 |
| Percent change from a year ago is shown |
From 38.4 to 34.8 on the index = 9.375%.
From the spring to the summer of 1933 when FDR confiscated gold and devalued the dollar from $20 to $34 (70%), the decline in this index was 5%, and then 14% by 1940.
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
The purchasing power of the US dollar is down 9.4% since Joe Biden was elected in November 2020, just sixteen months ago
Monday, April 11, 2022
Saturday, April 9, 2022
Another incompetent FBI sting operation against the vast right wing conspiracy comes a cropper in Michigan
Remember the Hutaree in 2010?
Obama's FBI tried to transform them, a bunch of yahoos living in a trailer park, into some sort of "armed revolt" against the government hot on the heels of protests after passage of Obamacare.
"Five days away from fundamentally transforming America", lol, meant sending in paid government operatives to fabricate a dangerous political threat to the nation from the right.
The m/o hasn't changed.
Now the 2020 Wolverine Watchmen Militia conspiracy to kidnap Governor Hitler has unraveled along similar lines, involving FBI infiltration with multiple actors, orchestration, and entrapment, all of which resulted in a lot of "tough talk" from the so-called conspirators, who were high on drugs and alcohol supplied by the FBI, but no planning of a mission, let alone no possession of an independent capacity to carry one out.
Thursday, April 7, 2022
Republican Senators Collins, Murkowski, and Romney vote to confirm soft-on-sex-crime Judge Jackson to Supreme Court
There was clearly a rush to push Breyer out and confirm a candidate before Biden becomes any less competent in office than he already is.
AP Obama's coverage is comic:
Jackson will take her seat when Justice Stephen Breyer retires this summer, solidifying the liberal wing of the 6-3 conservative-dominated court. ... Jackson could wait as long as three months to be sworn in, as the court’s session generally ends in late June or early July. She remains a judge on the federal appeals court in Washington, but she stepped away from cases there when she was nominated in February.
Wednesday, April 6, 2022
We won't have Rep. Fred Upton of Michigan to kick around anymore
It's amazing how the new Democrat redistricting law was able to bump off a Republican who has been in Congress since 1986 when beating him fair and square in an election never worked.
That said, Bill Huizenga better represents West Michigan conservatism than Upton ever did, but the redrawn district may mean he'll have a tougher time of it in country club Republican Berrien County.
GOP Rep. Fred Upton to retire :
... redistricting put Upton on a collision course with Huizenga for the newly drawn district.
Remember last fall when a bunch of Nobel economists assured us that gobs more spending by Joe Biden wouldn't have serious inflationary impacts?
Here's what the ring leader of Tom Nichols' vaunted expert class of economists had to say at the time:
Some, however, have invoked fears of inflation as a reason to not undertake these investments. This view is short-sighted. ... We need safe school buildings and bridges, and affordable child and elder care, whether inflation is 2% or 5%. With the investments being financed by tax increases, the inflationary impacts will be at most negligible ...
The Build Back Better package ... would transform the U.S. economy to be more efficient, equitable, sustainable, and prosperous for the long run, without presenting an inflationary threat.
From Joe Stiglitz' letter last September, here. Robert Shiller of all people signed on to this load of hooey. Carl Schramm unloaded on all this yesterday, here.
Stiglitz wrote that with a straight face when inflation had already soared to 5.3% in July. The orgy of coronavirus spending in 2020-2021 was already stoking the inflation engine, but the experts then simply ignored it, and called for more! more! more!
Now look where we are, even without more.
Government spending in the United States hasn't been financed by tax increases in decades. We wouldn't be $30 trillion in the hole if it were. It's financed by borrowing, and the interest payments on that borrowing progressively accumulate to crowd-out other spending. One day soon interest payments on the debt will become the biggest part of the budget, severely limiting our ability to allocate resources responsibly.
Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Redsteeze is supposed to be a writer, but not infrequently posts embarrassments like this
US COVID-19 cases and deaths both steeply declined in March 2022
There were about 980 deaths per day in March 2022 from COVID-19 in the United States.
Normal flu deaths per day in an average year are 98.
COVID-19 remains at least ten times more deadly than influenza as Omicron becomes dominant.
There were about 948 deaths per day in 2020, and about 1,310 per day in 2021.
So far in 2022 deaths per day are 1,726 through March.
Case counts are increasingly unreliable as mass self-testing, which usually goes unreported, becomes more commonplace.
Average temperature in 2021 in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was the eighth highest on record in 124 years
The trend line after 123 years of data shows average temperature in Grand Rapids, Michigan, rising 0.7 degrees F, or 0.388 degrees C, 65% less than the 1.1 degrees C claimed for the world by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change yesterday.
And the minimal warming in Grand Rapids may in fact be misleading. Five of the data points in those top eight are from the last twenty-five years, during which increasing development around the KGRR measuring station may well be contributing heat island effects.
Monday, April 4, 2022
Climate change lunatics must be more pissed off today than Hillary was when Obama robbed her of the Democrat nomination in June 2008
CNBC on UN IPCC's third installment "now or never" report of the current sixth assessment cycle today:
It has been feared that Russia’s unprovoked onslaught in Ukraine may eclipse the findings, despite the fact that the report could be the last comprehensive assessment of climate science while there is still time to secure a liveable future.
Drudge right now:
Anti-capitalist climate scaremongers of the UN IPCC delayed another report because of "disputes over the exact wording of the document"
The story oddly mentions the dispute without elaborating.
IPCC scientists also repeated calls for a substantial reduction in
fossil fuel use to curb global heating, now at 1.1 degrees Celsius above
pre-industrial levels. ...
“Climate change is the result of more than a century of unsustainable energy and land use, lifestyles and patterns of consumption and production,” the IPCC’s Skea said. “This report shows how taking action now can move us towards a fairer, more sustainable world.”
What these liars won't tell you is that it was MUCH warmer on Planet Earth in the Late Bronze Age, during the period of the Roman Republic and Empire, and in Medieval times than it is today. Ancient warming made human civilization flourish, and the warming wasn't caused by humans using "fossil fuels", nor has using fossil fuels returned global temperatures to anything like they were in antiquity.
Holocene warming peaked long ago and is trending lower even as human civilization has flourished, and staying alive in future will depend on STAYING WARM and growing enough food to support the increased population, which means developing and using every energy resource at our disposal.
Sunday, April 3, 2022
Saturday, April 2, 2022
America's idiotic green dream will end up in disaster just like Germany's
Hans-Werner Sinn, here:
To cushion the twin phaseout of coal and nuclear, and to close supply
gaps during the long transition to renewable energy, Germany decided to
build a large number of additional gas-fired power plants. Even
immediately before Russian forces invaded Ukraine, policymakers assumed
that the gas for these facilities would always come from Russia, which
supplied more than half of Germany’s needs. ...
Germany’s pledge to abandon coal and nuclear, the very energy sources
that would have given it a degree of self-sufficiency and autonomy, has
thus placed the country in great danger. Not so long ago, Germany was
the world’s second-largest lignite producer, after China. And it easily
could have procured the tiny amount of uranium needed to run its nuclear
power plants, and stored it domestically for many years. ...
Despite the fact that turbines and photovoltaic panels now dot much of the landscape, in 2021 the share of wind and solar power in Germany’s total final energy consumption, which includes heating, industrial processing, and traffic, was a meager 6.7 per cent. And while wind and solar generated 29 per cent of the country’s electricity output, electricity itself accounted for only about a fifth of its final energy consumption. Germany would not have come close to achieving energy autonomy even if the renewables sector had expanded at twice the speed that it did. ...
If Germany suddenly halted Russian gas imports, gas-based residential heating systems, on which half the German population, approximately 40 million people, rely, and industrial processes that rely heavily on gas imports would break down before replacement energy became available. The government would be unlikely to survive the resulting economic chaos, public uproar, and outrage should gas become unavailable or heating costs rise dramatically. In fact, the likely scale of domestic disruption would call into question the cohesion of the Western response to the Ukraine war.
Adam Tooze's maternal grandparents were both commies, and the grandfather Arthur Wynn wasn't exposed as a Soviet spy until 2009, eight years after his death
Assiduously avoided here in "The Cult of Adam Tooze":
Another model Tooze said he looks to in his role as public intellectual is that of his maternal grandparents. “Leading synthesizers of global data on childhood nutrition,” Peggy and Arthur Wynn published research on poverty and family policy and together wrote a pseudonymous book attacking Tory business connections called England’s Money Lords. (Arthur was also, for a time, a Soviet-spy recruiter at Oxford.) They continued their work into their 90s. Arthur died over his word processor one night after Peggy had gone to bed; he was making a list of things to do.
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