Tuesday, June 15, 2021
Monday, June 14, 2021
Sunday, June 13, 2021
Jason Lewis on the Rush Limbaugh Show this week was lighting his hair on fire about inflation
Jason Lewis' remedy for inflation, which came in at 5% year over year in May, actually 4.9%, is the standard remedy: The Fed should raise the interest rate, which is effectively zero at the moment and has been for some time.
Aggressive low-interest-rate policy has been the rule since 2002, with the brief escalation from 2005-2007 during the housing bubble being the exception. Over those 19 years through 2020, the average effective federal funds rate (DFF) has been 1.36%.
Contrast that with the 19 year period previous to that, from 1983-2001, when the DFF averaged 6.27%.
That should have kept inflation under control, right?
Well, no.
Under the low interest rate regime we've had an average annual change in CPI of just 2.01%. For the previous period with the higher DFF we had higher inflation, 3.24% per annum on average.
All inflation is bad. At 2% per annum the value of your pile of assets is cut in half in 35 years. At 3% it's closer to 20 years.
What kind of conservatism is it to advocate for either one?
Real conservatives believe in sound money. Less unsound money won't do.
The evidence is the two things, the fed funds rate and CPI, aren't correlated.
And CPI is rightly mocked because its components do not capture the inflation which has infected the cost of education, health care, housing, stocks, gold, intellectual property, et cetera in our life times.
It's the purchasing power of the dollar which has continued its inexorable decline which is the problem. We haven't had a sound dollar policy since the advent of the Great War in 1914. The desire for an independent monetary policy conducted by a Federal Reserve from 1913 came at the price of the ongoing robbery of the wealth of the people. World War couldn't have been financed without it, nor the Welfare State after it.
It's hardly a coincidence that political conservatism has been in retreat from the same time. You make a lie of the money in your pocket, you make a lie of everything else, too. Slowly at first, and then suddenly.
This American swindle will not continue forever.
US COVID-19 charts update for Sunday 6/13/21
Alles in Ordnung.
Cases per million are steady at the new lows.
Deaths per million continue to fall to new lows.
Hospitalizations are almost 10 times lower than they were at the peak in January.
Test positivity is bouncing off the bottom at 2%.
Despite non-stop vaccination propaganda, the curve is bending with not quite 52% having received at least one dose.
Click on any chart to enlarge.
The UK variant continues to dominate in every US state, with prevalence well over 50% in most places. The latest scare from Fauci is about an India variant, but so far prevalence of an India variant is highest only in Arkansas at 10.1%. A Brazilian variant has 25.1% prevalence in Illinois. New York variants are prevalent in a range of 20-22% in New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina.
Friday, June 11, 2021
Conflict is the original fact of life and is life itself
They shout: "No more war" -- but they desire class war. They are indignant when a murderer is executed for a crime of passion, but they feel a secret pleasure in hearing of the murder of a political opponent. What objection have they ever raised to the Bolshevist slaughters? There is no getting away from it: conflict is the original fact of life, is life itself, and not the most pitiful pacifist is able entirely to uproot the pleasure it gives his inmost soul. Theoretically, at least, he would like to fight and destroy all opponents of pacifism.
-- Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1934), p. 40f.
Ice-T understands the American Founding better than almost anyone in America ever: America is based on guns, on violence
We wouldn't be here without it.
Three experts have resigned from an FDA advisory panel over FDA approval of Biogen's Aduhelm because there's no evidence it works
At this rate there won't be anyone left to resign when the FDA approves coronavirus vaccines next year or the year following.
Story here.
Thursday, June 10, 2021
Mark Levin is so pathetic: He can characterize what went on in America's streets last year as an insurrection when millions rioted . . .
. . . and yet he still insists on the principle of non-violence from the people to put it down. We should just sit there and take it, watch our cities, businesses and homes burn down while the government does NOTHING.
I don't expect normie conservatism EVER to advocate watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants and their mobs.
This is because normie conservatism is really just Republicanism. Its roots do not go back further than Lincoln and his "project" for racial equality, which was in truth nothing but a demagogue's ploy to keep from losing a war. And because of this it has disarmed itself for every other political conflict except for the cause of racial equality. For THAT they will gladly destroy the country and see it destroyed, but otherwise won't lift a finger when BLM and Antifa come knocking.
This is why Republicanism failed to stop the income tax and women's suffrage, Social Security and the welfare state, abortion and gay marriage, and a whole host of other things large and small they said they were against over the years but on which they eventually caved, and then eventually championed. It's the reason "conservatism" has failed, because Republicans aren't conservatives. They are, according to their own lights, simply better versions of Democrats.
For this reason Republicanism can never be about the American Founding, protest to the contrary as it may, boast otherwise as it may. Lincoln destroyed the Founding and redefined the country, by force of arms!, and Republicans are stuck with it, and we with them, unless someone can recover the original spirit of liberty. And Democrats exist to never let them forget it, to make them live by their new principles which only tie their hands and guarantee their ongoing defeat.
Meanwhile, don't look for the Founding spirit from Noon to 3 let alone from 6 to 9. Instead look for more of the same game played by Rush Limbaugh, the "they're the real racists" game.
Race, race, race. Black unemployment was never lower than under Trump. Hunter Biden said the n-word and the fag-word and gets away with it. Blah, blah, blah, as your kid can't find a decent job to start his own life.
Wednesday, June 9, 2021
Tuesday, June 8, 2021
Donald Trump has transformed the GOP into a pro-same sex marriage party, which kinda explains the Jan 6 insurrection
Which is kinda mentally ill.
I mean, come on, the tip of the spear was Ashli Babbitt, who had an unusual personal life, reminiscent of Katie Hill.
The percentage supporting same sex marriage has jumped 15 points since 2016, with a clear majority of 55% of the GOP now supporting same sex marriage.
To quote Andrew Cuomo, America was never really that great. Until now that is.
Today's Tuesday conservatism over at Real Clear Politics is so ho-hum
In the line-up today at Real Clear Politics is one Buck Sexton, who tells us in "Following Rush Limbaugh" . . . not very much.
Is there any there there? is the question I have after reading this introduction to the man who is supposed to be the conservative in the duo taking over for Rush Limbaugh.
Since radio is a word business and this piece reads more like an apologia for his elevation to his new role than a taste of what to expect, it's not a good sign that this Buckaroo calls Rush's opening monologues "severely entertaining".
Is Buck Sexton a Mormon? I mean, this sounds like Mitt Romney, who trotted out his wife to assure Republicans that he was a conservative, and not long after addressed CPAC and called himself "a severely conservative Republican governor".
I know, I know. It's just a coincidence that this Jesuit-trained fellow sounds like the Mormon. But if you have to tell people you thought Rush was severely entertaining, maybe to you he really wasn't. At any rate, severe is not a word which ever came to mind when listening to Rush Limbaugh.
Then there's Stephen L. Miller, whose Twitter feed is enormously entertaining @redsteeze , but whose prose offerings are, shall we say, stilted? The guy writes like he's got a brick up his ass.
Taking yet another much-deserved whack at CNN's Brian Stelter, Miller not entertainingly resorts to wooden stock phrases like "petty star-gazing", "it should raise eyebrows", "not becoming of anyone", "all fine and good", "all well and good", and "for anyone wondering . . . look no further". With all this lumber neatly stacked in a pile, the final paragraph ends with mistakes like "gleamed off" for "gleaned off" and "who claim to be just as a rigorous and dedicated journalist as Brian".
Yes, Stelter falls far short as a journalist. It's good that a mediocre writer points it out to all the people who obviously ignore Brian Stelter by the millions. It's an easy beat for Miller to cover, but maybe he should move on.
Miller claims to be good at hockey. I hear Clay Travis has left an opening somewhere.
Then there's a Democrat over at The Hill wondering "whatever happened to conservatism?"
When you get to paragraph seven you'll learn that Jan 6 was an "armed insurrection" and, if you're living in reality, you'll stop reading there.
But if you are a glutton for punishment and read to the end, you'll learn that the answer is The John Birch Society finally won the battle for the soul of the Republican Party.
I'm sure the five people still alive who ever knew an actual John Bircher will find that extremely amusing, if for no other reason than "that's what they WANT you to think".
Have a day.
Monday, June 7, 2021
LOL, Rod Dreher finally is ready for government by a Strong Man to protect the white man
Yale’s Anti-White Racist Psychiatrist :
I don’t ever want to see Donald Trump again. He had these people’s number, in a way, but he did little or nothing effective to stop them. I want to vote for a presidential candidate who will move against these dirtbags and their institutions without mercy. Enough is enough. I’m not sure what can be done, but if we keep tolerating this, there is going to be violence, one way or another. I am not willing to sit here and listen to these aristocrats like Dr. Khilanani, and malignant institutions like Yale, turn people against me, my children, and my neighbors, because we are white.
US COVID-19 statistics all are making new lows in the first days of June 2021
The current case rate of 44.11/million yields about 14,600 cases daily nationwide.
The current death rate of 1.27/million yields about 420 deaths daily nationwide, which sustained over a year would yield about 150k deaths.
Using New York Times data, deaths from Mar 7-Jun 6 = 72582, cases = 4,334,762 for a case fatality rate of 1.67%. That's 6.7% lower than the rate which obtained during the first year of the pandemic to 3/7/21, which was 1.79% using the data compiled by covidtracking dot com.
It remains to be seen if we'll see a repeat of last winter. The rapid decline of cases after the first of the year before the mass vaccination effort took hold suggests the disease is seasonal like influenza. Apart from the initial appearance of the disease, the graphs below all suggest late autumn seasonality.
We won't really know how effective the vaccines are until they are put up against the next seasonal test.
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| 44/million on 6-5-21 |
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| 1.27/million on 6-5-21 |
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| 16856 on 6-5-21 |
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| 2.8% on 6-1-21 |
The default position of liberalism is to blame obstruction by reactionaries for republican failure, not the revolutionary impulses of the autocrat
"The republicans made me seize power".
You know whose side they are on when people talk like this. Spengler long ago observed how liberalism is all about tyranny, but does anyone still read him?
"The dictatorship of the bourgeoisie is all that Liberalism sets out to be."
The voices opposed to the US Senate filibuster, are, to put it bluntly, not related to our founding.
Caesar would soon seize autocratic power, and Cato would commit suicide rather than live under Caesar’s rule. Goodman and Soni argue Cato’s obstructionism — however high-minded — was a contributing factor to the Roman Republic’s collapse. America’s Founding Fathers, however, idolized Cato. George Washington’s soldiers staged a play about Cato at Valley Forge. Patrick Henry’s famous quote, “Give me liberty of give me death,” is derived from a line in that play.
Sunday, June 6, 2021
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