Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise

UFOs, Tiger King, Oil Prices, and Bulgarian Models

“But you have to tell her before the show is scheduled to be on. There is this guy, and he is always requesting shows that are already played. Yes . . . no. You have to tell her before. He couldn’t quite grasp the idea that the charge nurse couldn’t make it be yesterday. She couldn’t turn back time, thank you Einstein! Now he . . . he was nuts! He was a fruitcake, Jim!” – 12 Monkeys

When I woke up from surgery the doctor came in, “John, you brain was thrown outside of your body. Thankfully, I was able to put it back in.” I said, “Doc, thanks for reminding me.”

“World turned upside down” is probably an overused phrase – most times it’s used by people when there is a fairly normal surprise, like getting to work late because of a traffic jam in the hallway between the bedroom and the stairs to the basement. On Tuesday, however, the world really did turn upside down if you owned any oil. Not baby oil, my probation officer told me that baby oil really isn’t made from actual babies. Crude oil, that is. Black gold. Texas tea. The contract for crude oil turned sharply negative. How negative? Holders of some contracts would be paid $40 a barrel to take that bubbling crude.

Yes. You read that right. People were being paid to take crude oil. How can the industry make up for a negative price?

Volume?

If you bought gasoline around the year 1999, you might have seen $0.79 per gallon of gasoline to fill up your Ford® Probe™. The Probe© had the bad fortune of being named probe right before the X-Files© came on the air and gave probe a whole different meaning. You UFO abductees know what I mean.

Yup, politicians and aliens have one thing in common.

If you bought gasoline around July, 2008, you might have paid nearly $5 per gallon while you and Walter White were the only two people who ever actually bought a Pontiac© Aztek™. But in no case did 7-11® ever pay you to fill your tank. Buy you could drive over to Saul’s place.

That won’t happen today, either, so you can forget your dream of filling your swimming pool full of gasoline for fun and profit. Although, come to think of it, it would be humorous to watch the Olympics® if the swimming was done in a pool of gasoline. Since gasoline is so much less dense than water, Michael Phelps couldn’t float and would sink straight to the bottom. Since my swimming looks more like drowning anyway, swimming in gasoline might be just the thing to even the odds so I can finally win that gold medal.

Well, I guess everybody won at least one swimming race.

Though, there is some part of me that would love to take barrel after barrel at $40 each and dump it in a metal aboveground pool and just burn it. You’d be able to see the black cloud for miles. I’d take pictures and send them to Greta Thunberg so that she would know I’m doing my part to put valuable CO₂ back into the atmosphere. After all, she did dare me to do it.

I think that some of my readers might have read back over the past dozen or so posts about economics and thought, “Oh, John Wilder, he’s gone full doomer.” No, I really haven’t. I still have a very positive outlook about the future. But one think I don’t have is illusions. For instance, I have no illusions that the future will look much like the past. I’m not going to be 18 again, and the world won’t party like it’s 1999 again. Besides, who would want to? You’d have to actually remember phone numbers again and talk to people during dinner again.

The price of oil is a big deal to the economy of the world, and the economy of individual nations, too. I read today that over 10,000,000 jobs in the United States are tied directly or indirectly to the oil industry. Those are jobs that typically pay well, too. At least those jobs used to exist before Tuesday. Next week, I imagine many of those people will be home being introduced to the hypnotic train wreck that is Tiger King™ on Netflix©, and wondering if there is a hair-crime against humanity (crimes against hairmanity?) law in Oklahoma.

When the most normal person in a documentary is the guy whose life might have been used as the basis for Tony Montana in Scarface? It’s a cat-astrophe.

Your life changes. It’s not a static thing. A lot of the people being laid off will either blame themselves, or be bitter about losing their job. That’s natural, but being mad about losing your job is like being mad at the wind, or mad at Joe Biden. You can jump and yell, but it doesn’t matter because neither of them will remember what you’re saying, anyway.

When I was a kid, I remember being bothered by a particular idea. Pugsley brought it to mind when he showed me a piece of Plexiglas® from his computer case, scratched from his handling it over several years. “How do we fix it?”

“We don’t. Learn to live with it,” was my answer. I could see the disappointment in his face.

It was then I recalled breaking a glass in the kitchen when I was a kid. Sure, Ma Wilder didn’t like it when that happened, but what bothered me the most is that I couldn’t make it better. No amount of effort would reassemble that glass from the hundreds of shards on the linoleum floor back into the original.

That idea followed me through life: seeing a scratch in a car door, watching the tread wear down on my shoes. These were one-way events. The future seemed to be a one way street. People got older. Paint on the house faded. Keanu Reeves . . . well, I guess not everything ages.

Physicists have a description of this: entropy. Entropy means that things age and wear down. It never happens in the opposite direction.

The reason that this bothered me is that my hobbies were based on the opposite – most things in my life I could fix. When I built a model of an airplane, or a car, or a tank, in that moment it was new I felt that I had made a small piece of perfection. For me, I could look at it and see that moment in time where it would never be better. It was very satisfying to see that model take its final form because I had made the world just a little bit better. I recall holding a finished model in my hands, not wanting to paint it because it looked so perfect. Then after I’d painted it, being pleased because it looked even better.

I hate Bulgarians when they use profanity. Bulgarity is something I just can’t stand.

As I grew older, woodworking as a hobby filled made me feel those same emotions: the smooth feel of freshly sanded wood and then the sight of the grain soaking up the stain for the first time. It would never be more perfect than that moment in time. The second that I finished, it would start aging. Dust and time would take their toll. They’d be dropped. Or things would drop on them. Regardless, without effort, they’d never be the same as that moment.

But at that moment of creation, it was perfect, or at least as perfect as I could make it. Yes, the physicists are right about entropy – everything becomes more disordered over time. But the one thing they don’t mention is that entropy only increases when there’s no energy flowing into the system.

If you look outside, there’s a huge thermonuclear reactor that powers the Earth every day, sending in a really ludicrous number of watts of power. But watts is a silly metric unit, so I changed it to horsepower. It turns out, if you were to measure the Sun’s output hitting Earth in divisions of the Ford™ Shelby® 350’s 526 horsepower engine, it would take 18,377,411,500 (yes, I did the math) of them running for 24 hours straight at 7,500 RPM to equal the Sun’s output for a single day. For those of you doing the math, that’s 2.42 Shelby© engines for each person on Earth.

I think we have figured out the real reason for Global Warming®. The Sun. Or 18.4 billion Shelby’s® running at the red line every day.

If we have another ice age, we could heat the Earth with these babies. In the process, we’d solve the oil glut crisis, and hit full employment just at the Ford® plants alone. Plus I heard their exhaust kills Coronavirus. That’s my green new deal!

As I’ve grown older, I’ve learned to accept change. A lot of changes that have happened, I didn’t get to choose. Like my back hair, they just happened. That doesn’t make me a victim, though. I get to choose how I feel, how I react to those changes. Sometimes, changes just are. I get to choose, each and every time, how I react to them. For instance, braiding might be a solution.

Sometimes they are shattered glass type changes are like the first bra a young man runs into: it can never be undone. Sometimes, the changes are a block of wood to be smoothed, something that can be made into a temporary little bit of perfection that will enter my life. But I’ll never know what kind of change that it is until I work at it, and see what it is.

Not long after I saw Pugsley’s face after telling him to live with his scratched computer case, I looked it up. There are lots of ways to get at least some of the scratches out of the Plexiglas®. We’ll give it a shot, to see if we can’t make it better.

Spoiler, it might not be perfect, but it will be better. And it will be ours. We’ll own it.

Change is coming.

Deal with it.

American Caesar: Coming Soon To A Country Near You?

“Because there’s no crying in baseball! No crying!” – A League of Their Own

Wash this.

As we contemplate the wreckage of the economy and the cracks in our culture, I return to that question that many of us have been thinking of:

What happens next?

By next as in next week, well those patterns are short term. Just like the stock market has spent most of the last ten years going up, some weeks were down. The overall aggregate of those weeks was up. Until it wasn’t. The short term direction of the market varied, but like China’s expanding sea claims or my expanding waistline, the long term trend did not.

That’s what I see with the United States as a whole. Over the short term, things go up and down, but the long term stresses in the system keep building up. A brick building having foundation problems will build stress, until the bricks and mortar both snap in a line under tension, just like Joe Biden snaps when people move too quickly around him because of Crimean War flashbacks.

One major tension: people have been concerned about the national debt since before I’ve been alive. Why? The silly idea seems to be that “having an unpayable mountain of debt” might be a bad thing since you have to pay all of that back just to be broke. It’s only money, right? But the Federal debt as a percentage of GDP is now larger than at any time since the end of World War II. At that time the United States had mobilized to spending nearly 90% of Federal dollars on military spending items. That level of debt, 110% of the GDP, existed before COVID-19 gave us a gut shot. What will it be after all of the Chinese Virus spending? 120%? 150%?

At least with World War II we got cool tanks and games like Axis and Allies®. In the last bailout all we got was a bigger penthouse for CEOs like Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan/Chase. You might remember Dimon’s tone-deaf Christmas cards like the one he sent out below in 2013. Sure, people are allowed to send out glaringly condescending tennis-ball filled Christmas cards while they spend enough money to pay off your mortgage on a lunch trip to Switzerland for their dog. But to celebrate their wealth after having been the beneficiary of a $25 billion taxpayer-funded bailout in 2008? That’s just tacky.

I guess Dimon’s Christmas card is nearly as neat as 49,324 Sherman tanks, plus twenty-three aircraft carriers, and a zillion movies, at least some of which had Clint Eastwood. Okay, I’ll take that back. Having Clint Eastwood World War II movies is even more important than the ultimate comfort of a billionaire banker. There. I said it. Go ahead and judge me.

I guess pictures of a pampered CEO are close.

Thankfully Jamie Dimon never had to miss a meal.

At some point, there’s a mathematical limit where debt actually matters. After World War II, the United States dealt with debt through a crazy plan: paying it back, while growing the economy. As we stand right now, with the exception of spending enough on defense to cause the Soviets to collapse, we’ve gotten very little out of that debt. It’s like the nation has since 1990 gone on a spending binge like a six year old with addled on sugar with Mom’s credit card, ending up with a pile of Amazon® packages and next-day Prime® diabetes.

Outside of the economic mess which would have gone off at some point with our without the WuFlu, we’re a nation divided politically. The split has been getting worse and worse through time. People have cut off relations with relatives because of political differences that would have made for amusing table discussions even a decade ago. The creeping socialism that’s been winding its way through society since FDR’s New Deal used the Great Depression to introduce sweeping social changes that wrapped themselves around the national brainstem is now fresh again, back like Nic Cage on a bad sequel.

The idea of infinite benefits from a magical printing press is as old as any fairy tale, and we share it with our children every year – he’s called Santa Claus. But lots of people don’t believe in Santa Claus. Why?

Because Santa’s not real.

Santa can’t exist as he violates a fundamental law of the universe – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, or TANSTAAFL, as Pournelle and Niven would have said. Heck, the one thing the Soviets in a gulag and hard-core libertarians agree on is: If you don’t work, you don’t eat. No wonder my kids came back so tough after a week at Ayn Rand Preschool – you had to have the will to take the bottle.

People in socialist countries are the only ones who envy the high tech that the Amish have.

These tensions – the financial system collapse tension plus the political division tension – don’t lead to a good outcome. It’s been noted by commenters here and elsewhere that as long as things are good and bellies are full, people won’t revolt. But if you were saving for a rainy day, look outside: it’s pouring.

As I see it, there are three major ways this situation plays out – and none of them end up with 2030 being “business as usual” anymore.

First alternative: the Left takes over. Just like in Virginia, the Left will spend about 20 minutes before they decide to implement their entire basket of changes. I don’t think that this is likely. The reason is that at this point I don’t think the Right will go gently onto that goodnight. They have realized that gun rights “compromises” include only taking rights away. The Right is not keen to compromise on any rights, which is why the recent push-back came against the Coronavirus-related state shutdowns. If the Left tries this, there will be some level of anarchy. And we all know how many anarchists it takes to change a lightbulb: none. Anarchists have never changed anything.

Second alternative: the states Balkanize. The entire experiment breaks up. The Right isn’t interested, for the most part, in controlling what goes on outside of their state, and would be quite amused to watch New York and Los Angeles figure out that the things that make their lives good, like food and gasoline, all come from places they don’t like made by people who don’t like them. Pretty soon they’d be trading Netflix® subscriptions for potatoes. The reason this is a solution of the Right is because Red State people want their freedoms and to be left alone to grill. This is a difficult outcome – splitting up the states seems to fall along party lines, but lots of Blue states have a Red ring around them, and lots of Red states are covered in Blue dots.

The Third, and in my mind an increasingly likely alternative is an American Caesar.

The Roman Republic officially started in 509 B.C., but at the beginning wasn’t much more than a high school audio-visual club with dominion of around six neighborhood blocks until about 282 B.C. It was at that point when the Romans finally took over most of the other tribes in the local area and began to vie for domination of the Mediterranean against Carthage for Blockbuster® franchise rights.

“I hate it when they price just one dollar over. Seems so, disloyal, right Brutus?”

The Roman Republic was fed by expansion. At the time when Caesar became a de facto emperor, Rome controlled not only modern day Italy, but most of Spain, Portugal, Greece, a lot of the northern coast of Africa, France, Belgium, and the Balkan area. Does a republic or a democracy expand? Yes – whoever thought a democracies don’t start wars was as deluded as Joe Biden when he recently denounced President Lincoln for the way he’s handling the polio epidemic.

The Roman Republic lasted until Julius Caesar created and took the throne as dictator after political intrigue. He stepped into a situation where his political enemies were out to get him, and had passed a law to strip him of his troops. Politically and popularly, Caesar was already famous – he had written Commentaries on the Gallic War, which was a bestseller that described his military exploits. It was popular in Rome, and meant at least partially as propaganda to the common people to sidestep the Senate and official media. Sound familiar?

Caesar knew that his political enemies had a trap set for him when he returned – he was certain they’d strip his titles and wealth from him, but, he had an army that was more loyal to him than it was to Rome. When he led Legio XIII (the 13^th Legion) across the Rubicon River, Caesar legendarily said, “The die is cast.” By law, Roman Consuls gave up command at the Rubicon, some 200 miles north of Rome, which was probably about a hard 10-day march over the good roads at Rome. The Senate heard that “Julius is coming,” and got out of there faster than your Leftist friends when it comes time to split the bill for lunch.

Although things were politically precarious at that point, this was the big step. Rome tipped into a civil war. Caesar won, and the people were, generally, pleased, mainly because salads were popular back then. That’s why a few years after Caesar was assassinated, Augustus Caesar was able to take the title – the people were wanting to end the political nonsense, even if it meant a kind of tyranny: this wasn’t the first nor the last time this deal would be made. The people of Rome at that point didn’t want to elect a leader – they wanted an end to the chaos. If the result was an Emperor? So be it.

Spoiler, Caesar died. It would have been much worse if he had continued as a vegetable – let us mourn him.

So far, the leader of the United States has been (more or less) elected through legal means. The Electoral College itself is a great bulwark against fraud – it’s hard to fake enough votes because the dead voting in Chicago alone won’t do it. You’d have to have recounts in cemeteries in dozens of states.

With the jobless increasing 22 million in four weeks, chaos is on the way once people can leave their basements. Unless COVID-19 interrupts, I expect actual riots at the Democratic Convention, especially if they forget the Tupperware® they keep Biden in. Given how much economic activity has already cratered in the United States – total credit card spending is down nearly 30% since last year, but the rent for the store is the same. Businesses won’t be hiring anytime soon, and there’s no way that this will be a sharp recovery.

That economic and political turmoil that we’ll see in the next few years is ripe for a hero, a savior to come forward. Will this new leader look like the old Caesar? No, certainly not. Certainly this savior will be someone that many people know, and look up to.

Tom Hanks?

Maybe President-for-life Tom Hanks? Nah, I hear he eats baby kittens.

Ripples in the Fabric of the World: What happens next?

“I’m gonna have me a glass of ripple.” – Sanford and Son

This was Alaska, so there were no dolphins – instead The Boy had to play Salmon Says.

I remember when The Boy, The Mrs. and I were living in Fairbanks just after Pugsley was born. There aren’t a whole lot of things you can do with a four-year-old and a four-month-old since their sleeping schedules greatly interrupted our sleeping schedules. As a result, we took drives around the area. Don’t feel bad for us – Alaska was beautiful on every trip we took. And kids often sleep in the car, though everyone seemed to complain when I did it.

On one particular trip, we went up a road due east of Fairbanks: Chena Hot Springs Road. Like many roads around Fairbanks, this one ends in a complete dead end. In the lower 48, dead ends are rare – in most cases one road leads to the next like the seams in a great patchwork quilt. Not in Alaska. Alaska is the end of the road – and there are more dead ends than there are in the Kennedy family’s political careers.

About 20 miles from Fairbanks, we pulled over to stretch our legs. It was early September, and we had already seen our first snow and first freeze, so the weather was cool and pleasant. We Wilders have ice in our blood, and loved the climate of Fairbanks, which probably explains why my air conditioner is set at 64°F (-3K) and my house consumes half the electricity in my state in July.

We finally hiked through birch and pine to the river shown in the picture above, and The Boy ran up to the water and began doing what boys everywhere have been doing since boys and rocks and water were first all in the same place at the same time: he started throwing rocks in the river, starting with small ones, and finally ending up with the biggest ones he could heave in a meaningful manner into the rushing river. By meaningful, if a rock is too big, it doesn’t make that satisfying deep splash and “thunk” sound as the air rushes in to fill the rock-sized hole in the river. I’m convinced that if a task seems destructive, a four-year-old will do more work in an hour than a strong man can do in four.

The Boy loved it.

Above: Democratic budget planning session.

And tonight, when thinking about this post, I thought back to that moment. Even though The Boy was doing a lot of work, he was just putting rocks back into the stream they came out of in the first place. The splashes into the turbulent water would soon be so overwhelmed with the chaotic waves and currents that those splashes would be entirely lost; a signal terminated just like Joe Biden’s memories of every event since 1996. Twenty miles away in Fairbanks, it was certain that no trace of The Boy’s effort would ever be seen.

People like to talk about the “Butterfly Effect” in a way that makes it seem like every action has a consequence, no matter how small. That’s not true: I leave the toilet seat up all the time. The original “Butterfly Effect” was based on introducing a small amount of instability in a stable system and watching that instability grow, like that time I threw a garter snake into the volleyball team’s locker room. But when you introduce a small change into most systems, like those rocks into that turbulent Alaskan stream, nothing’s changed – the signal introduced is overwhelmed by the chaotic noise. Or towels.

But if it’s from Australia, it’s probably poisonous. Or beer.

Our current situation is nothing like a boy throwing stones in a river, however. Instead, it’s like an earthquake. When earthquakes happen in the ocean, they release a tremendous amount of energy. A 7.8 magnitude quake is similar in energy release to a 600 megaton nuclear bomb. Since no bomb this large has ever been built, just imagine calling your girlfriend your ex-girlfriend’s name in the middle of an argument for an approximation. To triple the explosive power, replace “girlfriend” with “wife” in the preceding sentence. Telling her to “Calm down,” will likewise increase the explosive yield. Please don’t ask me how I know.

When this energy is released in an earthquake associated with water, there is always the chance of a tsunami being formed – a wave radiating outward from the original earthquake that can be as high as 500’. This wave can reach shores thousands of miles away from the original quake. An earthquake off the coast of California on January 26, 1700 caused a 10 foot tsunami in Japan. I’ve heard that California passed a regulation that limited tsunami height hitting their coastline to no more than two feet, and those must be on a sunny day in June and the permit must be applied for sixty days in advance, so you can bet they’re safe. Finally an end to dangerous assault tsunamis!

Yeah. That never works.

That’s where we are today – the global impact of what’s going on isn’t the equivalent of a boy throwing rocks in a river, instead, it’s the equivalent of a still-ongoing earthquake, with the tsunami waves yet to hit the rest of the world.

In 2008-2009, the Fed did everything they could to mash money into the system to deal with the mess of the Great Recession in the United States. In addition to the collapse of oil prices, the result of the Great Recession and the Fed’s intervention was eventually, as it always is, inflation. Since the dollar was the world currency and no one can buy American wheat using currency made from papyrus and hope, the result was much different in Alexandria, Egypt than in Alexandria, Virginia. If you live in Alexandria, Virginia, if the price of bread doubles that means you still buy a loaf if you even notice that the price doubled. Where’s the Nutella®?

If you live in Alexandria, Egypt, if the price of bread doubles, you might not eat.

AOC called me. She told me I couldn’t have a post with the word “hunger” and the word “Alexandria” and not mention her.

Besides hunger, this situation led to yet even more unemployment in countries that barely had jobs in the first place. The normal poverty and corruption of Egypt didn’t stop – the inflation imported from a continent away so people could flip houses just made it that much worse. The result? Revolution across North Africa and the Middle East, and waves of refugees attempting to make it to Europe.

That was just one ripple from 2008-2009, when the crisis was far smaller than today’s. I fully expect conditions here in the United States to be far better off than Egypt during the whole of the crisis because our civilization didn’t peak in 4000 B.C. To be fair to the Egyptians, it was one hell of a peak. The pyramids will still be standing in 6,000 years when the only remnants of Western Civilization remaining will be the parts of Madonna® that nature can’t digest.

Cockroaches and Madonna© will survive the apocalypse.

However, it occurred to me today that any hardship we see in the United States will be small in comparison to the hardships that will be seen in the Third World. Those countries will feel the true wrath of COVID-19.

Which countries? Certainly oil producing countries. If Venezuela can’t feed Venezuelans at $60 oil, it won’t be able to feed them at $20 oil. I know it’s difficult to be harder on a country than communism, but Coronavirus will be the cherry on the cake of the workers’ paradise. Along with that, I don’t expect Africa or the Middle East to do any better than they did in 2010 although in some places it won’t even be noticed because they peaked even earlier than the Egyptians. Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, I’m looking at you.

China will likely be hard hit as well. With no one to purchase their stuff, and being a very significant net importer of both petroleum (now cheaper) and food (soon to be inflated). I’d expect to see this drive more social repression, which China is really, really good at, having been ruled by authoritarian leaders for roughly 27,000 years. The next five years will answer if they are the world juggernaut that they intend to be, or one that’s so dependent on the outside world that their power will evaporate away with this particular set of circumstances. I find the idea that they will turn inward like they have done since 221 B.C. compelling. Hey, it has worked for 2241 years, so why break a streak?

The carrier, the carrier, the carrier is on fire. We don’t need no water . . .

I tend to think the European Union won’t make it. The United States at least used to have a common language and, mainly, a common heritage. The European Union is like a pizza with pepperoni, pineapple, polonium and zinc washers on it. No, I apologize. The pizza makes more sense than the EU.

I especially think that, nation by nation, the EU is getting pretty tired of the refugee flow. Many refugees come to Europe and other Western states not to be European, but only to be economic “citizens” that have no affinity for Western Culture. Adam Piggot talked about this in a blog post where he described newly-minted Australians banding together in their ethnic group to raid stores to horde for the plague (LINK). That behavior (or behaviour, if you live in a country where everything that’s not poisonous and wanting to kill you is non-poisonous and wanting to kill you) won’t exactly be a selling point for the pro-immigration promoters.

The problem with making these predictions is like the rushing current The Boy threw stones into. The events in the entire world will be so turbulent that picking winners and losers reminds me of what Yogi Berra said: “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” But as this economic tsunami hits nation after nation, expect changes to come at us so constantly in the next five years that we will all be numb as Kamala Harris’ dead heart from the information flow.

I have to promise everyone – our current crisis will be no worse than a power outage that lasts 17 years.

I also think that in five years we will be a much harder people, everywhere on Earth. What would you think if you were, say, a newly minted engineering student preparing to enter a job market where even STEM graduates who normally can find real jobs with titles that don’t end in –ista have to look for the –ista jobs? What happens when even –ista jobs cease to exist?

Yes. There will be hardships. But there will also be rocks. And rivers. And boys. The ripples that the world is making are beyond our control. But the ripples you and I make?

Those might even last longer than Madonna’s™ indigestible bits.

The Coming End of The United States

“Hello, I’m Dr. Bean. Apparently. And my job is to sit and look at paintings. So, what have I learned that I can say about this painting? Well, firstly, it’s really quite big, which is excellent, because If it were really small, you know, microscopic, then hardly anyone would be able to see it.” – Bean

If you look closely, you can see itsy-bitsy fur bikini women.

The death of the United States as we know it is near. COVID-19 isn’t the cause of it, despite being in the news nearly as much as a Kardashian. Coronavirus is, rather, a symptom. Like any organism, as soon as a nation is born it begins the process of growth and eventual death. This cycle is a common theme in history, and I’ve visited it before in posts here because I find it more fascinating than, say, beekeeping.

One post I wrote about the how empires have a natural cycle and end date is here (End of Empires, PEZ, and Decadence). That post contains information about Sir John Glubb’s paper called The Fate of Empires. You can also find Glubb’s original paper here (LINK), and you’ll be pleased to find it’s been translated from Glubb’s original fish language.

Which brings us to Thomas Cole. Mr. Cole was an American painter. I say “was” because he’s now dead. This is good, because otherwise he’d have to explain to his wife where the heck he’s been since 1848. Cole did a series of five paintings depicting Glubb’s paper between the years of 1833 and 1836, which was pretty amazing, since Glubb’s paper wasn’t published until 1976. Cole’s five paintings are collectively known as The Course of Empire.

The first of these paintings is called The Savage State. It’s the first picture up above. Cole wasn’t horribly inventive with names, and it’s rumored that he had a dog named “Dog” and a cat named “Cat” and subsisted entirely on a diet of unsalted boiled potatoes. His painting, The Savage State is just that, a savage land dominated by nature, which is also how The Mrs. describes my side of the bedroom. In his painting, you can see that the civilization matched the landscape – rudimentary and rough. It’s chaotic, but that describes a great deal of the prehistory of man. This period of history can last a very, very long time, and would have lasted even longer if humanity would have failed to invent shag carpet.

If you look closely, all these paintings are set in the same place, at different times. Cole even changed the time of day from morning in the first one to night in the final one. I guess this is what you had to settle for as an 1836 version of HD television.

The next painting in the series is The Pastoral State. Each of the paintings presents the same area, just at different stages in the development of the civilization. The land from the original painting has been tamed enough for farming and herding animals. The wild nature of The Savage State has been at least partially replaced by enough control of the land that a greater degree of specialization and start of civilization is possible.

At this stage in the civilizational cycle, there is generally a single dominant culture. If there are two competing cultures, they’ll fight. This explains the Spartans and the Athenians, the North versus the South, or my ex-wife and humans not possessed by Satan. Having a single culture breeds trust, and the uniformity of purpose required for this phase.

The theme of the pastoral state is expansion along the frontier, and is characterized by growth and optimism. It’s how it feels to be on the winning team. Religion is dominant, as are ideals that are higher than self – in Rome, public service was considered honorable. Plutarch wrote about Spartan mothers and their attitudes when their sons went into battle: “Another woman handed her son his shield, and exhorted him: ‘Son, either with this or on this.’”

Legend has it that at one point when Athens was fighting Sparta, that a Spartan, hidden by a hill, taunted the Athenians by yelling, “One Spartan can beat a thousand Athenians!” Enraged, the commander of the Athenians selected his thousand best men and sent them over the hill to kill the insolent Spartan. After fifteen minutes of battle sounds and screaming, a single Athenian, mortally wounded, limped to the top of the hill and yelled down to his general: “Don’t fall for it! It’s a trap! There are actually two of them.”

This state ends when there is no more expansion and frontier. At that point, someone always gets the bright idea that they want to make a buck. The pursuit of profit then replaces the pursuit of honor.

This is the most beautiful and intricate of the paintings. Of course, I had to meme all over it. And looking at the multitudes of people in the painting I had to wonder, “What would a decent three bedroom in the suburbs cost?”

After profits have been pursued for a time, the Empire then reaches the height of power. Cole depicted this phase in his painting The Consummation. Both as a military and economic entity, the Empire will never be better off than at this time, well, at least until it builds that Death Star®. It is here that the greatest works of arts and literature of the society will be created. While the society retains the myth of the expansion, the reality is that is no longer a concern.

Also at this point, intellectuals will start rejecting all of the values that allowed the society to be great, and replacing them with ideals that are often the direct opposite of those that led to success. Virtue is replaced by vanity. Honor and discipline will be mocked as the philosophy of a fool, and be derided as inferior to the values and beliefs of amorality, nihilism, materialism, and collectivism.

Not that I have an opinion, or anything.

Somewhere about this time, with the Empire ceasing to grow, powerful groups figure out that it’s much easier to steal wealth than create it. Politicians devise ways to maximize how much money and power their group can take from the others.

This is the Cole painting, The Destruction of Empire, I see most often out of this set. Perhaps it’s a sign of the time, or perhaps it’s a sign that everyone likes a good Viking raid? Okay. Not everyone. But remember that Roman soldiers are trained, but Vikings are Bjorn.

With the Empire past its peak, the wealth is used to create decadence. Focus is on material goods, and religion declines across the Empire. Since the focus is on wealth, the welfare state forms – Romans had bread and circuses, we have EBT and Netflix®. Historically, foreign peoples from across the Empire stream towards the original culture. Why? Again, the focus is on material goods and not a cohesive society. Why would a Greek want to leave Greece for Rome? I prefer to read books about Rome in Braille – it makes it feel like ancient history.

And as the focus grows on material goods, the originality of the goods disappears. Art becomes a cynical mechanism of control and a means to harvest cash. The remake of the original is remade or rebooted to once again drag the culture for profits. I heard that Hollywood was even going to remake a Muslim version of Footloose, but this time without the Bacon.

An example of that is Spain after the conquest of the New World. Spain found itself with immense wealth in gold. How much wealth? So much that the Spaniards decided that they didn’t want to do the day-to-day things in life, and drew workers in from all across Europe to Do The Jobs Spaniards Wouldn’t Do. So much gold flew into Europe that it changed the exchange rate and wrecked the market for gold. After a century of such luxury, the Spaniards ceased to be the conquistadors that boldly conquered a continent with grit and bravado and became a culture that complained when the Dutch help didn’t peel the grapes correctly.

As an example, in one park I found a cannon seized from a Spanish warship during the Spanish-American War. I looked at the engraving on the cannon – it was beautiful. But this cannon, taken from the Spanish in 1898, was actually forged in 1780 or so. The United States was using cannon that were state of the art and sophisticated, with more than a century of technological advances on the Spanish.

Heck, when a friend got at tattoo in Spain, I was shocked. It was really good. Why was I shocked that it was good? No one expects Spanish ink-precision.

The destruction of Empire can flow not only from battle, but also from a checkbook – a financial collapse can be nearly as devastating as a foreign army, as Spain proves. Regardless, when vigor is gone, pessimism prevails, and sacrifice for the common good to a trustworthy state disappears? Why would you want to be a hero, as all of the national myths and heroes are, one by one, destroyed to make way for the new myths of the intellectual class?

Destruction is just around the corner.

If you look closely at this picture, there are no people, only birds, which must mean that Cole felt that the birds would take over the Earth. This is my favorite, because it makes me feel better about how my yard looks.

Cole’s final painting in the series was the Desolation of Empire. The Empire is over. The drama is over. What remains are a scattered people and the ruins of a great civilization. It sounds bleak, but it doesn’t need to be.

The desolation of Empire isn’t the ending for every person in it, it’s just the ending of the golden age of the way things were. Imagine someone near the end of the Roman Empire, worried about what they saw going on around it. Would the Roman Empire collapse? Certainly. Would all of the people die as a part of this collapse? No. But the globalism of the day did.

And the Roman Empire, in its death, set the stage for a new series of cultures all around Europe – from the reuse of Caesar as “Czar” in Moscow to the United States, which consciously adopted many of the symbols of ancient Rome. What was the first name of the United States Army? Under its first commander, Major General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, it was known as Legion of the United States from 1792-1796.

This isn’t the end of the world, it’s just the end of what we have now, and the end of the United States as we knew her. It’s the beginning of something new as the old structures cease to serve us. There’s a common phrase that I can’t find the source of but that describes the cycle simply and well: “Hard times breed strong men. Strong men breed good times. Good times breed soft men. Soft men? They bring hard times.”

We are in for hard times. But don’t fear. This will make strong men, and, if they are strong enough, a new United States that deserves those strong men.

A Hiking Trip Through The Coronavirus Economy

“You were last seen hiking up Mount Ego.” – Frasier

You know, because I might be using hiking as a metaphor.

When I was younger, I did a lot of hiking. So much so, that it was second nature to me – I can recall hiking up remote mountain trails when I was kindergarten. If you take the average kindergartner, they are built to walk a trail, and their strength to weight ratio will beat any four wheel drive. I guarantee you that unless you are in prime condition, your motor will run out before theirs will.

Before this weekend, the last time I went hiking was about four years ago, and it was quite a hike. We went up and down and deep into the Rockies, at one point following old mining trails that were originally blazed by miners with mules looking for gold – I know because I found an ore cart still sitting on its rails up around 12,000 feet when I was 20. I could tell it was a mining cart, because I found their deodorant underneath the cart, and everyone knows miners always pick Axe™.

On this trip, I was in good enough shape that one 18 year old rang the bell before I did, which is the kind of thing that makes an older man smile – he knows he still has “it.” And I did still have “it,” unlike my hair. I figure the group did over nine thousand feet up and nine thousand feet down over two days. It was nice, though I will admit that at one point every muscle in my body cramped all at once, even the bottom of my foot, and that’s my arch nemesis.

My commute often doesn’t include pants. Pants are for fancy, non-Corona time.

This weekend, Pugsley, having had enough of the house, convinced me that we should go hiking. Honestly, it was my idea, too, so I was thrilled when he got me up to go hiking. Since the lockdown I hadn’t been to my usual gym, and on several days in the last six weeks the most strenuous part of the day had been rolling out of bed to go downstairs to my “office” on the loveseat where I’ve been working from home. It’s also where I normally write these blog posts, so it’s a place which is already set up physically and mentally for productivity, except for the coffee, which was allllll the way upstairs. And I spent all that energy being debunked.

But after six weeks of not working out, how would I fare hiking?

Pugsley and I hit the trail. It was a warm, but not hot, spring day. In short? It was a day perfect for a hike. The grass was vibrantly green under a cloudless sky as we hit the trail. As trails go, this one isn’t the most challenging that I’ve been on, but it certainly is aggressive. And four years of rust was immediately apparent. And we didn’t bring any snacks, though I’ve heard that zombies bring entrail mix when they hike.

We made it about as far as my legs were willing to go. We weren’t out of the woods yet, but that’s the purpose of hiking, right? It is clear to me that I need to go hiking with Pugsley again – the treadmill at the gym is no replacement for an actual mountain. The next day I could feel the pain, but I knew I was getting stronger, since I was still alive. And Nietzsche always said that, “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger. Except for Ruffles®.”

All I need is a gym with a doughnut shop attached.

Getting stronger rarely feels good. It involves aches and pains. It involves discomfort, and moving your body in ways it may not have moved for a while. In a “good” recession, this is what happens. The economy sheds, often in very painful ways, companies that are no longer competitive and gets stronger. That recession is the spur for changes within companies that allow them to survive. Sentimentality goes by the wayside – the harsh blade of profitability determines what products will be built and what products will be discontinued. Plus the bank helps lots of folks get back up on their feet, mainly by repossessing the car.

This, however, is no ordinary recession. Entire industries are going to be destroyed. I’ll pick just one for this post: air travel. Airlines and airplane manufacturers are facing the biggest, by far, challenge of their existence. People are finally coming to the understanding that the last 45 days of their lives is the most momentous (so far) of nearly anyone alive. With me, it came with the dawning realization of my receding airline.

Body cavity search, Mr. Wilder?

The solution of government to this recession is that of the zombie – prolonging the existence of a company far after its usefulness to the world has ended. A great example is Boeing®. Boeing™ used to be among the better designers and builders of aircraft in the world. Recently, its reputation has suffered after it made a software change that resulted in crashes and the grounding of an entire airplane model, which might be the ultimate Boeing™ constrictor. It has a loan fund earmarked for it and similar companies that sits at about $17 billion dollars. I’m betting you and I couldn’t borrow in the way that Boeing© will.

And what about the airline industry as a whole?

Last year, on average, the TSA screened 2.7 million passengers a day.
Last week? Less than 100,000.
On an average day in 2019, there were 44,000 daily flights.
Last week? 8,000.

The airline industry is backed by $25 billion to pay employees that the Federal government is you and I are giving the airlines to pay employees until September. I guess you and I were feeling generous that day, since my industry didn’t exactly get paid and yours probably didn’t, either.

At least this government solution isn’t bigger than the problem . . .

And though I generally like the idea of inefficient or corrupt companies failing, this economic tidal wave is different – whereas the normal recession is a very vigorous workout that makes the body stronger, this is more like conducting weight loss surgery with a chainsaw. I’m sure the doctor is being gentle, but it’s still a chainsaw. Good companies and bad will fall, large companies and small.

If the economy is normally liquid water in good times, then the government’s tendency to freeze market winners into place is turning the economy to ice. But this economic collapse we’re seeing as a result of COVID-19 is a boiling pot of water. It’s chaos. Who will win? Who knows? Will useful, economically viable portions of the country be ripped away? Certainly. We can argue that bad companies will die, but this is economic Russian roulette.

And who said the Soviets weren’t innovators???

It has already happened, we just don’t have a real-time graph from Johns-Hopkins showing angry red bubbles of economic destruction on a county by county basis with a counter and a logarithmic graph of job losses to date. We also don’t have a doctor talking about all of the regulations that will have to change so businesses can grow again and how business regulations people are used to will be gone forever in the “New Normal” that Coronavirus has brought for us.

Some industries will be gone for good. I don’t miss flying, and had already given it up on all trips where it only saves me a few hours a few years ago. What else is gone? How about small movie theaters? How long can they survive in a world where the movies have turned to crap that’s driven by a corporate model that values sequels and familiarity over originality and cleverness? Will they be saved by movies that are created by a target audience of people around the world and are so culturally inert that they could be about kung fu warriors or Tom Cruise jumping off of a shiny building and all make equal sense?

Human/CGI cats singing. How could that be a flop? Maybe the Coronavirus was the Earth saving itself from the Cats® movie?

Why are comedy movies dead? Chinese people don’t think we’re funny and in our incredibly Politically Correct world, none of the jokes are allowed to be funny, anyway. Besides that, the small town theater has already found it hard to compete with Netflix® and Amazon©. Now the big Hollywood© studios have finally gotten first release on streaming. How happy will Disney® be when they don’t have to share the profit with small town theater owners? They’ll smile from mouse-ear to mouse-ear because Disney™ gets a big Federal bailout, and the theater owner doesn’t.

In this era, the results are unpredictable. If I work really hard on lifting weights? I’ll get stronger. But in the economy of 2020, either my arm might fall off, it might grow to world-class proportions in an afternoon. There’s no way to predict because there’s no rational process determining winners and losers.

Regardless, I need to hit the trails with Pugsley more. Even though I can’t predict the winners and losers in the economy in the next few weeks, months, or years? I can predict that I need to be able to hit that trail a little harder.

You never know when that might come in handy.

ALTERNATE BONUS MEME:

Endgame: At Some Point? This has to stop.

“You know, when I was a kid, food was food. Before our scientific magicians poisoned the water, polluted the soil, decimated plant and animal life.” – Soylent Green

I pity the fool that thinks we’re done.

In 471 B.C., a group of soldiers of the Roman Republic broke camp one fine morning. The way the story works out, I’m pretty sure it was a Monday. Their plan was to go attack some smelly hill people under the command of the Roman Consul, Appius. As the horn sounded to leave the camp, the smelly hill people swarmed down on the Roman column from behind. In the defense of the Roman soldiers, this was way before the invention of coffee but after the invention of wine, so they probably weren’t exactly awake.

As an aside, I imagine that the whole of the ancient history can be explained by un-showered illiterate people who were hungover most of the time trying to run things. I guess this description also applies to congress, but at least the Romans dressed well and threw great parties. Can you imagine Bernie Sanders or Adam Schiff or Mitch McConnell being fun at a party?

Perhaps the artist was a talented person who had only ever seen birds with lazy eye and just imagined what a person might look like?

Regardless, the Roman column broke under an attack less expected than the Spanish Inquisition. The Roman historian Titus Livius, more commonly known a Livy, is the reason we remember this battle. Livy wrote that the reason the hill people stopped pursing the Romans were that the Romans were running away faster than the victorious hill people could wade through the dead Romans, but remember, the smelly hill people didn’t have coffee, either, so maybe they just got . . . tired. The Roman Consul, Appius, tried to stop the fleeing soldiers, but wasn’t able to do so, no matter how he tried.

Appius rallying the troops. Colorized.

When the Romans made camp far enough away that the mean hill people weren’t going to attack them, Appius lined all of the soldiers up. Every soldier was asked, “Where are your weapons?” Every standard bearer was asked, “Where is your flag?” Then Centurions that had fled the field of battle were identified.

All of these men were beaten, and then beheaded, because being beheaded wasn’t quite enough. That made a bad morning worse, but it didn’t stop there: of the remaining men, they drew lots. One out of each ten was executed for the overall cowardice of the unit. Why not ten out of ten? There were still lots of smelly hill people around, and Appius might have been faster than some of them but not all of them.

This latter part where one out of ten was killed lives on today in our language as the word “decimate,” from the Latin “deci” meaning “Lucy’s husband,” and the Latin “mate” meaning, “someone an Australian drinks beer with.” But, in a literal fashion it means losing one out of every ten, and has been a military punishment used all the way up into the 20^th century, when the Soviets did it to at least part of the 64^th Rifle Division after a very bad day at Stalingrad in 1943, though rumor has it no one had fun in Stalingrad in ’43. If you don’t believe me, read your “Argentinian” grandfather’s real diary.

I know you’re thinking, “Hey, John Wilder, that’s fun, but why are you talking about dead Roman bird-faced men when the economy is collapsing?”

To be clear, I don’t have any dirt on the Clinton family.

The United States labor force in February 2020 was 164.6 million. In the last three weeks, respectively, 3.0 million, 6.9 million, and 6.6 million people filed for unemployment, bringing that total to 16.5 million newly unemployed. For those of you without a calculator or fingers, that’s just over 10%. And as bad as the rest of the news is, I had to search for it, rather than it being front page.

Think of it, the second worst unemployment numbers in the history of the United States not being above-the-fold page one news. Instead? “Could have been worse. At least the sky isn’t dripping blood and lava.”

Employment in the United States has been literally decimated in the last two weeks. Sure, it’s not as bad as being beaten to death because of those stupid scary hill people who had the bad manners to attack before lunch or being a Russian (or a German) at Stalingrad, but it’s not good.

It is catastrophic. And next week will be more of the same, if not worse.

If we listen to some leaders, it could be “until August,” or if you listen to Bill Gates, “until the entire United States can be vaccinated and Windows 14™ implanted into their spinal column.” Neither of those two are acceptable, especially since some people, like Joe Biden, have no discernable spine.

He sniffs, he sucks, he scores!

But removing those restrictions is important. Even as farmers dump milk that they can’t put into supermarket-sized cartons and break eggs that they can’t put into 18-packs for Wal-Mart, the system is breaking down. At a certain point the economy is important, because a breakdown in the system might be just the key for some of the more fringe elements on the Left to begin to “finally try real communism” in the United States, which will end up with a bigger butcher’s bill than COVID-19 could ever create. Yeah, it’s a worst-case scenario, and I don’t think we’ll go there, but did anyone think the Fed and Congress could imagine $5 trillion dollars in extra debt. In a single month?

The other side of the argument is, “Start everything back up. Now!”

That won’t work, either. You won’t see people crowding into quaint and cramped Italian restaurants, because nobody wants to get Coronavirus from the busboy. People want to see the infection numbers drop before they commit to getting into a stadium with 77,000 other people to cheer on the NFL®. Zero? Nope. But lower than the 30,000-ish daily (hopefully) peak of newly infected we’re seeing right now.

Well, I guess this is the hard part of the Art of the Deal.

And if you really want to see the fireworks over this idea, wander on over to Aesop’s place. Here’s a representative post. The genius (and the real nuclear part) is in the comments (LINK). As you can see, Aesop has a plan. The plan? Probably not. But it’s important, because it’s a plan.

One thing that is owed the people of the United States is the plan, complete with criteria and reasoning. We know, for certain, that after restrictions are removed that more people will die of COVID-19, and that every single death will be placed at the foot of Trump by the Left. Even though we know that collectively the Left couldn’t organize a hunger strike at a fashion show, we do know that they’re aces at blaming everyone for everything, just like The Mrs. blames me for not having the hardwood floor installed six years after having purchased it. Oops. The Mrs. messed up. She trusted me.

We also know that the devastation of job loss and economic collapse will create thousands of ‘silent’ deaths through despair and addiction. Trump will be blamed for that economic loss, as well. There’s no daily graphic for showing economic misery. Well, not yet there isn’t, but as soon as it sells in the news media? Expect it on the front page of Drudge® every single day.

You dirty birds. I have to apologize for this one since Misery the movie came out in 1990, but it’s at least cheap to watch on Amazon®. Which Pugsley and I did, after I wrote this. I guess we’re dirty birds.

When the time finally comes for Americans to emerge out of their basement bunkers fatter than Hillary Clinton after a wine evening with the ladies? And we’re caught up on all of that “must-see TV” (spoiler: fire insurance is a must if you live in King’s Landing®), what kind of a landscape will they see?

Americans are already getting antsy. It won’t last until August. I don’t think it will last past May.

The economy won’t be the same. Small businesses are in really bad shape. Since they don’t have a lobbyist like Boeing®, that steak house on Main Street? Owned by Ma and Pa Steakhouse owners? They don’t have anyone looking out for them. They’ll get loans, sure. But another loan on top of the mortgage on the restaurant? Another loan on top of the bills they have for the steaks sitting in the freezer because no one is coming in? Yeah.

That’ll help. Just like links from the chain of the anchor would help a lifeboat from the Titanic.

I’m an upbeat person, I really am. Work back through my posts, and I defy anyone to find me being downbeat. I’m not. I think that things will generally work out for me, at least until I die. That part will probably suck. Unless Anne Wilkes has a sledgehammer between me and the grave.

But one thing I want to stress is that hope isn’t a plan, and that hope isn’t your friend. Hope keeps you wishing for a future you wish to see, rather than the future you can work to have. If you hope that after Corona-chan is in the rear-view mirror, the United States will be the same, you will be disappointed.

If you hope that the world will snap back into “happy motoring” (thanks, Jim Kunstler) in June, you’ll find that hope will be a straightjacket. Hope is not your friend, to the extent that it allows happy thoughts to replace action.

Don’t hope. Do. And live. Hope is for amateurs and dreamers.

The United States as you knew her in February 2020 is dead. There. You have it. Deal with it and plan your life. You don’t have to be among the decimated.

But know this:

The United States is dead.

Let all of us go and find her. She is there, waiting for us.

Inflation? Sure. But not right now. (Special Edition Includes Greta Thunberg Joke)

“In 1899, my grandfather, Henry ‘by God’ Ford, was walking home from Edison Illumination after working a double shift. He was ruminating. That morning, he had himself an idea that changed the world. Sixty-five years, and 47 million automobiles later, what shall be his legacy? Getting it in the tail pipe from a Chevy Impala?” – Ford vs. Ferrari

If Stephen King were at the Fed: “All the interest rates float down here, Georgie.”

The government is getting ready to blast enough paper money into the economy that even Zoomers get the joke. The Boy has said, on multiple occasions, “Money printer go brrrr.” By that he means that it’s visible to anyone who is looking that government is willing to just add a zero to every piece of currency coming off the press just to toss money everywhere like Charlie Sheen on a night out with Johnny Depp when one of them is dressed like a Muppet® and the other one gets to be the hand.

But the point is, even teenagers anticipate immediate inflation.

But I can be better than Shoeless Joe: I can say it ain’t so.

See, even the kids get it. Not my meme, probably the work of a 12 year old Anon on 4chan.

In fact, I’ve said before and will say again, I expect that many items will not go up in price, but down. Here’s an example: Pugsley is a young man, at that tender age after puberty begins its hormonal onslaught, but before he has a driver’s license. Generally, that means that the thing he thinks the second-most about is: cars. You can probably figure out what first is. He says it’s the Bible, but I’m not sure he owns one, and that surely wouldn’t explain the Internet data rates I’m seeing.

He’s had me price some beautiful cars, some that do amazing things like go from zero to sixty in a short enough time that I’d worry that I’d look like Shrek® got caught under a steam roller if I put the hammer down. One of them is the Ford Shelby GT350®. This particular car can be purchased used, a year or two old, with less than 10,000 miles on it for about $50,000. Just for grins, I thought I’d check out what they were going for last week. $45,000. That’s a 10% drop, in two weeks.

Why?

Because absolutely no one older than 18 is looking to buy one right now, and everybody under 18 has, ahem, the Internet. Potential buyers are also anticipating further price drops. Why buy that Shelby™ at $45,000 when you can have it for $40,000 next month?

Anticipation of cheaper cars is one factor that leads to deflation.

But who will be able to a-Ford® it? I’ll admit it, I’ve even priced insurance.

There’s another powerful force pushing towards deflation: people just don’t have money. I’ve mentioned before that something like 80% of Americans can’t afford an emergency spend of $1,000. Now, people are losing jobs faster than Hillary Clinton’s witness list is shrinking, and it doesn’t take long for rent, phone, and food to add up to $1000. There won’t be inflation if nobody is buying, and you can’t buy if you don’t have money.

I was slightly concerned during the first few weeks of the COVID-19 lockdown because of empty shelves. Not a lot, because the way the food system works ensures that there is some slack in the system: grain isn’t grown and then immediately shipped to the pizza factory as flour. There are silos. There are cows in the field. There are vats of wine fermenting, and barrels of whiskey aging, and the porthole to the alternate dimension where marshmallows come from is holding up fine. A lot of our food is in the process of being made at any given time.

But this week the shelves were full. In Modern Mayberry, we had full shelves of everything except toilet paper. There was sugar, meat, eggs, milk. Okay, there wasn’t any chicken, but isn’t chicken really just poultry Jell-O®? But there was plenty of nearly everything else. How much of those full shelves wasn’t because of the distribution system, but because people were out of money?

That scares me. People need food.

Finally, there’s a third force. People who do have money are hanging on to it. In a very rational fashion, they’ve decided that they have no idea what’s coming next, so best to keep all the spare change in the candy dish available, so to speak. And spare change in the candy dish doesn’t move in the economy. It just sits there.

In part, our financial system is built around a concept called money velocity. In simple terms, after I spend a dollar, how fast does that dollar get spent on something else? When it moves around quickly, it can account for a lot of transactions in a short period, it seems like there is more money than there really is because it keeps being spent, again and again. It sounds like a hot check, but it’s not.

I actually liked economics classes in college. It was like a nap, but with a grade at the end.

If you consider that this money came from a checking account, in general according to the statistics a dollar in a checking account bounced around over five times in 90 days at the end of 2019. That means:

I got paid and,
I bought some toilet paper from Wal-Mart™ and,
Wal-Mart® paid their cashier with my dollar and,
The cashier bought my old bicycle and,
And I bought some more toilet paper from Wal-Mart©.

It’s simple. But what if there’s no toilet paper? Well, then the second half of the transaction never happens. I just sit on my dollar. It’s not moving around in the economy. That means, even if the Fed prints trillions of these dollars, it’s not enough to offset the fact that there’s no toilet paper to buy and that no one is going out to eat for the last month.

Those transactions just never happened.

And people like me that sit on a chunk of their pay? That drops the velocity on that stack of money to zero until I use it. Right now, people are in general sitting on every dollar they can, unless they have a good source for bargain toilet paper, and I guess they’re sitting on that, too.

Because of those conditions, a lot of things will cost less instead of more, at least in the near-term future. Does that apply to everything?

No.

Things that are in demand, and are in genuinely short supply, will increase in price. Take gold and silver, for instance. The price of silver today is $15 an ounce, according to Kitco™. To buy a silver coin? That’s $24 a coin. The $9 difference? That’s the price to get a coin by the United States Mint or from the Canadian Mint. Silver bars, which have a generally smaller premium? Forget it. Kitco© doesn’t have a single one in stock.

So not everything will deflate like my ego after losing that fistfight to William Shatner at Fight Club. Oops. Wasn’t supposed to mention that. Shhh.

Pugsley tried to Photoshop® something for me, but I told him that teenagers can only do minor editing, at least until they turn 18.

But houses will deflate like a bouncy castle after being jumped on by a dozen toddlers covered with hypodermic needles – but enough about New York City. How many people are buying and selling houses now? No one is. How many people are moving for a new job?

No one is.

Let’s take another example, the New Zealand dollar. The New Zealand dollar is a currency I’ve followed for several years, just for grins. I like to imagine buying a New Zealand winery and retiring there to be a funeral director. I just found out where New Zealanders bury lopsided people – asymmetry. Trust, me it’s funnier if you read the last word in a New Zealand accent.

In the last 15 years, the very best the New Zealand dollar has ever done against the United States dollar was a little shy of $0.90. Right now, you can get a New Zealand dollar for about $0.60. If you look at history, as long as people think of the United States dollar as “safe,” you get people jumping out of currencies like the New Zealand dollar into the United States dollar whenever they get skittish.

Here’s hoping the sheep don’t figure out they outnumber humans in New Zealand.

The United States having a zillion nuclear warheads probably makes people think it’s safe, so they take their money from all over the world. Instead of buying New Zealand dollars, they buy United States dollars, which makes United States dollars increase in value.

The New Zealand dollar has deflated.

I would have bet that would happen, and it has. Imagine all the sheep and, um . . . more sheep you could buy with your new expensive United States dollars?

Can I predict what assets are going to drop in price, by how much, and for how long?

No, I can’t.

But be aware that the rules that you are used to aren’t going to apply.

Will there be inflation?

I think so, after a while, and depending upon where and when the Federal Reserve tosses all those scads of money from the printer that goes brrrr. But if you had just lost your job, and got a check for $10,000 would you spend it on PEZ®, pantyhose, and elephant rides right now? Of course not. But it may be farther off into the future than you anticipate. Houses won’t inflate until people have enough money to buy one. Unless the Fed fills people’s pockets with money and forces them to buy a house, they won’t. Would I buy one in San Francisco for $2 million right now? Would you?

No.

Hmmm, makes those Oklahoma double-wide jokes seem a little, umm, self-serving?

Those assets are frozen, harder than a two-year-old’s grubby grip on a Gummy Worm©. And good luck borrowing money on a house for what it was “worth” yesterday. In the last bust, I went from bankers offering me more money than I could pay back on my signature before the housing bust to having to having to find a receipt to prove I hadn’t stolen that Spice Girls™ CD I listed as one of my assets. Banks always seem to close the barn door in a timely fashion, at least one month after the horse ran away.

Inflation? Sure. But before then that Shelby GT 350™ will be down another 20%, I bet.

Money printer go brrrrr.

Shelby GT 350® go Rawarrrrr? But on a budget, right?

Civil War 2.0 Weather Report #11: COVID, Mexico, and Civil War. Plus bikinis.

“100,000 pesos to perform with this El Guapo, who’s probably the biggest actor to come out of Mexico!” – ¡Three Amigos!

I once bought a clock with half a face. It was a limited time offer.

People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology. Might move from communities or states just because of ideology.
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.

The clock didn’t move this month for the second month in a row. That’s good. I can’t see it moving anytime soon, since I don’t see government sanctioned violence soon. Please . . . let me be right.

In this issue: Front Matter – Violence and Censorship Update – COVID-19 and the Coming Mexican Instability – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Links

Welcome to Issue 11 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. Issue One is here (LINK), Issue Two is here (LINK), Issue Three is here (LINK), Issue Four is here (LINK), Issue Five is here (LINK), Issue Six is here (LINK), Issue Seven is here (LINK), Issue Eight is here (LINK), Issue Nine is here (LINK), and Issue Ten is here (LINK).

Violence and Censorship Update

This one is fairly straightforward. March 2020 will probably go down as one of the quietest months on record for actual violence. With a huge percentage of the population home watching Netflix™ instead of living their lives, violence just wasn’t on the menu. Censorship is generally poorly reported anyway, but I haven’t heard much of that, either, other than of Amazon® banning and then unbanning of a certain book by an obscure German-speaking author with a distinctive mustache.

“Why should I care about future generations? What have they ever done for me?” – Groucho

Me? If you’re gonna ban a book by a German that cost millions of lives, start with the undisputed champ, Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Sadly, that’s a book that’s just too popular in some places, like each of Bernie Sanders’ three houses.

COVID-19, the Coming Mexican Instability, and Civil War 2.0

This topic could have been its own post, but I’ll include it in this month’s Civil War 2.0 Weather Report as the main topic.

News is changing quickly, so quickly that it keeps us as off balance as Johnny Depp on a Monday morning. The other day, Pugsley, (my son, who is in his early teens) was talking about an event. Implied in his statement was that the event was a long time ago.

“Pugsley,” I said, “that was just two weeks ago.”

The look on his face was priceless – his entire world had spun apart, with new changes every day. Yes, it was only two weeks ago, but in that span of time a year’s worth of dramatic changes had happened which includes him not being in school. Time has compressed, just like waistbands in self-isolation have expanded.

With so much news coming out, most people are grappling with the rapidly changing events of each day, as well as the important question of exactly what seven-season television show to binge-watch in the basement and when is the proper time to switch from coffee to wine since you’re supposed to be working from home. Is 4:30 too early?

Life is like a box of chocolates. They both are down in the basement with Netflix®.

Most people seem to think that things are going to go back to normal, even as company after company begins to show economic strain from missing revenue for the last month. The idea that the world has changed hasn’t caught up with them yet. And, yes, for real, the NBA® has thrown out the idea that they could play a game of H.O.R.S.E. for money.

I’m not kidding.

But what’s next? Economies around the world are crumbling, so what will the world look like in three months, in six months?

What happens next?

One of the major contributors to the stress that will cause Civil War 2.0 is on our southern border: Mexico. Increased instability due to decades of immigration (legal and illegal) has created a country where the number of first and second generation immigrants makes up at least 25% of the population in the United States. This has fed the cultural divide in the country – immigrants from Latin American countries tend to be way more communist like big government and they cannot lie.

COVID-19 will take this trend and increase it.

Mexico’s economy is tightly twinned to the United States. Even before NAFTA, Mexico was highly economically dependent on the United States. If the economy of the United States is toast? The economy of Mexico is charcoal.

And think of the savings on shampoo!

The odd thing is that people still aren’t thinking about the future that could have 40,000,000 to 50,000,000 unemployed in the United States. The implications for that are huge: stress on unemployment systems. Stress on social welfare systems. Heck, we’re already seeing stress on an important private system: food banks.

America is fortunate – it still produces and will continue to produce enough food to feed ourselves plus a big chunk of other nations. It still has oil to be extracted, natural gas to provide heating and fertilizer, and still has large amounts of mineral resources. Most importantly, it has vast forest resources and factories to produce the most important commodity on the world today: toilet paper.

Mexico, however, is a nation with a kleptocratic government that’s famous for being impotent and corrupt, with a secondary government consisting of drug cartels. Economically, Mexico periodically grows (slowly) between currency defaults. Right now, 41% of people in Mexico are in poverty, and that’s when things are going really well, which they have been. Mexico has been having a pretty significant period of stability and growth since 2010 or so. I mean, for Mexico.

Mexico is partially funded by what are known as remittances.

$26 billion or so is sent back every year by Mexicans working (mainly) in the United States – these are the remittances. This is the single largest source of foreign income to Mexico – think about that – people doing (mainly) menial labor in other countries are is their most economically successful export.

Large hats are the second largest export.

So, what happens when the Greatest Depression now brewing in the United States cascades into economic catastrophe for Mexico, both in Mexico and in the United States?

The waves of people that tried to get into the United States when things were working well will look small. The United States, even in the midst of the oncoming collapse is going to look much, much better than the failed state that Mexico will certainly devolve into.

Tension is already developing in the United States. Back during the Great Depression, cities commonly erected signs that discouraged men from even entering town, “Jobless Men: Keeping Going, We Can’t Take Care Of Our Own.” In a start down that road, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the H2B Guest Worker program was on hold. H2B visas are intended for, “temporary non-agricultural workers.” How long until H1B Guest Workers disappear? How long until illegals cease to be able to find work because of public backlash?

Best part of blogging as a job? Don’t need to worry about income taxes.

Something tells me that whatever party tries to tell the unemployed that importing tons of guest workers even temporarily to take jobs from Americans will soon find themselves out above the crowd, perhaps on a lamppost.

Regardless, there will be unemployed and desperate Mexicans that will seek life and the safety net available in the United States – all of the Democratic candidates raised their hands on offering free healthcare for illegal immigrants, even though Biden probably was thinking that they said free sniff hair for weasel innocence. Any campaign promise that involves sniffing hair is definitely one Biden will keep.

The benefits of being in the United States, even when illegal, are astounding. Essentially free health care at emergency rooms and clinics. Free schooling. Free food for their children. Free medical care to have babies. Illegals with children born in the United States get food stamps, legal services, and New York offers them up to $300 a month in cash. I think California offers them free cell phones, though most illegals won’t take them because they’re Android® phones and they were hoping to get a cute iPhone™ like that hota Lupita has.

The car company that makes Dodge™ automobiles doesn’t make cell phones. Just Chargers®.

Even though I predict a backlash from unemployed citizens to emerge, the lure of all that Free Stuff in the United States will prove to be too strong to citizens of an economy that will be devastated an order of magnitude greater than the United States.

They will come, especially since it’s likely that not only will Mexico be economically unstable, but politically unstable, leading to yet another revolution down south. That always works out so well for them, right? Just like the economic conditions of the United States pushed Mexico into the abyss, the collapse of Mexico will put additional pressure on the United States. In addition to the Free Stuff, Mexicans will be coming for safety from the Subcommandante of the Week.

Soon enough, dealing with the hungry in the United States will be all that we can do. Mexico imports 45% of its food right now. How many Mexicans will try to get to the United States when Mexico can’t afford to import?

Updated Civil War II Index

March was a difficult month for the economy, and that shows up in the graphs. April, I believe, will be worse. As such, I tried to make sure to select bikini models that suggest the somber nature of the graphs, or, failing that, I looked for cute ones. Either way, I’m sure that you all will agree that this meets or exceeds the fine journalistic standards set by my compatriots at CNN®.

Violence:

Up is more violent. Violence is down because everyone is stuck in the basement. Depending on how the food and money situation, you could see riots, big ones, in the streets of major cities. June may be a very difficult month, politics or no, but until then, enjoy your time at the beach. Mostly alone.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable. Instability skyrocketed with impeachment, and then got better before bouncing slightly this month and last. COVID-19 won’t help with stability, and I don’t think we’ll get this behind us soon.

Economic:

Down indicates worse economic conditions. The economic indicators began to turn in February, and here is the first look at March. I expect April to be the same or worse. Based on the way this index is calculated, it only shows a part of the free-falling stock market. As many readers to this series have noted – until the economy craters, don’t expect Civil War 2.0. But as you can see, affording clothing might be difficult soon.

Illegal Aliens:

Down is good, in theory. This is a statistic showing border apprehensions by the Border Patrol. Down. But for how long? At least past the ankle, right?

Links

Most are from Ricky this month . . . enjoy!

The Hill on Civil War

American Greatness on the Coronavirus War.

Coronavirus social unrestcoming?

COVID-19 and Martial Law?

The Atlantic on Martial Law.

Newsweek – Military Plans?

Police sickened by COVID-19.

Buzzfeed.

Gun sales spike, here, and here, and here.

Zerohedge: Are we getting ready for the boogaloo?

Survival Mindset: City vs. Country. Bonus? Country Girls.

“I’m so tired of all of this traffic. I just can’t wait to get out of Africa.” – Upright Citizen’s Brigade

Especially when I’m explaining.

When we moved to Alaska, we were moving from a mid-sized Midwestern city. The town we were moving from was not big enough for an NFL® franchise, but also not nearly small enough for a letter to Penthouse© about my experiences with an entire college sorority when I was a naïve college freshman in my first week at a small Midwest college.

But this town was a big enough town that there was still a reasonable degree of anonymity. If the person in the car next to me at the stop light was knuckle-deep up their nostril mining for mineral resources without even so much as an endangered species permit, well, the chances are I’d never see them again. And if I did, I could practice a pre-Coronavirus version of social distancing, which involved awkwardly “spilling” 173°F coffee over the hand they had extended for a welcoming handshake. I hope Grandpa forgave me after the burn surgery, but all he would do afterwards was waive that restraining order when I came over to say, “Hi,” and call the police.

He was such a scamp!

Sometimes when you sober up as a naïve freshman, you get udderly surprised.

Not too long after we moved to Fairbanks, The Mrs. had called me and asked me to pick up some canned bananas, sushi flavored ice cream with calamari chunks, and diet flavored peanuts (which turn out to be just a packet of salt) at Safeway™. I managed to get them. Did I mention that The Mrs. was pregnant with Pugsley at the time?

Anyway, after I got back into my car, I had to make a left turn to leave the Safeway© so I could head back to my house. Not a problem – it was a two lane road I was turning on to, but it was 6pm in February in Fairbanks – the traffic was as sparse as original hair on Joe Biden’s head, and it was colder than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s womb, so at least the ice cream wouldn’t melt.

I was third in line to make the left turn. The first turning car stopped, looked left, looked right, looked left and took his left turn. Boom, off he went, never to be seen again.

Now, second in line, behind a minivan. In front I could see the driver wasn’t looking left or right. As a battleship sized (really) opening to turn left opened and closed in front of her, I could see that she was arguing with her kids, probably about how the mean blonde man shouldn’t have taken the last of the canned bananas. Finally, when enough openings for the 7^th Fleet to safely make a left turn had been there and left, my hand hovered over the horn.

I paused.

I took a deep breath.

I we got a mushing dog when we were in Alaska, but he identified as a she. I guess it was a Trans-Siberian Husky.

What had I lost out of my life waiting behind this woman? 45 seconds? I put it in perspective. Was it worth it to add stress to a mother who was currently in a battle of wills with three junior high aged kids? No. I let out a sigh, and realized that getting upset about something small like this really was, was something I could let go of. Forever.

Why be stressed? I’d be home in less than 10 minutes anyway, and Alaska would still be in its own time zone, which was a decade earlier than the rest of the world. I exhaled slowly. Stress drained away.

The woman finally pulled out into an opening large enough to be considered an interplanetary distance. I followed, right behind. At the lights, she went straight. I went straight.

And then I followed her for seven miles. At the next right turn, she turned. I followed. At the next left turn? I followed. She turned down the secluded driveway that held four houses. I followed. She turned right one last time, and I didn’t follow, because she turned into her house.

Her house? Right next to mine.

Mainly we didn’t garden, we just raised our herds of mosquitoes.

Lesson learned. Living in Fairbanks was tough enough. No reason to make it tougher by being the jerk, especially when it’s a small place.

But the lessons learned from living in Fairbanks were bigger than that. I had grown up in the country, so I generally never left the house without things like a blanket, jumper cables, a knife, good shoes, or yak-flavored fruitcake. You never know when disaster will happen, and I’d seen Pa Wilder rescue some idiot flatlander at least once a year.

When you grow up in the country, you never know when or even if a car will come along. I’ve driven mountain roads in winter where my tracks were the only tracks that had punched through 6 inch (7 meter) deep snow and I knew that if I went off the road, the only thing that would keep me alive was between the steering wheel and the driver’s seat. You have a lot of time as you pick your way through a winding road to think of the things that should be in the car with you. You also know the only thing that will save you is . . .

You.

Second place, Jack London Memorial fire building championship (LINK). Link related.

I contrast this with living in an urban area. Sure, there are dangers there, but those dangers are man, not nature. Nature, in places like New York City, has been tamed to the extent that the only dirt you’ll see has been trucked in from miles away. In an urban setting you are reliant on people to do everything for you. Come get your trash. Heat your house. Wax and filet your Chihuahua. In New York City, they even have a number to complain, 311. In 2010, Wired (LINK) did an article and listed the complaints, graphing them. What complaints were sent to this number?

Graffiti. Consumer complaints. Traffic signals, damaged and overgrown trees, dirty conditions, chlorofluorocarbon recovery, problems with taxis, illegal building uses, property taxes, noise, and rodents.

In a rural world, graffiti is solved by talking with the neighbor boy’s dad.

Traffic signals? If you see three in a day, you’re doing something wrong.
Consumer complaints? Don’t shop there anymore.
Damaged trees and overgrown trees are solved with a chainsaw. Which also might solve the graffiti, if you know what I mean.
Illegal building uses? What’s that? When cousin Kaiden uses your barn to make meth?
Property taxes? Call the county commissioner. He lives down the road apiece and you know that Wanda is NOT his cousin.
Rodents? You do have a barn cat, right? And if by rodents you mean coyotes, that’s what the .223 is for.
Chlorofluorocarbons? The pigs eat those, right?

With a few exceptions, all of those issues are taken care of by rural residents themselves. The other things don’t even exist. Chlorofluorocarbons? Sounds like Bigfoot to me. Unless you mean sweet, sweet Freon®, which is necessary to keep the sushi ice cream cold.

Godzilla was flipping houses before it was cool.

I remember reading the Wired® article when it came out, incredulous that city dwellers would call the government and bother them with such petty things. In my mind, this call-in number over shallow inconveniences almost seemed like an experiment in conditioning people to be helpless when nearly all of these problems could easily be solved with either small arms or artillery.

In a rural setting, you’re prepared to save yourself. In an urban setting, you’re waiting for someone to save you. And in an urban setting, you’re anonymous. Do you think people would act like such fools on Black Friday if they had to face those same people the next day?

No. Good heavens. Want to see a polite Black Friday? Come to Modern Mayberry. We have to live with each other, and performing Brazilian ju-jitsu over a Spongebob Squarepants™ 50-piece socket set is just not something you can do and still nod and smile at the Dairy Queen® afterwards. Heck, it’s not like it was the Hello Kitty® smoker, right?

One of the stories that presents the biggest case for learned victimhood in cities is that of Kitty Genovese. Kitty was a bartender coming home from work one night in March in 1964. She was murdered. Some accounts say that dozens of people heard her murder, which lasted half an hour. Apparently there were one or two calls to the police, but no one came. At least one person that heard it said, “I just didn’t want to get involved.” Did I mention that happened in New York City? Yeah. It did.

Contrast it with this:

When I was driving in Fairbanks, I saw a car by the side of the road. It was -50°F outside, and it was a January night. The car was obviously stuck. I stopped, and rolled down the window. The other car did the same, and I found myself talking to a (maybe) sixteen year old girl, plainly embarrassed that she’d run off the road.

John Wilder: “You okay? Got someone coming?”

Unknown Teen Driver: “Yes. It’s all fine. I just wish everyone wouldn’t keep stopping!” They say that no man is an island, but to me it’s ironic that you’re more on an island in the sea of humanity that is New York City than you are in an isolated island of sub-arctic tundra in the snow on a rural road in Fairbanks, Alaska.

I kid. I only saw it snow once in June in the two years I lived there.

The other day I was at one of the nine stoplights (in the entire city of Modern Mayberry) and was thinking about some wonderful blog topic and not really paying any attention to the light. The light turned green. My car was as immobile as Bernie Sanders’ love of communism. There were two cars behind me. Pugsley, however, said, “Dad, get the lead out! Are you waiting for a special color of green? Are you waiting for it to grow vines and pull you through the intersection?”

None of the cars behind me honked.

When it comes to community cohesion, where would you rather be?

Okay, probably not behind me.

Submarines, Star Trek, and Economic Collapse

“But on the submarine, Boris wasn’t as cheerful as he could have been.” – The Bullwinkle Show

If it’s a missile sub, you could say, “Okay, Boomer.”

In most submarine movies, there is a scene where the submarine is hit. One of the forward compartments is being flooded, but the submarine can’t surface because the enemy destroyer is lurking on the surface like Nancy Pelosi lurking at the clinic where they reinject her with blood from the young. The captain must make the fateful decision: do I try to save the team in the forward cabin and perhaps lose the ship? Or do I close the bulkhead door and assure the safety of the ship and the remaining crew?

Time is always of the essence. When the movie is particularly well made, one of the people on the other side of the door is someone you know the captain cares about. It’s often a nephew, or a new, innocent crew member that is doomed to death. You can tell you’re supposed to like him, because he actually has a name; something like Ensign Timmy McFarmboy instead of Dead Crewman #3.

One memorable variant of this theme was in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan™. In that particular scene, Captain, Kirk doesn’t order Spock to go in the reactor room, Spock just does it to save the ship and crew from Ricardo Montalbán’s massive pectoral muscles. “Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,” are among his last words to Kirk. Thankfully, Spock has as many lives as a cat, and kept returning to Star Trek® movies because his agent couldn’t get him the lead role in Die Hard.

Spock said my mother was so fat, that she outweighed the needs of the many.

Presidents don’t generally have the luxury of behaving like captains of submarines or starships in the movies, especially in 2020. The world of politics won’t allow it. Political enemies keep attempting to frame both sides of the equation so that whatever happens, the president loses.

If he acts too soon in closing the bulkhead? He’s being irresponsible – overreacting. If he acts too late and loses the submarine? He was fiddling while America burned. Regardless of his decisions, each one will be held up to the scrutiny of the perfect knowledge that only the future will bring.

That’s the burden of the mantle of command: you own the decisions. I won’t second guess President Trump – I wasn’t in those rooms when the decisions were made. I don’t have the facts that he does. And I don’t have to take responsibility.

He does.

However, to continue to use the submarine analogy, the front compartment is flooding. In many ways, the political opposition on the Left is thrilled: they feel that they have a winning issue against Trump, even if it took a crisis that will either kill Americans or wreck the economy to do it. Either is fine with them, which is a function of how polarized the country is now.

The crisis, however, is huge. And it’s far more than Corona.

Easter sheep: ready to wool the world.

I would bet that the reason that Trump said that he wanted the country to reopen for business at Easter was that he was given information about how the COVID-19 measures are wrecking the economy. But I think the information he was given was overly optimistic. I don’t think anyone told him we’d see 3.3 million initial jobless claims – no one expected that we’d see the largest numbers in history. The expectation is that we’ll see another 6.0 million next week. In a labor market of 160-some million Americans, that’s a 6%* unemployment increase. (*edited for an incorrect figure and updated unemployment with 4/2/20 numbers)

In two weeks.

No, his advisers didn’t tell him that.

“We’re the first nation to go to the poorhouse in an automobile.” – Will Rogers

The personal pain and tragedy that level of unemployment represents is astonishing. In previous posts, I told you the economic fallout would be Great Depression bad, but this is worse. The Federal Reserve Bank is projecting 32% unemployment at the high end. 25% was the highest unemployment rate during the Great Depression.

At the height of the Great Recession in 2009, the unemployment rate hit 10%. Total. Not 10% additional two weeks. The Great Recession is the biggest economic emergency that many people remember, and this is projected to dwarf it.

The jobs we’re already losing aren’t all low-paying jobs, either. Oil has dropped in price to $20 and I don’t think it’s done dropping. Oil production companies, the folks that drill the wells for the sweet, sweet oil? They’ll be shedding jobs nearly immediately. The average oilfield job pays $100,000 per year, but $20 per barrel won’t pay for $100,000 per year jobs. Or pickup trucks. Or houses.

The economy is crashing faster than at any point in recorded history. Daily. Based on JP Morgan’s™ recent estimates, it will be $4 trillion smaller (a drop of nearly 20% overall) this year. That’s assuming that the economy returns to astonishing levels of growth in the last half of 2020.

I hope I’m wrong, but I consider an immediate rebound highly unlikely.

Why?

Dear Diary, Today the stock market didn’t crash.

This is far worse than 2008 – at this point, it’s projected to be eight times worse. At the maximum rate of growth the economy has seen in the last fifty years, it will take a decade to get back to where we are today. That’s a decade of lower employment. A decade of people having to do with less, not more.

I’ve heard it said that all of the economy is still there, waiting to be re-occupied. But it’s not. The stock market has dropped by a third. How much of that was in the average person’s 401k? Spending habits will change. And the people who have been fired – will they come back to work for a company that fired them nearly immediately? Will businesses start as usual the instant the stay-at-home orders are lifted? Will oil zoom back up in price to $60 a barrel?

No. Spending isn’t being deferred – in many cases spending is being cancelled right now. If this goes on until May, that will be at least six weeks without the usual wages for millions of people, perhaps as many as 20 million people. For the majority of households not capable of handling a $1000 emergency, what will happen to their spending profile?

And the people won’t be the same, either.

Most of my jokes about unemployment don’t work. Oh, except for the one about the unemployed classical musician. He’s baroque.

Think about that for a second. Are people going to emerge like cave dwellers from the basement, and start consuming like they used to? No. They won’t have the money, having spent it all on toilet paper. They’ve had bills. Food. Electricity. Rent. Sure, they’re not getting kicked out of their house or apartment during the crisis, but someone has to pay the rent at some point.

Corona has also hit economies all around the entire world. As we speak, the world stock markets have lost trillions of dollars as well. Sure, that impacted all of the Greek shipping tycoons who wanted to buy a yacht, but it also impact all of the people who were thinking of buying a new car this year. Not only will demand be down in the United States, demand will be down globally.

For a decade.

If we’re lucky.

We sit at the crossroads of a country experiencing increasing polarity, year after year, and have just had the greatest financial catastrophe anyone living has seen. The submarine is still taking on water, and the hatch isn’t yet closed.

Expect even more surprises.

Soon.