren’t the result of some crazy person acting on their own.  And Ben & Jerry™ intended this.

The virtue signal Ben & Jerry® was trying to light was one where Mount Rushmore would be given back to the American Indians that owned it.  Of course, the American Indians who owned it killed a batch of previous American Indians to take it, and since the place around Mount Rushmore isn’t exactly the garden spot of the world, they were kicked out of a much nicer place.

It warmed my heart that some nice person asked the most relevant question:  “Hey, Ben & Jerry’s®, why don’t you start?”

To me it’s like what I want to say to the government when they want me to give up my guns.  “You first.”

The amazing part to me is that this has nothing at all to do with ice cream.  It’s about projecting the woke values of a company owned by faceless corporate overlords to erase the history of the United States.  It has nothing to do with ice cream, and everything to do with an agenda.  After you see it, you can’t unsee it.  I’ll just re-print the relevant Stonetoss:

Burgers?

Ben & Jerry’s©, and, by proxy their corporate overlords are selling hate.  The hate?  Against you.  To be clear, this should come as a zero surprise since Ben & Jerry® hate you and want to erase you and your forefathers from history because you’re inconvenient to a business model that wants to sell only to nupeeple who are perfect economic units.

Heck, if they’re bored, they’ll remove American Indians from their products just to make nupeeple:

Is Land O’ Lakes® saying, “Keep the land, get rid of the Indians”?

Me?  I’m hoping that Ben & Jerry’s® becomes Been Gone & Jerry’s©, an out of business ice cream company that was put out of business because it hated its customers and the country that made it.  Then they can have Wilder Ice Cream©.  Maybe I’ll make a flavor called Been Gone & Jerry’s™.  That one gets most of its flavor from vanilla and me taking pleasure from Ben & Jerry’s® failing.

One Problem? People Who Don’t Want To Solve The Problem.

“You want the solution to inflation? Hi, friends. Marshall Lucky here for New Deal Used Cars, where we’re lowering inflation not only by fighting high prices, not only by murdering high prices, but by blowing the living s**t out of high prices. Yes sir. Here’s an example. It’s a 1972 Cadillac Coupe DeVille, for sixty-two ninety-nine. That price . . . is too high.” (shoots the car) – Used Cars

But I hear he does know Tae Kwon Dough.

I’m amused that something called the “Inflation Reduction Act” has the same initials as the Irish Republican Army, but at the same time is a lot more destructive than the IRA ever was.  The idea that solving inflation involves the government spending metric-Lizzo-Tons® of cash on boondoggles that will benefit Democratic donors is an idea that only someone with a child’s intellect could come up with, so at least we know what the Veep has been doing when she’s done with the construction paper for the day.

Here’s Brandon’s Tweet®:

I also hear he’s a fan of putting out fires by throwing more gasoline on them.

Don’t think this is a naked Leftist slush-pile for donors that will make Sam Bankman-Fraud’s scheme of taking American taxpayer dollars given to Ukraine and donating them after deposit to Leftist political schemes in the United States?  This is bigger by far.  And not only that, it’s being overseen by that paragon of virtue, John Podesta.

Yeah, that same John Podesta who on a scale of 1-10 for being creepy rates “Drag Queen Story Hour”.

As Podesta always says, “If you want you be a successful stalker, you must do the following.”

Green Energy isn’t about energy, it’s about the green.  And the particular green in question is money.  The alchemy that the Left wants to work is to give it to people and companies who give money to the Left.  Hakuna Matata, the Circle Of Politics!

How does it work?  Simple!  Pay taxes, have the Left direct the money to people who support the Left.  This is what they mean by “Our Democracy®” since the people involve in “Our©” don’t include you.  Or me.  They include people who support the Left, or can be bought to support the Left.  Green (remember, that means money laundering) energy company Solyndra™ received over $535,000,000 in loans from Obama, and produced nothing but accounting irregularities.

This was actually the subject of the 1994 Nobel Prize® in Economics.  I’m still waiting for one in blogging, and have my fingers crossed, but regardless, the idea was that if government could give everyone in the United States $1, it would be a much better deal for the political weasels to give three people $100 million.  This is also the basis for every decision made in Congress.

Cats are better than dogs.  Cats don’t work for the cops.

(Also, for the record, there is a Nobel Prize® for Literature, and if some nice reader would nominate me for a Nobel©, then I would be one of the very few nominated for both a Nobel™ and a Hugo®.  Winning?  Who cares, it’s an honor just to be nominated.)

The Nobel Prize™ was won by three dudes, one of which you might be familiar with:  Graham John Nash, who also wrote Teach Your Children Well was played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind.  Sorry about the confusion.  I guess Graham is no Nash-trophysicist.

The result of this is a very, very unserious economy.  Green Energy in most cases just means, “La-la-la I’m not listening, I can’t hear you because my fingers are in my ears, so the laws of thermodynamics do not exist and if they do, Congress can pass a law to change those laws” energy.  Unserious.

I hear that there is now a way to make the turbine blades 99% recyclable (true!).  All you have to do is chop them up into small pieces and ship them down to Louisiana where more energy than was used to create the blades is used to recycle them!  What a win! (/sarcasm) 

AOC’s chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti even let the mask slip and noted that the real goal of Green Energy policy.  In his own words, according to Sam Ricketts, WaPo® reporter:  “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal, is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.  Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?  Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing.”

The entire economy.  Why?  Because they don’t like you.  They want to funnel money to the people that give them the big shrimp parties, and give them money to put out ads so they can run again.  The thing that fuels Washington, D.C. isn’t electricity.  It is cash.  And shrimp.  And the quest for power – over you.

If we arrested all the corrupt politicians, who would we vote for in November of 2024?

The idea that solving the problems that we have with our economy is hard is laughable.  Solving those problems is trivial.  Really.  Why does no one do it?  Solving those problems is painful.

  • If solving them involves increasing the interest rates until the banks squeal, and some of them fail?
  • If solving them involves the destruction of entire portions of the economy only kept alive via corruption?
  • If solving them involves reducing the payments to those who could, but don’t contribute?
  • If solving them involves changing the rules so that people who game Wall Street rather than producing anything can’t rig the game?

Washington, D.C. won’t be for them, because they’d rather let a paper cut turn into an amputation than make any decision that will stop the shrimp parties with the beautiful people who are just rubbing their hands at the idea of an “Inflation Reduction Act”.