Back on September 4th, C. S. P. Schofield at Daily Timewaster put up this GIF image of a playful kitten. If anything embodies naughtiness on four legs, it's this critter!
Miss D. and I can't stop giggling at it. It's quintessential kitten behavior: "I'm going to be naughty - now chase me and try to stop me!" It reminds us of our (very large) black cat, Ashbutt, in the early days after we adopted him.
Thanks, Mr. Schofield, for giving us so much fun over the past week. More, please!
Peter
I was mind-boggled by the Biden administration's response yesterday to surging inflation.
"If you take out" beef, pork & poultry, the "price increases are more in line with historical norms".
If there's a more crass, unfeeling and insensitive official response to the distress being experienced by many consumers today, I'm not sure what it might be. In so many words, the Biden administration is telling us:
If you can't afford your food bills, just do without protein! The rest will be so much more affordable!
Yeah, right - and third-world protein deficiency diseases can become a regular feature of American health care, too! Thanks for nothing!
Peter
I'm sure most of my readers saw or heard Mr. Biden's pronouncements yesterday about COVID-19 and new measures to deal with it.
There's just one little problem about most of his decrees. They are not constitutional. The President does not have the legal authority to do those things. Therefore, those of us who have sworn to "support and defend" the constitution, and who take our oaths seriously, are going to respond to his decrees accordingly.
The same goes for any organ(s) of government that try to enforce those decrees. They, too, lack the constitutional authority to do that; therefore, their actions will be ipso facto and prima facie illegal. A great many Americans already know how to deal with those who try to force them into doing something by illegal means.
As I've said before, we're dealing with usurpers of power who have to double down on their illegal seizure of power, because they have nothing to lose. They know what will happen to them if when they're deposed. We can therefore expect them to try to impose Mr. Biden's plans upon us (or, rather, not his plans, but the plans of those behind him), any and every way they can, in order to force us into compliance, compel our obedience, and overcome our resistance. It's up to us to stop them in their tracks. By all means, let that be through legal methods if possible.
St. Francis of Assisi is reputed to have said, "Preach the gospel at all times. If necessary, use words." Those of us who've sworn an oath to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic" and promised to "bear true faith and allegiance to the same" can understand his words. We are now called upon to "support and defend" legitimate, constitutional authority against its illegitimate, unconstitutional enemies, wherever they may be found. To do so is (or should be) a way of life, not mere words. If we have to live up to our oath, well, we won't be the first Americans who've had to confront that reality. May we be worthy of, and live up to, the example the best among them have set us.
Let's accept, too, that fulfilling our oath is likely to come at a price. Let us not flinch from paying it, if necessary.
On social media yesterday, this clip from the TV series Babylon 5 was circulating. It's eerily prescient about how disdainfully and contemptuously the current denizens of the Capitol and the White House are treating our constitution.
Let's make sure the powers that be don't get away with the same thing in our non-fictional time.
I'll let Samuel Adams have the last word.
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."
Peter
I had to laugh when reading this report.
A driver in northeastern Spain has tested positive for ‘every possible kind of drug’ after being pulled over by police on Saturday.
Police found high levels of cannabis, amphetamines/methamphetamine, cocaine, opiates; as well as alcohol, with a rate of 0,60 mg/l.
Local police told Euronews that a neighbour in the town of Carcastillo called the police saying that "several people were getting in a vehicle influenced by alcoholic beverages."
There's more at the link.
I didn't know it was possible to test positive for everything! Wouldn't that be the sort of result we'd expect a coroner to discover during an autopsy, rather than police during a sobriety check?
I have an uncomfortable feeling that rednecks across the USA, reading this report, are saying to each other, "Dang it, I won't let some furriner set the record! Hold my beer and watch this!"
Peter
Received from reader E. S., this photograph, which he says was taken in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida. It gives me the shivers just to look at it! Click the image for a larger view.
I presume the power's still out, or that pool and those transformers would be spittin' and sparkin' like there was no tomorrow. I hope the electric company can get them out of there before someone throws the switch and starts the power rolling again...
Peter
... representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky has found one. In a tweet yesterday, he pointed out how the Center for Disease Control and Prevention's definition of "vaccination" has evolved over time. Click the image below for a larger view.
He goes on to provide sources for the changing definitions, to prove he's not making up anything.
Gee, the more the COVID-19 vaccinations prove to be sub-optimal at best (and downright dangerous to health at worst), the faster the CDC's definition of a vaccination changes. Political correctness at its finest! Who'd o' thunk it?
Bureaucrats - causing worse (and less curable) diseases in the body politic than germs and viruses do in the human body.
Peter
It's been far too long since I updated my blogroll (several years, IIRC). I went through my "Blogs I Read Frequently" list yesterday, removed a number that are inactive or very seldom active, and added several that have become daily visits for me. (No disapproval intended of those that were removed: it's just that, if they aren't posting often, I don't go there often. It's a practical thing.)
Please see the list in the sidebar, and go take a look at those blogs for yourself if you don't already know them. They write good too!
Peter
The inimitable Claire Wolfe, who's been an inspiration to what she terms "freedomistas" for decades, has just produced a couple of articles on "Dealing with our new totalitarian reality" that are worth reading. These links will take you to Part 1 and Part 2.
Here's an excerpt from the second article to whet your appetite.
Virtually every traditional institution has lost all credibility. No one of good sense trusts any any official or any piece of information they can’t verify for themselves.
In other words, if ever a regime was ready to prolapse into an oozing lump of rotted illusions, it’s this one.
However ... this system — partially “private” and partly Deep State (but can you tell the difference?) — may have the capability to outlast the depraved class that built it.
. . .
In the meantime we have two jobs to do. Just two: live with the new totalitarianism and plan to outlive it.
Live with does not mean tolerate. Outlive doesn’t mean to wait passively until it dies on its own. On the contrary.
No, we do not have to tolerate the intolerable. Our job of living with the new totalitarian reality doesn’t mean accepting it on its own terms. It means first acknowledging reality, evaluating our position, then taking positive steps to go around, through, over, or under the obstacles in our path. In totalitarianism, obstacles are many.
. . .
Living with totalitarianism does not mean going along to get along — except in the case of the Freedom Outlaw Mole, whose role of reporting and sabotaging from within becomes more important than ever as evil tightens its grip.
Under totalitarianism — with all its dangers even for the most mild dissenters — we deplorables will each make our own decisions about how visible we’re willing to be. Already some formerly public noisemakers have opted to slip away into silence while others redouble their public rages against the machine.
But even if we we choose to appear to be good, obedient members of the proletariat, we will not ever stop routing our way around or through a system that is bad to its tubercular bones.
Our second job — outliving a rotten system — also does not imply passivity. It means we do all we can to ensure our own healthy survival while hastening the ancien regime’s inevitable downfall.
. . .
Totalitarianisms are inherently flawed. Whatever the differences between them (and remember, that every totalitarianism looks different), they’re all based on the laughable belief that a tiny, out-of-touch elite and their minions can understand and completely control a nation or the world ... But in the end, control by an elite is simply impossible — and that goes double for an elite like ours, which is already in a state of decrepitude and decomposition.
What they’re doing now looks like an exercise of power, but it’s really desperation. They will stop at nothing because nothing — the abyss — awaits them when the billions realize they’ve been had.
But they will stop. Because one day they are finally so weakened that even their most ardent partisans won’t (or can’t) stand for them any more. At that point … doom. Their doom.
. . .
... take comfort that, contra Biden and Swalwell, the mighty United States government and its entire Deep State apparatus was just trounced in Afghanistan not by F15s and nuclear weapons, but by tribal goat herders.
. . .
Be flexible, be fast, be ready to spot opportunity, even if it comes in a form you never anticipated. And oh please try not to be stupid. Let all the stupidity be on their side.
There's much more at the link. Highly recommended reading.
Ms. Wolfe offers a number of very practical suggestions in the article that we can implement as part of our personal resistance to centralized government tyranny, bureaucracy and control. (Her books also offer useful - and frequently amusing - advice.) I suggest we read her work for ourselves, select steps we can personally take in our own circumstances, and implement them. There's no time like the present to start!
Peter
Bruce Wilds points out that the state and big business have made so many inroads into our personal freedoms that we have very little privacy left. Basically, we've freely handed over to them the knowledge they're going to use to manipulate us.
Many people claim they have nothing to hide and use that as the reason they don't object to the expanding web of surveillance being weaved over them. These people ignore the fact we are surrendering our right to freedom when we as a society go down this path. The reality is that when someone knows all about you and your deepest thought they gain tremendous power over you. This is directly linked to the ability to control you.
. . .
This has drastically increased the fear of speaking out, which, was at one time considered a mainstay of a free society. The more I know and learn, the more appalled I have become concerning the direction society is taking mankind. Rather than making us freer, modern society is slowly squeezing and tamping down our right to go about life unimpeded and with a minimum of barriers blocking our ability to, shall we say, "freely move about the cabin."
This has gone to the point where our government thinks it should supply the poor and indigent with free computers and the internet to level the playing field. This in turn forces the rest of us to move in the direction of being "connected" or becoming irrelevant. Of course, being connected means it becomes easier for big brother to watch your every move and allows those in power to exert more control over those under their watchful eye.
. . .
Mainstream media continues to condition people to accept public surveillance and a Big Brother state under the umbrella of COVID or the greater good. Tax money has and continues to be diverted from more important venues to fund spying on the innocent and taking attention away from the guilty. This has created a scenario in which the noose will only continue to tighten around the neck of mankind.
There's more at the link.
Mr. Wilds cites as an example this video on how devices such as Amazon's Echo "smart speakers", Ring "smart doorbells" and similar products from other companies are invading our privacy. The excerpt I've embedded below (from 12m. 35sec. to 15m. 44sec. if you watch the video in native mode on YouTube) is just over 3 minutes long. It's truly scary in its implications for our privacy. Please take 3 minutes to watch it, and think about what this means for you and "Big Brother".
Makes you think, doesn't it? Literally everything you say and do around your home is being recorded on central computers over which you have no control. Can you imagine a more perfect foundation for a "social credit score" such as China is implementing? If anyone wants to know what sort of person you are, or what your political or cultural or religious opinions are, all they have to do is gain access to that central database - and you may never know that they have.
Even worse, similar capabilities are now being built into devices such as television sets, which record your channel and programming preferences, what you're doing while you watch TV (and while you're not watching), and so on. It all gets sent to a central computer system that analyzes your behavior, then sells that information to marketers trying to figure out how best to manipulate you into buying their products.
That's why I will never allow such systems into my home: and, if I ever have to use a TV or other system with such capabilities, it'll be permanently blocked from accessing the Internet. If it can't function without such access, I'll do without it.
Peter
Here's a news report that's so full of sickening irony, one doesn't quite know where to start. Bold, underlined text is my emphasis.
3 anti-violence workers charged with felony gun violations — while on bail for felony gun violations
At least three men who are supposedly working to end gun violence in Chicago were charged with illegally carrying guns this week while they were already on bond for other felony gun cases. One of the men’s pending cases includes allegations that he shot at two people.
When Sendalio Williams, 25, appeared before Judge John Lyke on Saturday afternoon, it was the second time in four months that he stood in front of the same judge on a new gun charge ... Williams also appeared before Lyke on May 3. In that case, cops watching a CPD surveillance camera feed allegedly saw him fire a gun and jump into a black SUV ... Prosecutors said he admitted to police that he fired the gun in the direction of two other men ... On Saturday ... his defense attorney told Lyke he studied criminal justice at Westwood College and “works with CeaseFire to educate kids about gun violence.”
. . .
Also appearing before Lyke on Saturday was 41-year-old William Jenkins, who has worked for two years “canvassing neighborhoods and high crime areas to cut down on shootings,” according to his public defender.
Police allegedly found a loaded handgun with an extended ammunition magazine sticking out of a backpack between the front seats of his car during a traffic stop on Friday. Jenkins, who received a 20-year sentence for attempted murder in 1999, has a pending unlawful use of a weapon by a felon case, prosecutors said.
. . .
Last Sunday, Darnell Hite appeared for a bond hearing in front of Judge Charles Beach.
When police pulled Hite over for a traffic stop near the Magnificent Mile around noon last Saturday, he reached into his fanny pack to get his license. That’s when police allegedly saw the butt of a handgun sticking out of the bag. According to court records, Hite already has an unlawful use of a weapon case pending from June 2020.
His defense attorney told Beach that he’s married, “works outreach to stop violence,” and is an active church member.
There's more at the link.
Speaking as a retired pastor, allow me to assure you: if any of these three "innocent little baa lambs" had been in my congregation, and had tried to use their alleged "faith" and church attendance as features of their criminal defense, I'd be the first to appear in court and quote to the judge a few selections from Scripture about their attitude and behavior. I might emphasize Matthew 23:27-28. It seems to me to be a pretty accurate assessment of their behavior.
Both as a pastor and as a prison chaplain, I never ceased to be cynically amused at the number of "anti-violence" and "community development" groups, outreaches and workers who were themselves hardened criminals, and whose behavior over time demonstrated conclusively that their only interest in "reaching out" to their communities was to gather groups of like-minded people to work together to commit more crimes. In effect, they were hunting for future gang members to influence and lead - and, in their mostly inner-city environments, they usually found fertile ground for their lies and deceptions. Talk about hunting over bait!
As for a "justice" system that ignores reality by letting such offenders out on bail, only to reoffend again and again . . . the less said about that, the better. I will point out that such a "justice" system is almost bound to result in people taking the law, and justice, into their own hands. I've seen that in action, too. If people know that the criminal they've just caught red-handed will be given a slap on the wrist by activist prosecutors and/or judges, and be back on the street within hours or days, they're more likely to say "The hell with that!" and not bother to call the police to arrest the perpetrator. Instead, they'll ensure, the hard way, that the criminal doesn't get a second (or third, or fourth, or umpteenth) chance. Alternatively, they'll turn to vigilante justice rather than organized criminal prosecutions to deal with crime. Vigilantes tend to be a lot less concerned with the balance of evidence and cold, dispassionate analysis, and a lot more into hot-blooded judgments and swift, summary punishment. All over the world, in all sorts of circumstances, we've seen that play out.
As for the three "innocent little baa lambs" in Chicago . . . one trusts something appropriate will happen to them, one way or another. I'm sure the people of Chicago would agree, even if the local justice system wouldn't.
Peter
I'm sure many of my readers have seen publicity for a proposed demonstration in Washington D.C. on September 18th.
Far right extremist groups, including the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, are planning to attend a September 18 rally at the U.S. Capitol to demand "justice" for the hundreds of people who have been charged for their alleged roles in the January 6 attack, according to two sources familiar with new intelligence.
The intelligence is based on chatter on online messaging boards ... Capitol Police leadership and the House Sergeant of Arms discussed the intelligence during a call Wednesday. Capitol Police and D.C.'s Metropolitan Police are planning an all hands on deck approach to the protest, although the size of the crowd expected at this point is not very large.
There's more at the link. It's been confirmed that D.C. police have activated their entire force in anticipation of the rally.
Remember the massive law enforcement measures - amounting almost to persecution - implemented over the January 6th protests? Cellphones tracked, travel and hotel bookings monitored (including credit card charges), social media accounts scrutinized . . . it was positively Orwellian. It's likely to be even worse this time around.
No matter how strongly you feel about the conditions under which the arrested January 6th protesters are being held, or the way the judicial system is treating them, I can only suggest most strongly that you stay away from the September 18th protest. The only thing you'll achieve by going is to make yourself even more of a target to the Biden administration and its biased, partisan "justice" system than you are already. You'll serve no good purpose by being there, and a host of bad ones.
Yes, the January 6th protesters deserve justice. No, at this time it appears that they're not getting it: in fact, if third-hand reports can be trusted, they may be victims of profound injustice. However, the September 18th rally will do nothing to rectify that, because it won't address the root of the problem: the illegitimate nature of the Biden administration as a whole. As I've noted before, they have everything to lose if they "lighten up": so, instead, they'll double down, cracking down even harder on dissent in the hope that they'll frighten others into submitting rather than resisting.
As I pointed out some months ago:
... when you talk politics in the USA today, bear in mind that it's not just politics. It's a conflict for survival ... The progressive left has gone all-in on seizing and maintaining control, at any cost. They're maintaining a puppet President in power, a man mentally incompetent to and incapable of exercising that office, because they can manipulate him to achieve their ends. They've shut off the capital city of our nation from its people, and are protecting themselves and their institutions behind barbed wire and military guards, to keep the people out and keep themselves in power. Those realities alone should illustrate that they're not going to give up, and they're not going to go away.
If you knowingly and willingly position yourself beneath the progressive left's jackboots, don't be surprised if you get squished.
A far better idea is to plan and work towards removing the jackboots from the corridors of power - and everyone wearing them.
Peter
If you've been following our discussions on inflation over recent months, you'll know that the cold, hard evidence of financial reality indicates that our inflation rate is close to out of control. The official rate of inflation bears about as much resemblance to the actual, on-the-street reality as I do to Mata Hari. Some months ago, I suggested: "To know the true rate of consumer inflation in the USA, take the official rate declared by the government and multiply it by 3½. The result will be much closer to reality." We can argue about the multiplication factor until the cows come home, but I reckon a factor of 3 to 3½ remains a pretty accurate reflection of what's happening out there. I see it reflected in our grocery bills every time we shop.
I'm far from the only one. Here are a few articles that should make you worry. First, Phil at Bustedknuckles, whose "spidey sense" is tingling as badly as mine.
The Just In Time Inventory system has finally, once and for all, been exposed as the Bean Counters Trick that it has always been.
The Trucker’s Strike down in Australia that no one heard about just proved that beyond a doubt and there is your video proof above.
The forty five container ships stacked up off the coast of California waiting to get unloaded that they don’t want you to know about is also proof. Nobody wanted to pay for building and maintaining giant warehouses to hold inventory anymore.
So right now there are 45 floating ones rocking back and forth blocking the shipping lanes instead.
For the life of me I haven’t been able to convince my wife to build up a pantry.
Ninety years ago everyone had some kind of pantry out of necessity.
I’m thinking they are going to be making a come back in a huge way here in the very near future as the signs keep popping up everywhere I go lately and they all say the same thing.
That was two days ago.
I have since seen three more with slightly different variations of the same basic message.
We can’t get what you came here to buy, so sorry.. . .
I am here to tell you that this is not going to be a temporary thing and I hate to use this phrase that got beat to death by the corporate whores a while back but it’s the one that fits the best.
We are living in a paradigm shift.
The old ways are being replaced both deliberately and by side affect necessity.
There is going to be a society wide Darwin effect start showing up here real soon.
There's more at the link. Note, too, that the Australian truckers' strike to which Phil refers is ongoing, but news of it is being actively censored by every major Australian (and other) news outlet. You might ask yourself why that's the case . . .
In another article, Phil notes, speaking of a Canadian prepper supplier:
Pay close attention to what this guy is telling you because he is the canary in the coal mine.
His suppliers, the ones who’s job it is to know what is going on with the supply chain, are sending him written warnings about what to expect.
Supply chain disruptions from 6 to 12 months?
I’m here to tell you that is unrealistically optimistic. We haven’t even gotten close to the neck of the funnel yet.
Price hikes of 8 to 30 percent?
Already here and going to get much, much worse.
Again, more at the link.
In case you needed confirmation of what that Canadian prepper supplier is saying, here's the Vancouver Sun, a British Columbia mainstream media outlet.
The vice-president and co-founder of Backpack Buddies, a B.C. charity that provides a backpack of food to 4,000 school kids facing food insecurity each week, has been warned by suppliers that food prices are rising ... The increases range from a five per cent jump on oatmeal, to a 38 per cent leap on cans of beans and pasta.
. . .
B.C. is accustomed to a “robust” food-supply chain, meaning that if a local crop like raspberries fails, we can expect to find berries from California or South America in store instead.
“But this year, the entire West is under siege by drought,” said Tom Baumann, an agriculture expert and professor emeritus at the University of the Fraser Valley. “On top of that, you have the pandemic, which has had a grave impact on the whole system.”
Baumann listed several other factors that contribute to rising food prices, including a shortage of farm workers, increased transportation costs and feed shortages for livestock. “None of it is good for the supply chain,” he said.
Rising food prices come as no surprise to Sylvain Charlebois, lead author of Canada’s Food Price Report, which has accurately predicted price increases the last several years.
“Food connects many elements,” said the food policy researcher at Dalhousie University in Halifax. “Unfortunately this year we have a bit of a perfect storm.”
"A 38% leap on cans of beans and pasta". Thirty-eight per cent. That's more than a one-third increase in price, in a matter of months. If that's happening in Canada, just north of us, what makes you think it isn't happening here? (Hint: it is. It's worse in some parts of the country than in others, but it's here too. Check your grocery bills.)
We've already noted that the inflation we're seeing all around us is more of a monetary phenomenon than anything else. I said some months ago:
The reason house prices, share prices, etc. are all continually rising is that the "funny money" created by the Federal Reserve (the red in the graph above) is funding the increase. More and more empty, valueless dollars, created out of thin air without any underlying economic value, are chasing whatever they can buy that does have economic value. That's the very definition of inflation: more money chasing the same amount of goods. What happens when all those "funny money" dollars are exposed as having no underlying economic value, and therefore become monetarily valueless? Just look at how much the dollar has declined in value over the past century or so. Expect an even greater collapse in the not too distant future, as the Fed's economic chickens come home to roost.
The real problem is, nobody in our government is paying attention to the economic facts and figures that should be at their fingertips. They're utterly ignoring the economic elephant in the living-room. They're too busy scoring political points off each other, pointing fingers, decrying this, proclaiming that, accusing, denouncing and posturing. They're caricatures of leaders, intent only on feathering their own nests by fooling their constituents into carrying on voting for them - while their failed policies are destroying our economy around us.
Charles Hugh Smith, whom we've met many times in these pages, comments:
Just as in the final throes of Imperial collapse in the Soviet Union, nobody seems to be in charge in the U.S. It's difficult to tell if incompetence is now the default setting everywhere in the American State or if there are a couple of competing chess games being played behind the curtain. When failure is so absolute, incompetence alone doesn't seem quite up to the task. Perhaps failure received a nudge. After all, the cliff edge is already crumbling and it doesn't take much to help a rival lose their footing.
As I have argued recently, inflation is not transitory; the trends have reversed and inflation is now embedded via two fundamental dynamics: the endless trillions being created out of thin air by the Fed and Treasury are not increasing the productivity or resilience of the U.S. economy; rather they are fatally weakening the economy and society by institutionalizing soaring wealth-income-power inequality, and 2) globalization's increase of global supplies and optimization of global supply chains has reversed; scarcities can no longer be filled by exploiting another developing-economy via neocolonial-neoliberal pillage. That oh-so-profitable game is over, but few believe it's possible: isn't there always another place and people to pillage?
The warring elites will have to choose an economic side soon: either go with the Fed's plan for an ever-more unequal future America in which inflation stripmines the bottom 90% while the technocrat class and its billionaire owners become ever-wealthier and the world loses confidence in the predictability of the U.S. dollar's value, or the debt and phantom capital of the Fed's sand castles are wiped away and the dollar is re-anchored to the nation's economic foundations of improving productivity via newly enforced competition, transparency and accountability and the resilience of a reshored industrial base.
Hopefully America's equivalents of the KGB have an equivalently sound grasp of just how prone to failure America's financial fantasy has become. No empire can survive the debauchery of its currency, for the empire's power flows not from hard power (military) or soft power (cultural influence) but from the currency that funds both hard and soft power.
There is no win-win at this late date: one elite will lose, and America will itself be lost if those debauching the dollar are allowed to win. The rationalizations are as absurd and extreme as the policies: as long as the trillions flow into the assets owned by billionaires, there can't be any inflation, and so on, an endless spew of excuses by those profiting from the debauchery of the dollar.
No nation can produce less of lesser quality, and squander more on infinitely greedy and corrupt elites, all funded by issuing trillions of new units of currency, and imagine that this asymmetry will never have consequences.
It's not yet clear that there is any leadership left in America. What's playing on stage are warring camps of self-interested elites fighting to secure their power even as the foundations crumble beneath their feet.
I'm going to give the last word to Peter Schiff. He's a "gold bug", and has his own perspective on our economy, which you should take into account: but I can't disagree with what he says in the video clip below. It's really important. I highly recommend that you take a few minutes out of your day to watch it, and think about what he says. It's the reality we're facing right now.
Money quote from the video clip:
"So, you can’t solve this problem with inflation because inflation is the problem ... The limiting factor on consumption is the number of goods that you produce. If you simply produce more money and let people use it to buy stuff, well, prices just have to go up. That’s what these guys don’t seem to understand yet – that you can print money, but you can’t print stuff."
True dat. We're seeing the consequences of that all around us. We're awash in stimulus dollars, but we can't buy enough goods with it because of supply chain problems, inflation, and economic mismanagement. It's a gigantic circular cluster- copulation, and I see no way out of it unless and until our politicians wake up to the catastrophe they're inflicting on us, and do something to change our trajectory. They won't, of course, because they're terrified that doing so would mean they'd have to cut entitlement programs that they rely on to attract votes. (Yes, it would.) They're not going to do anything that might jeopardize their hold on power . . . so the rest of us are well and truly up the creek without a paddle.
This is not, repeat, NOT going to get better. It's going to get worse. Plan and prepare accordingly, or be steamrollered by reality when it arrives.
Peter
Scott Adams does strike the right note from time to time in his "Dilbert" comic strip. Click the image below to be taken to a full-size version at the strip's Web page.
I wonder if the robot's mother was named Karen?
Peter
I had to laugh at an alarmist report from Pro Publica last week.
Precinct officers are the worker bees of political parties, typically responsible for routine tasks like making phone calls or knocking on doors. But collectively, they can influence how elections are run. In some states, they have a say in choosing poll workers, and in others they help pick members of boards that oversee elections.
After Bannon’s endorsement, the “precinct strategy” rocketed across far-right media ... Suddenly, people who had never before showed interest in party politics started calling the local GOP headquarters or crowding into county conventions, eager to enlist as precinct officers. They showed up in states Trump won and in states he lost, in deep-red rural areas, in swing-voting suburbs and in populous cities.
. . .
What’s different this time is an uncompromising focus on elections themselves. The new movement is built entirely around Trump’s insistence that the electoral system failed in 2020 and that Republicans can’t let it happen again. The result is a nationwide groundswell of party activists whose central goal is not merely to win elections but to reshape their machinery.
“They feel President Trump was rightfully elected president and it was taken from him,” said Michael Barnett, the GOP chairman in Palm Beach County, Florida, who has enthusiastically added 90 executive committee members this year. “They feel their involvement in upcoming elections will prevent something like that from happening again.”
There's much more at the link, most of it field reports from various states and regions saying the same thing over and over again. The article is being taken as a harbinger of a major threat by left-wing media outlets (see, for example, this MSNBC opinion piece. Gasp! Shock! Horror! The Trumpists are coming!)
The one thing the report does not mention is that electoral fraud in November 2020 was blatant, real and unarguable. For all that Democrats and progressive leftists call such allegations "lies" or "unproven" or whatever, there is more than sufficient evidence to prove that there's fire behind the smoke. We covered the subject in detail back then, and not one of the allegations advanced by objective analysis has ever been disproven or rejected by a competent authority. In fact, when taken to court, in just about every incident judges rejected the case because the plaintiffs "lacked standing", or because the case was "moot" in the light of subsequent developments, or whatever. I repeat - the allegations have mostly never been tested in court, largely because partisan "impartial" judges and progressive leftists made sure that they would not be tested.
I'm entirely in favor of more electoral officials and observers taking part in the process. Frankly, I don't give a damn whether they're Republicans or Democrats, left- or right-wing, old or young, male or female, or any other distinction(s) you care to make. I care only that they be honest, upright citizens who want to ensure a free, fair election that's not tainted by electoral fraud. We saw abundant evidence in November 2020 that in some areas at least, electoral officials were biased and partisan beyond belief. (Who can forget, in Detroit, seeing Republican poll observers being excluded from the vote count, and openly jeered at by Democratic poll workers as they were removed, and then screens being put over the windows to prevent them looking in?) To counter such blatant bias by electoral officials, I'll gladly support Republicans (or anyone else) seeking to elect or appoint more of their own people to monitor and expose such shenanigans.
Openness. Honesty. Fairness. Transparency. Anything and anyone who can help to ensure more of them should be welcomed with open arms. Their political views are irrelevant compared to their personal integrity.
Peter
Karl Denninger claims he's found out why US health care professionals and hospitals won't recommend known, proven remedies for COVID-19 such as hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin.
You want to know why, if you get Covid-19, the doctor and hospital won't prescribe and use anything until you're choking -- and then only Dexamethasone, Remdesivir (which has failed twice in random controlled trials, including a VERY LARGE one, and is dangerous enough, on the data, that I'd never take it personally), oxygen, and ultimately a ventilator?
Here's the reason directly from the government itself on an official government web page:
. . .
If the hospital or physician refuses to treat you with anything other than Remdesivir (which has an EUA still outstanding despite failing said trials), dexamethasone, oxygen and a ventilator (which, you remember, Trump bought tens of thousands of for this explicit purpose under the DPA) they are immune from all legal action you may take due to their negligence, even if they KNOW there are other treatment options that, on the science, work.
If they use those options they lose the PREP Act immunity.
That's right: The US Federal Government demanded that in exchange for legal protection in all respects with regard to Covid-19 treatment only what they approved for said use could be used. Anything else and poof -- the PREP Act liability shield is gone.
HHS killed every single person denied care and treatments by direct decree as they not only pay the hospitals $30,000+ to put you on a ventilator they immunized the hospitals from legal action if and only if they refused to treat you with anything not on the FDA's "approved" list.
THE PROBLEM WAS CREATED BY TRUMP AND CURRENTLY RESIDES WITH BIDEN WHO HAS REFUSED TO PUT A STOP TO IT.
Both of them, all of HHS, every member of Congress and every clinician and hospital involved from your local physician on up to every hospital following those protocols are murderous pricks who, between them, agreed to let you die on purpose and use proved-worthless and dangerous drugs to avail themselves of a liability shield put forward by HHS and authorized, years prior, by Congress.
Every one of these people -- including every single Congressperson who did not revoke the PREP Act (or demand HHS remove that clause under pain of doing so) -- is a mass-murderer.
Now you know what happened -- and why.
You also now know why the only thing they will recommend in the current context is the jabs.
There's more at the link.
If Mr. Denninger is right then heads need to roll - and I'm not just talking metaphorically. However, I differ from him on two points.
I'd extend that to the news media, too. Did you notice Rolling Stone's hit piece against Ivermectin last week, claiming that gunshot victims were languishing in ER's, while people who'd "overdosed on Ivermectin" were filling all available beds? (I'd link to it, but it's already been deleted.) It was part of a barrage of criticism against the drug that was picked up and amplified by all sorts of media outlets. However, it was all a lie.
One problem: The story is fake.
The hospital in Oklahoma that was said to be at the epicenter of all those many gunshot victims (got questions about that, too) left waiting for their emergency care, is explicitly denying that it's overwhelmed by horse-ivermectin overdose cases and the lone doctor making the claim, Dr. Jason McElyea, is not an employee of the hospital at all, he's a contractor, and hasn't worked at the hospital for months. In fact, it hasn't treated any horse-ivermectin cases at all.
Here's the statement, as reported by Rolling Stone:
UPDATE: Northeastern Hospital System Sequoyah issued a statement: Although Dr. Jason McElyea is not an employee of NHS Sequoyah, he is affiliated with a medical staffing group that provides coverage for our emergency room. With that said, Dr. McElyea has not worked at our Sallisaw location in over 2 months. NHS Sequoyah has not treated any patients due to complications related to taking ivermectin. This includes not treating any patients for ivermectin overdose. All patients who have visited our emergency room have received medical attention as appropriate. Our hospital has not had to turn away any patients seeking emergency care. We want to reassure our community that our staff is working hard to provide quality healthcare to all patients. We appreciate the opportunity to clarify this issue and as always, we value our community’s support.”Which pretty well discredits the whole hysterical narrative being spread around by multiple news outlets. It's fake news, based on shoddy reporting, from a claim of one source with zero firsthand knowledge, yet a whole host of news outlets picked up the fake story and spread it around to scare people.
Now, obviously, the hospital would have an interest in seeing patients coming in for treatment and a report like that probably would have kept a lot of them away.
But at the same time, a detailed denial like that is pretty firm and the hospital would be in trouble if it were not true. They said they're treated no one for taking horse dewormer, no one at all.
So the news outlets have made huge errors in judgment and trashed their own credibility based on that now-denied report they could have gotten the answer to, and it was one after another running themselves off the cliff, none of them really checking, all of them taking the word of one doctor, who could have had any agenda.
. . .
There's some kind of campaign ramping up against ivermectin, a drug whose inventor won the Nobel prize in 2015 for the first version of, and which has been endorsed by the Japan Medical Association, as well as in many studies which have found it to be an effective early treatment for COVID. There's no President Trump involved, so it's something very funny going on. Could it be the work of Big Pharma which has far more expensive medications for COVID to sell? It's terrible if true, given that there's a lot of evidence out there that ivermectin does indeed cure the illness.
Again, more at the link.
My medicine cabinet continues to include hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin (and yes, the latter is the "horse syrup" variety, given that local pharmacies won't dispense the approved-for-humans medical version even if you have a doctor's prescription). I've taken both in my fight against not just one, but two COVID-19 infections, and a possible third brush with the Delta variant. (Yes, I was careful to match the dose of Ivermectin to my body weight; I'm not stupid - and the applicator includes an easy way to measure out the necessary dose.)
I'm not a doctor and I don't play one on TV, so I can only offer what the experts would dismiss as "anecdotal evidence": but I came through the illness every time and recovered fully, without seeing a doctor at all. The only times I sought medical intervention were to get the tests that proved I was, indeed, infected with COVID-19. (I also used dietary supplements such as vitamins, zinc, and the usual list.) As shown by the fact that I'm writing these words, I recovered. On the other hand, a friend who spent a week in hospital with double pneumonia caused by COVID-19 has still not fully recovered, several months later, despite being treated according to the "officially approved" protocol with Remdesivir and other medications.
Draw your own conclusions. I have.
Peter
Harvested from the Internet over the past 7 days. Click any image for a larger view.
More next week.
Peter
Last week someone sent me the link to a song by Mystery, a French-Canadian progressive rock band. They've been around in one form or another since 1986, but I'd never heard of them before. I listened with interest, then went on to investigate several other tracks by them.
I don't know what to think. Musically, they're very competent, and certainly fall into the progressive rock category. Their music is actually very good . . . but there's a certain "sameness" about it. I think, if you were to select a dozen of their tracks at random and listen to them all, you'd feel as I do - that it's hard to tell them apart. There seems to be a similarity between them, as if the band is recording the same music with variations. I may be doing them a complete injustice, of course; another listener might disagree with me completely. Nevertheless, I can't shake that impression.
However, that doesn't alter the fact that what they do, they do very well. I'm going to include three tracks this morning, to give you an impression of their music, and encourage you to listen to more of them on YouTube. They have a fairly impressive output. (The link is to Unicorn Digital's channel, which is operated by Mystery and features other artists as well.)
Well, there you are. Judge for yourself. I'm going to listen to more of their music, because I think their quality is worth it, and I hope I'll hear enough to change my first impression of "sameness". We'll see. You can learn more about them and their music at their Web site.
Peter
