A Hiking Trip Through The Coronavirus Economy

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

HIKING

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.

SLEEP

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®.”

GYM

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.

TSA

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.

BANDAID

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.

RUSSIAN

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?

CATS2

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:

CATS

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

PEPPARD

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?

Livy

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

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 20th century, when the Soviets did it to at least part of the 64th 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?”

COLLAPSE

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.

BIDEN

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.

FIRED

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.

MISERY

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.

HOPE

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

KINGDATE

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.

brrr

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.

SHELBY

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.

VELOC

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.

inflate

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.

DIVERS

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.

calcutta

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!

CWCLO

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

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

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.

MARX

“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?

FORREST

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.

BATH

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.

HAT

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?

BLOG

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.

CELL

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:

VIOLF

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:

INSTABF

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:

Capture

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:

BORDF

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

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

trigger

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!

COWS

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 7th 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.

SLED

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.

neighbor

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.

2ND

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

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.

JUNE

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

CRASH

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

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.

SHEEP

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.

PAPER2

“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?

PLANE

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.

JOBS

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.

Another Way Politics Messes Things Up, Complete With A Bikini Picture

“Though in war, you only get killed once; in politics it can happen over and over.” – Battlestar Galactica (2000’s)

confuse

“The taxpayers are sending congressmen on expensive trips abroad. It might be worth it except they keep coming back.” –Will Rogers

Politics is not a great tool for a real, actual crisis.

Politics is, like our economy, about motion.  It’s about creating fear enough to spur people into an emotional frenzy, or bully bureaucrats.  One of my favorite stories along this line was when Amy Klobuchar, D(emon)-Minnesota, wrote to the Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) about . . . Buckyballs®.  Buckyballs™, if you don’t remember them, they were small strong spherical magnets that were fun to play with.  They were generally marketed as a desk toy for adults.

One toddler died from swallowing seven of them.  Apparently, during the life of the product, there were 19 other injuries as well, though I don’t have details on those, but I have it on good advice (Ma Wilder) that nearly anything will put your eye out or result in a severed limb.  Maybe I would have taken her more seriously if we had more adults who looked like Captain Hook.

But there were hundreds of thousands of Buckyball® sets sold, and MILLIONS of little magnetic balls in circulation.  Cars, for example, are at least 287 times more deadly than Buckyballs©.  100 kids a year die on bicycles.  The biggest cause of death for toddlers?  Backyard pools.  Most dangerous food product for toddlers?  Hot dogs.

But dying because of small magnets?

buckyb

Clearly, common sense assault toy safety should be important to all of us.

That’s somewhere lower than “being hit by lightning while holding an aluminum replica of Celine Dion above my head on a pole while covered in barbeque sauce and crushed potato chips.”

Did Amy go after those bicycles or pools or hot dogs?  No, that would make her look crazier than usual and give her bad press.  Instead, Amy went after Buckyballs™.   And Amy got her way.  The CPSC shut down Buckyballs™, and went after the owner of the company with particular zeal.  Why?

Amy asked them to.  You see, in 2012, despite the looming Mayan Calendar Apocalypse™, Amy needed something to complain about.  So she found her reason in the newspaper and built her grandstanding off the back of that unfortunate fatality.  I can hear her complaint now.  “Children are dying in a very rare yet odd and public way that puts them in the newspaper!  The only thing that can save them?  Senator Amy to the rescue!”

I’m just sad that Amy didn’t volunteer to catch the Jarts© when her brothers were playing and she was a kid.  Seriously, Jarts™ were fun.  Jarts® child death toll over a span of 35 years before the CPSC banned them?  3.  Thankfully, you can still buy them, but to beat the CPSC, the company asks that you assemble them yourself.  It’s a kit.

Ha!

Jarts®, when played right.

The problem wasn’t with Buckyballs®, the problem was that there wasn’t anything else pressing that Amy could complain about and get away with.  Her party held the presidency, so most national issues were out of the question because if they failed, the Democrats would own the failure.  But she could complain about a tiny toy company.  The only victims would be the owner and the people who liked the toy.  Confession:  I bought six sets of Buckballs™ in their going out of business sale to help contribute to the owner before he lost his business.

What does one stupid senator’s quest against a (mostly) harmless toy have to do with today and the COVID-19 virus?

Everything.

schumer

Chuck saved me some joke writing.

Politics in 2020 is still about doing something.  But, more importantly, it’s the art of been seen to be doing something.  One day when I came home from work, The Mrs. was incensed.  “Schumer wants to allocate $4 billion to the Corona virus!  He’s insane!”  The Mrs. was skeptical at that point, primarily because we’re used to the media crying wolf about every little potential crisis, and secondarily because the Corona death toll was smaller than Jeffery Dahmer’s.

My response was simple:  “$4 billion?  Trump should say, ‘Make it $8 billion, Little Chucky, think big,’ but put in an asterisk that we’ll spend the money only if necessary, and in ways deemed by the President to stop a pandemic.  Heck, he could even get a few miles wall out of that.  Aren’t you tired of the Canadians, dear, coming in with their beavers and maple syrup asking ‘aboot’ everything?  Initiate Operation Leafblower*.”

“But John,” she replied, “the country doesn’t have $8 billion to spare.”

“So what?  We don’t have $4 billion, either.”

*I actually love Canadians.  And Canada, ever since I discovered Bob and Doug as a kid, beauty, eh.  It’s a joke, you hosers.

bikini

And this should add back in the RDA of bikini as suggested by the FDA . . . .

The Corona Virus, Chinese Virus, MOVID-19 (named after MOre streaming VIDeo in your basement) or whatever you want to call it is still an enigma.  Those that say it is not any worse than the flu really should look at the real-time consequences we’re seeing in hospitals, especially in New York.  However, is Corona Chan a wrecking ball like Joe Biden at a hair sniffing contest that, unless it was stopped, destroy civilization?

Nah.  We’ve lived through, and thrived through, worse.

But are we the same people who did that?

Right now, people no longer hold the idea of sacrifice highly.  Instead, the idea is the no one should ever be inconvenienced for the greater good.  Which is because in the mind of most people, there no longer is a commonly recognized greater good.

You can see this in the stories of the infantile people licking products, spitting on food, and stating that if they came down with Corona, that they were going to go to Trump rallies to infect as many people as possible.  There are people who think, “Well, the rules on staying home don’t apply to me.”  There is no us to them, no commonality, only the idea their needs, right now.

biden

I’m Joe Biden, and I forgot this message.

Why isn’t there a greater good?  It’s primarily being driven by the political rift between Right and Left, though there are other factors, as well.  Decisions are made not on the basis of what is for that greater good, but on the basis of what looks good for the cameras and can get more money for “my” group of constituents, and get more votes for me.

As such, every decision is a political one, meant to obtain or maintain power.  And every opportunity should be made to attack an opponent, whether or not they deserve it.  This means that every action taken in the muddled and unclear past is subject to criticism based on the perfect knowledge of the future.  Political attackers are looking for errors.

Let me explain, using a discussion of Type I and Type II errors.

The best way to explain what these errors are is to use an example that always stuck with me:   prescription drugs.  The two primary jobs of the FDA are to approve drugs for sale in the United States and surf social media during the day.  When the FDA approves a drug that it shouldn’t have approved, that’s a Type I error.  What happens with a Type I error is that there is a body count.  Drugs that show up on the market that kill people (even terminally ill people) make the FDA look bad, so they just won’t do it, and will go to ludicrous lengths to keep drug company profits high.

HOT DOG

So, the cat did warn the dog not to eat out of it’s bowl.

What happens when a bad drug gets through and into the market?  Does anybody at the FDA lose a job?  No.  Does anyone get demoted?  No.  But they look bad, which I guess is similar to public execution for a bureaucrat.

That leads to the second type of error, the Type II error.  That’s when the FDA doesn’t approve of a drug that it should have approved.   People still die, and maybe a lot of people.  But since they really died of the condition and not the lack of a drug that legally doesn’t exist, you can’t get to a body count.  You can’t convict without a body count, or at least that’s what my lawyer tells me.

Let’s go into an alternate universe where President Trump hears of the Wuhan Flu and shuts down access to China immediately.  Not only that, he shuts down access to secondary nations that have contact with China, and perfectly protects the United States from Corona.

Does he get any credit if he does this?  No.  No one will count the dead bodies that didn’t exist because he took decisive action.  In fact, he’d be called a racist xenophobe abusing his powers by the media.  You can read various articles making exactly this point that were written around the end of January and the beginning of February.    My favorite of these articles is one written by an avowed communist that includes the line, “The Trump administration’s ‘state of emergency’ should be regarded as a piece of more substantial and systematic hostility in its relations with China.”  The author then complains that people should move freely.  There’s a lovely comment at the bottom, “Well, this article aged poorly.”  I expect articles like these to be scrubbed from the Internet as people get around to it.

Trump’s critics kept complaining he was doing too much, until there was a body count.  At that point, the problem became a Type I problem – people dying because of choices that were made in the past.  So, with that upward ticking clock of bodies available live on the Johns-Hopkins Pandemicvision™, we are in a continually unfolding crisis complete with rolling odometer of sick and infected that, from a political standpoint, require visible action.

ISOLATE

To get a quick test result, touch Johnny Depp’s face and see how soon his test results come back.  Bonus?  Contact high.   

Or at least people pretending to take action.  Is the current policy of shutting down huge chunks of the economy the best one?  I’m not sure.  The information we have is very poor – we simply don’t have sufficient information to make great decisions.  I’m thinking the President has better info, what with deciding to put the Northern Command (the bit of the armed forces that’s concerned with North America) back into the nuclear bunker under Cheyenne Mountain, which is always the sign that things are going well.

The initial death rate was estimated to be up to 10%.  I think it’s clear that’s not the case at this point.  Some hack said that it’s so mild that, “half of Britain may have already had it.”  It’s also clear that’s not the case.  But every credible report I’ve heard says it’s big – intensive care units being swamped.  Time and data will tell.

But politician response has to be played for the crowd:  Nancy Pelosi is already blaming everything on Trump’s past decisions.  Her quote, “But as the President fiddles, people are dying,” seems to ignore Nancy’s own banjo lessons during the impeachment.

knuckle

I’ve never seen a more non-essential employee . . .

In a sense, we are where we are as a society because there isn’t anything that can ever be simple bad luck.  Blame must be assigned.  Every accident must have a cause, and every person at fault must pay, even if the outcome isn’t one that was intended, or even remotely likely.  The lady spilling coffee in her lap for hundreds of thousands of dollars in money from McDonalds is the norm now, not the outlier.

All political decisions are coming through these filters:  Type I Errors and Assigning Blame.  Don’t be surprised by the mindboggling amounts of money and silliness that will come shortly.

But sometimes sanity wins.  Buckyballs™ were made legal again when the CPSC got thrashed in the courts back in June of 2018.

How I Learned To Love The End Of The World

“We estimate between two and four megatons.  Everything within a 30 kilometer radius will be completely destroyed, including the three remaining reactors at Chernobyl.” – Chernobyl (HBO®)

Shelves

Thankfully, everyone is equally hungry under communism.  Bernie’s job is done.

I think I’ve always thought about what’s known today as “prepping” – even at a young age.  When I was young, we lived deep in the mountains.  How deep?  The next closest kid anywhere near my age was ten miles away and probably 2,000’ lower in elevation and was actually a yeti that had moved there from Tibet to get away from the crowds.  The nearest grocery store was twenty miles away.  The nearest movie theater?  Fifty miles.

When you live nearly so far from civilization that tourists try to pay you in beads and pantyhose, you have to think ahead.  Ma Wilder did.  Ma had designed the house with remoteness in mind.  Her pantry was always full, and it was huge.  She built in a pantry that consisted of one entire fifteen foot wall, floor to ceiling, a foot deep.

The pantry was always (and I mean always) stocked from floor to ceiling with canned goods.  Freezer?  Not one freezer.  Two.  And they were always packed to the brim with food.  Well, with the exception of when Pa would let the inventory go down so there would be room to fit half a cow.  Literally.  He’d buy a “side of beef” which was half of a cow.  Minus the hooves, of course.

Ma Wilder had also designed a root cellar that the contractor built.  For those of you not in the know, a root cellar is a small building (8 foot by 8 foot by 8 foot) that is 90% buried to keep vegetables so they will neither sprout nor spoil.  In order to do that, the cellar is dark and cool, like Nancy Pelosi’s heart.  Ma Wilder kept hundreds of pounds of potatoes there.  I should know – I was often the guy taking them down in fall and hauling them up in winter.  And to be clear, we kept the potatoes in the cellar, since Nancy Pelosi’s heart isn’t big enough to hold a French fry.

FRY

Exercise?  No, with COVID-19, it’s extra fries.

The house was designed to be heated in winter with firewood.  Since electricity was incredibly expensive up there, Pa Wilder made gathering, cutting, splitting, and stacking firewood his summer hobby.  As it was Pa’s summer hobby, it turned out to be my summer hobby, too.  It was hard work, and paid poorly until it came time to hit the blocking sled for football when it paid off with massive thighs of steel.

There is no jean size for “massive thighs of steel.”

But it wasn’t just the remoteness that drove Ma Wilder to be prepared.  First, I have to explain a little bit about the family.  My parents were older than I was.  Oh, sure, that’s normally the case, except in some places like Hollywood, but in my case my parents were a LOT older.

Why?

It turns out that I was adopted, despite the original story they told me of finding me as an infant in a crashed space capsule in a wolf den near the summit of Mount Olympus.  In reality, Ma Wilder was my biological grandmother and not who hiked around Greece looking for wolf-raised space babies.  Apparently, as a child the only super-power I had consisted of making my biological mother and father both disappear.

I blame the heat ray vision.

ORPHANS

I made a website for orphans, but it doesn’t have a home page.

So, I was adopted.  Since my parents were not only older than me, but also much older than even standard issue parents, they had hands-on experience with the Great Depression and World War II while they were young.  Apparently, those were events that may been somewhat memorable.

I do remember sitting down in rocking chair in the kitchen while supper was cooking.  After Pa Wilder had finished his chores for the day, he and Ma would sit down to talk about life, most often with a libation, as Pa Wilder called drinking.  I believe it was mainly bourbon, but I can’t really say since they were quite poor hosts and never offered me any.  Often, Ma and Pa discussed people I didn’t know.  This was so boring it made me want to go to and stick forks in outlets to test breakers.

Especially when they talked about people, I was often admonished that “what we discuss stays within the family” though it was implied that that admonishment probably counted for every topic.  I can see how it might be considered controversial how irritated that they were that the neighbor dog kept peeing in the snow by the back porch and they didn’t want me to tattle to the neighbors.   Or how economic collapse might be a thing.  Or how we might be headed towards nuclear war, and had Pa thought about buying dynamite so he could blow up the road leading to our house so we weren’t the victims of marauding, murdering gangs?

Yup.  That was an actual conversation that Ma and Pa had.  I think they only mentioned that idea once while I was in the room, but when your mother is calmly talking about having your father blow up bridges to save you from hordes of people (the parents of the kids you go to school with) ransacking your home after the Soviets gave America a “just thinking about you” bouquet of 10 megaton fireballs?

You tend to remember that sort of conversation when you’re 12.

MADMAX

I heard that after a nuclear war, there are high radiation levels, then only the politicians will be left.

Ma and Pa were acutely aware that all of their material prosperity could evaporate in an instant.  Ma and Pa had both seen rich men laid low by the Great Depression, and Pa Wilder had fought in World War II.  He had driven all through northern Europe, having been on Omaha at D-Day +3.  I can’t even imagine what he had seen.  Of course I asked him the obvious question, “Did any Germans shoot at ya, Pa?”

“No, son, they never shot at me,” he replied with all the coolness of a Steve McQueen, “but I was with a lot of people they were shooting at.”

I’m ashamed at how long it took me to figure out what he was really saying.

PA

That’s not impressive, though.  One of my friends had a grandpa that brought down 15 German planes during the war.  Worst mechanic the Luftwaffe had.

I’m not sure that they ever mentioned the idea of nuclear Armageddon more than once or twice, but it doesn’t take long to make a kid connect the dots:  “Oh, that’s why we have all the food.  And all the guns.  And the 500 gallons of gasoline.  And the 250 gallons of diesel.  And Ma’s amusing utter failure to raise vegetables in the backyard, repeated year after year.”

My parents were preppers before it even had a name beyond “being prudent.”  It’s probably justifiable, especially on Ma Wilder’s part.  She had seen her family make it through the Great Depression okay, but her family had also raised several children whose parents weren’t well off enough to feed them.  I know that sounds crazy in the year 2020, but in the year 1930, sometimes parents couldn’t even figure out where to get enough money to feed a child.

I think those experiences were a driving force in Ma Wilder’s life.  She saved aluminum TV dinner trays.  She saved old clothes.  She could sew (fairly well), make soap (that was more like a caustic chemical burn in a bar), knit (very well), or ferment wine (she gave me a sip and to 12 year old me it tasted of pepper, hate and despair).  Back when she grew up, prepping wasn’t a hobby.  Prepping was what everyone did.

As I mentioned, one factor that made all the preparation seem even more normal was being so far away from anything.  Also, being so far away from everything meant I was pretty far away from the middle school.  I was the last one on the bus route.  That also meant I was the first one on, and the last one off.  It gave me a lot of time alone on the bus to read – a lot.

All of this might explain why I developed a love of fiction that featured the end of the world when I was growing up.  Lucifer’s Hammer, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Earth Abides, The Stand, On the Beach, The Postman, and I Am Legend were all novels that I read as I rode the green pleather seat on an endless loop back and forth to school.  My classmates might have been looking at the trees and houses or talking to each other, but I was living in a world where everything had changed, all at once and strong men did what they could to rebuild.  And without communists this time.

BALTIMORE

I think Baltimore jokes are just a riot!

My middle school’s library was filled with books that were older than me – many from the 1950’s with pages already becoming yellow and brittle with age.  There were dozens of science fiction anthologies.  Science fiction in the 1950’s was filled with the paranoia of a country that was just coming to grips with the concept of being able to destroy an entire planet and wrestling with the now obvious fragility of the human species.  One of the short stories I remember was A Pail of Air, by Fritz Leiber.  You can read it for free here (LINK).  It’s worth it.

If you’re not a fan of apocalyptic stories, you might think that the attractive part about reading the end of the world was about death – and you’re wrong.  Reading that literature was, for me, a celebration of life.  In most of those books and stories the human race didn’t die out.  To me, apocalyptic books weren’t about gloom, they were about hope.  No matter what was thrown at humanity, we would find a way through.

I am unabashedly pro-human, and most fiction in the 1950’s was pro-human.  Somewhere after that, we became a bit more self-loathing and reveled in the idea of our destruction.  I can’t help but think that self-loathing started with Doogie Howser, M.D., but I might be wrong.  Much of today’s literature isn’t fun, and isn’t optimistic.  Sure, I see tough times ahead.  But I feel quite strongly that we can make it through them.

Trust me.  We will.

What, you don’t think I developed psychic powers on Mount Olympus?

Eight Phases of Crisis: COVID-19 Edition

“You had a dishwasher box to sleep in?  I didn’t even know sleep.  It was pretty much twenty-four seven ball gags, brownie mix and clown porn.” – Deadpool

BATSLAP

One girl I dated in High School asked if she used too much makeup.  I replied, “Dunno, depends on if you are trying to kill Batman®”

“Great, now it’s the end of the world and we can’t get a new dishwasher,” The Mrs. actually said, after I finally relented that it would probably cost more to fix the dodgy old dishwasher than a new one would cost.  Plus, the old dishwasher is stainless steel, so if it were a hundred yards away, it would make quite a nice practice target.  I call that a win-win.  Besides, Amazon® actually has them in stock, so I could theoretically have one by next week.

See?  You can get quality appliances during the end of the world.

I started working from home yesterday, which was nice.  When it was lunchtime, I wasn’t hungry, but I was nice and warm so I took a nap right in my home office which is also known as the couch.  Good times.  I do have a concern – The Mrs. slapped my heinie as I walked by and said, “nice butt” so I’m thinking of bringing this up with HR.  I want to be treated as more than a sexual object.  I mean, not much more, but more.

As much as you might be interested in my derrière, I really do want to talk about COVID-19 and get to the bottom of how the issue will progress in the coming months.  While each crisis is different, they are all sort-of-predictable because in the end, people don’t change all that much, even though circumstances do.  Certainly we want to get this all behind us, in the rear view, so to speak.

Okay, I’ll stop.  Seven synonyms for the posterior in two paragraphs are quite enough.  I don’t want you to think I’m a bum.

But what is this pattern I mentioned?  Here are, as near as I can determine, Eight Stages of a Crisis™, a level at which each crisis can be evaluated compared to the other – this is my modification of work originally done by Zunin and Myers.  This is like the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief, but with the apocalypse in mind.  Why settle for one death, when you can have millions or billions on your mind?  It’s so nice and cheery.  The nice part of using this model is that you can gauge where we are in the current COVID-19 mess.

FRANZ

Who would he assassinate for a Klondike® bar?  Apparently Archduke Franz Ferdinand. 

The Warning

This is the opening stage of a crisis.  It may be short, as in 9/11, or it may be a slow-motion collapse like the gradually increasing troop buildups and mobilizations that led to World War I.  Everyone wanted to stop it, but no one was sane enough to say “no.”  The Warning before the first Civil War was literally decades in length.

In the current COVID crisis, The Warning came during and just after the December impeachment.  With the focus of the country elsewhere, who cared about the flu?  We don’t trust the media very much.  Why?  They don’t seem trustworthy.  Example:  when Trump shuts down air transport to China, CNN® says it’s racist.  When China shuts down air transport from the United States, CNN™ says it’s a wise and prudent move by China’s benevolent leadership.

In a world where CNN™ and the Chinese government have similar levels of credibility we tend to forget the ending to the story of the boy who cried wolf:  in the end, wolves really attacked.

DINOS

How did they not see this coming?

The Event

The Event is generally not long, but it can be.  It’s the Shot Heard Round the World at Lexington and Concord in the Revolutionary War.  The Event is when the rules change forever, and nothing can ever make the world go back to the way it was.  It’s the spark that lights the fire.  When people look back, everyone can see The Event.

Nothing is ever the same afterwards – The Event changes everyone that it touches, and often ends up changing systems permanently.  It is disruptive.  It may not be the reason that everything fails, it might just be a small event toppling an already unstable system.  In a crisis like 9/11, the event is obvious and instant.  COVID-19 has led to a slow-rolling avalanche across the economy.  Was it poised for a fall anyway?  Possibly.

As a longer cascade, what will be The Event that history will use to remember COVID-19?

In one of my more frightening thoughts:  what if we haven’t seen The Event yet?

DISB

I’m not sure he’s koalafied to make that decision.

Disbelief

When things have changed, and changed drastically, people refuse to believe it.  When the power is out because a tree fell on the power lines, I will walk into a room an automatically flip the light switch.  Why?  Habit, partially.  But there’s a part of my mind that is existing in Disbelief, perhaps, that doesn’t believe that the power could ever be gone.

Disbelief isn’t a coping strategy, and it’s not an attempt of the mind to protect itself, at least in a healthy person.  It’s more inertia.  You’re used to the world being a certain way, and when it isn’t, part of your mind isn’t quite ready to process it.

This might be an overreaction – COVID-19 might be no worse than the flu.  But that isn’t explained by the reactions we’ve seen so far from places that got it earlier than the United States.  Italy is locked down.  In two weeks, we will know more.  In a month, I think, we will have certainty.

PANIC

In order to calm panicked customers, Wal-Mart opened up a second register.

Panic

At some point, the mind is confronted with the new reality and forced to accept it.  But the rules are new, and unknown.  What to do?  One could take a deep breath, and review the situation and think logically or?  One could Panic.  Panic is easier, and doesn’t require a lot of thought.

Panic is the natural reaction when your brain realizes that it has done zero to prepare for the new reality.  So, what to do? Buy staples as required to build up the stockpile you’ve accumulated over time?  Or buy 550 cans of Diet Mountain Dew®?  Or just buy toilet paper, because everyone else is and you don’t know what to do or have any independent thought?   Toilet paper purchasing is Panic.

HERO

Not all heroes are able to walk.  I mean, some gained 400 lbs on the couch.

Heroism

While the Panic is ongoing, the first glimmer of Heroism starts to show.  Brave men and women working in the medical field are the first signs of Heroism.  Donald Trump talking with Al Sharpton to address the problems he sees is Heroism – realizing that there is a greater good, and that sacrifice is required.  Heroism is embodied throughout the response to the crises where a few have an opportunity to save many, and where enemies put aside squabbles for a time because it’s the right thing to do.

There was a family story – Grandma Wilder went during World War II to weld Liberty ships at the Alameda Ship Yard.  She would regularly get things sent to her from her mother who lived in the country in the middle of Flyover.  Needles were rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Sugar was rationed in San Francisco, but not in Flyover.  Why ration needles and sugar?  To build common purpose, so even people not piloting P-51s or jumping out of landing craft at Iwo Jima could feel like they were doing their part.  To be fair, rationing was necessary in wide segments of the economy, it wasn’t a fake, but it did help bring everyone together.

Right now Heroism is going on, and we aren’t even asked to do anything more than to sit down and watch Netflix® unless we’re keeping vital industries going.  Here’s a link to Aesop’s place that shows the quiet heroism going on out there (LINK).  Read it all.

CLIFF

I read the other day that coyotes are about 10 miles an hour faster than road runners.  My entire childhood was a lie.

The Cliff

Keeping order requires energy.  Some part of the energy of the system is put into keeping order.  In a time of significant social cohesion, like World War II, the United States didn’t face The Cliff, even though virtually every other developed nation did.  Instead, the energy that the crisis took was replaced by people working together.

Most of the time in a real crisis, however, there’s The Cliff.  I wrote about it here: Seneca’s Cliff and You.

We have not fallen off The Cliff.  Is it certain that there is one?  No.  But every single leader, elected or appointed, is acting like it’s there.  I believe we will see it.  The new normal will be grow from events moving quickly.  Already at Wilder Redoubt, we’ve had nothing but home cooked meals for the last week, with a couple of store-bought sandwiches being the exception.

Will home cooked food, family dinners, and homeschooling be the legacy of COVID-19?

I expect that we’ll see The Cliff soon enough.  How deep will it go?  As I’ve mentioned before, no one knows.  The worst case is that the economy crashes through levels to Great Depression era lockup in two weeks or so.  Only 40% of Americans are able to absorb an unexpected $1,000 expense.  80% are living paycheck to paycheck, and those paychecks just stopped.

Dead.

Going first will be car payments.  The average monthly car payment is $800.  Me?  I’d sell you my daily driver for just two months of that, so expect car finance companies to seize up like an ungreased stripper pole.  But the businesses that employ those people aren’t much better off.  The best restaurant in Modern Mayberry came pretty close to closing down shop six years ago, but pulled through.  The second best restaurant didn’t survive.  There will be cascading failures as the debts owed from one business to the next go unpaid, and this won’t just be for small businesses.  I feel confident saying that several businesses with 10,000 or more employees will go bankrupt.  Overall loss to the economy?  40% of the GDP this year?

Is there a better case?  Sure.  We contain COVID-19 in a month or so, and then call it good.  We only lose 10% to 20% of our GDP this year, and government pumps five or six trillion dollars into the economy to juice it back up.  That’s the best case.  And that’s just in the United States.

I’m not kidding, that’s how deep The Cliff is.  If we’re lucky.

EMPEROR

Something, something, Dark Side®.

Disillusionment

After the fall, things suck.  We had heroes, but the time for Heroism is over.  Disillusionment sets in when things don’t snap back to normal.  Things will seem rosy, only for failure to crush hope.  The more government “helps” during this phase, the worse recovery will be.  Roosevelt “helped” so much during the Great Depression that he extended it for years.

But politicians will take drastic steps, because they can’t help themselves.  The length of time Disillusionment lasts?  Months to years.

FIX

Some re-assembly required.

Rebuilding

This is the other side of The Cliff.  Whereas, as Seneca said you go down a cliff pretty quickly, you only build up slowly.  Rebuilding the economy will take years.  If we do it right, we’ll build a stronger economy, less dependent upon foreign supply lines, that guarantees freedom while preserving the traditional values that built the wealth in the first place.

If done poorly?  The system is controlled, oppressive, and coercive.  Leaders matter, but the quality of the citizenry to fight back against the system is even more important.  Rebuilding takes years, and by my best case scenario, four to eight years.

DISHWASH

So, I guess I’ll get a jump start on rebuilding.  Dishwashers on the Internet.  Amazing.  My only problem is that there’s this lady at work who keeps making suggestive comments and touching me all the time.  Just a few minutes ago, she told me that she expects me to share a bed with her!  They always told me not to get my honey where I got my money, but what happens when you work at home?

Essential Decisions: Coming to a Town Near You

“They call it a panic room.  I know that’s a difficult concept for you, because for you, every room is a panic room.” – Monk

TP

I hear that the Australians have really started hoarding toilet paper – they are superstitious about problems down under.

What’s essential?  Right now, there are hundreds of Federal bureaucrats asking exactly that question.

That scares me.

Why?  The Federal government could cause an ice shortage in Antarctica if they were given a mandate to make more ice, so I’m not hopeful that they’ll make the right decisions.  It should probably scare you, too.  When Hurricane Ike hit Houston, we were there.  Here are some examples of the great competence that was on display from our Federal, state, and local governments:

  • Radio telling us to go the FEMA website for crucial information. During a power outage.  Where cell phones weren’t working.  So, I assumed we were to access the FEMA website psychically.
  • Radio telling us to go and bail out “first second responders” because they didn’t have food or water, because no one can plan for a Hurricane in Texas, right?
  • FEMA water showing up over a week later after power was nearly completely restored. Oh, and you could get one case.  In contrast, a local radio station had a semi-load of bottled water delivered for distribution in only two days.

america

Okay, I may have yelled at a hurricane like this during Hurricane Ike after a wee bit of wine.  No flag.  But there was a bathrobe and it was after midnight.  Does that count?

Federal response is good for, oh, responding late and poorly to any real event.  And why did I call government people “second responders” up above?  Because they are generally the second (or later) person to respond to any crisis.  In most cases, you’re the first responder.  Fire at your house?  It’s you and your trusty extinguisher or cell phone.

Bad guy in your hallway?  First responder is you, because the average police response time in the United States is ten minutes.  Then?  They’ll generally not run into the house like Rambo on steroids, they’ll come in slowly so they can go home that night.  It’s not unlikely that you’d be alone with that robber for fifteen minutes after you made the call to 911.

Do you think you’ll have time to take selfies with the burglar?  Maybe share photos of your kids and amusing anecdotes?  The old saying is right:  when seconds count, the second responders are minutes away.

burglar

One burglar stole all my lamps.  I was upset, but I was also delighted.

It’s not that I dislike the government, I think their inefficiency is cute and endearing in the same way that dealing with a young child is.  If government were actually efficient at anything that would scare me.  The government (at every level) is horrible at coordination and planning, as illustrated by my examples above, with the exception of taxation, where money is on the line – they won’t even give fishermen a break on their net income.    Individuals that are motivated by profits, however, are exceptional at planning and fixing bad situations.  Plus, do you really want to be 100% reliant on government for anything important (besides national defense)?

Let’s take an example:  food lines are a constant theme of Socialism.  I know Bernie Sanders says, people lining up in lines for scarce food, “is a good thing.”  But in capitalist systems, the food waits for you, in abundant variety.  Why?  So people can make a buck.  That’s why we have more than one kind of beer, and one kind of ketchup.  Heck, in the local Wal-Mart® there are like 8 different kinds of Heinz™ ketchup in five different sizes.  The market works to satisfy you, in ways great and small.  Especially if covering yourself in ketchup is what satisfies you.  Mmmm, jalapeño-ranch ketchup.

smooth

I got some Heinz™ ketchup in my eye, and now I don’t need glasses anymore.  My optician said that Heinz®-sight is 20/20.

The profit motive is at work even during this COVID-19 panic.  I heard this week an amazingly Good Thing.  At work, I heard we were waiting for some widgets and some polishing compound for a racknpinion molecule, and heard that there was no shipping on some of the stuff we wanted.  None.  Every single truck that normally shipped gizmos and lefthanded-transaxle wax was being put into hauling food.

That’s a lot of trucks.  As confirmation of this, The Boy went to go retrieve his things from his dorm, college having been cancelled for the End of the World®, and noted that there were huge numbers of trucks moving on the interstate.  The Boy estimated there were probably 150% of the number of trucks he normally sees, and this was on a Saturday.  State Troopers were entirely absent.  Even the cops want the food to move.

hillary

So, next time you get pulled over, just roll down your window and start a nasty dry cough.  I’m betting the lights go off and the trooper heads out . . .

This was accomplished not by bans.  Not by government edicts .  Just, “the people are scared and want more food?  Give it to them.”  This is easy because there’s plenty of food in the system.  The corn that’s being turned into Tostitos® was grown with sunlight from 2019.  Next year’s Tostitos have yet to be planted.  Rice?  We have tons.  Fuel?  As I told you several weeks ago – it’ll be the cheapest in the past 20 years.  Taking inflation into account, it may be the cheapest in history, so cheap you’ll be able to start bathing with gasoline instead of tap water, like Jeff Bezos does to clean grease from his moving parts.

You can shut down some parts of the free market because they’re non-essential – we did that in World War II.  My folks tell stories of rationing of sugar and sewing needles and tires.  And at some point those semi-trucks hauling the radishes and rutabaga and rhubarb and redfish will need new tires.  They’ll need oil changes, and wiper fluid, and the drivers will need coffee and meth.

And farmers must farm, and ranchers must ranch, and people must be ready to pick the pizza rolls from the pizza tree when they are ripe.  Someone has to milk the mice.  But farmers live for that, so as long as they have gallon milk jugs, they’ll keep filling them.  Economic incentives are still working.

The longer we go on with “nonessential” businesses being closed, the more businesses will become essential.  In Modern Mayberry, we regularly close down non-essential businesses.  It’s a day we refer to in our local dialect as “Sunday”.  On Sunday, if Wal-Mart® or a fast food restaurant doesn’t have it, you’re not getting it.  That was one of the bigger changes in moving here from bigger cities – businesses close down on Sunday, and the hours aren’t all that long on Saturday.  Most businesses close at 5pm.

So, we live with non-essential shutdowns all the time.  It’s hard to argue that the steak restaurant is essential to the public, though it’s certainly the opinion of the waitress and the owner that it’s essential, but even they agree to close it down on Sunday and Monday.

SUNDAY

It’s the first five days after Sunday that are the always the hardest.

In a true governmental paradox where bureaucrats live on a different planet than the rest of us, schools are closed but daycares remain open.  Having the grimiest, most germ-laden creatures on Earth (first graders) congregate for seven hours at school is wrong, but having those same infested viral fermentation pots play together for eleven hours at a daycare is okay.

I guess daycare workers need better unions.

But reasonable people could work together and come up with a definition of what’s essential.  My job isn’t.  Not today.  In a few months?  Maybe, but probably not.  In a few years?  Yeah, somebody needs to do it, for sure.  And most jobs, even within essential industries aren’t essential.  HR?  Let them work from home, or better yet, work from Nome or the bottom of the ocean for the next year.

Heck, I’d be surprised if productivity of home workers wasn’t greater than working in a traditional office setting.  I had read a statistic when I was starting off at work after college, and it said that up to 2/3 of the average office worker’s day was wasted.  But how do office workers waste time?  I had one boss who would just pull up a chair and talk.  For sometimes two hours or more.  About, well, whatever.

Before you snicker, around the same time I read a statistic that said something like 40% of industrial repairs fixed the wrong thing.  But it’s hard to take a steel smelter home to fix it, unless you sneak it out in your big lunchbox.

Anyway, we’ll soon be seeing what government bureaucrats feel is essential.

I’m just hoping it involves beer . . . .