Weimerica – Page 14 – Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

Watch How Biden Uses This One Weird Trick To Turn The United States Into A Third World Country

“Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia. He was an English Guy. He came to fight the Turkish.” – The Hollywood Knights

I asked for a book on oil, and the librarian suggested the non-friction section. (you’ll be able to figure out which are my memes in this post)

This has been a very consequential week in American history, and though I see the seeds of (hopefully peaceful) revolt that will eventually end in a restoration, the other seeds I see this week show that rough times are up ahead. I’ll discuss Trump in conjunction with Monday’s upcoming Civil War 2.0 Weather Report, but today I’ll focus on a much more momentous development: the Collapse of the Dollar Empire.

This week several major moves happened, all of which are negative for the United States. Heck, someone did a meme of this – I’d quote them, but I just found this info snippet without attribution:

If there was a children’s book of Joe Biden’s Very Bad Terrible No Good Week, well, this would be it, but knowing Joe it would have to be a scratch and sniff.

The United States has had several things going for it in the Post World War II era:

Lots of nuclear weapons,
A monopoly on PEZ® dispenser licensing in the world’s biggest PEZ™ market,
The premier military force in the world,
The premier economy in the world, and,
The reserve currency of the world.

The first one is self-explanatory. We even used that threat successfully several times, especially when Kissinger convinced the Soviets (with Nixon’s permission) that Nixon was unstable and often flew into rages and just might decide that he’d trade Moscow for the East Coast. To paraphrase Teddy Roosevelt, the idea is to “act insane and have a massive nuclear arsenal”, or, as it is also known, “my ex-wife’s divorce strategy”.

The second one is just a reflection of the cultural dominance that the United States had. There were McDonald’s® restaurants calorie dispensing units around the world, but the most prominent foreign restaurant most Americans know is the International House of Pancakes®, which I assume is from Bulgaria or some place. Plus no one else could make Elmer Fudd™ PEZ™ dispensers.

They also don’t like tank tops.

The United States also had the premier military in the world. Period. We spent trillions of dollars emulating the successful bits of the Wehrmacht, so we were totally ready to fight World War II part II, if everyone agreed. Only one country wanted to play (Iraq) so we showed them what we could do if an enemy gave us six months to prepare along with the previously pre-staged equipment in Saudi Arabia. Not content with that L, they went for a rematch.

We also built the best economy in the world. Sure, it had ups and downs, and American cars manufacturers were stunned by Japanese quality in the 1970s, but we really did catch up, and by the 1990s were producing stuff that didn’t suck. We led in technological and information systems. By many measures, though, we peaked in 1973, and then the decline started. I might add that was around the time the Hart Cellar Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 started being felt.

Huh. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

They hated Trump, yet the lines didn’t form up to head south . . .

More potent than nuclear weapons was the economic policy of the United States – it was called dollar diplomacy. Since the Soviet Union’s idea of diplomacy was sending burly Russian women to show foreigners how to use diesel tractor made in Tractor Collective Factory 231 that had all the charm of a T-34 tank and all the reliability of something made by workers that considered a hammer a precision instrument, who were fueled on vodka and cabbage. Obviously, a foreign head of state could choose those cool tractors that weighed in at 34 tons (45 kiloliters). That presented a problem. In no country that I know (outside of the Soviet Union) could you trade a behemoth tractor that could double as a tank for hot chicks and booze.

Foreign leaders therefore adopted the “take the Yankee money” attitude, because mistresses need more than what the Soviet tractor lubrication manual could provide.

The really weird and cool side effect of this dollar dominance is we could just print as many of these things as we wanted, send them overseas, and people would send us stuff. Heck, that was too much work, so we invented a computer payment system so that we could pretend we printed dollars, send people a receipt, and they’d send us booze, cars, compact disc players, and, well, anything. I hear cocaine was popular in the 1980s.

I’m no rube. I saw Scarface.

I was disappointed the first time I saw Scarface – he didn’t really know anything about scarves.

But there was one little, tiny thing that made the dollar so prominent. Oil.

That brings us to Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal. He got along okay with the West, hated commies, and tried to modernize (somewhat) Saudi Arabia. Faisal also led the Oil Embargo of 1973 and 1974 (related to U.S. support of Israel during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War). This generated a lot of money for the Saudis as well as economic chaos in the West.

Oddly, Saudi king Faisal was, um, ventilated by his American-educated nephew in 1975. And the new Saudi King agreed to buy and sell oil only in dollars.

Huh. Surely those things weren’t connected?

Likewise, through the 1980s, the Saudis sold lots and lots of oil cheaply at the request of Reagan to bankrupt the Soviet Union, make the dollar triumphant, and leave the United States as the sole superpower.

If Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg had a kid, would it be called Slush Puppy?

One major reason the dollar was the reserve currency of the world is that it was the only currency that oil was bought and sold in. It became the de facto settlement currency because of that and the highly developed financial systems that made the transfer of billions of dollars effortless and easy.

That’s the history lesson.

In 2017, one of Trump’s first official visits was to Saudi Arabia. They even had that weird moment where they put their hands on a glowing glow to power up some sort of Saudi CIA that would help fight terrorism. Relations were good.

In two years, Biden has conducted a stunning array of foreign policy missteps that has unwound all of the work done since 1973. One of the powers of the dollar as a weapon is that if you use it, maybe it isn’t so important, and if people feel really threatened?

I wonder if we’ll start calling our sanctions “Special Financial Operations”?

They’ll create a system where it won’t hurt them. Russia’s a case in point. Regardless of how their military is doing (I don’t trust either side to analyze this one) their economy really hasn’t been hurt in this conflict. It was hurt in 2014, but they planned for the disruption, and from the reports I’ve recently seen, they’re doing fine. For Russians, which wasn’t much to start with.

The point that Biden missed (and that your humble correspondent picked up on immediately) is that Russia doesn’t need dollars since they make their own stuff, with the exception of tracksuits, iPhones®, and porn. They can figure out how to make new Vodka-Pepsi® or Vodka-Starbucks™, but the world still needs their grain, fertilizer, oil, and natural gas.

Biden has done the near impossible in a little over two years as Resident of the White House.

He’s pushed China closer to Russia.
He’s pushed Saudi Arabia closer to Iran.
He’s created a situation where large-scale trades are going to be conducted in currency other than the dollar on a regular basis.
He’s drawn the Strategic Petroleum Reserve down levels not seen since 1984.
He’s working on maximizing inflation while spending everything possible.

In Saudi Arabia, all the bike thieves say, “Look, Ma, no hands!”

But Joe has shown that a previous statement by Barack Obama to be correct:

“Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up.”

And he’s got 581 more days to the election. And we’ve got 656 days until the next inauguration.

There’s A Mind Virus. And A Cure.

“Exactly. An illusion, placed in our minds by this planet’s inhabitants.” – Star Trek, TOS

Well, tell us how you really feel, Elon. All photo and meme content “as-found”.

Elon Musk Tweeted® the above on Saturday.

He was replying to another person who was walking down Market Street with a friend.

Her friend said, “I’ve never seen anything like this.” She continued, “I love SF, but what the city has become is unconscionable. Several pockets of 20 to 30 people all off their heads. A number of them with pants barely on. Zombies. The walking dead. Cops observing the proceedings from 100 feet away.”

Elon’s Tweet© was in response to that. Of course, when I looked it up to make sure that it was real (it was April Fools on Saturday), the media had tried to spin it that Elon was relating it to mass layoffs. He was not. He was referring to the disease of Leftism, which he referred to as “this self-destructive mind virus”.

And although I don’t think of Elon as any sort of savior for the Right, he often says things that are so provocative that it drives the Left nuts. They can’t even drive their Teslas™ with the amount of Smug™ they were promised because Elon has broken their Twitter® echo chamber.

That’s not going to win him friends in San Francisco or Washington, D.C., or with any Leftist, since the things that they want to avoid are the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.

The theme of this is inversion. Let’s take an example that you’ve probably seen before:

What’s the difference between a Calvin® model and a bakery? The bakery is supposed to have rolls.

I’m sure that the model on the bottom might be a perfectly nice person. I don’t know her. She also might have a great personality and might be an excellent singer, or poet, or writer. But in any world where beauty is measured objectively (and it can be), well, let’s hope she has that nice personality.

But that’s the nature of inversion, replacing virtue with vice. And the self-destructive mind virus Elon is speaking of? It’s Evil. I don’t know Jack Fell (this is an as-found with no context) but he spells it out nicely in this Tweet® (or Gab®?):

My friend’s family is very racist. He brought his Asian girlfriend home to meet them, and his wife and kids were very rude to her.

The level of propaganda for Evil has reached “Comically Satanic Villain Plotting To Destroy Society” on the Wilder Scale. Of particular and topical concern is the LGBTQI+ (it just keeps growing and I’m sure will soon include people sexually attracted to cactus) agendas. It started with an appeal to emotion – let adults do what they want behind closed doors. This flew in the face of many facts, but it was sufficiently strong to move public opinion.

No one called me anorexicphobic when I was against teen girls starving themselves, some to death, because they had a mental delusion that they were fat. I wanted them cured. But suddenly, because a five-year-old picked up a Barbie®, now he has to wear dresses and be called Nancy and then be jacked up on chemicals that will wreck many of his body’s normal processes and if I don’t agree and want them to be helped instead, I’m transphobic?

Nah. I’m not. I’m sympathetic. These kids need help, not hormones, and society should say so.

Let me give you a taste of how bad it’s going now:

I cut out the pictures of the kids that were pictured on the Drag Camp ad, since I view it to be among the most corrosive and exploitive thing I’ve seen in months. It is putting the ordinary and boring next to the horrific – summer camp right next to exploited children.

David Foster Wallace called this “Lynchian,” referring to the director David Lynch. That’s what this is – putting the ordinary and boring, kids growing up and coming of age through the typical drama, and then adding in ghoulish parents and doctors talking about mutilating a child to conform to this peculiar mass hysteria. And normalizing it. Oh, and to top it off, anyone who objects to this monstrosity is denounced and cancelled.

I wonder who could be behind this . . . could it be . . .

As I’ve said before, this practice of transforming lust and deviance into a virtue above actual virtues is something old and awful – Evil.

The mind virus continues. Looking back at COVID, it appears that at every case, the people who were opposed to the crazed response and rules were correct. Being skeptical of the Vaxx turns out to become more validated daily – today the World Health Organization® came out and noted that kids and teens really shouldn’t be experimented on with a (now verified) gene changing experimental mRNA technique, and that (if the stats are correct) that same Vaxx now is likely behind a 25% increase in mortality and a decrease in fertility of women.

But this is what the Mind Virus made people say:

I bet he’s fun at parties.

They wanted people who disagreed with government mandates crushed. I guess, inside every little Leftist, is a Stalin wanting to break free. And nothing makes them madder than Trump. Nothing.

Questions that I’m sure that they don’t want you to ask . . .

Because I disagreed with them on a fundamental level on the way that I would manage my own health, they wanted me fired, broke, my children removed, and if I still wouldn’t relent, dead. And it was a joke to them.

We’re not as far down the road as some countries. Great Britain appears to be well down the road to utter insanity, and also proving why the 2^nd Amendment was a really good idea:

I guess the Brits don’t hire cops with self-awareness in mind.

The “self-destructive mind virus” that Elon says was being spread by Twitter® still is, but now people have the ability to speak out against it on Twitter™. Would I call Twitter© a force for Good? Not yet. I do believe that the arguments for the Good always beat Evil over time, and unmuzzling the Good is a great first step.

But it’s not nearly enough. The Left has pushed this insane agenda to fundamentally repudiate and destroy the family to the point where normal people are done with it – messing with the kids is always a step too far. Is this a temporary pullback, so that the Left can consolidate its gains while pretending we should be okay with the present situation, and then push further later?

I’m hoping not, because I see the complete moral capitulation to inversion of the most cherished values that we have being examined and rejected by a good portion of the base of the American people. We see what happens when the Left has full run, and it is the inversion of a good American life. Besides, there are things other than the recognition of a failed society we can learn from The Walking Dead:

After a fair trial, of course.

Deflation? Inflation? All I Want Is A Good Steak.

“Oh, my God! The automatic pilot! He’s deflating!” – Airplane!

I went to see a hedge fund manager at work and punch him in the face. And then get a Quarter Pounder®.

Welcome to the next step down. But how is this going to go?

First, there are signs that this will lead to more inflation than a Kardashian’s butt experiences in an entire season of whatever crap they’re doing on TV. Here are some signs pointed towards inflation:

It’s inflation season. That comes right after blowing up Russian pipeline season, duck season, rabbit season, duck season, rabbit season, and train derailment season.
$2 trillion (a number no doubt made up because it sounded good to whatever political appointee approves these things) of newly printed cash has been allocated to “stabilize” the banking system.

When Bernie Madoff stole his investors money, the Fed® didn’t backstop the investors, even though they couldn’t keep up with the compounding interest of Madoff’s lies. That was deflationary. But backstopping all bank customers, everywhere?

That’s more inflationary than Stormy Daniels, umm, attributes. I heard a rumor that half of Oprah’s money was in Silicon Valley Bank®. She got very upset when she thought that Elon Musk would be the only remaining African-American billionaire.

Everyone needs a backup. Mars is Elon’s planet-B.

The latest announcement from the Fed® on their plans to stop inflation sounded desperate. I imagine that Janet Yellin would offer to learn poll dancing if she thought it would lower inflation. I think that might work, since never in the history of mankind have so many dollar bills jumped back into pockets than when Janet walks on stage.

What about things that indicate that deflation might be around the corner?

During the implosion of Silicon Valley Bank™, it sounds like all of their bondholders and shareholders got vaporized. So, at least $15 billion and probably closer to $30 billion in cash was vaporized faster than a hoagie at Oprah’s house.
The stock market is down. When the market goes down, the money doesn’t power a secret spaceship, it just disappears like my biological father did when my biological mother got pregnant.
When interest rates go up, housing prices go down. Why? People buy houses based on borrowed money, and higher interest rates don’t increase the amount of money that they pay at (spins wheel) the PEZ™ factory. Nope, it just makes the house payment more expensive, unless the price of the house goes down. This is deflationary, because right now housing value is vaporizing like crack at Hunter’s place on a Saturday night.

The Chairman of the Fed® thought he was a magician, but he had chocolate on his shirt. He thought he had Twix® up his sleeve.

Here’s another, weird, example.

While I was writing this, The Mrs. walked by my secluded writing spot in the sitting room, and asked me, “Hey, want a steak?” I had a scotch already, so, that’s perfect!

“What answer do you expect me to give you?” She cooked the steak. This was a perfectly marbled ribeye, an inch and a half thick. She seared the sides, and it let out a gentle “moo” as I cut into it.

What did that ribeye cost? $12 a pound.

Why?

Well, there’s been a drought in prime cattle country. Cattle gotta drink.

The Mrs. and her brother own the better part of a buttload of land. The year before they got $6,000 for the hay. They fertilized. After Russia invaded the Ukraine, fertilizer prices spiked. They decided to just grow whatever grew and not spend the $3,000 to fertilize it.

They made $6,000 for the hay, same as the year before even though they had half the hay this year.

Sorry if that joke was corny.

For cattle farmers, growers, leaders, ranchers prices went up, but what they got for a cattle didn’t. Therefore? In March of 2023, I can get a pound of the best ribeye ever to grace a cast iron skillet for $12, whereas two Double Quarter Pounders With Cheese™ would cost me . . . $12.

This is not a hard choice.

In 2024 or 2025, though, I expect that same beef to cost double or more. I’ve been nagging my brother in law to get some cattle.

Why?

I like steak way more than the crap they serve at McDonald’s®. So, in some places, there is deflation right now.

Houses.
I read today that there are several projects in Vegas that just received stop orders because the financing fell through. If a project is a good idea at 1% interest and 2% inflation, it may not be a good idea while skydiving with a bag of loose change as your parachute.
Plans that don’t have financing. In an inflationary environment, a plan that doesn’t have financing is as useful as a waterproof towel.

There’s also been a rush towards our border of illegals that are desperate to come to a horribly awful and racist country. Is this inflationary, or deflationary?

Inflationary. Illegals do take jobs that are low on the pay scale, so that strawberries are 0.03% cheaper. Is that deflationary?

Can we call Transformers® Carmen?

No. It’s inflationary. Illegals do make things like strawberries, lettuce, and cocaine cheaper, but they do actually cost about $10,000, each, for every year that they’re here for things like welfare, schools, roads, etc. So a family of five? Costs everyone at least $50,000 per year.

Where does the cash come from?

That’s the genius! We print it!

So, inflation or deflation?

Yes.

Our currency is going to zero, probably sooner than many might anticipate. What will go up? In 2023, not cows. But in 2025? Yeah, nearly certainly.

Some things will come down – I can’t predict them all. But the Fed™ will never stop printing. Their choice is this:

Increase rates and blow up banks, the stock market, and house prices.
Keep rates the same and blow up the currency.

The current plan.

The currency is toast. So is Biden’s chance at re-election. This time next year? I expect that we’ll see all of the above in full motion. I predicted in 2018 that 2025 we’d see a big breakdown, and I’m not betting against that now. Biden will likely go down as the single worst resident of the White House in history.

I only hope that this complete economic and societal breakdown will finally rid us of the scourge of Kardashians. At least then it will be worth it.

How An Army Commercial Shows We’re Rapidly Falling Apart

“Chicks dig me, because I rarely wear underwear and when I do it’s usually something unusual. But now I know why I have always lost women to guys like you. I mean, it’s not just the uniform. It’s the stories that you tell.” – Stripes

I didn’t know I was a lycanthrope. I guess that makes me an unawarewolf.

The United States’ Army has a new ad campaign out. The slogan, however, is fairly familiar: “Be All That You Can Be.” This became the slogan of the Army’s recruiting campaign back when they had to convince people to join because driving a fast car like Burt Reynolds while marrying busty blondes was a much more interesting career option.

That slogan lasted from 1980 to 2001, with “Army Of One®” was replaced by Call of Duty™ online mode. The Air Force was encouraged by that slogan, and decided to use “Air Force Of Only One Plane®” since that was all they could afford if they decided to go with the F-35.

But things have not gone well for Big Green recently. I heard in the last year, they actually recruited only one soldier, and he was a decoy. I kid. They had a goal of something like 60,000, but only recruited 45,000. I’m guessing that’s because the other 15,000 decided that working at McDonald’s® was a better option.

Want me to stop telling Rolling Stones jokes? You can’t always get what you want.

And, why not? The videos showing recent Army performance have been, um, less than stellar. From the pullout of Afghanistan, to Biden forcing troops to take the Vaxx or take a hike, it’s been bad. The commercials for recruitment have likewise been horrific. If it’s not good enough for the wise Latina child joining the armed forces and then looking back on her lesbian biracial parents who gave her hormone replacement therapy at age three, well, it’s not good enough for me.

I think the Army missed some real gems in going back to that old slogan. They could have chosen some of these:

Join the Army, where the camouflage makes you invisible to your ex.
Join the Army, and let us take care of your social life . . . because you won’t have one.
The Army: Where you can kill two birds with one grenade.
The Army: If you needed a good excuse to shave your head.
Join the Army: Where you’ll find that “hurry up and wait” isn’t just a saying, it’s a way of life.
The Army: “You’ll learn to stay awake while standing up.”
Join the Army and see the world, through the scope of a rifle.
The Army: “You’ll make lifelong friends. Or enemies. Or both.
The Army, where you can put your Call of Duty™ skills to use, just without the respawn.
Join the Army, and get one free PEZ™ dispenser every year.

Why did the magician sleep at Motel 6®? Because only he could make the stains disappear.

I mean, who traditionally makes up the Army, anyway?

Actually, white dudes. In the terminology of today, people who were born male at birth and score low on the diversity index. Hell, in 2023, I’m wondering when “mail” will show up as a gender – “Oh, baby, put me in the big slot! I’m an oversized package!”

I looked up the makeup of the Army using the most recent statistics I could find. They’re kind of murky, because they don’t break out “Hispanic” by itself. I guess I can understand that. Even though I’ve been described as “so Danish that’s the picture in the dictionary” I can also claim that at least 25% of my ancestors were born in Mexico. Were they Danish?

Yeah. Still don’t understand how they dealt with the sunburn. But Pugsley can check that box on the college application.

2 is a prime number. That’s kind of odd, right?

So, the stats I could find are murky. It looks like the numbers of white people in the Army has gone down 2% in two years from 70% to 68%. And what’s one percent? About 5,000 guys. So, of their missing 15,000, you could make an argument that 10,000 of them might have been white guys that didn’t join up.

I know three kids that were friends of The Boy that were gung ho about joining the military, until November, 2020. Then?

“Nah, I think I’ll work.”

So, to recreate the idea that perhaps the Army wants white guys to join up, the reversion to the “Be All That You Can Be™” slogan was the reaction from the Army. To be clear, they’re still using food made before 1960, ammo made before 1970, so why not a slogan that was made in 1980?

Oh, Francis, where are you now?

Enter the new video. Where in the last few, the only thing not visible was a white guy, this video is chock full of white guys. At one location where the video was stored on YouTube©, the comment section was more disastrous than French naval performance at Trafalgar. I mean hundreds and hundreds of comments that, well, I’ll just post a few of them and let you draw your own conclusions. I did not cherry pick these, and did not see a single, not one, zero positive comments. Feel free to go give a look yourself – the video is here (LINK).

Yup, pretty bad. Both of my sons have received text messages from Army recruiters, heck, as late as 2016, I presented to The Boy the options of West Point and Colorado Springs for colleges. He noped out of both choices. Pugsley is not at all interested.

I am not disappointed – rather, the opposite, and became doubly so after the decision by the Biden Administration to force armed forces members to Vaxx up. Sure, the DOD rescinded the requirement this year on January 10, but that didn’t help the people who already Vaxxed up. Wonder if the VA is going to cover that?

Regardless, I would hazard a guess that confidence in the cohesion of the country is lower than at any time in my life. Perhaps the real slogan should be “Be All That You Can Binge-Watch On Netflix®”?

Silicon Valley Bank? You’re Soaking In It.

“Why don’t we pretend he didn’t die? Just for a bit . . .” – Weekend at Bernie’s

Why can’t Ray Charles drive? He’s dead. (Outside of this one, memes are “as found”)

On March 15, 44 B.C., Julius Caesar was walking to work, since Rome was declared by Gretanius Thunbergium to be a “walkable city” because she was concerned about the sweat of galley slaves and horses making the oceans too salty, thus enraging Neptune, the god of the sea.

This particular day was a good one in Rome, and the bright warm Sun shone down on Caesar as he made it to the Senate. Caesar loved the Senate, since all of the Senators were really cool and he loved hanging out with them to watch the gladiator games every Sunday.

Then, on arriving at the Senate? Caesar was stabbed in the back by raising interest rates, and, with his last, dying words, he said, “Please, take this salad dressing, and remember me by it. Oh, and name a way that babies are born after me. And Kaiser and Czar might be cool titles for kings in the future.”

Okay, that might not be exactly what happened. But you can’t prove it wasn’t, because it’s not on YouTube®.

But interest rates have been a thing since long before even Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, took the throne, and then became a human pincushion. And they’ve been gumming up society both before then, and also since then.

Last Friday, on March 10, a curious thing happened – the 19^th largest bank, Silicon Valley Bank, went tango uniform. To paraphrase Python, Monty:

“It’s a stiff. Bereft of life. It rests in peace. If you hadn’t backfilled the coffers with Federal Reserve® notes, it would be pushing up daisies. Its metabolic processes are now history. It’s off the twig. It’s kicked the bucket. It’s shuffled off the mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleeding choir invisible. THIS IS AN EX-BANK.”

How, exactly, does a Norwegian blue parrot bank die so quickly?

The truth is, it has been dead for a bit. I’ll explain. You can get explanations of this elsewhere, but none of them will be as funny, since that’s what my job is.

When banks take in money, they have several options of what they can do with it. They can bury it in Mason® jars in the back 40, they can loan it to other people, or they can park it in an investment. Back in 2008, the big financial crisis was that the loans were to people that could never have paid the money back. I was offered a guaranteed approval home loan on a house (with zero down!) that was ten times my income.

“Why would you offer me that? I could never pay that back?” was my response.

The loan lady sighed audibly over the phone. “I know, but I’m required to tell you that.”

It’s like they never learned anything.

So, part of the problem in 2008 was that the loans were junk because some folks said, “I could use a pool surrounded by marble columns with a champagne fountain built out of PEZ™. I’m in!” even though they only made $32 dollars a month. They even had a name for these loans – NINJA – “No Income, No Job”.

These banks also gambled with the cash of the average depositor, investing in champagne PEZ© fountain manufacturers. Hey, how could they lose?

Oh, yeah. Things don’t go up forever. So when they end? It gets ugly.

The response to that by the Fed® was to use a cash cannon and barrage the banks. The idea was this, the banks would soak up the cash to paper over the bad debts, and if they had extra cash, they’d park it at the Fed™. Essentially, the Fed™, working with the banks, made sure that the bankers could keep getting big bonuses, not face criminal charges like the average small-town banker might if he stole the cash from the deposits to pay for his 4.5 out of 10 mistress and trips to Vegas.

It’s like there are different rules for you and I.

Nope. They got to keep their penthouses, private jets, and bimbos. In order to keep this nonsense so it wouldn’t implode, the one thing the Fed™ had to do was keep interest rates low. If the Fed© had tried this in 1975, or 1985, or 1995, the world would have punished it by driving the value of the dollar down (faster), cratering purchasing power and the economy.

But after 2008, there was no other big power. Japan was a basketcase, Europe was still the Jekyll an Hyde level continent, with Western Europe mainly concerned about how many “Syrians” they could import, and Eastern Europe mainly working out how to make more potatoes so they could make more vodka. Roads? Why?

That left the United States as, amazingly, still the only kid with a currency anyone trusted, even though we were spending like a sixteen-year-old with dad’s credit card.

Huh, wonder when YouTube® will ban people for this?

Oh, the Left is already trying to censor people. Nevermind.

I like the cut of his jib.

Not now. The COVID world created the Trump/Biden policy of “How can we spend more money today?” Contrast that with China’s “No body count is too high” policy, and, oddly, the world began to trust the United States less. Add in Biden’s incoherent policy of a.) letting wars start and b.) pushing away allies like the Saudis, and now we live in a world driven by chaos.

And we’ve lost the trust of the world.

So, the banks still do the same three things with the cash deposited in their banks: Mason™ jars in the backyard, loan it, or invest it. Last time, the banks invested in whatever crap floated in the window. That was silly.

The banks thought they had cracked the code: this time, they invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds.

Yay! That’s what a sober person would do, right?

Well, maybe. But when a bank buys a 10-year bond that has an attached interest rate of 0.08%, and the stated inflation rate is 6%, the value of that 10-year bond craters. Interest rates go up? Bond values go down. It turns out Silicon Valley Bank™ had some of these bonds. How many? Enough to wipe out all of the shareholder and bondholder (yeah, they bought and sold bonds) value. And it’s not limited to them. Here’s the take on the unrealized losses of the biggest banks in America:

Losers in 1901, Losers in 1921, Losers in 1929, Losers in 1937, Losers in 1945, Losers in 1948, Losers in 1953, Losers in 1957, Losers in 1950, Losers in 1960, Losers in 1969, Losers in 1973, Losers in 1980, Losers in 1981, Losers in 1990, Losers in 2001, Losers in 2007 . . . Oh, wait, the banks didn’t lose anything, it was just regular people.

The FDIC insures deposits to $250,000. Except when (reportedly) Oprah had half a billion in that particular bank. Turns out that the United States blinked: “You get all your money, and you get all your money, and you get all your money,” because Oprah is more important than you and I.

Two other banks have failed already. You can see that some of their CEOs were serious people only worried about the welfare of their depositors.

Yup, the “adults” are in charge.

This will not result in an immediate run. The Fed® and the Treasury will continue to backstop the banks because to do otherwise would collapse the system. They even say so. Valuing assets “at par” means at what the banks paid for them. I own a car from 2003. In Fedspeak® that asset would be valued at the initial purchase price, despite the fact that it has one light-second worth of miles (kilopascals) on it. Here’s proof:

See? I’m a respected journalist. Besides, I believe I am the VERY FIRST person to note that the reserve ratio had gone to zero. You can check it out. This will help my lawyer if I’m ever sued. (Serious about the very first part.)

The Fed™ is screwed. They want to keep Biden in office, which requires low interest rates and a booming economy and no inflation. But to lower inflation, they have to jack up the interest rates far above the rate of inflation. Biden cannot be re-elected. Period, unless there’s a global war.

Nah, people would never buy a war started due to economic issues.

Ooops. I’d say sorry, but this is already in the playbook.

Me? My bet is this can keeps rattling around causing damage for several months. Six or seven? Maybe. Eventually, the Fed® is going to figure out that they can’t paper over this mess.

In the meantime, the cash for businesses will dry up, and the only people that can borrow money will be those that don’t need it. New projects? They’ll be cancelled unless the company has the cash or it will ruin them if they don’t stop. New housing? Forget it. The housing market will collapse, (it already is) and the costs of new stuff to make new are so high that no one can afford it, forget the interest rate.

People will stop eating dinner in a restaurant. We already have.

No, the Ides of March won’t be the end. But you can see it from here. While you can, enjoy the nice walk on a sunny day.

And Neptune? He’s always been a whiney bitch. Ignore Neptune.

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report: National Divorce? Getting Closer.

“Dolores, I am making a citizen’s divorce.” – The Man with Two Brains

Big Alarm Clock is a conspiracy! Wake up people! (all non-regular memes are as-found)

Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
Open War.

I’ve kept the Clock O’Doom the same. Again. This is moving sideways, but things can unravel quickly. The advice remains. Avoid crowds. Get out of cities. Now. A year too soon is better than one day too late.

In this issue: Front Matter – The National Divorce – Violence and Censorship Update – Biden’s Misery Index – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – The Silly Season – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue 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, subscribe because you’ll join over 740 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

The National Divorce

I remember reading about research a while back that (my fuzzy memory says) indicated that when a married couple didn’t want to have a divorce, one of the easiest things they could do was not talk about a divorce. I guess that would mean that the first rule of staying married club is don’t talk about divorce club.

Marjorie Taylor Greene brought up the issue in a big way:

It’s a stark question: do we want to stay married, or not. Folks on the Internet followed suit, with this poll:

The Internet is what it is, and a poll like that isn’t at all scientific. But 19,000 people (75% of respondents) were done. They were ready to get lawyers, and decide how we get to split up California and Virginia and who got alternating weekends with Michigan.

A much more scientific poll was done by Rasmussen® (more on them later in this Issue) and it emerged that a majority of Republicans wanted out. 47%, plus an 11% who might be in favor, but they wanted to know if they could still get Netflix™ off of Uncle Tim’s account it he were stuck in a Blue State before they made up their mind.

Leftists are never in favor of making anything smaller, since it lowers their power. Remember, it is Leftists who are on the side of international and world governments. I’m pretty sure they’d love to include Mars, too, since it’s Red. This is shown in the poll below:

Fully a third of all people (based on Rasmussen’s™ report) are ready to check out. That’s a lot. Although Gallup® wasn’t around to do a poll, most literature I can find seems to indicate that only 1/3 of the folks living in the Colonies wanted the Revolution, so 1/3 is a big, big number.

I’ll add in this other (entirely unscientific) poll:

Again, unscientific, but it shows that there are a sizeable number of folks out there who believe that soldiers would, if ordered, shoot on American civilians. That’s another scary thought, and perhaps feeds back into the idea that people would much rather have a peaceful exit rather than a violent one.

I read that this year’s CPAC (Republican fanboy convention) was poorly attended, and lacking in energy. And why not? The most fervent people in the Republican party are done, and don’t trust the vote, and don’t think that their votes may ever matter again.

Spiderman®, though, seems to have an opinion:

Violence and Censorship Update

Cancelling really isn’t government censorship, but it’s censorship nevertheless. Scott Adams, noted cartoonist and author, really rustled the collective jimmies of the Left. Rasmussen™ had a poll about whether it was “okay to be white” and 47% of black people indicated that it was either not okay, or they weren’t sure.

Scott has a YouTube® channel (still!) where he talks about whatever he wants to talk about. In this, he opined that if that was the way that black people felt, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be around them. The following cartoon describes it in such a way that Scott retweeted it:

The outrage was both predictable, even though Scott noted that many black people he knew called him up and said that his stance was completely reasonable. Mr. Adams’ publisher dropped him. Mr. Adams’ cartoon syndicator dropped him. Mr. Adams’ agent . . . dropped him. His new book, due out in the fall? Cancelled.

I don’t feel bad for Scott, he knew what he was doing, and he has tens of millions of dollars. But what is it about that simple narrative that makes the Left explode? I’ll cover that in a future post.

The Silence of the Adams

It’s not violence now, but Illinois has now decided that most crimes short of murdering someone and taking selfies with the victim are now non-detainable. Burn someone’s house? Out without bail. Kill someone while high? Out without bail.

Florida. Sigh. Why? They want to make bloggers who write about elected officials register if they make money for their efforts. Is this the single stupidest thing to come out of Florida since they elected ¡Jeb!?

The publisher of Roald Dahl is going through his books an removing whatever they don’t like based on political correctness. No more “ugly” or “fat” or . . . black. Paging Scott Adams . . . These “corrections” are showing up in people’s previously purchased e-books, too. This is why physical media is good. And why I have lots of books.

It’s not censorship, exactly, when programmers prevent A.I. from coming to conclusions based on fact, but it’s close. There are certain facts that are inconvenient, like boys have xy chromosomes and girls have xx chromosomes, so programmers prevent A.I. from talking about that. Elon Musk says he’s going to do his own, non-woke A.I.

When the trains carrying ethyl-methyl-death crashed in East Palestine, it was a story that was minimized until it couldn’t be. I follow stories like this that are under the news, and was aware of it within a few hours of it happening. But the news? No reporting on it, since it didn’t impact Baltimore and had the potential to make the Biden administration look even worse than it normally looks.

Biden’s Misery Index

Let’s take a look to see how we’ve done this month . . . .

Yup, up again, and, like Kamala’s womb, this graph doesn’t eggs. Here’s a recap:

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 combine to become the index. On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Violence is still minimal right now. I’m betting it stays down until June at the earliest.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it was down a bit more. I think this is a conscious attempt to keep things together, Biden just came out in favor of “law and order”, because I think he saw it the show on cable.

Economic:

Economic numbers took a big dive this month, which surprised me. The numbers look fairly unstable from month to month, which still isn’t good.

Illegal Aliens:

The number took a big drop! Yay! Oh, it’s still higher than ever for that month. I’d say border is wide open, but we have no border.

So, when can we ask the Mexicans to leave?

The Silly Season

One way to deflect a story is to not tell it. The other way to deflect a story is to flood the media with, well, nonsense. My favorite this month? The Chinese Spy Balloon™. During World War II, the Japanese decided they would make Americans afraid. They launched 9,000 balloons filled with explosives at the United States. As near as I could find with an in-depth three-minute look, one exploded. Out of 9,000.

Ohhh, I’m so afraid.

I’m not sure what we’ve found out about the Chinese Spy Balloon©. I think that we’ll find out they were trying to check up on why Americans weren’t buying more extended warrantees based on those cell-phone calls. Since we haven’t heard anything, I’m think that it may actually have been a weather balloon. Regardless, they can solve their problem with just a little bit of camouflage that the United States would never shoot down:

Was this the story that they were attempting to distract us from?

It’s a scary one. Why do we need so may people? Why aren’t all the traditional people who would go into the military signing up? Oh, yeah. They’ve been told they’re racist. They’ve been told they have unearned privilege? They’ve seen the military force people to take the vaxx. And now they want them to sign up to fight?

What could be next?

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky. Thanks so much, Ricky!!

Bad Guys

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11761485/NYPD-release-images-four-brazen-thieves-staged-50-000-raid-Manhattan-Givenchy.html

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1628194739987046400

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1626367620151738375

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1626397252334809090

https://twitter.com/nofones2/status/1626369625314279426

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1626447147225718786

Good Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1621965430930669569

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1628225095893131264

https://twitter.com/nofones/status/1627464538609139714

https://twitter.com/762sfuxk/status/1626379421065134080

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11735803/Armed-intruder-left-critical-condition-shot-neck-homeowner.html

One Guy

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11632047/Vigilante-killed-robber-Houston-restaurant-breaks-silence.html

Body Count

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-11732497/More-48-000-Americans-committed-suicide-year-report-finds.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11711353/Seven-states-eye-legalizing-assisted-suicide-America.html

https://goodsciencing.com/covid/athletes-suffer-cardiac-arrest-die-after-covid-shot/

https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/new-paper-an-estimated-13-million

https://emeralddb3.substack.com/p/is-coincidence-now-the-leading-cause

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11738179/Still-think-secure-Joe-Moment-500-Venezuelan-migrants-walk-southern-border.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11730363/Biden-preparing-mass-deportations-non-Mexican-migrants-Mexico.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-11733577/Map-shows-14-million-Americans-live-5-miles-cancer-gas-emitting-plants.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11776999/The-blanketed-fentanyl-NINEFOLD-rise-deadly-opioid-use-western-US.html

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11701187/Zombie-Nation-Shocking-images-lay-bare-Americas-drug-crisis.html

Vote Count

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11761979/Kari-Lake-vows-Arizona-gubernatorial-defeat-state-supreme-court.html

https://www.uncoverdc.com/2023/02/08/maricopa-heat-maps-the-story-keeps-getting-worse/

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/15/everything-you-need-to-know-about-democrat-gov-tony-evers-bid-to-overhaul-wisconsin-elections/

https://alaskapublic.org/2023/02/17/launch-of-campaign-to-repeal-ranked-choice-voting-draws-a-crowd-in-anchorage/

https://raheemkassam.substack.com/p/fox-vs-dominion-discovery-docs-show

Civil War
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/keith-olbermann-calls-economic-civil-war-institute-gun-control

https://www.foxnews.com/media/olbermann-urges-blue-states-wage-economic-civil-war-red-states-starve-red-states-submission

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/internal-atf-docs-show-zero-tolerance-guidelines-shutting-down-gun-stores

https://www.carolinacoastonline.com/tideland_news/opinions/article_bec42134-ad30-11ed-979b-4365a8a67e62.html

https://thefederalist.com/2023/02/17/idaho-house-approves-talks-to-annex-oregon-counties/

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/lost-cause-2-0-desantis-and-republicans-inspired-by-racist-confederate-history-re-writes/

https://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/newswire/gops-civil-war-republicans-confront-bitter-divide-no-clear-path-forward/

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/02/06/megadonor-gop-richard-elizabeth-uihlein-00081267

https://www.reformer.com/opinion/columnists/nicholas-boke-what-would-a-civil-war-look-like-anyway/article_c6beefac-aca1-11ed-9fa4-d74d7a722a44.html

https://sundayguardianlive.com/world/will-2022-witness-american-civil-war-2-0-will-happen-2024

https://news.uchicago.edu/us-headed-toward-another-civil-war-william-howell

https://www.businessinsider.com/mtg-defends-call-split-up-us-says-civil-war-looming-2023-2

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greenes-national-divorce-was-the-civil-war.html

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/02/marjorie-taylor-greene-secession-civil-war/673142/

https://www.theringer.com/2023/2/24/23613267/emasculation-proclamation-civil-war-ii

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/02/project-veritas-has-forced-out-james-okeefe.html

https://hard-drive.net/hd/technology/ken-burns-releases-4000-part-tiktok-series-on-the-civil-war/

Discipline, Romans, And Spending All The Money

“That’s newspapers for you. You could fill volumes with what you don’t read in ‘em.” – The Green Berets

I decided never to jog with Marcus Aurelius. It’s always dangerous to run with Caesars.

Self-discipline is hard, but it starts with the smallest step. Even (the dead) Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius in his book Meditations talked about how hard it was to get out of bed in the morning. Marcus talked about how warm and comfy he was under the covers, and how he’d like to stay there, curled up. In then end, though, he got up because he had responsibility to govern the Empire that was a bit more important than his desire to be comfy.

Me? There are some mornings I would have given up Gaul for another fifteen minutes. Okay, maybe not Gaul because of the food, but definitely Judea.

Marcus did the tough (maybe he had a hangover?) thing because he had a responsibility to millions of citizens to do his very best for them, and as nearly as I can determine, he took that seriously. Plus? It’s good to be the Emperor. I hear they didn’t have to wait in the drive through for Chicken McNuggets® and always got enough Hot Mustard™ sauce.

My advice? Never eat a Kid’s Meal at McDonald’s®. Their mothers tend to get upset.

The difficult part of discipline is that it requires, well, discipline. Getting good things in life is difficult – that’s why we work for them. And that’s why it’s called work. It’s tough. But when the seeds are planted, cared for, and weeded, then at harvest it’s time to reap the rewards. Discipline is like that. Heck, some sort of east Asian place that I can’t be bothered to look up has a proverb that says that, “A woman who marries a man who works hard every day will never starve.”

I don’t think that was China, because if it was China, they have been starving every century by the tens of millions, especially when they embarked on the Chinese Diet Plan called Communism. Maybe it was Puerto Rico? Or Applebee’s™?

Probably not. But I think it might have ended in a vowel, but not Y, because that’s sometimes only a vowel, and I don’t think that Asians use the same fonts.

So, if even a dead Roman can figure it out, why can’t we?

Some people want to ban Roman numerals. Not on my watch.

The latest bouts of fiscal insanity in the United States have made me think that none of them have read Marcus Aurelius, or maybe even can read. What triggered this post is the recent Supreme Court Case about ghosts. Oh, wait, that’s later. No, student loans.

Student loans in the United States are a particularly horrible thing that gives money to Leftist professors so that they can indoctrinate youth but the youth has to pay for it until they lose all their teeth or pay it off. I think that was in the terms and conditions of my student loans, but I can’t be exactly sure, since after I signed my name, they gave me $7,500. Duh.

The most pernicious thing about student loans is that they live forever. I paid mine off in January, 2013. I paid ahead, but didn’t want to pay them off completely if the world ended in December, 2012 (which was a thing). Oddly, this is a true story, and illustrates how far I’m willing to take a joke.

But student loan forgiveness is just the tip of the iceberg. For the last five or so years of my life, the government (both Right and Left) has been like a fat girl who decides on a Tuesday night that the diet is over. That cookie dough? Sure. I can eat a tube or two. Covered in frosting. Oh, and I’ll just tidy up the frosting container so it doesn’t go bad. If you’ve given up, why not go all in?

The cannibal decided to go on a vegan diet. He found a family of them at Whole Foods®.

The government (again, both Right and Left) has decided that there is no limit. Every Tuesday for them is time to give Ukraine more money for . . . (spins wheel) dental x-ray infrastructure. Will $23 billion cover that? Sure, if it were just Ukraine, that would be one thing. But it’s not just that. Biden’s Build Back Better means that we’ll just burn cash to make us warm if we run out of oil.

If I seem a bit cynical, it’s because that at every single turn in my life, that I’ve seen fiscal discipline further erode, and money fly a bit freer each day. At no point have I ever seen (outside of Ron and Rand Paul) and politician say, “stop”. Apparently, when elected to Congress, the “spend money on everything light” blinks on the dashboard of their cars.

My dashboard keeps telling me “trunk is ajar”. Silly car. A trunk isn’t a jar.

There is no discipline. There is no pretending to have discipline. It’s all just comfy warm covers and Chicken McNuggies™ while every sense of fiscal discipline is overridden by another trip of the spoon int the Pillsbury™ chocolate frosting.

But that’s okay. I’m sure it will end fine. Where’s the frosting? I think I want to sleep late today. Oh, but have we spent enough money on Ukraine?

Is The End Of The Road Nearly At Hand?

“If they have him, and they can somehow piece the country together, get communications up, they’ll control everything; the Federal Reserve, the military.” – The Last Ship

Where does the Fed® hide its monetary mistakes? In debasement.

Pa Wilder was a banker, and when we communicated via a while back, I’d send him long-ish messages about most everything. One time, I broached the economy with him. As a small farm banker with more than 50 years of experience, he was familiar with the way the system worked.

When I first heard that the Federal Reserve™ wasn’t owned by the government, but by the member banks, I asked him. I figured he’d tell me, “Nah, John, it’s really owned by the government, aliens aren’t real, go back to sleep – we won the war.” Nope. He then went through how each member bank was required to buy stock in the regional Federal Reserve Banks (as I recall) with at least 6% of their deposits.

Whoa. His bank owned a tiny part of the Federal Reserve Bank®. Certainly not much, but part of it. The Federal Reserve Bank© is a private institution. It was the 1913 mechanism to get the politicians out of the economy. The Great Depression shows how well it worked.

What do you call a talkative Colombian? Hablo Escobar.

After World War II, there was a time of relative stability – Europe and Japan were shattered, and the United States had industry that was just waiting to stop making weapons and start making washers. The sudden influx of labor with the demobilizing G.I.s made a combination for economic growth. After they drank the bars dry and made a zillion babies.

Even with the added costs of Social Security, it worked. The economy was working so well that we could build an interstate highway system without breaking a sweat. The highway system even added to the economic boom by lowering the cost and time required to move goods, effectively shrinking the country.

However, every good party has to end. Johnson’s Great Society and financing for the Vietnam War out of “money we just made up” caused Nixon to end the last tether between gold and the dollar. Sure, the Fed® had been cheating about the amount of cash it had been printing, but when the bluff was called, Nixon had the option of sending all our gold to France or saying “just kidding”.

He chose the latter. I think it was a good idea, because it wasn’t like France was going to do anything about it, anyway. The result was the petrodollar – the idea that all international transactions in oil would take place in dollars. That also resulted in almost all transactions taking place in the dollar. The inflation of the 1970s was the result – it was before we figured out how to tax the world by printing dollars in a sorta responsible way.

If I had a dime for every time I didn’t know what was going on, I’d say, “Hey, where did all these dimes come from?”

So, people all over the world needed dollars, even though we were printing them like we were, well, the Fed™. As long as the Soviet Union existed, there was a counterbalance to the United States, so at least there was some check. But after they went tango uniform?

That’s when the responsibility completely ended, the cash was printed, and the instability really started.

The Dotcom Bubble was the first – fed by cash from the Fed® with no place to go. And then it tanked. So the Fed™ printed a few trillion bucks. That led directly to . . .

The Housing Bubble. You probably have heard of it.

But this was different – it actually lead to protests against the banks. A reprogramming was necessary – “put the bankers in jail” had to be stopped, because bankers like to use our money to buy themselves nice things like that tiny part of France where they don’t let Muslims in. Except the Saudis.

I read that photographers and art thieves both take pictures.

A reprogramming was needed – Occupy Wall Street™ had to turn to . . . something. That reprogramming of the Lefty rank and file was into “white people are awful” and it got the heat away from the bankers. And made movies suck.

Meanwhile, the money hijinks led to country after country having revolutions, from Libya to Egypt to Syria. Why? Because inflation in the United States (at that point) meant that people had to pay a nickel more for Cheetos®. In Egypt, that meant that one of the children had to be sold into medical experimentation.

The key to all of this was keeping the dollar as the key currency used in international transactions. To be clear, Russia was a big threat in this. Sure, Russia is ruled by corrupt folks who kill people who threaten them, but I can raise you a Jeff Epstein, a Hunter Biden, and Hillary.

The Russians certainly threatened all of this with Nordstream® and Nordstream II©. These pipelines pushed natural gas straight from Russia to Europe. Now, Russia could take . . . euros for gas. Dollar not required.

Watch a 10-hour movie? No. But have Netflix® break it up into 10 one-hour movies?

And scary. All the investment of the Left in Green Energy® led them to shut down nuclear power plants (Germany, I’m looking at you) and replace them with natural gas plants. And you see the results.

(hint: Ukraine and certain underwater explosions)

Now we find that we have a currency that’s becoming worth less every day, foreign folks are building ways to not take the dollar. So they need fewer of them. And want fewer of them in their pockets.

It doesn’t help that we’re in debt by (spins wheel) over $25 trillion bucks, the economy is distorted, and that Medicare® and Medicaid™ will soon cost more than Joe Biden’s hair plugs. And we’re going to double that in the next eight years, and double it again in the next eight. That’s $100 trillion dollars.

Does anyone reading this believe we can last that long?

Oops.

Pa Wilder said 20 years ago that he didn’t see how it could last. But many folks have gone broke by betting against the Fed™. That one day they can’t paper it all over?

Nah. Don’t worry. It’ll be fine.

Rigging The Game

“Coupons. Well, what a wonderful way to economize. Well, I could clip them and give them to my personal shopper.” – Frasier

The first symptom of COVID-19? Believing what the government says. (all memes this post “as-found”)

It’s a strange, new world. During my childhood, there was an active focus on one concept: we’re all humans, regardless of race. We should all be treated the same, and have the same rules. Sure, there were programs like affirmative action, but the primary impact of those was (for the most part) in making sure that minority candidates were considered for jobs. The rule (generally) remained that the most qualified person got the job. Meritocracy reigned.

I won’t pick the date this changed, because it’s been a continuum, a bit here, a bit there. But if you had seen the following headline in 1980 or 1990, I think the first thought of people would have been, “How can that even be legal?”

I was trying to think of a Bank of America® joke, but I lost interest.

The idea isn’t just at Bank of America®, it’s also at Wells Fargo™, too, you can look it up. The concept is that companies attempting to get their ESG (link to my previous post on this monstrosity here) score up are setting up programs like that. To be clear, any loan by any bank that’s not rooted in the ability of the borrower to repay is awful, and immoral. It’s also shenanigans like this that led directly to the 2008 housing bubble and Great Recession.

In a related story, I wonder if Pelosi shorted them yet?

If a country is searching for a solid economy, this isn’t it. If a country is looking to make actual equality the measure, this also isn’t it. If it were just this, it would just be (outside of being illegal) just a limited number of bad business decisions, but it’s not limited to just this.

How about electric cars? I mean, I’m as much into having children dig for toxic cobalt in the Congo so rich people in California can have electric cars and feel smug about it as the next person, but to create a tax incentive?

Seems a bit like we’re rubbing it in.

If Apple® makes an electric car, will it have Windows™?

Not to mention reparations. It’s odd that the people who want to abolish debt for people that borrowed money are also the ones that want to pay people for things that never happened to them. I guarantee that, no matter how much is offered it won’t be accepted.

Why? It will never be enough. Ever.

Another symptom of the Kleptocracy.

What about the Biden family themselves? Is their economy wrecked like they’ve wrecked the nation?

No. Joe went from $0 net worth in 2015 to $9,000,000 (latest info I could find) today. How’d he do that? I’m sure he cut back on Starbucks®. According to reports, Hunter asked a donor to set up a job for his “pled guilty to a felony for $100,000 credit card fraud for makeup” niece.

They agreed to hire this felon for $85,000 a year. She refused. She wanted no less than $180,000. To be fair, from the pictures it does look like she needs that much makeup.

Again, that’s small potatoes, when looking at the billions that have already been looted from the open checkbook that is the Ukraine.

The IRS called Hunter and told him he was being indicted for tax fraud. He hung up, and told his dad, “Ha! I don’t even pay taxes!”

And yet, there’s more! I’ll skip over the massive payments for illegal aliens to play computer games and stay in hotels at taxpayer expense while actual Americans are homeless and face bankruptcy to medical bills inflated by donor companies like Pfizer®. I’m sure that doesn’t make anyone mad.

What’s the difference between E.T.® and an illegal alien? E.T. learned English and wanted to go home.

In point of fact, what we are seeing is the looting of an economy. Our economy. I think it’s been going on for years, but the looting wasn’t so visible because it was papered over, literally. After the 2008 Great Recession, there wasn’t really any attempt to make the economy better, rather, the idea was to just keep printing money – Qualitative Easing is what they called, it, which was a fancy way to say that the money would be printed and buy up the weakest assets of the companies that the Fed® had desired to support.

COVID-19 was the lynchpin, though. As the tide receded and undulated, we could finally see who didn’t have a swimsuit on. It turned out, it was most of the economy. Now, inflation. And, to top it off, eggs appear to be the 2023 version of toilet paper, so I guess this year that Halloween pranks will actually add value to the house.

It also looks like the plan that The Mrs. was brooding on, “let’s get some chickens that lay eggs” will finally hatch.

Maybe.

What do Green Eggs and Ham, Fifty Shades of Gray, and our economy have in common? They all make people who can barely read want to try new things.

Oddly, it gets even worse. Since 1988, the United States has paid $13 trillion in interest to . . . use its own currency – the government needs currency, the Treasury prints bonds, the Fed® creates cash, the United States owes interest and pays fees to the Fed™ member banks.

That’s weird, because the United States used to just issue its own cash. Without debt. Sure, if you print too much, that causes inflation.

Oh. I see we’re soaking in inflation. And the Fed® actively plans for inflation as a part of the business plan. I think there’s a pictograph that might explain things . . .

Chuck Norris mines cryptocurrency. By hand.

The looting can’t continue forever. And that’s a good thing. This made-up economy filled with economic nonsense that, at times, makes Lenin look like an economic genius, has a time limit. Merit will return, just as the Gods of the Copybook Headings have always predicted.

There can be no other outcome.

The Destruction of the American Education Society – On Purpose

“And I say to you gentlemen that this college is a failure. The trouble is we’re neglecting football for education.” – Horse Feathers

Remember, if you teach homeschool, you can’t get fired for drinking on the job.

Jimmy Carter doesn’t deserve all of the blame he gets. He handled inflation poorly, energy poorly, lost a lot of helicopters in the desert. Oh, wait, was I talking about Biden?

Nope. Carter. One of the biggest things to blame on Carter was the creation of the Department of Education, which he did in an election year to get more votes. Of course, Carter didn’t start the rot, that really started with Franklin Roosevelt, who attempted to federalize education, because he wanted to further centralize power. Roosevelt started a quite lot of rot, but it took longer for some of it to surface than the run time of Avatar 2.

What has happened since education has come under the control of the feds?

How many introverts does it take to change a lightbulb? One, unless he needs help. Then it’s still one.

Previously each state and local area ran its school system. The schools themselves were, generally, of excellent quality. But a bigger bureaucracy led to two things. The first is the activation of Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy. Dr. Pournelle’s description of it is below:

Pournelle’s Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people”:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

Sure there are local school boards that are awful. I’ve heard horrible things about Los Angeles, and other large cities. Why? Because the boards are so large that they have to have massive infrastructure – the idea of the neighborhood school disappears, replaced by massive numbers of administrators in a Soviet-style collective.

I couldn’t answer my daughter’s question, “What does a ballerina wear?” I couldn’t put tu and tu together.

To make this better, we add in the feds???

Yikes. That’s like solving an ingrown hair with a flamethrower. It works, but what’s the cost?

Good teachers, for one. Teaching has always been an important profession, and with local control, the messages that went out to the kids reflected both American values, and local values. Even if you didn’t agree with the values of Los Angeles, you could move to a place where the school district mirrored your values, like mine, which has classes in PEZ™ dispenser maintenance.

But with federal control, you get federal rules on what can and can’t be done. The result was the second problem with federal control:

Indoctrination.

I tried to indoctrinate a hairdresser, but I couldn’t condition her.

Schools used to start with teaching basic skills. If there was a student who wasn’t getting it, they were flunked. Try to flunk a kid today? It can’t happen. The result in (as I recall) the Baltimore school district is that the parents are suing the schools because, after 13 years of education and a diploma, graduates can’t read. For the sake of the school district, I hope the plaintiff’s lawyer went to school there.

But why can’t the students read?

The idea was that there was a certain minimum competence in reading, writing and math that was required and expected. The basics of history and geography were also taught, as well as classic literature.

And that was it. Bring your own lunch. Need someone to talk to? Go talk to your friends.

The basic function of the school was education. Sometime around 2006, though, the competence level was reset to “breathing”. Now? Biden’s Department of Education wants “projects” that increase Critical Race Theory usage in schools. The same initiative is called “Promoting Informational Literacy Skills” which essentially involves coming up with ways to convince kids that The Current Thing is correct, i.e., not to “do your own research” and to only trust .gov sources.

I guess she was just biden her time.

The bureaucracy was bad enough, but the indoctrination is worse. The difficulty is that most school districts compete for federal money, and when they accept it, every single rule applies. Remember, the first rule of government club is that you do whatever the government says.

Back during Obama, the Department of Education even put out a “letter” that indicated they would investigate any school who didn’t discipline students the way the Leftists in Washington wanted. So, suspensions and detentions essentially ended in many school districts. The result? Well, I don’t think anyone is complaining the schools have too much discipline nowadays.

Why would they want that?

We can be assured that the Department of Education never educated a single kid, in fact whoever was responsible for my algebra homework was fired. But they have been responsible for indoctrination with Leftist values.

If you listen to Pink Floyd and eat ice cream, you become comfortably plump.

The solution starts with saying no. No to federal rules, no to federal money. And if anyone wanted to actually improve education in the United States, the first thing to do would be to abolish the Department of Education and every single one of its rules.

After that?

Time to think about that pesky Department of Energy . . .