Joe Biden is Less Than Zero

 

Dead Putin crony list, according to the US Sun

Ivan Pechorin, 39, fell off a boat

Ravil Maganov, 67, fell out a window 

Igor Nosov, 43, stroke

Yevgeny Zinichev, 55, in the Arctic Ocean

Yuri Voronov, 61, in his swimming pool

Alexander Tyulakov, 61, noose around his neck

Leonid Shulman, 60, multiple stab wounds

Alexander Subbotin, 43, heart attack

Vladislav Avayev, 51, murder suicide

Sergey Protosenya, 55, hanged

Yevgeny Palant, 47, multiple knife wounds

Story.         

Speaking of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, she was the one responsible for backing down on Hong Kong, giving it back to China in 1984

 She won in the Falklands, but folded on China.

Thatcher later recounted that Deng had told her directly "I could walk in and take the whole lot this afternoon," to which she replied, "There is nothing I could do to stop you, but the eyes of the world would now know what China is like."

More.

In old global warming news, it turns out that it was Margaret Thatcher of all people who first funded the warmists

 As you can see, today's posts so far show a pattern: Elect women leaders at your peril.

The jury's in and the verdict is that Liz Truss is a complete lunatic

 

In LA, Karen Bass the candidate for mayor who wants to remove all guns from the community has hers stolen

 Ha ha.

Guns for me but not for thee.

In the UK you can call for an end to the monarchy and become Prime Minister, or get arrested

 

Still there

 

World mourns death of queen Elizabeth II

 That queen Elizabeth lived sixty-nine, and reigned forty-five years, means no more than that the duration of her existence was equal to sixty-nine, and the duration of her government to forty-five annual revolutions of the sun.

-- John Locke

The English flatter themselves with this delusion

Americans, Long Besotted by Royalty, Mourn Britain's Queen

 

 

As usual Peter Berkowitz is on about the universal principles of Jefferson's Declaration at the expense of the "for ourselves and our posterity" of the founders' Constitution

 Here.

Here's hoping the new head of state of the Solomon Islands doesn't roll over and give it up to the Chicoms like the last one did Hong Kong

 

Trend for annual precipitation in Grand Rapids, Michigan 1903-2021

 

The mean annual has risen to 34.79 through 2021 from 31.45 through 1963 . . . an extra 3.34 inches annually, in keeping with a long term slightly cooling Oceanic Nino Index from 1951.

Through 2021 mean precipitation for the eight months Jan-Aug is 22.88, but for Jan-Aug 2022 we've got 27.61 inches.

Wet. Wet. Wet.

Meanwhile out West it's the reverse.

Dry. Dry. Dry.

 

 

 

LOL, climate change to hibernate, just like bears

 

Tune in next summer, when global warming returns for season 4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 . . .

Laugh of the Day: EU inflation is knocking on the door of 10% but the ECB benchmark lending rate is set at 0%, expected puny hike by 0.75 points called a "jumbo"

European Central Bank could unleash a jumbo rate hike as the economy slides toward recession

 

Last time I checked it wasn't Donald Trump who turned Washington, DC into an armed camp occupied by the National Guard for five months

 There was no disruption to the peaceful transfer of power on January 6th. It occurred successfully by act of Congress, without the aid of the military whatsoever.

Whatsover.

It was a tyrannical new president who shut down DC, FOR FIVE MONTHS, by using the National Guard, not the old president.

The brazen military industrial complex is asserting today that the Judicial Branch is civilian Commander in Chief, not the Executive

 These people are a threat to the constitution:

Signatories:

Former Secretaries of Defense

Dr. Ashton Baldwin Carter
William Sebastian Cohen
Dr. Mark Thomas Esper
Dr. Robert Michael Gates
Charles Timothy Hagel
James Norman Mattis
Leon Edward Panetta
Dr. William James Perry

Former Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Gen. (ret.) Martin Edward Dempsey
Gen. (ret.) Joseph Francis Dunford Jr.
Adm. (ret.) Michael Glenn Mullen
Gen. (ret.) Richard Bowman Myers
Gen. (ret.) Peter Pace 

6. In certain cases or controversies, civilian control is exercised within the judicial branch through judicial review of policies, orders, and actions involving the military. In practice, the power to declare a policy/order/action illegal or unconstitutional is decisive because the military is obligated (by law and by professional ethics) to refuse to carry out an illegal or unconstitutional policy/order/action. 

 

An extraordinary open letter signed by eight former defense secretaries and five former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

 The letter also says that civilian control of the military can be exercised by the judicial branch when an administration’s decisions are challenged, and that a court ruling is decisive because military leaders are obligated by law and professional ethics to refuse to carry out illegal or unconstitutional orders.

Money printing getting way ahead of output is the cause of the current inflation

 US GDP last clocked in at $24.883 trillion in 2Q. The total public debt at the end of 2Q is $30.569 trillion.

That's now a mismatch of 123%, up from 105% in 2013, ten years ago, when the total public debt was $16.8 trillion and the GDP $16 trillion.

In other words, the debt has grown by 82% over the period while the GDP has grown by only 56%.

The debt represents spending money we do not have, and the increase in the debt represents the spending of more money we do not have. We simply create it out of thin air to facilitate the process. It doesn't matter what form it takes, whether in the form of Treasury securities or physical money.

Spending go whirr, Fed money machine go whirr, debt go whirr, and eventually inflation go whirr. Inflation is the payback for going into the debt for which we refused to pay at the time.

Debt draws forward prosperity . . .

But it should come as no surprise that the future we robbed has no prosperity in it, now that we have arrived there. 

And people wonder where the inflation came from.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

 

Inflation trader squeals like a stuck pig, fears QT will soon lead to the sort of stock event you tell the grandchildren about

 Well, we've heard that before, but this story about one of them perfectly describes how Fed money creation has ballooned, by design, to facilitate gains for those first in line for the money, the banksters, while the rest of us just get the inflation:

The Fed creates reserves as a special form of dollars that can only be held by banks and some similar firms, that they use to settle debts to each other. (The rest of us mostly use bank-created electronic money, plus physical dollars.) Since QE began, reserves have ballooned as the Fed created reserves to buy bonds from banks. 

Unlike in 2017, large quantities of reserves have been returned to the central bank via money-market funds. These funds, which savers use as a liquid alternative to savings accounts, are allowed to deposit money at the Fed overnight using reverse repurchase agreements (RRPs), and have already sucked $2.2 trillion of reserves out of the system, up from zero at the start of last year.

For now, the loss of reserves isn’t a problem. Banks had too many deposits and reserves anyway, and they still have $3.3 trillion of reserves, more than they had ever held until last year.

More.

Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon in the sense that it is and can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output.

 

Brad DeLong's new book about the world achieving enough prosperity doesn't have enough words

DeLong had begun working on this story in 1994. He had produced hundreds of thousands of words, then hundreds of thousands more, updating the text as academic economics and the world itself changed. He kept writing, for years, for decades, for so long that he ended up writing for roughly 5 percent of the time capitalism itself has existed. The problem wasn’t figuring out how the story started. The problem was knowing when it ended. ...

His friends inquired about the drafts they had read years before. The project ballooned in its complexity. “I have had editors who were saying [they were] going to drop me if I couldn’t get it down to 150,000 words,” DeLong told me. (The book ended up at 180,000, plus online notes and appendices.) ...

As for DeLong, he has a more immediate challenge: figuring out what to do with the hundreds of thousands of words he trimmed out of Slouching Towards Utopia. He thinks he might write a history of the economy, full stop. That story might start in 6,000 B.C.     

More.

Pandemic overstaffed Amazon cut 100k jobs in 2Q2022

 During the second quarter, Amazon’s workforce shrank by roughly 100,000 jobs to 1.52 million, the biggest quarter-to-quarter contraction in the company’s history. 

More.

How the Uniparty recruits members for the Patriot Movement

 

If anyone is a threat to democracy, it's Joe Biden

 

Pushed out of another job, this time at liberal CNN, John Harwood wonders what's next: MAYBE HE SHOULD ASK JEB

 

LOL, it's not "affordable": It costs $41k minimum, goes 270 miles, and takes 18 minutes to charge

 

A 2022 Honda Civic LX will cost you about $24k, go 446 miles, and take you just a few minutes to fill its 12.4 gallon tank.

Hanoi Jane's hubris is the hubris of us all, left, right, and in between

 Old age is supposed to teach you a little humility, if life before that hasn't taught you any:

What we do or don’t do right now will determine what kind of future there will be.

Says the 85 year old who has been diagnosed with cancer.

How's it goin', ey?

 

Joe Biden's authoritarianism is simply an optical illusion

 

Joe Biden is older and slower than Abraham Lincoln, but someone should check that there aren't any dead mules at Fort Sumter, just to be sure

 

WaPo Democrat, but I repeat myself, calls this a civil war

 

Commander in Chief Dark Brandon decides to bomb the box office

 

WaPo: Dark Brandon declared civil war last night but the major networks didn't cover it

 

Your reminder that Hillary wiped her server clean AFTER October 28, 2014, the date when the Department of State for the first time asked the Secretary to return her public record to the Department

 Politico.

The legacy of unionized, government teachers who refused to show up because of COVID-19: Students in 2022 are performing at a level last seen two decades ago

 In math, the average score for 9-year-old students fell 7 percentage points between 2020 and 2022, according to the study. The average reading score fell 5 points. . . . Although it marks a sharp drop since 2020, the average reading score was 7 points higher than it was in 1971, and the average math score was 15 points higher than in 1978, the study found.

More. 

Now just in time for the election lying Democrats, but I repeat myself, want you to think that they and their allies opposed school closings when they were attacking Republicans for wanting them open. 

US COVID-19 deaths per day in August 2022 are up 37% compared with the May-Jul average of 373

Deaths per day monthly in 2022:

Aug 2022: 511

Jul 2022: 383

Jun 2022: 363

May 2022: 373

Apr 2022: 426

Mar 2022: 980

Feb 2022: 2,247

Jan 2022: 1,987

 

Deaths per day annually still fell through August, but not by much, from 953 through July:

2020: 1,131

2021: 1,310

2022 through 8/31: 896 

 

LOL, reactionary California Senate votes 69-3-8 to keep Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant open another five years as green energy not up to the task

 

As with electric cars, rooftop solar energy is great until it blows up and starts on fire: Now they tell us

 Between April 2020 and June 2021, solar panels atop Amazon fulfillment centers caught fire or experienced electrical explosions at least six different times. ...

The documents, which have never been made public, indicate that between April 2020 and June 2021, Amazon experienced “critical fire or arc flash events” in at least six of its 47 North American sites with solar installations, effecting 12.7% of such facilities. Arc flashes are a kind of electrical explosion. ... 

By June of last year, all of Amazon’s U.S. operations with solar had to be taken offline . . ..

More.

A series of Russian businessmen meets with sudden unexplained deaths

 Ravil Maganov, the chairman of Russia’s second-largest oil producer Lukoil, died on Thursday after falling from a hospital window in Moscow

Gazprom executive, Alexander Tyulakov, was found dead in his garage near St Petersburg

Sergei Protosenya, a former top manager of Russia’s largest liquefied natural gas producer Novatek, was found dead with his wife and daughter at a villa in Spain

Former Lukoil manager, Alexander Subbotin, was found dead in the basement of a house outside Moscow 

Vladislav Avayev, an ex-vice president of Gazprombank, was found dead in a Moscow apartment, also with the bodies of his wife and daughter

Story.

Here, Ravil, let me help you out that window

 Lukoil Chairman Ravil Maganov dies after fall from hospital window, sources say