Thursday, June 16, 2022
Perverse anti-capitalist AP Obama says inflation had been under control since the early 1980s, blames inflation now on "robust recovery from the pandemic"
You can't make this shit up.
AP Obama, here:
Inflation in the United States, which had been under control since the early 1980s, resurged with a vengeance just over a year ago, largely a consequence of the economy’s unexpectedly robust recovery from the pandemic recession. The rebound caught businesses by surprise and led to shortages, delayed shipments — and higher prices.
Inflation averaged 4.75% 1981-1990 inclusive. You can't call that "under control". The FedFunds rate averaged 9.4% over that same period. The one halved your nest egg in about 15 years while the other halved what was left in 7.5.
If that's success I'd hate to see failure.
While the Fed fiddles around with interest rates as if they controlled anything, oh look! over there! a deer!, it has presided over an orgy of balance sheet expansion of $7.7 trillion since 2008 as the Treasury has flooded the economy with $1.5 trillion in new currency and the Congress of idiots has spent us blind with $15.75 trillion beyond the 2008 baseline ballooning the total debt to $30 trillion by the end of 2021 so that it's three times the size that it was just 14 years ago.
An economy which runs only on going deep into debt is not a capitalist economy.
It's a Chinese communist economy.
Today's inflation-adjusted price of gasoline from 1918 is $4.84, but we're averaging record prices well north of $5.00
Calculator here:
We estimate it would take $4.84 on June 16, 2022 to have equal purchasing power with $0.25 on June 16, 1918.
For the 1918 price, see here.
You can see from this chart that the price of gasoline in 1918 was indeed about $0.25. Wholesale prices averaged about 20.6 cents in 1918.
As of three days ago the official government average actual price at 900 retail outlets was $5.107.
GasBuddy has the USA average at about $5.03 this morning.
Wednesday, June 15, 2022
Sometimes the UK Daily Mail can screw up a story as badly as The Grauniad, but Drudge is even worse
"Converted to non-condensing by 2029" is definitely NOT what the story says. Quite the opposite.
And Drudge's headline is also false:
Biden plans for all to pay $350 to upgrade to 'energy efficient' furnaces...
$350 is how much more the more efficient condensing furnaces cost. You just won't be able to buy the old non-condensing variety after 2029.
The Biden rule isn't going to force anyone to pay anything unless they elect to buy a new furnace after 2029, in which case you'll be able to get only the more expensive, more efficient type.
I bought one way back in 2008, with a DC motor for the blower which is where the real savings come from: On the electricity used to move the heated air.
Too bad the story never mentions it.
Stonks laugh again after Powell's miserable 75 basis point hike to fight inflation
The rate is now 1.52% vs. CPI up 8.5% year over year and the all commodities Producer Price Index up 21.5% year over year.
This isn't being tough.
It's a joke perpetrated on an ignorant public like all the other jokes of our time, like George Floyd, Caitlin Jenner, and Jan 6.
The investing world's experts, let alone all the sheeple who follow them, don't have a CLUE how bad this market has been since August 2000
The TOP, do you hear me, was in already last November.
As of May 2022 real return has pulled back all the way to 4.14%.
We truly live in a new period of suck.
Tuesday, June 14, 2022
You are being lied to: CDC data shows firearm homicides among children ages 1-17 are down 28% 1999-2020 vs. 1981-1998
For the 22 years 1999-2020 (8,030 days) firearm homicides among children ages 1-17 totaled 19,306 or 2.404/day.
For the 18 years 1981-1998 (6,570 days) firearm homicides among children ages 1-17 totaled 21,919 or 3.336/day.
The per day rate has declined 28%.
Data here.
Monday, June 13, 2022
LOL, phony green Barack Obama is a prepper, installs 2,500 gallon propane tank for 6,900 square foot Martha's Vineyard estate, five times the typical size
Martha's Vineyard Times reports here:
The select board approved a request for a 2,500-gallon commercial propane tank for 79 Turkeyland Cove Road in Katama — owned by former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama. “We’ve never had a private propane tank come to us,” said select board member Arthur Smadbeck, with select board member Michael Donaroma noting a private-residence propane tank is typically a fraction of the quantity being requested.
500 gallon tanks "provide adequate fuel needs for whole-home or business heating for structures up to 4,500 square feet."
Sunday, June 12, 2022
LOL, the blog of the St. Louis Fed gaslights you on gasoline prices by jumping through hoops to make the current outrageous prices disappear
While nominal gas prices have increased rapidly over the past few months, real gas prices were still lower than they were for most of the 2006-2014 period.
More in "Gaslighting gas prices", April 21, 2022.
They don't pay those economists the big bucks for nothing:
[W]e compute by dividing the nominal price by the consumer price index (CPI) and multiplying by 127.5, the value of the CPI in January 1990.
Talk about gaslighting.
Look, US Regular All Formulations (GASREGW), which is what the blog post used, peaked around the 4th of July in 2008 around $4.11/gallon.
Here's what a popular inflation calculator says about that:
We estimate it would take $5.54 on June 12, 2022 to have equal purchasing power with $4.11 on July 4, 2008.
Just using a simple CPI calculator here puts $4.11 in 2008 at $4.94 . . . already IN 2020.
We are mostly certainly paying the highest prices ever for gasoline.
Be happy, right? At least we're not Hong Kong.
Friday, June 10, 2022
Matthew Dowd still works hard every day to prove that he's the dumbest man alive
 |
| https://www.econlib.org/archives/2015/01/are_german_scho.html |
Nancy Pelosi's husband, Paul Pelosi, has a court date August 3rd, when charges, if any, will be filed and he will be arraigned
AP Obama reports here:
Pelosi agreed to a court date of Aug. 3, 2022 in Napa County Superior Court, according to the Napa County district attorney news release. If charges are filed, he will be arraigned then.
Thursday, June 9, 2022
CDC watchers are abuzz trying to explain away data showing coronavirus cases are higher among the boosted than the merely double-jabbed
Remember when there weren't supposed to be ANY cases among the vaccinated?
Rachel Madcow, 3/29/21:
now we know that the vaccines work well enough that the virus stops with every vaccinated person.
These people still haven't owned up to that fact, nor to their responsibility for the continuing spread of the disease.
Social Security: As usual, the people want a pony, daddy
81% support taxing income beyond $147k to shore up the projected Social Security trust fund shortfall, Republicans by 79% and Democrats by 88%.
81% also support cutting benefits for those same earners whose Social Security taxes would soar.
Meanwhile, 64% support increasing the minimum monthly benefit from $951 to $1,341.
More.
Equity used to mean everybody had a reasonable expectation of receiving what they put into the system, but that stopped being true for high income earners in the 1990s.
Last year, a person making $200k taxed at the current 6.2% rate for 30 years would have to live 10 years beyond full retirement age of 67 to recoup all his contributions at a 2021 maximum benefit level of $3,113 per month, or to age 77.
Life expectancy in the US fell to 76.6 years in 2021.
Wednesday, June 8, 2022
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
Inflation under Joe Biden means it's back to PB&J for lunch, according to this e-mail ad from my grocery store
C'mon, who advertises peanut butter?
It's June and Tennessee still can't get its act together and report any breakthrough cases, hospitalizations, and deaths for 2022
Breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths in December 2021 were running close to 20% and cases just over 30%.
Omicron in 2022 is a bitch, eh?
US COVID-19: The Big Picture, through May 31, 2022
Vaccines have done nothing to stop the spread and little to reduce deaths in any significant way.
Over the last eleven years 2010-2020, heart disease in the United States has killed 1729 people per day on average.
Cancer comes in a close second at 1620 per day.
COVID-19 remains the third leading cause of death, averaging 1221 deaths per day to date, 822 days after the first death on February 29, 2020.
The best explanation of the data so far remains that the virus has evolved to spread more easily at the expense of lethality, otherwise the explosion in cases in 2022 would have resulted in far many more deaths than we have at present. Deaths per day in the third year of the pandemic remain relatively constant when measured over time.
And who is most victimized?
California, America's largest state by population, continues to show that COVID-19 infects people 65 and over the least, but kills them the most by far. Since May 2021, deaths among people 65 and over in California have changed little, constituting 74% of deaths then and 71% a year later.
This is despite the fact that people 65 and older became the most vaccinated segment of the US population in 2021.
CDC reports that today 95% of them nationally have received at least one dose, 91.2% are fully vaccinated, 69.7% are boosted once, and 29.7% are boosted twice. In California to date nearly 85% of people 65+ have been fully vaccinated with nearly 76% of those boosted.
There needs to be a massive shift in the messaging of the medical establishment away from thinking the vaccines are a panacea for anybody, toward preventing senior deaths by reducing their comorbidities and quickly treating them with drugs like Paxlovid when they become infected with coronavirus:
In reducing mortality, Arbel said the treatment showed a very high benefit in patients 65 and older - an 81% risk reduction. There were no observed benefits in younger adults, who are at less risk of dying from COVID.
Monday, June 6, 2022
Methinks NeverTrump Separatist Kevin Williamson doth protest too much
Donald Trump is an idolator and a heretic, a blasphemer and a perpetrator of sacrilege, and much more.
Our modern separatists pronounce all those heretical, or carnal, from whom they have withdrawn.
If CNBC gave a flying fig about "how readers feel", it wouldn't have disabled comments years ago
Here’s what four of them had to say.
Four, lol.
Sunday, June 5, 2022
Definitional breakdown: It's not just the New England Journal of Medicine, which thinks 18 and 19 year olds are children (for political reasons)
Now The New York Post thinks 62 year olds are "elderly".
Before it was just Obama and Democrats who infamously and routinely seemed not to know the size, proportion, and meaning of things (when life starts was above his pay grade, 57 states, hundreds of millions getting Obamacare, 200 million dead from COVID-19, et cetera).
Now everyone is getting into the act.
Life expectancy in the US is about 77 years old. You are elderly when you are near that or exceed it.
Federal law prohibits FFLs from engaging in handgun commerce with anyone under 21 and longgun commerce with anyone under 18. Meanwhile 18 year olds can vote, be tried as adults, sign contracts, and get drafted to have their asses shot off in wars, and fry in the electric chair for shooting up schools. Let's have some of that, shall we?
And just in case you were wondering, a woman is still an adult human female, at least until it becomes Wokepedia.
The car America needs right now is the Honda Fit, withdrawn from the market in 2020 due to falling demand for small cars
The $17k subcompact gets about 36mpg, and more, on the highway compared with the HR-V which gets only 30mpg and costs $5k more.
Hey, who wants a Fit during a Plague, right?
The Chicoms might as well be at war with Australia
Defense Minister Richard Marles said the Chinese J-16 flew very close to the Australian plane and released flares and chaff that were ingested by the engines of the Poseidon, a converted Boeing 737-800.
“The J-16 ... accelerated and cut across the nose of the P-8, settling in front of the P-8 at very close distance,” he told reporters in Melbourne. “At that moment, it then released a bundle of chaff, which contains small pieces of aluminium, some of which were ingested into the engine of the P-8 aircraft. Quite obviously, this is very dangerous.”
More.
LOL, The Grauniad just lies that electric vehicles aren't heavier and don't produce more tire pollution than conventional vehicles
The average weight of all cars has been increasing. But there has been particular debate over whether battery electric vehicles (BEVs), which are heavier than conventional cars and can have greater wheel torque, may lead to more tyre particles being produced. Molden said it would depend on driving style, with gentle EV drivers producing fewer particles than fossil-fuelled cars driven badly, though on average he expected slightly higher tyre particles from BEVs.
More here, in "Car tyres produce vastly more particle pollution than exhausts, tests show".
Meanwhile, the great Scotty Kilmer was all over this like white on rice a couple of days ago:
Saturday, June 4, 2022
Friday, June 3, 2022
Full time as a percentage of civilian population vaults to 50.4% in May 2022, the 2019 average level
Full-time usually peaks in the summer months.
The average level for the year through May 2022 is 49.8%.
Gasoline is quickly approaching the 2008 inflation-adjusted high of $5 per gallon
Just after filling up yesterday at the corner for $4.79, the price was raised to $4.99.
More representation for the people does not equal "bigger government and more politicians"
The last thing most Americans want is a bigger government and more politicians, yet the solution to the zero-sum redistricting game is to create more seats for the House of Representatives.
More.
The founders of this country wanted representation to GROW with population. The original formula, never ratified, would have entitled every 50,000 Americans to one representative in the House. You know, one who might actually know who the hell you are and what you think, elected by funds raised from you and not from special interests a thousand miles away?
Mostly Republicans stopped this constitutional process in 1929 by act of Congress, fixing representation at 435 in the US House. But the impulse to Congressional supremacy over the other branches of government has ever been bipartisan.
Now, the "ideal" House district represents 761,000 people. All it takes is an oligarchy of 218 to decide the fate of hundreds of millions, whose leader is a shadow president popularly known as The Speaker of the House who can serve year upon year while the real president is limited to two terms.
Such an awful outcome was never intended by the framers.
The resulting system has turned politics into a binary pressure cooker without a relief valve, threatening to explode in another civil war at any moment, if contemporary doom and gloom political rhetoric on the extremes of both sides is to be believed.
In fact thousands upon thousands of Congressional staffers and lobbyists run everything and write the legislation, not the people through their elected representatives.
Politics is a fact of life. Aristotle taught us that man is a political animal.
Denying that fact is the surest route to the barbarism of civil war, or the present system of legislative tyranny which has saddled the American people with $30 trillion of debt.
A bigger House is actually a smaller government where you keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
Thursday, June 2, 2022
The lying sacks of shit at the New England Journal of Medicine inflate gun deaths among children by counting 18 and 19 year olds among the children
The previous analysis, which examined data through 2016, showed that firearm-related injuries were second only to motor vehicle crashes (both traffic-related and nontraffic-related) as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, defined as persons 1 to 19 years of age.
More.
Leave it to the professional liars in the medical establishment to do this sort of thing, adding to their well-deserved tarnish earned during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Measure it properly as persons 1 to 17 years of age and this is what you get, below (Motor Vehicle deaths still number one by far and drownings and firearm homicides way back running neck-and-neck for number two).
And even more importantly, compared with 1981-1998, firearm homicides among children are DOWN by 12%, firearm suicides among children are DOWN by 15%, and accidental firearm deaths among children don't even make the top ten any more (Motor Vehicle deaths also were down 34%, drownings down 25%, deaths by fire or burning down 56%, accidental suffocation deaths down 16%, and pedestrian and other land transportation deaths down 6%).
Suicides among children by suffocation were up from 5,085 to 12,890, a whopping 153%, perhaps due in part to mandatory gun locks causing a change in choice of method. Combined firearm and suffocation suicides among children still rose significantly, however, from 17,968 to 23,824 or 33%.
We won't speculate on the prominent role models trailblazing the way for this horrible new trend, like Robin Williams who hung himself in 2014.
You can do that for yourself.
Wednesday, June 1, 2022
For all you haters out there, here are the top 10 LGBT-friendly companies
Google
Microsoft
H E B
Lululemon
Deloitte
Bath & Body Works
Progressive Insurance
IBM
Walt Disney Co.
Apple
He's making a list, checking it twice . . .
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