Civil War 2.0 Weather Report – Ministry of Truth, and Socially Coming Apart

“Remember, all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.” – The Matrix

TEN

My day was great until noon.  Then I woke up.

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

I’ve kept Clock O’Doom at the same location.  For now.  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 – Ministry of Truth – Violence And Censorship Update – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Abortion and Conflict – 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 nearly 690 other people and get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30AM Eastern, free of charge.

Ministry of Truth

We now have a Ministry of Truth.  Oh, I’m sorry – it’s the Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board.  Why?  Presumably because people say things the Leftists don’t agree with.

I’ve heard that calling a groomer “groomer” really makes them mad.

The leader of the board that determines what is true and what isn’t?

Nina Jankowicz.

Nina, if you’re unaware, is the poster child for insufferable Leftist blather.  She is, first, a low level, stooge for the Left.  Her expertise in all things disinformation allowed her to opine that Hunter Biden’s laptop was expressible only in the holy high words of the Left: Russian disinformation.  Russian disinformation was, according to the legend of the Left, the only reason that St. Hillary wasn’t elected.

Sadly, this Nina has no luftballons.

Now, ordinarily I don’t mind such creatures – their trajectory is predictable – they write a book, take a position washing dogs for their political masters, and then gracelessly drift away.  These sorts of political vampires are what make writing fun.

But Nina’s different.  Nina wasn’t hired by the political bits of Washington, she was hired by Homeland Security.  What’s the difference?  The Department of Homeland Security is primarily a law enforcement agency.  It’s (sort-of) okay having a reptilian partisan hack at the cabinet level, but infesting law enforcement with Leftist partisan robots is a step too far, especially when Resident Biden is talking about Ultra MAGA, or whatever the voices in his head were telling him that afternoon.

At least, though, the mask is off.

Violence And Censorship Update

It’s been fairly quiet on the political violence front, at least recently.  We do have plenty of Censorship news.

Okay, this isn’t real.

For the first time ever, got some good news up first:

Twitter®.  If you had a wheelbarrow, you could have made a fortune mining salt from Leftist tears.  The very same Leftists that were overjoyed that they controlled Twitter® aren’t exactly thrilled by the idea that they won’t control this platform.  Here’s some salt to share:

It’s even better to mine the salt from a famous person.

Twitter isn’t done censoring, though.  They censored info about the FDA containing info from the FDA.

DuckDuckGo® had to counterbalance the loss of Twitter© – they decided that the only news sources they would handle would be trusted.  I’m betting Nina will love that.

And never forget that having an opinion that the Left doesn’t like is punishable by violence.

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 again flat.  Perhaps turning back up in May or June – Antifa® seems primed?

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable, and it went up a little in April.  Much more in June?

Economic:

I had bet the economic numbers would be worse, and I was wrong.  If the stock market slide continues, though . . . .

Illegal Aliens:

This data was at record levels for this time of year.  All-time record levels.  Again.

Abortion and Conflict

The draft abortion decision by the Supreme Court is out.  It shows a huge divide in the country.  An example of the salt to be mined is here:

There were even a few words from Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

And the Federal Reserve© had a comment:

The United States is hopelessly divided.  An example?

This was thought of as a negative result that would make people on the Right mad, rather than the desired result.  Tinder® and all of the rest of the hook-up culture has been horrible for the people involved, especially women.  I spent some time watching a YouTube® of a pro-life march at a college in some city.  The pro-life folks were kind and polite, but the people on the other side of the issue were mean, angry, and wouldn’t listen, at all.

The idea of a rational discussion and debate with the Left is nearly impossible.  The objectives are 100% out of sync.

The end result of all this program changing is an America that is far more divided, and a step closer to Civil War 2.0.

LINKS

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

Bad Guys

https://twitter.com/i/status/1509177129044488192

https://twitter.com/i/status/1502074883550892033

https://twitter.com/i/status/1510413517509255175

https://twitter.com/i/status/1520557517130153989

https://twitter.com/i/status/1510909715961679873

https://youtu.be/iykHLx65WNw

https://twitter.com/i/status/1507576908099293189

https://twitter.com/wdsu/status/1506375168058343427

https://abcnews4.com/news/local/video-gunfire-rings-out-at-little-league-game-in-north-charleston-wciv

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnEdeUbWAlg

https://twitter.com/ATLUncensored/status/1516757571570348038

https://twitter.com/OsintUpdates/status/1510581397458599936

https://www.inquirer.com/news/shooting-philadelphia-kensington-mantua-strawberry-mansion-20220415.html

Good Guys

https://www.tmz.com/2022/04/02/sucker-punch-high-school-track-runner-press-charges-lawsuit/

https://youtu.be/-qUgXFN2aLw

https://twitter.com/t0masimp8000/status/1503871472498257920

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/houston-car-dealership-employee-flips-script-on-attempted-robber-sends-him-running/ar-AAW5MYE

Two Guys

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10684433/Gun-wielding-Texas-man-shot-dead-girlfriends-ex-husband-not-face-charges.html

Body Count

https://southfront.org/from-30-to-40-ukrainian-children-disappeared-without-a-trace-in-spain/

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/avian-flu-has-spread-to-27-states-sharply-driving-up-egg-prices/ar-AAWgZBQ

https://www.cnet.com/personal-finance/bird-flu-27-million-birds-dead/

https://airtable.com/shrbaT4x8LG8EbvVG/tbl7xKsSUIOPAa7Mx

https://dailyexpose.uk/2022/04/08/athletes-833-serious-540-dead-post-injection/

https://palexander.substack.com/p/us-military-doctor-testifies-she?s=r

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/number-covid-patients-us-hospitals-reaches-record-low-83819273

https://www.revolver.news/2022/04/black-lives-matter-reign-of-terror/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGb748VOcYU

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/opioid-overdose-deaths-teens-skyrocketed-due-fentanyl/story?id=84035862

https://cowboystatedaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/wyo-nuke-map-1.jpg

Vote Count

THE STEAL WAS REAL – WATCH “2000 Mules” NOW:  https://www.bitchute.com/embed/TizNoVq1qcwb/

https://www.dailysignal.com/2022/04/29/film-2000-mules-offers-vivid-proof-of-voter-fraud/

https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/dinesh-dsouzas-2000-mules-ballot-trafficking-expose-has-evidence-can-it

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/04/29/dishonest-pivot-heart-new-voter-fraud-conspiracy/

True The Vote: https://twitter.com/realLizUSA/status/1513585569779040262

https://uncoverdc.com/2022/04/08/true-the-vote-previously-undisclosed-details-show-rico-crimes-in-2020-election/

https://www.truethevote.org/election-integrity-testimony-in-wisconsin-on-thursday-march-24-2022/

https://www.truethevote.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/FILE_5193_no-meta.pdf

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2022/04/30/exclusive-true-the-votes-catherine-engelbrecht-mules-went-routes-trafficking-ballots-repeatedly-day-after-day-ahead-2020-election/

Zuck: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/washington-secrets/rigged-documentary-details-zuckerbergs-400m-vote-juicing-for-biden

https://www.hastingstribune.com/ap/agriculture/zuckerberg-helped-fund-the-2020-elections-now-republicans-seek-to-ban-future-grants/article_24dae7d5-3989-50b3-8c63-528185976ade.html

https://newrepublic.com/article/165939/election-funding-voter-suppression-zuckerberg

AZ: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/04/07/brnovich-interim-report-finds-serious-vulnerabilities-in-2020-election/

FL: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/florida-voter-registration-republicans-overtake-democrats-100000

GA: https://justthenews.com/politics-policy/elections/investigators-georgia-ballot-harvesting-probe-zero-funding-eyewitness

PA: https://uncoverdc.com/2022/04/15/pennsylvania-compelling-evidence-shows-blue-counties-scored-grants-in-2020-election/

PA: https://www.wfmz.com/news/area/lehighvalley/lehigh-county-da-likely-hundreds-of-instances-where-people-deposited-more-than-1-ballot-into/article_90b9cd12-b451-11ec-b79a-9f2106bb481b.html

USA:https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/24/poll-one-in-six-biden-voters-would-have-changed-their-vote-if-they-had-known-about-scandals-suppressed-by-media/

USA: https://www.newsmax.com/us/biden-usps-election-funding/2022/03/28/id/1063188/

USA: https://www.axios.com/2022-midterms-out-state-money-71487d18-76fd-452a-9020-d93ddf4e3106.html

 

Civil War

https://dnyuz.com/2022/04/03/flurry-of-new-laws-move-blue-and-red-states-further-apart/

https://aninjusticemag.com/contrary-to-popular-opinion-we-are-not-winning-this-war-196bc828bfdf

https://medium.com/politically-speaking/will-war-break-out-between-red-and-blue-states-93cac4d8c219

https://newrepublic.com/article/165959/global-age-civil-war

https://www.jns.org/opinion/the-democratic-socialists-of-americas-civil-war-over-bds/

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-civil-war-for-americas-banks/

https://www.businessinsider.com/civil-war-violence-2022-midterm-elections-texas-republican-trump-2022-3

https://www.denisonforum.org/current-events/is-america-headed-toward-another-civil-war/

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FRhTPOXVIAEyVYU.jpg

Biden’s Economic Case For Nuclear War

“Two hundred years have passed since the nuclear war raged to an end and the computers took over what was left of the world – sealed it off from the outside – and made it perfect. Now, in the Domed City in this year 2319, living is unending joy.” – Logan’s Run

After a nuclear war in the Middle East, there will only be one country and the Persian Gulf left.  Just Kuwait and sea.

When we lived in Fairbanks, my hobby in the summer was getting firewood.  I was the Bubba (from Forrest Gump) of firewood:  “There’s lots of ways to have birch.  There’s split birch, there’s dry birch, there’s stacked birch, there’s birch that the bark fell off of, there’s birch that still has bark, there’s wet birch, there’s birch logs . . .” you get the idea.  Now imagine that James Spader was saying it.  That will become important later.

As such, we spent a lot of time in the (mostly Gump-free) forest.  The Mrs. would generally keep an eye on the (then four-year-old) The Boy.  Outside of moose and grizzly bear, the forest was safe.  Oh, did I mention the wasps?  Yeah.  Fairbanks was infested with them.  So, one day while I was knocking down trees and sawing them up, The Boy was playing near a tree.

What’s Gump’s password?  1FORREST1. (meme as found)

Then The Boy started screaming.  If you noticed the clear foreshadowing, it certainly wasn’t a bear or a moose, but rather The Boy had been jumping up and down (unknowingly) on a subterranean wasp nest.

Wasps have a sense of humor.  Oh, no, they don’t.  They’re hatred wrapped up in spite with a side order of malice and animosity.  So, they did the only thing their stupid malignant minds can comprehend:  they stung The Boy.  Repeatedly.

Fast forward a few months.  We had abandoned all of that sweet, sweet birch that we were going to combust in order to liberate the carbon back into the atmosphere and move from Fairbanks to Houston.  Ugh.  In the backyard, though, a beautiful butterfly came fluttering by bouncing from flower to flower.

I could see the wonder and amazement in The Boy’s eyes as he tracked it across the backyard.  He moved close.

“Be careful,” I said, “they bite!”

He ran screaming into the house, and now I had a four-year-old son that was deathly afraid of butterflies and also the problem of explaining to The Mrs. how I was really just kidding and not intentionally emotionally scarring our child.

Good times.

I sleep on a cushion made of butterfly larva.  It’s a caterpillow.

“What,” you might ask, “does that story have to do with nuclear war?  I can read the title, John Wilder, and I didn’t come here for twisted tales of how you made a child cry by telling him that butterflies sting.”

Well, bear with me.

What if . . . nuclear war is not so bad?  What if nuclear war is Joe Biden’s cunning plan to revive our economy?

I mean, giving trillions of dollars just seemed to work for a while, and now everyone’s tired of having all that free money.  Giving billions to the vaxx companies so that they could, um, prevent oops, lessen the likelihood the vaxxed got COVID oops, lessen the impact of COVID oops, make billions of dollars in profits.

The Mrs. says that Jack Daniels® keeps her healthy.  She calls it Liver Cross-Fit®.

The next best idea that Biden had, besides eating crayons and attempting to have sex with his desk was just more of the “print trillions of dollars” idea.  That didn’t go as well once people figured out they weren’t the ones getting the money, and they had to trade internal organs for a tank of gasoline.

Giving billions of dollars to Ukraine seemed safe, but outside of asking for more money, Zelinsky’s prime impact on the war effort in Ukraine appears to be walking around sweaty in an olive drab t-shirt while looking for escorts with Hunter Biden.

Huh.  That doesn’t seem to be working.

So, how about provoking a nuclear war?  I can just imagine the conversation with the cabinet . . . .

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (SECDEF):  “Are you sure, Mr. President?  Don’t you think that giving Ukraine, and I quote, ‘a whole bejeebus load of guns and stuff’ might provoke the Russians?”

Vice President Kamala Harris (VP):  (unintelligible giggling, possibly drunk)

Secretary of State Antony Blinken (STATE):  “I’d like to remind you, Mr. President, there are a lot of Ukrainians that we’ve got left.  I mean, the Russians have to run out of artillery shells at some point.”

Joseph R. Biden (BRANDON):  “But, hey, man, have you thought this through?  If we bomb the Russians, and they bomb us, we can (long pause) you know the thing.  Build better boobies.” (waves hands while looking uncomprehendingly at imaginary people behind him)

Vice President Kamala Harris (VP):  (giggling)  “You said boobies!  Check out this rack!” (lifts blouse)

Monica Lewinsky is 48!  It seems just like yesterday that she was crawling all over the White House.

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (TREAS):  (ignoring VP)  “He has a point.  Think of all the industrial activity we would get if a nuclear war hit the United States.  Look at (checks notes) Japan.  We nuked them twice, and look how their economy skyrocketed!”

Joseph R. Biden (BRANDON):  “Yeah, man, he has a good point.  Is it a good point?  Who has the good point?”

Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen (TREAS):  “You, sir.”

Vice President Kamala Harris (VP):  (giggling)  “So, it’s settled!  Margaritas for everyone!  This has been a long, hard day, if you know what I mean.” (winking at Yellen)

Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (SECDEF):  “Sounds great!  I’m in.  Just one more thing to do before I call it a day!”  (picks up phone to call NORAD)  “Brandon has authorized Operation McChicken™, repeat, Brandon has authorized Operation McChicken©, authorization code “PEZ BRAVO JOHNNY DEPP.”  (hangs up phone)  “Now where’s that margarita?”

So, if it appears that that the Biden Administration is being run by people who have all of the competence of Bulgarian mall lawyers attempting to fix a seventeen-year-old copier by poking and prodding it with whatever pens and paperclips their greasy fingers can find hoping against hope that their random actions will fix whatever “ERROR 031” is?

No.  The Bulgarian mall lawyers, though only dimly aware that their random actions are little more effective than hitting the machine with a hammer while chanting Sheryl Crow songs in the nude, at least were bright enough to not vote for Biden.

So, perhaps like that butterfly, nuclear war won’t be so bad?  Despite how good Biden makes it sound, I’ll take my chances without having a nuclear war, thank you.

As found.

I’d love to write more, but I’m watching a movie with James Spader and it requires all of my attention because he might be Jack the Ripper.

Inflation, Velocity, and Bikini Economics

“Well, you already know my name.  I come here to, uh, unwind, because my job can be intense. I often dream I’m Clint Eastwood.” – Psyche

A picture from the last Federal Reserve® meeting.

There are several things that are wrecking the economy.  One of them that isn’t Joe Biden (or his sidekick, the Amazing Giggle Girl) is the sheer amount of cash in the system.  M2 is one of the broader definitions of currency – it includes ready cash, savings accounts, quarters under seat cushions, winning lottery tickets, tears from Leftists over Elon buying Twitter™ and, really, anything that can be spent fairly rapidly.

I want to send a shout-out to the guy who plays the triangle in the orchestra. Thanks for every ting!

I’ve brought up before that this measure, M2, has shot up.  It sort of has to – the national debt doubles every eight years so they have to get more and more into the system to build that sort of debt.  Half of M2 has been created since September 2013.  In the United States, we have so much debt you could rename the country “Owen”.

Although (in theory) cash is supposed to grow in tandem with the economy, inflation has been the inevitable result, especially since the dollar is no longer backed by anything other than kind wishes and Nancy Pelosi’s belly button lint.

So why aren’t things worse?

Velocity.

What’s velocity?  A simple definition is how fast cash moves in the economy.  I’ve had a collection of pennies in a piggy bank since I was in junior high.  Why pennies?  I spent all of the dimes, nickels, and quarters on beer when I was underage stuff, so over time, it became a penny fest.  But those 1,000 or so pennies are definitely part of M2, but have had zero velocity since I could drive.

So, inflation happens when you line up bikini girls in order of height?

The $20 in cash I spent at Walmart® moved to the bank, where it was deposited.  Walmart™ then got a deposit and spent it on wages to a clerk.  The clerk then spent it on PEZ®, and then it was recycled again.  That currency had a pretty high velocity, just like that one girlfriend that told me she needed time and distance.  That’s velocity, right?

Some cash moves around.  Some doesn’t.

Here’s the dirty secret of the economy since 2008:  the velocity of M2 has dropped from a “healthy” economy velocity of 1.7 or so to a “piles of cash under the mattress” level of 1.1.

People hang on to both cash and ratty underwear (this is true – one sign of a depression is lowered sales of men’s underwear) during times of uncertainty, and a quick view of the chart shows that despite all of the “quantitative easing” that the Federal Reserve™ has done since 2008, things are still broken.  Cash is sitting in piggy banks, in accounts, and at least some is sitting in dark pools in accounts to prop up the reserves of the banks.

Things get tough right around the elbow.

We’re seeing the stock market dip now, in a system awash in cash.  Why is the stock market dipping when prices of everything are skyrocketing?  What is the dipping sauce, is it ranch?  Why aren’t stock prices going up, too?

Certainly, some companies are having record profits – oil companies, timber companies, fertilizer companies.  But how many people are going to buy luxuries when the price of eggs is $5.00 a dozen and a hamburger costs a kidney “donation” at McTransplants®?

So, is this a kidney Bean?

Inflation causes failure.  At first, it looks good.  It increases some profits, like that fertilizer company’s profits.  Housing prices take off.  Most people enjoy this, at first.

But after it gives, then inflation takes away.  Prices have to go up at the restaurants because beef and broccoli and potatoes go up in price.  Then, people look and decide that they can cook at home for cheaper.  And those higher house prices?  The result is higher taxes on the property.

Now prices at the restaurant have to stay up, because the restaurant can’t make up for higher prices by charging less than it costs to keep the lights on.  But there are fewer customers.

So businesses, especially businesses built on disposable income, fail harder than Joe Biden on a crossword puzzle.  But that’s just the start, at least as long as we keep Joe away from actual decisions.

The scary part (besides Joe hanging with his invisible friend, JoJo) is that no one really knows what happens when all of it unwinds.

Well, it’s sort of like a bikini picture.

What will make the velocity of currency go up?  When people are afraid to hold on to their money because they’re worried that it’s losing value.

But that is (my guess) not quite yet.

I do expect, especially when the stock market unwinds to see a deflation first, across multiple asset classes.  It will be “catch a falling knife” time because in many cases it won’t be clear what is a good bargain, and what’s junk.  In 2008, gold dropped from nearly $1,000 to $710 as the market melted down.

Gold was obviously safer at that time than the stock market, but even it was driven downward – because cash was vanishing from existence as home loans defaulted.  How does that happen?  Remember, if I have $100 in the bank, it’s not really there.  The bank loaned it out.

So, I think I have $100, but so does the person who borrowed it from the bank, so M2 shows that there is $200.  When the loan defaults, there’s only $100.  And it’s $100 the bank is on the hook to pay back to me, so they have to borrow it from someone else.

Yup.  Defaulting loans and business failures cause the economy to contract, even during inflation.  And if that causes the Fed® to print more money?

We’ll be in even bigger trouble.

Update:  our appeal at Google® was approved.  The podcast was restored (LINK).  Our livestream is on tonight (Wednesday at 9 Eastern), at our channel.

Inflation: Crowding Out The Real Economy

“You don’t? Well, you don’t have to understand what it eh, it eh . . . It was printed in eh . . . Washington. Well, and when they print something in Washington, they know what it means.” – Green Acres

“Never trust an actor with a gun.” – Abraham Lincoln

Like the beginning of a movie starring Will Smith as Winnie the Pooh, Amy Schumer as Piglet, and Mitt “Mittens” Romney as Christopher Robin, you know one thing: the pain is only starting.

The pain I’m speaking of is inflation, though. I’d love to be the bearer of happy news. I’d love to say, “Nah, as soon as things straighten out in (spins wheel) China West Taiwan, things will be better. Nope.

Let me explain.

The Federal Government is really good at exactly two things, and one of them is spending money. Since they already donated a few billion bucks worth of stuff to the Taliban, they decided to go for a few trillion to everyone who was breathing.

What’s the difference between a rake and an AK-47? Don’t ask me, I just fly the drone.

The spending has been amazing, and it has created the expected result: inflation. It’s not done, though.

As I said, the Federal Government is good at spending money, but it’s slow at spending money. Although it looks like the Federal Government is just willy-nilly stuffing the money it just printed into the mouths of anyone nearby, it’s much more complicated than that.

First, a bureaucrat has to invent the program. And that means?

Paperwork. That has to be reviewed and approved. And every buzzword of sustainable and underserved and economic equity has to be mashed into the program and form. Once complete?

The program has to be announced, and various states, counties, alternative bands, and alternative energy providers then pounce on the paperwork to ask for buckets of cash. Biden’s grants for free crack pipes won’t figure out what communities they need to go to by themselves!

This process takes months. Then, once awarded, people need to order the crack pipes from China Terre Haute. Why not China? This is the Federal Government, and we know it is charged with protecting the American Crackpipe Maker Equalitarian Sisterhood (ACMES). So, all the crack pipe materials will be locally sourced from approved Wiccans.

How to cook crack and clean crabs: step one – use commas.

If it stopped at crack pipes, it would be fine, probably. But it’s not just that. It’s concrete for a burst of road construction. It’s rebar for the concrete. It’s plywood for the forms.

There was already price pressure on almost everything. Now that some of the largest steel (around 100 million tons of production) works in the world are shut down or sanctioned due to Vlad’s Spring Vacation, (not to mention fuel costs shooting up higher than a T-72 turret) that rebar is now much more expensive.

If that were the only problem, these sort of crushing cost increases would probably be something that we could live with. But whenever the government wants to buy a cubic yard of concrete to make a new office to process paperwork for Build Back Better Bux applications, well, that increases the cost.

For everyone.

In Denmark, they tried to repave a street with Legos®. They ran into a lot of roadblocks.

It makes the cost of building or expanding a business higher, unpredictable, and perhaps unattainable. Government spending – trillions of dollars of government spending that came from money that was simply wished into existence – crowds out private spending.

That means the new Pizza Hut® can’t be built because concrete is too expensive. That means the new PEZ™ factory can’t be built to keep up with the PEZ© demand because steel for the machinery costs too much. The alternatives that create a productive economy are walled off due to increased costs.

So, it’s happening now.

A little.

I’m telling you now, the big waves of Fed.Gov spending have yet to hit. Hundreds of millions of dollars more than the usual printing are hitting the economy – each month. The pressure from printing has yet to stop. It has yet to slow. It is still increasing.

I don’t think my doctor likes me. I called him and told him that I took a bunch of sleeping pills. He told me have a few drinks to relax.

The economy of every country that hyperinflated did so because of one simple reason: the leadership seemed to not understand that printing didn’t lead to prosperity. They had some sort of belief that money was a magical totem so that they could print more, and people would be happy.

In small quantities, it works. Home prices go up. Prices go up. People who save (as always) are the ones that get burned as their saved cash lowers in value.

Germany hyperinflated in the 1920s because they wanted to print cash. Lots of it. They didn’t have the good fortune to be able to create all they wanted with computers and the press of a button, so they had to hyperinflate the old-fashioned way: printing.

How bad did it get?

That certainly didn’t lead to any sort of social upheaval.

They managed to double the capacity of the printing press by only printing on one side.

I bet we can match that: I bet we can start making electronic money with only four bits per byte. I guess I can be the bearer of glad tidings and report there is good news, though:

We don’t have to watch a movie starring Will Smith as Winnie the Pooh, Amy Schumer as Piglet, and Mitt “Mittens” Romney as Christopher Robin. We’ve got that going for us.

The Economic Fate Of The United States: Two Choices

“No, you’ve already made the choice. Now you have to understand it.” – The Matrix Reloaded

I spent hundreds to rent a limo, but there was no driver.  All that cash on a limo, and nothing to chauffeur it.

I did posts about inflation before inflation hit, but I’m not a psychic.  It’s not like I work for ESPN or something.  No.  This inflation was absolutely predictable, and in fact, has been absolutely predictable since 2008.  Ben Bernanke’s Fed© Approved™ solution to the Great Liquidity Crisis during the Great Recession was simple:  print a lot of money.

Make no mistake, the economic problem was big back then in 2008.  I personally saw an entire segment of the economy reach a full dead stop.  Rail cars piled up at the sidings on my drive to work near Modern Mayberry because the railroads had no place to put them – miles of them.  I mean, without rail cars how could new railroad employees train?

Why did this happen?  Nobody knew which banks had money and which ones didn’t.  The trust that underlies the system had been blown up by a series of banks defaulting, with stocks crashing, and bonds plummeting.  Heck, even physicists stopped trusting atoms – they make up everything.  The Fed’s® solution to this lack of trust?  Like I said, print money.

They were sneaky about how they did it – they printed money and gave it to the banks by buying up the awful assets they had on the books.  The money vacuumed up the bad debt like Charlie Sheen on the set of Two and a Half Grams.

Something tells me he’d be a more thoughtful Fed® chairman than the one we have now.

The printing also kicked the can down the road.  We could spend all day about the causes, but the reality is that we are the can that was kicked down the road.  Our current inflation is the result of keeping the party going even when the system should have cleared out the bad debts, cleared out the dead companies, and cleared out the waste that caused the crisis.

Would it have been tough?  Sure, especially on elevator repairmen – but their business is always up and down anyway.

So, now what?

The reality is simple.  As a nation, we face only two choices.

The first choice we could make is to keep doing what we’re doing.  We can keep printing money, and keep pretending that the economic problems are created by the sanctions we put in place over a regional border conflict that we helped create and certainly encouraged.

The result of the decision to keep printing will first be higher prices.  Higher fuel prices mean less driving, but they also mean that the cost of nearly everything you buy costs more:  food, trash service, beer, PEZ®, posters of Elvis (especially posters of the The King after he discovered carbohydrates), everything physical will cost more.

Why can’t Elvis drive his Cadillac™ in reverse?  He’s dead.

Oh, sure, hyperinflation seems like fun at first.  Rising prices, rising wages . . . but the wages never keep up with the prices.  And businesses can’t keep up with the rising costs, so long-term contracts that had been great are now unprofitable.  Bare shelves show up.  People rush to ditch cash to buy stuff because they know that Kraft© Mac n’ Cheese™ is going to be 20% more next week, so canned goods have a better rate of return than the stock market.  Some people don’t like canned food, but for me it’s ate out of tin.

But then banks have finally gotten wise, and we’ll see higher interest rates on car loans, home loans, and student debt.  Higher costs on cars plus higher interest costs mean lower new car sales, especially when people are struggling to find change in their couches to buy Pizza Rolls® and Twinkies™.

Lower new car sales mean fewer new cars made.  Which requires fewer workers.  Which increases unemployment.  Eventually, there’s a recession or depression as economic activity ceases to be meaningful – weird things happen as people resort to a manic level of activity.

The banks finally get wise and loans don’t come with an interest rate, they come with a scheme to create a way that the bank doesn’t go bankrupt as the currency value plummets.  The values are pegged to a commodity (like gold) or an inflation index.  Bankers have been through this before in country after country and know every trick to keep themselves whole.  I assure you, inflation has their interest.

I saw a homeless man talking to his shadow.  That means six more weeks of inflation.

Ultimately, the orgy of printing results in destitution, unemployment, and a political and moral crisis.  How bad is it?  Reminders of the hyperinflation caused by worthless money during the Revolutionary War are still in the Constitution – “No state shall coin money, emit bills of credit, or make anything but gold and silver tender in payment of debts.”  I even keep a copy of the Constitution on the wall – The Mrs. calls it the Decoration of Independence.

Wonder why the German bankers are so crazy about not letting the euro hyperinflate?  They’ve been through that before.  And German bankers are generally pessimists, which is why they study Russian.

Sadly, we’re seeing these impacts even though many of the trillions in printing haven’t even hit the economy yet.  Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill hasn’t even hit the economy yet.  Think construction is expensive now?  Wait until there are a trillion more dollar in construction contracts that hit the economy in the next six months.  That will lead to millions of guys standing around trying to look busy.

I wanted to build highways, but I decided not to go down that road.

So, that’s path one – keep going and wait for everything to blow up like slobber from a pasty dingo with a bag of decade-old beef jerky, which seems like an oddly specific analogy, but I have my reasons.  What will be on the other side?  No one can say – often, hyperinflation destroys the entire fabric of the country, making the people desperate, willing to do anything, even watch another Marvel® movie.

There is, of course, a second choice:

Quit printing money.

Stop entirely.

Have the Fed® increase the interest rate to slow down the economy and re-value the currency.  Stop the shenanigans.

The result of that is, of course, also a major recession – probably worse than the Great Recession of 2008.  Possibly as bad as the Great Depression.

There will be plummeting home values as interest rates increase.  There will be unemployment.    But once the debt clears, in a decade or so, what will be left will be an economy that is based, perhaps, on a more fundamentally sound currency, or even one that won’t inflate until it is worthless.  I can dream, can’t I?

It’s not a pleasant idea, going through that pain.  But in the end, it provides a chance for economic prosperity.

That’s it.  Those are really the only choices I see in the economy.  We’ll have to pick one.

I have no faith that the second path will be taken.  Why?  This graph, for one.  Looks like people who like free stuff, vote for people who give them . . . free stuff.

Romney supporters signed their checks on the front, Obama voters signed theirs on the back.

It requires making a hard choice, a knowing difficulty.  It’s like having the discipline to eat the broccoli and skip the ice cream before they wheel you out to read things off the teleprompter.  I have seen no sign of the political class of the United States being willing to make any difficult decision.  I have seen only a little appetite in the general populace to take the tough road.

No, I think we’ll make the first choice.  When inflation gets worse?  My bet is that the reaction of the political leadership will be to send checks to everyone.  Wait and see.

No, I’m not a psychic.  But I wish I was a remote viewer.  I’m still looking for the one from the stereo.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part II

“Did you ever run for dictator of anything?” – Green Acres

Why didn’t Julius Caesar ever say “thank you” to anyone?  He didn’t speak English.

This is Part II of the series.  Part I can be found here (LINK).

The history of when the United States started to slip into a dictatorship is long, but I’ll start with the Civil War.  The worst part of the Civil War (besides, you know, all of the dead people) was Lincoln running roughshod over the Constitution whenever it suited him:

  • Shut down opposition newspapers, arresting the owners and editors,
  • Arrested a former congressman (generally a good idea) and put him to a military tribunal (he wasn’t in the military) and then . . . deported him to the Confederacy,
  • Legalized disco, and
  • Put the entire state of Maryland under martial law.

Important Civil War Fact:  It is not true that, despite popular conception, Lincoln had written the first draft of the Gettysburg Address on a Bacon Swiss Hand-Breaded Chicken Sandwich™ wrapper from Carl’s Jr.©  Lincoln actually preferred Arby’s®.

The movie Lincoln grossed $300,000,000, which is weird because Abe normally didn’t do well in theaters.

But the slip toward despotism wasn’t done and the precedent was one people didn’t forget:  in a crisis, the rights of the citizens who oppose you are optional.  War and crisis seemed to bring it out the best, and although I could spend quite a bit about the overreaches of other presidents (Woodrow Wilson, I’m looking at you) the next person grasping for the tyrant’s ring was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

FDR was really awful, if you love liberty.  His expansion of Federal power (unlike most of Lincoln’s) is still with us today.  As the economic crisis of the Great Depression hit nation after nation and led to dictatorships across the world, America craved their own Strong Man.

It also explains why he never ran for office.

Roosevelt was more than ready.  It is quite arguable that the vast majority of the things that Roosevelt did made the crisis longer.  It is acknowledged today by the Federal Reserve™ (thanks, Wilson) that they not only caused the Great Depression, but that their actions made it worse.  It makes me so mad:  if I didn’t have a cold, I’d Sudafed®.

Roosevelt did not let the crisis go to waste.  He created power structure after power structure in the country.  Social Security.  Threatening the Supreme Court so that his definition of the Interstate Commerce Clause was adopted, which allows the Federal government to reach into almost every business in the country today.

Roosevelt also violated the idea that presidents served two terms, and two terms only.  Thankfully, he died about 300 years into his presidency.  And, thankfully, he inspired a Constitutional Amendment to prevent anyone from rolling in his wheelchair tracks.

But the rot of creeping state control continued.  What held it at bay was, thankfully (and oddly enough), the Soviets.

I didn’t like their food, though – I’m against the Soviet Onion.

Centralization is always the goal of the dictator.  In order to compete with the Soviets, though, we needed to keep our economy in overdrive to build more jets and missiles and nuclear bombs.  The easiest way to do that?  Dispersed knowledge.  Incentives.  Voluntary cooperation.  In short, capitalism.  The Soviets may have thought that they’d bury us, but in reality they never could keep up with a people motivated by freedom, patriotism, and profit.

We buried the Soviets.

But the requirement to beat them also required a people in the United States that were ill-suited for a Caesar.

Unfortunately, in addition to building missiles, the communists had been trying to hollow out the institutions of the United States.  It’s ironic:  the Soviet Union was hollowed out by communism around the same time that the big rot of communism that the Soviets planted in the United States started to show here.  They wormed their way through what I now call The List of the Long March through the Institutions:

  • Colleges and Universities
  • The K-12 educational system.
  • Most Protestant religious organizations.
  • Most Catholic organizations.
  • The American Medical Association.
  • Most departments of the Federal government, absent the armed services.
  • The general officer corps of the armed services.
  • The courts.
  • Silicon Valley tech companies.
  • Most Fortune® 500™ companies.

I had a communist girlfriend who I later found out was a psycho.  How did I miss the red flags?

The control of these Institutions ultimately gives the Left the power to destabilize society.  It rots society from within.  The signs of that sort of rot are so big they cannot be concealed now:

  • 70% of citizens supporting some form of mandatory vaxx in blue states (81% in Washington, D.C.),
  • Only speech and activities approved of by the toxic combination of government, BigTechBook™, and GloboCorp® is approved,
  • George R.R. Martin is still pretending he’s writing his next Game of Thrones® book,
  • The leader of Iran still had a Twitter™ account while the President’s account was cancelled,
  • Open borders are reality, flooding the United States with many with no functional idea of liberty,
  • Firing for wrongthink is not only approved, it’s encouraged, and
  • Disney®, a global company, is attempting to override the will of the people of Florida because their employees do not agree with the idea that teachers shouldn’t talk about gay sex with five-year-olds.

That’s bad enough.  The good news is that not everyone is an NPC, waiting to receive the next government-approved Woke Upgrade that (spins wheel) attempts to convince you your computer is non-binary.  Heck, if you’re reading this, chances are high that you make your own decisions and are skeptical of much of The Agenda.

I’d like my remains to be scattered at Disneyworld®.  I don’t want to be cremated, though.

But in 2022, we have the potential for the biggest economic failure in the history of the United States.  We have the possibility of a failed economy combined with a failed currency.  This would bring economic chaos that would be destabilizing.  In the 1930s, 20% of the American workforce was in agriculture.  Now?  Around 2%.

Without jobs, in a collapsing economy?  That’s a lot of hungry people.  A lot of homeless people.

A lot of people without hope.  A lot of people who will look for a man who promises solutions.  The Strong Man.

The response?  That’s Friday’s post:  The Strong Man, and the signposts along the way.

The Coming American Dictatorship, Part I

“Well, Captain, the Klingons called you a tin-plated overbearing, swaggering dictator with delusions of godhood.” – Star Trek

“Comrade Stalin, a fortune-teller came to see you!” “Execute him. If he was any good, he would have known not to come.”

Most people like to be told what to do. They want to be led. That makes sense, given the history of humanity. We work best when we work together, and the worst group is a group of a dozen people who each think they’re the leader. Because of this, hierarchy is a built-in feature to our operating system. Get a group of lumberjacks together, and one of them will want to be named the branch manager.

The downside of this “working together” is that the vast mass of people are willing to behave like lemmings and all jump off the cliff, as long as that’s what everyone else in the group is doing. Heck, lemmings would even jump off a dock, if they felt pier pressure. For me, the last few years has been the biggest revelation in human behavior and how easily people (especially NPCs) can be reprogrammed.

The three biggest reprogramming efforts in the last few years have been Trump, COVID, and Ukraine. I’ll skip Trump for the moment, and jump into COVID. Was the ‘Rona a real disease? Certainly. The reaction to it was overblown at every level. The average age of people who died from Corona-chan was (through my rough calculations) 73 in the United States.

In two years, a total of 921 deaths below the age of 17 were recorded. By my calcs, this was less than 1% of the deaths from all causes for kids of that age. In other words, it was uncommon. For that, though, we shut down schools, shut down the economy, and tossed trillions in cash out everywhere. That led to pent-up demand – when the local Lego® store reopened, people lined up for blocks.

If you step on a rusty Lego™, you might need to get a Tetris© shot.

You’re aware of all of that, of course. This isn’t ancient history. But the number of Americans who became Corona believers overnight was in the tens of millions. The reactions of panic were amazing. It became the reason for the existence of the news media and Big Tech® to actively put a blanket of censorship on all views that didn’t agree with whatever the blessed St. Anthony Fauci, PBUH, didn’t believe that afternoon.

The ‘Rona continued to be a means of control, as well as amazing profitability for the vaxx makers. Biden even tried to up the ante with controls that would have made Brezhnev blush that were (in some cases) later defeated, which made him stop before he went full Trudeau. Never go full Trudeau.

Eventually, the vaxx requirements and silly Corona restrictions got so politically muddled and unpopular that the subject had to be changed. A desperate politician with low approval ratings decided that the best thing that could have happened to him is . . . Russia.

Cowboys don’t have to worry either, they have herd immunity.

Leftists have been head over heels hating Russia for quite a long time, even more than they hate having to switch cars after the Amber Alert comes over the radio. I started to write a paragraph as to why – but why doesn’t matter.

It would have been elementary statecraft for Biden to get Ukraine and Russia to have a peaceful settlement, or at least one short of war. Instead, every public statement was a variant of “let’s you and him fight.”

Biden actively egged on the conflict that no one believed would actually happen.

Why? This why is important.

It was to swap out the chips. COVID-19 Fear Enabler™ was replaced with 2022 Russia Hate®. Joe saw his shot to again become nearly as popular as “that dance the kids are doing, the twist” and someone decided to make the chip swap.

Now, I’m not saying that there aren’t valid reasons to be on the side of Ukraine – there are. Me? I’m not on either side – I don’t need to choose between various them. But the real loser of this war won’t only be Ukraine and Russia. In the long run, I think the biggest loser will be the economy of the United States, especially with unemployment after Ukraine has to lay off the Biden, Pelosi, and Romney families.

Pictured: Will Smith not hitting someone for making a joke.

I see that there is a very, very significant portion of the populace that is highly susceptible to this reprogramming – again – no every Russia hater is an NPC, but many are. The technology for this reprogramming has been honed very well over time. People who couldn’t spell Ukraine and couldn’t find it on a map want to intervene with a no-fly zone and troops. One wonders if they know that “no-fly” has nothing to do with zipperless pants.

Whether planned or not, this will very likely result in the final crisis that the United States will face in its current form. The difficulty is that we are a population that is already divided. I feel that the recent sanctions against Russia are an own goal that will ultimately result in the death of the dollar as the reserve currency and wrote about that here: (https://wilderwealthywise.com/russia-and-the-end-of-the-dollar/).

Ultimately, this leads to that final crisis that we’ll face as a nation.

How will we deal with an economic crisis? Certainly there is the possibility of Civil War 2.0, which is what I had previously had as my number one risk. It’s still there, but a new risk is becoming more and more probable as we head towards Biden’s Depression. What kind of crisis? That one is simple. Economic disruption in the United States of Weimar proportions, as I’ll outline below.

A move away from the US dollar as the reserve currency (which is happening right now) will create poverty. Yes, we make food in the United States. But we don’t make the microchips required to run the John Deere® harvesters. We also make most of the energy that we consume. But we don’t make the steel to produce the pipe to drill it or move it. We’ve simply lost much of the technological and experience base required to make the things we need, except for Doritos®.

As noted above, I can see other probabilities, but Biden’s driving Russia and China together to create a Eurasian bloc that has both raw materials and production capacity will upset and supplant the unipolar world we had since 1992. This creates the conditions necessary to crush a United States built on a FIRE economy.

What’s a FIRE economy? Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate. Yup, that’s the United States. Regardless of how it has been used, it is an economy that’s built around sloshing money around. No matter what the condo sells for in New York, it won’t put a single more hamburger into a McDonald’s® in Manhattan.

Russia can make and harvest the food, because they can make tractors or import them from China. Russia can make excess energy, as well as the pipe to move it. They don’t even need China for that. The United States used to be indispensable. Now?

The United States imports $90 billion a month more than it exports. $90 billion. Why do people sent us $90 billion in stuff every month more than we send out? Because we pay with dollars.

If only he could have gotten another 150,000 votes at 3am, I’m sure he could have won Saudi Arabia.

These dollars exist because we just print them, or, more likely, create electronic bits that we call dollars. It was a good gig, but Biden’s sanctions against Russia have shown the Russians that they don’t need the Western financial system. They can sell oil and fertilizer and grain for . . . rubles. Or gold. Or microchips. They don’t need the dollar.

This sort of crisis facing the United States has happened before. Most of the time, it rhymes.

  • A decadent people
  • Weakened through a fixation only on pleasure and power
  • Because they live in abundance
  • Are confronted with a crisis – typically ending the pleasure

What, then, do the people want?

Well, of course, they want the pleasure back. They want the abundance back. What are they willing to do? Anything. As I said, people like to be led. So, when the Strong Man shows up with the Plan, they’re ready to accept it.

What does the Strong Man require to return the pleasure and abundance back? Simple, said the spider to the no-fly zone: Control.

Who is ready to give control? People who can swap programming nearly immediately, to swap out COVID Fear Pack™ to Save Ukraine 2022 Upgrade© without skipping a beat.

And that’s how you get a Dictator

Wednesday: The Road to Dictatorship, Past, Present, and Future.

Beer, Hangovers, And The End Of The Party

“We hope you enjoyed the beer, oh, like I mean the movie, eh.” – Strange Brew

They never talk about the worst pupil of Socrates: Mediocrates.

I was 22 when I bought two six packs of “Old German Lager®” for $1.25 each. Not each beer, each six pack, and as I recall this was when a decent beer cost nearly a buck a beer. I then went down with my friend to watch the local minor league team play on a Tuesday afternoon. That is something you can do when you’re in college. Now, Tuesday afternoons are mostly 72°F (43 hemi-demi-centi-meters) and partly-fluorescent with a chance of popcorn smells from the communal microwave.

I used to think that the best beer was one that was so cold it was nearly ice, and best served in an ice-cold mug. Then my nephew brought me a hot one on a summer day that he’d been shaking for five minutes. That one was pretty good, too. However, I can say that Old German Lager™ was the single worst beer that I have ever had in my life.

But more on that later.

The world is a really big place. Oh, sure, sometimes people say (when they run into a coincidence) that it’s a small world, but my standard response to that is, “let’s see you paint it.”

I tried to get thinner at the paint store. It didn’t work.

The world really does seem large. When I’ve spent time on a plane flight for work over the breadbasket, I can recall sitting for hours just looking at the patchwork of fields filled with cattle or crops stretching to the horizon. It seems huge.

And it is huge.

The miracle of the modern world is certainly not the iPhone®, but agriculture – it’s what allows people to keep living. Mankind has always known hunger and many people in history have expired from the “diet plan that never fails”. But in the last 20 years, as our population reached the highest levels ever, there were more fat people than starving people for the first time on Earth.

The problem of solving world hunger was no longer a matter of producing the food, it was no longer a matter of being able to distribute the food, it wasn’t even a matter of paying for food – all the hunger on the planet was simply a matter of politics.

In 2022 that won’t be the case.

Fertilizer prices are at record highs. Additionally, the diesel fuel the farmers rely on to plant, harvest and transport the food is at near-record highs. Right now, we’re living on the harvest from last year. This year, we’re perhaps . . . headed towards a disaster.

I’ve mentioned before that Russia and Ukraine together account for around 25% of global wheat exports. Russia has a harvest projected that will lower its exports in 2022, and is currently exporting at least some grain (though I bet China and India have a coupon to jump to the head of the line to buy food). Ukraine? I’m thinking that planting and harvesting and producing fertilizer (Ukraine was an exporter of fertilizer) is the last thing on their minds.

I guess that would make me an entremanure.

Food production is pretty finely balanced with consumption – there is no Strategic Doritos® Reserve that the President can tap into if the party runs low. In reality, the world typically has some buffer – about 100 days (from the latest data I’ve seen) of grain. Most of that isn’t in countries that are importers – it’s in grain silos near the farms, waiting for shipment to the Doritos™ factory.

That’s good news. But the recent things I’ve seen show that, at least in the United States, farmers are attempting to plant everything they can, but the markets today are weird. Several stories have pointed out that some local grain elevators aren’t buying grain, because they’re worried the market will collapse and they won’t be able to sell the grain at a profit.

The farmers depend on those sales to buy . . . fertilizer and diesel. Will prices collapse? Probably not, since money printing even more money seems to be the only thing that Congress can agree on. It will be painful in the United States. It may be catastrophic in countries where the oligarchs live on $0.47 per day.

A friend’s wife ran off with a tractor salesman. She wrote him a John Deere® letter.

The world economy is likewise balanced in the production of “stuff”. There’s a shortage of cars. Why? There’s a shortage of chips. So, the 20-year-old hulk of a car that has traveled just as long as light travels in a second that I have for a spare if my spare breaks down has doubled in price in the last year. Last year, it was worth $2,000. Now, Pugsley says it’s going for $4,000.

Progress, I guess, if you own a used car that’s within three oil changes of traveling as far as the Moon’s orbit. I might even get a few extra bucks from Elon Musk.

Metals are likewise going through the roof – basics like copper and nickel are increasing. I got a burger last week – it was up 25% – in two weeks. Tires? The local dealership said that they were up 25%. This month. And PEZ®? Forget about it.

Want inflation?

It’s here.

The drivers that started the snowball running down the cliff was all the free money during the Great ‘Rona Rave of 2020-2021-2022. Politicians have the idea that they have to do something, even if it’s stupid. Printing money and paying people not to work is, 100%, stupid.

Of course, the next idea is one right out Nixon’s playbook – before the election, heat up the economy so that everything is running on full speed when the votes are cast. It’s the same idea as throwing vodka in the punchbowl to get the party going. Hangovers? Who worries about hangovers at midnight?

Except if you’re drinking Old German Lager©. I said that Old German Lager™ was the worst beer in the world. It was. We drank it and it tasted, at best, questionable. But it’s beer, right?

Well, about the sixth inning the headache started. But neither my friend nor I were in the slightest bit buzzed. We were completely sober, but had gone straight to the hangover.

“Premium” might be false advertising.

That’s what we’ve done. Like Nixon’s inflationary party in the 1970s, we went straight into the tough times. We went from the Vietnam boom to the bust, complete with high oil prices and a Cold War. We are in the hangover part of history.

And this time, we didn’t even get the buzz.

The Modern World Part IV: What To Do?

“Would you say I have a plethora of piñatas?” – Three Amigos

He was also the first person to use CTRL-C.

So, I promised three blogs on the Modern World.  They are here – The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers, The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating, and The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed.  As I sat preparing to do the blog tonight, I realized there was one more post to provide the capstone to the series, which I present in this post.

How do we deal with modernity outside of moving to a cabin in Montana?

Listen, despite the name, Ted made more than one bomb.

First, if you’re not healthy, get healthy.  That’s actually horribly simple to do for most people.

  • Limit the amount of food that you eat – we’re provided with a plethora of food choices daily. Most of it I don’t need.  As I’ve railed for years, most (not all!) people in the United States could go without food for two weeks with no ill effects, and many would find the experience a positive, not a negative.  Here is some sound advice I’ve incorporated into my life:  you can’t outrun your teeth.  But I can outrun most Leftists – you can tell they like carbs.
  • Sure donuts (in metric, doughnuts) are good. Avoid them.    Will one a week kill you?  No.  Will one a day?  Maybe.  Same with chips.  I had a “snack size” bag of chips two weeks ago.  Since I’ve been eating well, they made me feel queasy.  Same with donuts.  When your diet is good meat and real vegetables, donuts and that gooey cheese they serve with movie-theater nachos taste like . . . a chemical product.  Which they are.  Corollary:  don’t let your teeth dig your grave.  I wouldn’t want to ruin the gravedigger’s hole career.
  • Pick foods that are as close as possible to actual food. If you’re gonna have a chicken sandwich at McDonalds®, pick the one that’s made out of actual chicken rather than some sort of processed chicken stuff.  A baked potato or French fries?  Baked, thank you.  Seriously, once I stopped eating crap, crap tasted like crap.  If it has vegetable oil or a list of ingredients longer than, say, seven, once a week.  At most.  Heck, I even had a kid’s meal at McDonalds today.  It sure made his parents mad.
  • The food pyramid is even poor geometry – heck, I read Pharaoh used slaves to build his. Bricks might have been easier?  Regardless, real fats and meat (butter, a well-marbled ribeye) are good for you and make you feel full.  Flour spikes your insulin and all the breads (except the ones I make from grinding the bones of door-to-door salesmen) are made from flour.  Insulin tells your body to store fat.  Do the math.
  • Get exercise.   It’s good for you.  If nothing else, walk.  If you can’t walk, undulate like a snake on a baby oil-covered shower curtain.  One thing I’ve seen in life – when a man stops walking, death isn’t far away.  Keep moving.  Even if your legs are weak, you can still do diddly-squats.
  • Avoid it, except, say, once a week.  Maybe.  I’ll have an entire post on that at some point.

The other day I said, “Alexa, turn on CNN®.  I want to hear the news.”  Alexa responded, “I’m sorry Lord John, you’ll have to pick one or the other.”

Second, feed your mind.

  • Feed your mind like you feed your body. Go to the source, and check everyone (even me!) and determine what isn’t Truth.  Journalists are now being taught in journalism school (it’s like real school, but they use pictures and coloring books) that being an advocate for the globalist, Leftist viewpoint is the point of news reporting.  Understand that virtually every news story you are reading today in mainstream media is written by a rich kid who wasn’t smart enough to go to law school and believes that lying to you is ethical, as long as it advances The Agenda and The Narrative.  And sometimes they change The Agenda and The Narrative in less than a week.  Don’t believe me?  Ask Psaki about COVID.
  • The media lies. But I repeat myself.  “Truth is the first casualty of war,” quoted Ethel Annakin-Skywalker in 1915 according to something I read on the Internet.  Remember that “nurse” who told Congress of Iraqi soldiers tossing infants out when they took incubators from hospitals when Iraq invaded Kuwait?  She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States.  Look it up.  Before you believe a single thing coming from Ukraine, look it up, and understand this:  your emotion is the aim.  Heck, I hear manipulating your emotions is all the rage.
  • Propaganda: even when you’re aware of propaganda, it’s effective.
  • Look for things that make you happy. When I go on the Internet, sometimes (when I’m in a growly mood) I look for things that will make me mad.  There’s plenty.  Twitter® is a sea of it.  Most social media is a sea of it.  That’s why (except for when writing for research purposes) I avoid it like the plague – remember, all work and no plague makes for an entirely different 13th
  • For 95% of people, there is no reason you can’t be happy in this moment, right now.   There are people in this world who have serious problems, but for the most part you’re really not one of them.  Even if you are, why would you let those problems rob you from a moment of being happy?  There is a time to grieve, a time to be sad.  When you let it rule your life, you’re a victim.  Stop it.  Don’t make me come over there and make you.

I brought a grenade to a water balloon fight once.  It did level the playing field.

Then, there’s marriage.  These rules aren’t for 1970, (though they would have worked) but more for today – the world has moved on.  It is far harder today to find a good match than it was even when I met The Mrs. two decades ago.  If you’re happily married, ignore and skip to the next section.

  • If you’re not married, take care in picking your partner. A lot of care.  A bad match will last just as long as a good one (if you have kids) and be amazingly costly.  And never pick woman obsessed with Star Wars® – divorce is strong with this one.
  • Avoid dating apps. They’re really just casual sex apps.  And never go casual.  Get competitive.
  • If you’re a young dude (below 35), try to get a wife who is no older than 20-24 years old and marry for values and character. Why?  Nothing good happens with a single woman in their mid to late 20s now.
  • If you’re a young woman, find a quality guy who has values and character, and stay a virgin until marriage.
  • If you’re a young person, especially a man, avoid marrying a spouse whose parents divorced when they were young (0-16). Understand their family and their values.  Understand that the values on display with the parents are another clue to how your future spouse will be.
  • If you’re a man, don’t let your wife’s work interfere with raising the kids and keeping the house. Raising kids with decent values are more important than most luxuries.
  • And while we’re there about kids, understand this – the move to turn government schools into an indoctrination center has never been higher. Which values do you want your children to have?  Yours?  The governments?

But I hear it’s at a pretty low interest rate.  Heck, I think we could refinance New Zealand to make the balloon payment.

What about economics?

  • Avoid debt to the extent possible. Never borrow to buy a car, unless it’s the only choice.  Never buy a new car unless your net worth is over $1 million or a company you own is paying for it.  Heck, I hear the best way to get back on your feet is to miss two car payments . . . .
  • I have one.  I could pay it off in cash.  Why could I pay it off?  Because I never borrow to buy cars (since 1997).  I hear Spongebob® isn’t paying his mortgage – his house is underwater.
  • Understand that luxury has multiple costs: first, there’s the cash that has to be paid every month.  Second, there’s a moral cost.  Just like a donut, occasional luxury won’t dull the character.  But every month, and forever?  It robs bank accounts and robs the most precious thing that any person controls – their time.
  • Video games are a luxury. If a person spends 20 hours a week playing video games, what else could have been done with their time?  Imagine if Hemingway spent his spare time playing Grand Theft Auto instead of sitting under the Catalan Sun drinking wine from a bota and watching bullfights?    GTA is a life stealer.  And for Ernest, so was a shotgun.
  • Why live in a big city? The high housing cost?  The crush of incessant humanity surrounding you?  Oh, yeah, you can get Thai food at 3am.
  • Realize the dollar is going to die. The United States prints them, and then other people take them.  When Jen P-saki said that this was “Putin’s Inflation” I asked the question:  “When did Putin take control of our money supply and then started printing trillions of dollars?”  If you salted away a bit of gold and silver (and lead, too) the best case is that you could give it to your kids when you pass on.  The worst case?  Well, between you and me, silver and gold might be the biggest bargains of the century in 2022 (I am NOT an investment advisor).
  • Realize that in the future, there is a high degree of probability that having “divergent” opinions to The Narrative will result in cutting people off from their money – it has already happened in Canada. You may not believe it, but it’s Tru-deau.  How will you prepare for that?
  • You have a year’s worth of food, right? You buy a little extra each month and salt it away?  It’s a lot easier to do when the shelves are full, and when shortages hit you’re not part of the problem – you’re part of the solution because you won’t be adding to the panic.  It’s not hoarding if you bought it before the panic hits.

I heard he was sad later in life.  He had a Kipling depression.

The Modern World thinks that this is a new scenario.  It isn’t.  Kipling wrote about this many, many years ago in The Gods of The Copybook Headings:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;

 And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

The Modern World Part III: You Exist To Be Farmed

“I have nipples, Greg.  Could you milk me?” – Meet the Parents

Klaus, and his cat, Mrs. Triddlesworth.

This is the third and final (for now) commentary about modern life and what modernity has brought us.  The first one was dealing with health (The Modern World Part I: Health And Strippers), the second with life in general (The Modern World Part II: Wages, Subscriptions, and Dating).  This last one deals with the essence of the modern world:  Money.

We are being farmed.  For money.  For time.  For votes.

I started noticing the money-farming thing in the 1990s.  I looked at what Sears© was doing back then because I was at the point where I needed to start paying bills or cultivating the lifestyle of an urban outdoorsman.  To me, what Sears® was attempting seemed obvious – they were attempting to see what the average family spent each month and were trying to swallow it all.

You could even get a Sears© store credit card to pay for it all (plus a wee 20% interest fee).  Sadly, I heard that their Sears™ credit card database has just been hacked – they now have the personal data for everyone born between 1899 and 1921.  Sears™, of course, sold everything from tools to toddler beds to toasters to towels to trench coats to twine.

But that wasn’t enough.  Sears™ bought Allstate™ so they could insure your house and car.  Sears™ bought Dean Witter Investments©, Coldwell Banker Real Estate™, and developed the Discover™ card to boot.

Outside of food, you could get a majority of your needs covered if you had a family just by buying stuff from Sears© product and their companies.  You could invest, buy a home, and even (in some places) have Sears™ mechanics work on your car.

I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys’r’Us© kid . . . bankrupt and empty inside.

This strategy failed, spectacularly, because Sears™ forgot how to sell stuff – it imagined it was a finance-real estate – insurance company and forgot that the big business that brought people in the door was the stuff.  Today, there are fewer Sears™ stores left than movies Nic Cage did in the last three months, so only 36 or so.

But the concept of “farming people for monthly payments” stuck with me.  The very best companies start with an idea of how to serve people, but at some point, the goal of all of them become money extraction.  Then they (generally) fail.  I’m looking at you, General Electric®.

Sometimes, companies even get the law changed to make a product legally required.  Example?

Car insurance.  There was a time it wasn’t required.  As of 2020 (the latest data I could find), two states don’t require it, but the other 48 require it (or bonding).  Before 1956, no states required car insurance.  Is it a good idea?  Yeah.  But I think the biggest proponents were car insurance companies who were tired of covering for the 45% of accidents that were caused by women drivers, which is weird.  The steering wheel isn’t even on their side.

What’s the worst thing about parallel parking?  The witnesses.

What other regular bills do most people pay in 2022?

  • Cable TV,
  • Subscription streaming,
  • Internet,
  • Elvis impersonators,
  • Property taxes,
  • Mortgage or rent,
  • Trash,
  • PEZ®,
  • Water,
  • Water soluble dog wax,
  • Sewer,
  • Johnny Depp, and
  • Homeowners’ associations

I could keep going.  Everyone wants a check, and most of them want it monthly so they can be as regular as Biden’s strokes.  Some of the things on the list are optional, and some are compulsory.  It took The Mrs. and I quite a lot of hunting when we moved to Texas to find a house that didn’t have a homeowners’ association.  And Johnny Depp?  Who can avoid that on a Saturday night?

But the farming gets worse.  It used to be that many (not all) families in the 1950s could get by with only one income.  Then, enter feminism.  It was far from natural – but women were made to feel in some way inadequate if they didn’t burn their bras, start smoking, and go to work and type PowerPoints®.  Or whatever women did at work in the 1960s.  Help the Clampetts?  I’m at a loss.

I gave a friend a book for his birthday.  I hope he returns it on time, it’s due in two weeks.

The number of houses for families didn’t go up any faster, but the income of the families did as mothers entered the workforce.  So, as women began to make money, the same number of families were chasing the same number of houses (suburbia could only grow so fast), but with higher income.

The result?  Housing prices went up so the standard of living didn’t even increase that much.  The nuclear family, already pulled from the extended family by events I’ve talked about in earlier posts in this series, began to feel the stress.  The net gain from women entering the workforce for many families was nearly zero, if not negative.

Don’t believe me?  Check housing prices around big cities.

As the stress from two working families shot up, the divorce rate went up.  And government dependency went up.  Thus?

People farmed for their labor became dependent people farmed for votes.  How can the Left keep winning like this?  That, sadly, wasn’t the only big economic change to hit the modern world.

College became (during the 1970s) another way to farm people for money.  The Average Midwestern College® in the 1970s could be paid for with a typical part-time job with money left over for pizza, Pepsi®, and a Ford® Pinto™.  The Pinto® might have been the best argument ever for car insurance.

Before then, most people didn’t go to college, because it wasn’t required to get a good job or start a good business.  But as numbers of people attending college went up, supply and demand kicked in.

The supply of college slots increased, sure, but the colleges found that they could charge a lot more for school.  But politicians decided that everyone should be allowed to go to school, so they introduced the Guaranteed Student Loan.  This was a government program where you could borrow enough to cover the tuition at most schools.

Okay, say it out loud.

Heck, I’d like to thank student loans for getting me through grad school.  I don’t think I can ever repay you.  I kid.  But the last loan payment was due on 1/1/2013.  I made sure to not pay ahead, so if 2012 was the end of the world, at least that last payment would have been a freebie.

Colleges, of course, decided that you could pay the borrowed amount PLUS more money, so tuition went up with loan amounts.  More students plus higher tuition led to more loans.  This led to more debt.

Now the average student loan debt is over $39,000.  The total student loan debt in the country is $1,7 trillion.

Where did this $1.7 trillion go?  To climbing walls.  To cool dorm rooms.  To spring breaks.  To new buildings.  And, far too much of it went to Leftist professors teaching their students that the problem is too much tradition, and the solution is even more modernity and “free” medical care.

What kind of Medicare would Moses have?  Part C.

Yes.  Medical care.  In general, the very best medical advice I’ve seen says to stay away from doctors as much as you can.  Eat healthy food.  Get exercise.  Stay hydrated.  Wash your hands.  Try not to get crushed under heavy things.  Avoid Chicago.

The problem is that none of this is very profitable for the medical industry.  Healthy people are lousy customers.  Goldman Sachs® asked it themselves, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”  Yes, this is a real quote.

Well, no, curing patients doesn’t work for big financial companies – they hate that idea.  No one makes money off of diet foods if you maintain a healthy weight.  No one makes money off of insulin if you can avoid diabetes.  And they actually want you to get cancer.  This is again a comment from the same Goldman Sachs® report:  “Where an incident pool remains stable (e.g., in cancer) the potential for a cure poses less risk to the sustainability of a franchise.”

Hmmm.  Does the Pfizer™ vaccine make more sense now?  If they have their way, boosting will be an annual event.  Does that sound sustainable?  I’m sure Goldman Sachs© is thrilled.

Are psychoactive medications sustainable?

But people owning things appears to be cramping the style of the elites.   The latest idea that has been widely talked about is the Great Reset – a transition away from past economic ideas, such as “ownership” and “family” and “freedom” and “sleeping in on Saturday morning”.

We’ve been moving towards the Great Reset.  According to their thoughts:  We’ll own nothing, and like it.  Then, our time could be farmed forever.  Our desires could be controlled and programmed.  We’ll like having nothing because that’s what they designed.  And they’ll further atomize and alienate us.

Because that’s profitable.  Don’t believe me?  Listen to them, in their own words: