Economic Stuff

If you look back to the early days of this site, a lot of what I posted was about economics or government economic policy. These days, it is rare that the topic comes up unless it is in references to communism. In fact, economics is no longer a big topic of discussion anywhere, even with the silly libertarians. It comes up, of course, but it is no longer the big issue. Up until recent, economics was the centerpiece of conservatism and their brief against their alleged opponents.

Thirty years ago, the big change in politics was Bill Clinton using the catchphrase, “It’s the economy stupid” to attack George Bush. From then on, official politics was about taxes and fiscal policy. It was all a show, of course, but it framed the political debate and turned economists into TV stars. The site Marginal Revolution was a big deal for a while because Tyler Cowen was a star economist. Today the site is covered in tumbleweeds because no one cares about libertarian economics anymore.

Even now with the economy having problems at the retail end, people are more focused on the less tangible stuff like CRT or Covid policy. The massive Build Back Better bill stuck in Congress gets little attention. Regime media talks about it as a magic elixir so the crazies have something to chant, but otherwise they have left it alone. Twenty years ago, Conservative Inc would have been organizing a campaign against it, but today they cannot generate much interest in the thing.

One reason for this is that people have come to realize that caring about the economy, tax policy or government programs changes nothing. Those who vote Republican have come to terms with the fact that none of the things they want in terms of taxes and spending will ever happen, so they have lost interest. The far-left still dreams of the socialist paradise, but it is mostly a show of piety. Medicare-for-all may as well be unicorns-for-all and they probably know it.

It used to be an axiom of politics that a good economy was good for incumbents, but the strong economy was of no use to Trump in 2020. He tried to talk about the stock market and jobs for black people, but no one cared about those things. What mattered was his personality and how the righteous felt about it. With Biden, the issue is his growing dementia and the weirdness of this administration. They built a fake Oval Office for him to do live shots for some reason. Why do that?

The lesson here is that if caring about something makes no difference, people will eventually stop caring about it. Caring about immigration, for example, does nothing to change policy, so eventually people will stop caring about it too. You can run through all the issues this way and before long you get to the point where caring who wins the next election no longer matters. That’s why politics is getting so personals. It is the only thing people can care about, so they care about personalities.

Even so, economics still matters. If the economy turns sour, people will care about economics, if only in a general sense. The Cloud People have big plans for the post-human economic order, so it is worth discussing. This week, the show is about some of the issues that come up in dissident circles related to economics. A little change of pace from the normal ranting and raving about the culture. A call back to the days of green eyeshade conservatism.

This week I have the usual variety of items in the now standard format. Spreaker has the full show. I am up on Google Play now, so the Android commies can take me along when out disrespecting the country. I am on iTunes, which means the Apple Nazis can listen to me on their Hitler phones. The anarchists can catch me on iHeart Radio. I am now on Deezer, for our European haters and Stitcher for the weirdos. YouTube also has the full podcast. Of course, there is a download link below.


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This Week’s Show

Contents

  • 00:00: Opening
  • 02:00: Supply Chains
  • 17:00 Build Back Better
  • 37:00 Money Trouble

Direct DownloadThe iTunesGoogle PlayiHeart Radio, RSS Feed, Amazon

Full Show On Spreaker

Full Show On YouTube

https://youtu.be/qOdA2Hoj5Ko

156 thoughts on “Economic Stuff

  1. Yes, we absolutely have a ruler problem in this (former) country, and their removal, by whatever means necessary, is job #1.

    • There’s an high skrewl anon poasting tonight, who was in the hall, outside the classroom, when the Texas shooting occurred.

      boards.4chan DOT org/pol/thread/342923482

      Absolutely fascinating stuff, and uber-KlownWelt.

      Pray for our teenaged White Brother; he is on the front lines of the War against He11 on Earth.

  2. Good section on supply chains- yes, the Z man called out the obvious early on.
    Then it goes wrong. They do not believe in the illusion of BBB. They know it’s a scam. But the political elite knows where the power lies- with the technocrats with their depopulation control agenda. (The Bolsheviks never believed in their shit either – they were more power hungry psychopaths, pumped up with Western money). The politicians are desperately hoping they’ll be included in the small number allowed to survive. (That probably includes Rand Paul, who never quite delivers the killer blow on Fauci). Johnson, the U.K. prime minister used to laugh at “green energy”. Now, it’s all he talks about. Restrictions on movement are tightening daily. In Canada, you’re a prisoner in your country without a double jab, in Italy and Lithuania you can’t work without it. In France, it’s to be mandated from January to ALL citizens. It’s coming to you in the US. “Screw your freedoms”, as Arnie said. You have a chance in America as you’re armed. Here, in Britain, it looks bleak. The petrol is back in the stations at least. Maybe, we can make Molotov cocktails.

    • It seems they want a robust control grid. Scrape [white ] people out of rural areas into monitor-able zones [agricorps with Mestizo workers present less risk]. Control with granularity down to the individual person. No anonymity. Strong punishments. So if you say the wrong thing, your child’s scholarship gets canceled, or you become homeless.

      They need the control grid because the good easy life is ending, it’s going to get harsh. So they need us penned up.

      Look at what they do to Palestinians: put sewage in their wells, shoot out the knee caps of kids, simply take their homes. They will laugh as we starve.

      Statistically the the second dose of the injection is worse than the first. For young men, the third dose is much worse that the second. Dose by dose, more and more will die. But with out the correct stamp in your passport, you will be restricted. It’s firstly about getting control, the slow attrition by shots is more of an ancillary bonus.

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    • America is the least demographically Western country of all the polities you listed. CRT and its attendant cultural pathologies all flow from the US so I don’t understand why you would regard it as more free than western Europe.Their guns are for show.

  3. On the topic of economies of scale as well as managed economies and cultures (i.e. communism and today’s “build back better”)….

    Something occurred to me last night when I was at the HS football game and my son was playing in the band.

    My son is talented at his instrument, but he’s still a kid, still learning, still makes mistakes, and being that it is a brass instrument, his mouth muscles get tired. This is true of most average school bands. There are also varying levels of talent and seriousness amongst the kids participating. When these kids play their instruments alone, their mistakes are pronounced. Solo performances are the most difficult. You really have to have a musical piece mastered to pull it off flawlessly. But the idea of scale is easily seen with these school bands. The more kids you have playing one type of instrument together, like if you have 5 trumpet players as an example, playing the same notes, the mistake of one kid will be drowned out by the competence of the other 4. The entire band playing together further dampens out all the small errors. The scale and size of the band further adds to this effect.

    If you totally eliminate one group of instruments in the band playing their key part, the musical arrangement loses its coherence. The bass of the sousaphones and the beat of the drums helps to tie the piece together. Remove all the drums and you’ll have chaos.

    It’s the same idea with economies, cultures, and governments. They can pull off all these build back better schemes because they’re going to tinker with things in a modular way. As long as the rest of the economy. Government, and culture at large are functioning ok, the failures in the smaller areas that are being manipulated and tinkered with won’t matter. The incompetence of the people running things never matters either. All their screw ups are masked by the sheer size and scope of everything going on all around us.

  4. here’s a question about the soviet union – was the really bad stuff (genocide, executions) mostly in the 1918-1945 era? That’s a hunch I have though I’m not sure if it lines up with the facts.

    Also, I feel that there were really two cold wars. You had the 1945-1962 era cold war which is what most americans really think of when they think of the cold war. This is also when anti-communist activism (McCarthy, birchers etc) as well as the duck and cover stuff was going on.

    Then you have the 1963-1991 era where the soviet union started experiencing problems of its own and where the fear of nuclear annihilation wasn’t as much a thing. Like my parents both graduated from high school in 1977 and they never did nuclear bomb drills and probably would have laughed at that stuff. Also, most of american politics was focused more on Vietnam, civil rights, domestic crime, weird cults (manson, jonestown) and other things. Reagan did try to resurrect the cold war somewhat but I feel this was not the peak of the cold war.

  5. An interesting article out of Holland regarding the increasing rate of excess mortality in Europe – across all ages (except the very young) and with young males being the flashing red light. Is the pause on Moderna in all the Scandinavian countries just the first domino to fall? How will the Biden junta deal with emerging evidence that the vexx not only fails to protect but that it actively harms? My money is on “double down”.

    https://www.rintrah.nl/too-many-people-are-dying-and-its-starting-to-worry-the-demographers/

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  6. Chip shortage. No kidding. I went to take a gander at some GPUs and holy shit. And I do mean, H. O. L. Y. C. R. A. P. those prices right now. a GTX 1080 TI for $400+? FUUUU……

    • The Gateway Pundit, 07:23 AM: Gavin Newsom Admits 12-Year-Old Daughter Has Not Yet Been Vaccinated Despite K-12 Vaccine Mandate for Rest of State…

      Not quite economics, although, OTOH, you can’t have an economy if everyone is dead.

      • An Old Friend: It’s the White males they want killed off. That’s been the pattern throughout all of recorded history, and all of genetics pre-history – kill the males, mate with the females.

        • makes one think about why so many males were imported to europe in the last few years.

          Then coincidentally the largest cardiac side effects show up in young white males.

          Nothing to think about there…

        • 3g4me: It’s the White males they want killed off. That’s been the pattern throughout all of recorded history, and all of genetics pre-history – kill the males, mate with the females.

          Everywhere I’m looking today [Sunday], I’m seeing “EXCESS MORTALITY” stories.

          Free Republic is filled with them right now; for instance, take a gander at this one:

          freerepublic DOT com/focus/f-chat/4002362/posts

          In particular, everyone is zeroing in on thrombolytic/cardiovascular deaths of YOUNG MEN.

          Market DASH Ticker DOT Org has another long piece about it, but, as usual, Denn!nger doesn’t do a very good job of explaining himself [God bless his poor little Type-A grossly overworked & overstressed heart].

          • Sorry, also meant to bump tristan:

            makes one think about why so many males were imported to europe in the last few years. Then cohencidentally the largest cardiac side effects show up in young white males.

            Anyway, ALL of the stories today are talking about grossly OBVIOUS increases in mortality statistics, especially involving thrombolytic/cardiovascular events in YOUNG MEN.

  7. I’m not particularly worried about the build back better bullshit because, the yearly spend amount is relatively small. We see the same crew waste ten-twenty times that amount of money every year already. Or to mention that they blew through a similar amount in the much smaller Afghanistan with absolutely zero long term effect.

    All in alll it looks like just another grift.

    • You should be worried about the build back better bullshit. It’s not the additional amount of grift that’s the issue, it’s the society that they will build, it won’t be going back and it won’t be better. It will have no functional middle class, it will be a centrally managed economy with interchangeable peons who are dependent on the State and who have no independent autonomy.

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  8. I wonder if anyone in the ruling class has considered how their economic fads are going to affect the poor and middle classes. Take their obsession with electric vehicles, for example:

    “…the cost to replace the low-output (30-kilowatt) version of the Nissan Leaf’s battery ranges from $3,500 to $4,500, and the cost to swap out the higher-performing versions (62 kilowatt) runs closer to $8,000.”

    Electric Vehicles Don’t Save Money
    https://spectator.org/electric-vehicles-maintenance-cost/

    It can cost several thousand dollars to replace the battery in an electric vehicle, which is often more than the total cost of a used vehicle in some poorer states. If you’re going to purchase a previously owned EV, and a fair number of people will have to because they can’t afford a new one, you may have to replace the battery because the effective lifespan for most of these things is about 100,000 miles. I’m sure they’ll be a program to refurbish for resale purposes, but that cost will only be passed down to the consumer.

    My guess: the end result of this fad will be that the used car market dries up while more drivers are turned into renters, impoverishing them in the process as they struggle to keep up with maintenance costs. A large conglomerate will own your car and you will pay a monthly fee to use it, then you’ll trade it in after a few years. The company will refurbish and resell your old car because they have the benefit of economy of scale — but used EVs will be more expensive, too expensive for some. The end result is that you’ll own nothing, you’ll just rent/lease your transportation from others. In a worst case scenario, the government, working through private proxies, can then deny car rentals to anyone they deem “problematic”; they already do this with commercial air travel.

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    • IIRC, something like 80 or 85% of Tesla owners revert to gasoline powered vehicles for their next purchase.

      Some brand and technology loyalty there….

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      • All electric car owners like that. They love the smug feeling and the gee whiz at first.

        Then the reality of having to plug/unplug the damn thing in every single day gets really, really old. Plus the lack of range/utility that a gas car offers isn’t there, so they wind up having a second car for the convenience.

        Baring huge range increases and vastly expedited charge times, electric vehicles by choice in any large numbers will never happen.

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      • They like the performance when they’re young and like reliability when they’re older. Tesla owners aren’t buying those cars for the green credibility.

        • How do you define “reliability” in e.g. “Deep Red”* Texas when the eco-phreak turbine windmills come crashing down in an ice storm and the entire alternating-current high-voltage electricity grid goes t!ts-up with them?

          PS: As of a few days ago, “Deep Red” Texas is now officially the new corporate home of Tesla.

          PPS: We’re just a few tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants away from acknowledging the reality of Deep Blue Texas.

          PPPS: Why haven’t we seen any news stories as to who precisely is shipping the Haitians to Texas?

          Because we know with 110% certainty that the Haitians aren’t swimming to Texas [on account of ooga-booga’s don’t know how to swim].

          My guess is that [should we lose this thing] in another four or five years, the Frankfurt School will write a great big best-selling tome [published by Simon & Schuster], boasting about how they took the opportunity of The Great Reset to repurpose their myriad ocean-going cruise-liners [forbidden from offering cruises during COVID] so as to instead create the Haitian invasion of Texas.

    • The fact that most Leftist schemes are unworkable or even contradict known laws of physics or biology is a feature, not a bug. Leftism is about securing power for Leftists. Ideally, this power must be unlimited in both space (so “small government” is out) and time. There’s a problem especially with the latter. If a given scheme ever did succeed in a dramatic way that was obvious to all, there would be no more need for Leftists to control everything and everyone to achieve it. This leads to the familiar formulaic “we didn’t do enough _BLANK_ because of those evil _RIGHT_WING_BOGEYMAN_HERE_. If it weren’t for them we could have done more _BLANK_ and every _BLANK_ would _BLANK_ now!”.

      There are of course also those Leftist schemes that actually are meant to succeed but in an ironic and sinister way. Tell the average man to imagine “an electric car in every garage” and what does he picture? Probably a suburban street lined with 3/2 bungalows and a 1 or 2 car garage with an electric inside.

      The real elites know that this vision isn’t possible*. However, they can still say, without lying, that they want an electric car in every garage. They just leave out the part where only they and a few of their friends and relatives are rich and well-connected enough to still have cars, garages, or even permanent homes for that matter.

      The reality of things is that most of these schemes actually do succeed to a small degree. In fact this is precisely why places like California are so screwed up. Half measures are implemented that drive up costs, increase government dependency, and reduce freedom but never enough to reach the dual-society utopia that the most elitist of the ruling class want. The average person isn’t quite pushed to the limits of survival living in a shack in a dump without running water. Some small businesses limp along by cutting deals with crooked regulators. A narrow majority can still (barely) afford a cramped home in a shitty high-crime neighborhood by working themselves to death. So the result is a stagnant, overworked, angry, and cynical society where anyone smart or innovative has left or is planning to. Yes indeed, welcome to California!

      As for myself, I would recommend the “Cuban option” to deal with the proposed plague of Teslas and regulations meant to make our gas cars illegal. Get an old car or truck with a non-electronic engine that can run on homemade diesel, drip gas, moonshine, or some other hillbilly fuel. Learn how to keep it running by working on it yourself.

      * It’s not just the expense of replacing the batteries. It’s the massive upgrades to the electric grid that would be needed to effectively distribute the amounts of energy currently distributed in the form of motor fuels through the wires overhead. Then of course, the hundreds of new power plants needed to produce that power. All of this is supposed to happen in a nation of people who hate each other and are afraid of their own shadows.

  9. There may be a ray of hope, since I’ve forgotten the premier rule of effective terror:

    It must be arbitrary and random.

    Rather than a complete collapse and die-off, they’re probably adulterating just enough batches to cause paraplegia and death but in no discernable pattern. This adds that frisson of danger that gets Karen wet.

    So, the good news is we’re playing Russian Roulette with 2 bullets instead of 5.
    The bad news is we’re playing Russian Roulette.

    (These are the birth pangs of a One World government. So, why is an OWG supposed to be better?)

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  11. Have not heard the show, but I’d take issue with “Trump lost despite a strong economy” as by the time the election came around the Beer Flu shutdown had nuked a big part of the economy, and there was not enough of a massive tide of people protecting gains to stem the fraud efforts in a few key cities.
    Related, the FT is having a meltdown/panic attack thinking Trump will win in 2024. Of course for Presidential Elections you need only fraud in a few key cities, for Congressional Districts its much harder, there are 435 districts, many without huge urban sinks of basketball American run cities where vote fraud is tradition and Rinos slink away to curl up in a fetal position.
    The economic crisis of shutting down the world economy for a year and never ending jabs and lockdowns is hitting not just Dirt People but important interests, and the lack of a leash on the Dem Crazies is scaring again important people. I don’t think there is central control, I think Z-Man is correct that there are circles and factions within the Regency that make decisions. Senile Bane apparently gave China the greenlight to invade Taiwan, with Milley’s approval/instructions, but we have combat Marines there. The very same FBI agents tasked with arresting moms upset at anti-White discrimination in schools are themselves White and have their own kids in those schools. And all that does is create a tidal wave of Whites leaving schools for homeschooling and online college instruction. Which means schools are now just an anti-White tax and benefit only non-Whites.
    I think we are looking at: another lockdown, Fauci cancels Christmas, more jabs required (every two months), electricity blackouts nationwide, fuel shortages, natural gas shortages, lots of other shortages, massive food inflation globally. And a whole lot of big companies loaded up on debt failing. We have our own Evergrandes and rising interest rates are going to kill a lot of them. GM, Ford, whatever Chrysler is called these days, Boeing, and a bunch of retailers like Best Buy would be my bets for failure.

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    • A long time ago I saw a comedy sketch about a “pest control” team brought in to deal with a plague of, I don’t know, bunnies or something. So they decide to release wolves in this place that never had them. Now there’s a wolf problem, so they decide to release tigers, now there’s a tiger problem… At the end I think they were running from some Jurassic Park T-rexes.

      This is basically what I think is happening. The ruling class had a Trump problem, so they unleashed the Coof panic (and maybe the Coof itself but we need more evidence). The problem was that mass panic reacts explosively with estrogen and modern society is a giant lake of that stuff. Coof panic needed to be dealt with because it was hurting things that mattered – no not people’s civil rights or small business, no one cares about that stuff. It was hurting large companies and international trade. So there was the rush to vaccinate everyone. Two problems arose with that. First of all, they pushed the vax narrative using a lot of brazen lies about things that a lot of people actually understood, like viruses. They also rammed through vaccines using new technologies with unknown side effects without testing them enough.

      Thus large numbers of people refused to get the vaccines. Then it turned out, around the same time, that the things didn’t even work all that well. They are also rushing around trying to silence the rising numbers of reports of severe reactions.

      The current “plan” is to simply force people to take the vaccines. This is not because the people in charge believe the vaccines work. It’s because they think they can make enough people think they work to get them to go back to work and back to shopping out in the big scary Coofed-up world.

      The fantasy playing in our ruler’s rotting brains is that compulsory vaccination will make enough people go back to acting normal that the economic crisis can be put to rest. They will wipe the fake sweat off their brows and exclaim “whew! that was a close one” as they take another sip of brandy and adrenochrome.

      This does appear to be it though. This idiotic narrative is their T-rex that will eat all the remaining tigers and wolves and then… turn into a cute house pet? Well, no, in fact they’ve now antagonized serious people capable of serious violence enough that they will get the 1789 treatment if this fails – unless – they can start a war.

      That’s really all I can see as a possible T-rex eater. They need a war and a big one. In any case, This (the whole period from 2019 on) is their last gamble. They’ve bet the title to the casino – let’s take it from the bastards.

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      • Once again, that which may not be spoken.

        Serious people are talking about real rebellion now, and the main thrust is a potential serious push for secession by many red states. This is viewed as the most practical alternative to open, and likely very bloody, insurrection. Lots of trail balloons (or warning shots) are now being disseminated in major media outlets, plus polling. Biden’s handlers are largely ignoring this threat because Civil War 2.0 meets their needs. The True Believers within the DC bubble are convinced that a rebel uprising can, and will, be quashed rather quickly by the alphabet agencies, with some military support. This would then be the green light for going full retard and implementing a ruthless crackdown and detention program. And they couldn’t be more wrong or stupid. Once the shooting starts, like all battles in history, it will immediately become unpredictable and chaotic. And that, in turn, is the green light for China to retake Taiwan. Will Tater Joe then start WW3? Not a chance in Hell. He will bluster, fart, and back down.

        Modeling suggests that the best way to stop this hyper-crazy is a national work stoppage and strike. Build on what’s already in progress and shut everything down for a week or more until DC cries uncle. Anything less and the slaughter becomes unavoidable.

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        • I agree.

          So the Q then becomes, how do we organize and coordinate a national strike? Get T to announce one? Hannity, Tucker, Desantis, Rand Paul? Fox? Talk radio gang? FB? Google? Billboards? Paid advertising?

          • All of the above plus the good ol’ jungle telegraph. Union activists in real industries (NOT teachers, gov employees, paper pushers) need to get on it or get out and make room for the 3rd worlders waiting to replace them. Technicians of all sorts, firemen, miners, energy distribution… Make a list of all such orgs and find a contact perso to direct the effort. General strike is the last best hope. That and silencing the Panopticon.

      • I give a maybe to the Cat-in-the-hat scenario. I think the vax intention goes right back to the beginning. The vax injuries+kills whites, it leads to a new intra-white strife and disunity, whites losing income, and importantly a passport system.

        The corporations are a don’t care, they are mostly owned by private wealth funds, and can be propped with printer money. If corporations fail, all the better. Swindlers will buy up the assets for pennies on the dollar. Already trillions have flowed out to grease oligarch wheels. At bankruptcy, the pension fund, small fry, etc, component of ownership can be extinguished, leaving wandering international investors to cart off assets.

  12. It amazes me how transient and long-term inconsequential the issues of most American domestic political conflict are. This didn’t start just 5 years ago or under Obama. Growing up on the West Coast I was taken aback by the bouts of collective shrieking at an all-purpose boogeyman, smoking. Then in my lifetime the new waystation was smoking weed being morally just (picture some Black jazz musicians as who we are as Americans) and also Good For The Economy, while smoking cigarettes is an archaic-barbaric practice like leeching or bear-baiting that is probably monstrous and patriarchal, to be sure, but since people have actually cut down on it necessarily there is not the same amount of denunciations of turpitude.

    Today in the “free version of POLITICO Pro Health Care’s morning newsletter” (“presented by” the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America) they had an item about increasing the federal tobacco tax for the first time since 2009. Naturally the industry doesn’t favor this. The point man if can be so called, is Sen. Jon Tester who I remember reading several times over the last decade was “out of step” with his state and certain to be defeated for re-election, anyway, you can always trust a political junkie. Now, it is true that the revenue will come from the mutant successors of the Marlboro Man in the vape shops, but I’d be shocked if anyone not either selling, using, or running an activist business of opposing the other industry has an opinion about this.

    In the libertarian abstract, “Taxes Ares Bad” because it is just passed onto the consumer. Also, it encourages bureaucratic bloat, though libertarians live & work with bloated bureaucrats in D.C. now, for the most part, so you don’t hear the second half of the critique as much. I have never heard a libertarian engage with the point that taxation like having police at all is a tool of structuring the society, so that if you bat back all the taxes and the police you eventually get an unstructured society. We really do have a lot of libertarianism laboratories now in big American urban centers (Los Angeles, SF Bay, Minneapolis), and it’s true, if one doesn’t live in any of those places it’s difficult to care how the experiments are going. I expect Chicago will be the next big libertarian termite conquest, as it certainly seems primed for it.

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    • There’s a difference between judicially appointed, government mandated assault libertarianism and people who’d rather be left alone to settle the small stuff where they live.

      • We know the Zman doesn’t care. He’ll laugh his Klaus Gustav Blofeld laugh, admire the libertarian hanging ornaments in his volcano lair, and go back to petting his laser sharks.

    • Those examples you listed seem much more indicative of anarcho-tyranny than any sort of examples of libertarianism, unless you’re just focusing on the social permissiveness allowed for various groups I suppose.

  13. There are people who leased cars 2 years ago who are now selling the cars for more than what they paid for it new. There are even dealers lying to lease holders saying their buy-out option is no good. Because a person who leased the car can buy it at the end of their lease and sell it for more than they paid for it. It’s insane.

    The only thing that is really all that surprising is how long it took for this kind of stuff to happen. The whole Western world is run like a Toyota factory today where everything is ‘just in time’ (Toyota created the JIT model from what I understand), so you would think a lot of this stuff would have shown up a lot earlier, like a matter of 2 months. Pretty much all of retail is run this way. Yet, other than the occasional paper good and meat shortages, it has been remarkably good considering.

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    • Just wait. We’re only getting started. I’d guess Amazon filled their newly-built warehouses before everybody stayed home. It’s only since people have begun to re-emerge that this thing started showing its teeth.

    • Tars: We have 2 leased cars that we had planned to get rid of in 2021/2022. With the prices and shortages of both new and used vehicles, not sure what we are going to do. Selling them for more $ is all fine and good, but need to be able to buy something to replace them with – Hubby wants something new and I want something older with 4wd and a lot less electronics.

        • Ha. I have my original 1998 Toyota Tacoma with less than 200k miles on it.

          I have guys walking up to me in Costco parking lot making offers to buy it. I’m polite and just say not thanks….

  14. Crypto people miss the plot. They say that the Government would have to shut down the internet to get rid of it, which is true, therefore they speculate that they’r beyond Government reach. The problem is WHEN the government deems cryptos as a currency threat (they will, see E-Gold circa 2007) all of these transactions will be forced onto dark web exchanges at a currency conversion premium, well, well into the double digits, and also with the risk of being caught. Also, cryptos are currently a valuable tool for governments right now as they serve as a carbon sink for excess money creation. They know damn well that inflation is running hotter than they’re saying and billions being pumped into a phony asset class serves as a temporary relief valve in the current monetary accommodation. It’s only when yokels start pricing their used Hondas at .4456 BTC that the rug will be pulled out. And unscrupulous bank like Chase are making good pocket change on trading these things right now.

    • This all true, but I think the point crypto bugs really miss us that businesses are the de facto collection arm of the IRS. They not only automatically remit income taxes with every paycheck, but they also collect and pay lots of hidden taxes and sales taxes in the states that charge them. If the government wanted to end the use of crypto, it would simply have to tell businesses to charge a 25% sales tax on crypto transactions, and voila, look at how many crypto users go back to government issued currency.

      12
  15. I really enjoyed the points about the universal appeal of gold and silver. This is one of the reasons that I favor bullion as a store of wealth long-term.

    You also touched on one of the reasons I am not a huge crypto fan – utility.

    Go to a farm market or honesty stand and try to pay in crypto.

    I searched for farm markets that take crypto and I found 4 or 5 in the entire US.

    One is in South Dakota, which is 1200 miles from my location. Quite accessible!

    They take BTC, and that’s about it. If you’re in another crypto you’d have to eat the transfer fees to get into BTC, then transfer it to the market.

    Yeah, I’m going to do that rather than walk a couple blocks to the Thursday afternoon farm stand at the hardware store and buy three big beautiful bell peppers for a buck or two.

    • Just to play Devil’s Advocate a bit, I’m guessing you’d have some difficulty throwing a 1 oz. Troy Silver out as legal tender in those ‘in-between’ places as well, and gold would certainly be viewed as fake so how much better are hard metals really unless we are in a true Mad Max / SHTF scenario? (I am in no way endorsing crypto, just pointing out metals have similar issues)

      14
      • Apex: Gold and silver only have utility, right now, as stores of value. In the event of a genuine economic collapse they might be accepted in lieu of fiat, but many believe they would soon be supplanted by beans, bullets, bandages, and booze. And after barter and some sort of larger economic activity reappears, precious metals might be useful. But as my husband says, a tiny .25 ounce gold coin is about $500 right now. Who’s going to accept that (or pay that) for their beans?

        No one with any sense ought to consider a bank safe deposit box, but many of the same systemic flaws there also apply at precious metal depositories – in the US and abroad. You need to make an appointment in advance, and fill out various documents to take possession of ‘your’ metal.

        Buy some PVC pipe and/or rent a few storage pods somewhere – for any other supplies you can’t or don’t want to store at home. And here again – it’s pretty easy to go down the rabbit hole on trying to be ‘prepared.’ Husband had a customer that had to use a crap ton of stored food he had stocked up on for fear of Y2K. Of course, now that old guy’s kids and grandkids are pretty well set re farm acreage and supplies as well as currency.

        I don’t envision a future huddled around a fire eating stored beans, fearful of government drones overhead. But the more clownworld resembles TEOTWAKI fantasy, the less I want to survive anything.

        10
        • Junk silver (pre-1964 U.S. coins) for the win. At today’s spot silver quote of approximately $23 per tr. oz., a 90% silver dime is worth about $1.50 fiat. There’s your can of beans. Putting aside say $100 face value of these coins is just a solid prep, like stocking up on ammo or some shelf-stable foodstuffs.

    • I don’t know anything about crypto other than the fact that is too complicated to use as money. If I have to read a 10 page FAQ to figure out how to buy something from someone who takes Crypto, it’s too complicated. Anyone who lives in one of America’s major cities knows it’s too complicated. You just cannot live around diversity and think the general public is going to be able to use bitcoin.

      The argument for bitcoin has shifted. Back when it first started, it was supposedly a better money than Dollars or Pounds (damn, I wish I would have bought some back then). It was cheaper and faster than using a money transfer service. Now it is unusable as a currency and the goalpost has shifted to being a store of value (one that fluxuates by 30% or more). It’s a bubble.

      • I see crypto as a potentially useful short-term speculative vehicle against inflation.

        The trick now is getting a directional play correct, taking profit, then converting to fiat or hard assets without getting scalped by fees and taxes.

        • “The trick now is getting a directional play correct, taking profit, then converting to fiat or hard assets without getting scalped by fees and taxes.”

          That sounds like four tricks.

  16. One take on the economic insanity is that it will be a very bad thing because most people at the bottom of the social pyramid will become destitute, starving, and die in the streets. But that is already happening in many big cities. There are several amateur videographers now recording this very thing in places like Philadelphia & Detroit, where rampant drug addiction is taking down many a suburban Caucasian, not just the fringe bottom-of-the-barrel type.

    Like a drunk on a bender, the bottom is now inevitable, it’s just a matter of when. Normie desperately needs to believe that we can vote our way back to the 1950s and will push the ballot machine level with his dying breath; so a slow roll into the ditch is most likely unless the economy shows us some mercy and goes into crash & burn mode. If so, Normie might just get off the couch when his latte fix is absent and the next election is still months away.

    14
  17. I had an appointment to get the J&J jab, but I’m probably going to cancel it.

    I’m thinking I should buy a tube of Ivermectin off Amazon while I still can.

    20
    • I’m just not worried about this disease. If no one ever told me about Covid, I don’t think I would think anything is different in the world.

      In that way, its a hoax….

      32
      • As I’ve often said, I wasn’t as worried about the “pandemic” so much as I was the reaction to it.

        13
        • Speaking of Amish, my farm is surrounded by Amish, and I don’t know how others feel, but my experience has been excellent. Hard workers. Honest. The folks I deal with directly have several young sons, and when I hire them to do work, they put their head down and work their asses off. Come to think of it, I’ve never seen an overweight Amish person.
          I once hired one of the lads to dig several holes for me. I told him I was going in the house for a few minutes and would be right back. After what seemed like 10/15 minutes, I headed back out and he was sitting on the ground. I furrowed my brow and asked,”are you ok”, to which he replied,”yeah, what else ya got”.

          Hard workers
          Honest
          Just s little hard to get hold of. (No cell phones).

          • I have Amish neighbors as well. Most of them (the women) are overweight. But, like you say, they’re all hard workers.

          • Drew
            I think the reason they may be overweight is they are pregnant quite a bit. That extra doesn’t go away overnight.
            Anyway, if you can, befriend them. If nothing else, they will provide a parallel means of existence/survival.

    • I’m staring down the barrel of a jab mandate our CEO dropped Monday.

      I’m debating what to do.

      Even before this I wasn’t particularly interested in continuing on with my current contract project or hiring back into my old firm.

      Additionally, I’ve spent far too much of my life in this area and have never really found my people.

      The good news is that I can afford to walk.

      36
      • Then, where’s the debate? It appears to be a no-brainer to leave. Why on earth would you subject yourself to a potentially fatal “vaccination” when you’ve got other good options?

        17
      • Not trying to sound flip but: Have you thought about just ignoring it (and keep drawing a paycheck)? They will hassle you, but, I dunno, isn’t it more of a moral victory to push back on them and make their b.s. job more inconvenient than to just fall on your sword before the battle?

        But you can’t eat moral victories and if you have a better option for using your time, you should certainly quit… I just doubt that any of these jab mandates will be applied to anywhere past 50% compliance. I expect people will just not pay Brandon’s OSHA fines, further Greece-ifying the economy.

        I was all outraged the day of Brandon’s speech, then I realized, “Wait a minute, he isn’t actually capable of enforcing any of this”

        18
        • “Joe Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Doesn’t Exist. It’s Just A Press Release”
          -the Federalist

          “Press statements have exactly zero legal authority.

          There is no mandate to haul into court. And that may be part of the plan.”

          No one can file a lawsuit opposing something that doesn’t exist. These people are operating in a completely illegal manner now.

          • The purpose of the mandate is to give the corporatists cover. They desperately want to pursue their own mandates because they’re all the same type of people who circle the DC beltway. “I’m sorry but we have to make this policy because Pres Potato says so”. They’re all counting on people being ignorant of basic concepts of law, the Constitution, and civil rights. So far it’s worked here in Oregon with the “mask mandate”.

            I would also second the advice Nabrisco is giving though and in fact I try to apply it as broadly as possible. With any of this new tyranny always ask yourself “Is this enforceable? If it is, how likely is it that they’ll catch me? What is the penalty if they do? In many cases, there’s no actual plan or budget for enforcement. There’s also the possibility that a given policy will be prevented from taking effect by court action, perhaps for years. NEVER COMPLY WILLINGLY OR EARLY. Give that HR bitch a reason to get even more psych medicines. Make them work for everything.

          • OSHA is a much smaller organization than people realize. They’re going to monitor the vaccination status of tens of millions of workers? Kinda doubt it.

        • I third. I agree with Nabrisco and Pozymandias.

          In fact, I’ll do that myself if it comes to it, thanks fellas.

      • You can get a card on-line that will work for you. Showing at an airport or government agency has risk, but showing your employer is no risk. It’s not as if they can validate the thing.

        11
        • Upon entering any number of stores in the Spirit of America state:

          “We respectfully ask that those who are not vaccinated wear facemasks or coverings.”

          Or what?

          🤔👌

          15
    • look up the FLCC protocol and get the items there, ahead of time. and you will not be getting Ivermectin at amazon. much better to be ready with a prophylactic solution, for when the coof hits, than take the jab. even if you do get vaxxed, you can still get the coof, so in every case you need Ivermectin ahead of time.

    • Maniac: It’s also quite easy to purchase Quercetin and Zinc as prophylactics for good health in general and viral protection in particular.

  18. I have a friend who just recently got his job back and has been applying for new positions that have recently opened back up within HERTZ. After they filed for bankruptcy and liquidated many of their holdings and property, they quickly got back to restructuring the hierarchy and trying to build back better with less. My friend took a pay cut but the trade off is he still can advance much more quickly now due to his previous record and the restructuring; plus they let him keep his car, his office and pay for his gas and travel expenses. Overall not overtly terrible for him. But I haven’t even asked him how many cars and lots they had to drop between May 2020 and the present. I don’t even know how they plan to expand their former holdings without the property they had jettisoned only less than a year ago?

    Solid episode this week Z.

    • I don’t know which was more disappointing in reaction to AOC’s “tax the rich” dress: those on the right who believed what she ‘said’, or those one the left. The one’s on the left were just being their regular, stupid selves in thinking that a sock puppet for the oligarchs is ever going to bite the hands that feed her, but the ones on the right ran to defend the puppeteers from the puppet.

    • Musk seems like a uniquely high-functioning dork born into a bind where the minimum expectation of him was that he become a “self-made” oligarch. In a sane (recently deceased) world he’d be the greatest personnel manager Bell Labs ever knew.

      I’d let him decide if he wants to get in the Minecraft ditch or not. I think he’d understand an “Archaic Torso of Apollo” moment. He alone among his peers might even have read it.

  19. James Carville famously said he wanted to reincarnated as the bond market in his next life as that was where the real power was.

    Simply this: Governments borrow money via bonds; the more they borrow, the less credit worthy they become, the more interest is on the bond, and borrowing money becomes increasingly expensive. It’s a corrective mechanism.

    Fast forward: US Gov just infinitely prints whatever it needs, and buys it’s own bonds (if it can be bothered). “Money printer goes Brrrrr”.

    Bonds are in the toilet. Inflation is a certainty. Hard to believe we’re ruled by men and women this colossally stupid. No one cares, left or right. Unreal.

    23
    • Japan says that you’re wrong.

      As Z says, the system is impossibly complicated. Japan has been printing money like crazy for decades and fights deflation. Not saying that’s going to be the case in the states, but it’s worth noting.

      It all depends on where the money goes. Congress giving money to individuals – assuming they spend it – is very different from the fed sending money to financial institutions to buy financial instruments.

      Regardless, what they’re doing is not a sign of a healthy system (our system is absolutely addicted to low interest rates, as Z has noted), nor is it a sign that the people in charge care about a healthy system.

      • Debt is way of pulling forward gains from increases in productivity. Unleashing the productive capacity of a billion Chinamen and the technological revolution allowed for a lot of debt. China and tech are about tapped out now. India has a lot of idle people and Africa, but how much can be done there is an open question.

        We may be reaching the limit of debt, which is why inflation is suddenly a thing.

        19
        • Great point. Inflation is always a money/debt vs the amount of goods and services available equation.

          The huge amount of debt/currency issuance over the past 20 years or so was accompanied by a huge amount of goods being produced by China where you brought into the world economy a ton of productive workers and established a ton of productive factories.

          Issuing debt/currency doesn’t cause inflation if you match it with a similar amount of goods and services. Btw, that’s the whole idea behind Modern Monetary Theory. If there’s slack in the economy, you can create create money without inflation because the money given to the people will cause then to spend it causing businesses to increase goods and services in proportion to the money created. Inflation only arrives if you create money when there’s no excess capacity in the economy.

          Of course, MMT is insane if only because it relies on government officials and politicians to know how to get the money out and when to turn off the spigot. In fact, MMT sounds a lot like something the Communists would do.

          (Btw, Richard Werner writes a lot about the connection between debt and productivity. He’s living in unicorn land with the suggestion but he’s right that an economy would be best served by only allowing debt to be issued for productive business endeavors – which presumably would increase the amount of good and services by as much or more as the amount of debt issued – and not for consumption.)

          But as you say, China is settling down. It’s production is no longer enough to offset the new debt/currency being issued. That’s an issue. India is the next great hope to boost production/productivity, but Indians aren’t as smart as Chinese (not even close) and is a mess to do business. India will not replicate China. Africa is a joke.

          It’s hard to understand the importance of China joining the world economy, probably along the lines of the Europeans discovering the New World. Out of the blue, you added a billion smart, capable workers, basically the equivalent of adding the workforce of the U.S. and Europe but insanely cheap. That was an amazing boost to the world economy and a massive deflationary force.

          Now, that’s fading away.

          19
        • Maybe that’s why China wants more babies. As we should. Don’t know much about their debt situation, but I’m guessing talk of looming financial crisis means it’s not good. Which begs the question: can a debt-saddled nation start reproducing without first going bankrupt?

          There’s the notion that affluence means fewer kids. Makes you wonder what the definition of affluence is. “Debt is way of pulling forward gains from increases in productivity.” Perhaps even biologically!

      • Well, the world still accepts the South African Rand, so probably a long time.

  20. I haven’t had time to listen to this yet, but I see “supply chains” in the notes, so I figured should add my observations about that:
    I’m noticing more and more often when I go to the store that there are empty shelves where there never were before, unless they weatherman predicted snow. Most disturbing of all are the empty shelves in the liquor store…

    12
    • Gab has a, “Supply Chain Pain,” group where people are swapping information about shortages.

      Thankfully, my liquor stores and beer coolers are very well-stocked. Highly recommend most brews from Southern Tier Brewing if you can find them.

      OTOH, I’m not surprised about the shortages. At one point during shutdown, the local liquor store cashier’s comment was, “Every day is like New Year’s Eve!”

      • My neighborhood liquor store is overstocked with what I like because lately I’ve been buying less of it than usual. I can normalize that situation. But I don’t expect ever to see the specific pickles, olives, canned tomatoes, sausage, etc., that I like ever again.

        One of my earliest memories is of my grandmother describing the legendary Viennese foods she loved that disappeared when she was a teenager circa WWII. When I was born, there were dudes who look like me on the moon, so I didn’t think I’d ever see that kind of culture-loss happen.

        lol

      • WGH, we must live quite near each other. Certain clues you give off have made that plain. Southern Tier is brewed in my county.

  21. Don’t know about libertarians but the folks at the Mises Institute have called the shots pretty well over the years as we await the “crack up boom.” Also James Howard Kunstler’s “long emergency” has been spot on as the Hemingway-esque “gradually, then all at once” collapse rolls like a slow burn into an old forest.

    That it’s all personality centered has become our “two minute” hate extending throughout the media day with Emanuel Goldstein having been replaced by King George spending his waning years, in the age before teleprompters, playing cribbage before afternoon tea.

    Lew Rockwell’s site has been deplatformed by the way.

  22. Related – on Economists…

    Once again, another huge miss in the jobs report – 194k added compared to 500k expected. This has become standard every month, with economists predicting some huge jobs blowout, and the number coming in much lower.

    You might think that these economists would take a long look at their models and try to understand what is wrong, what inputs are they missing, what assumptions are wrong. Nope, they just churn out the same output each month and apparently are not ashamed of how wrong they are.

    In my business consulting world, if we continually churned out such terrible models for a client, the CEO would laugh at us and we’d lose them as a client.

    Recently I watched an online forum with three “famous” economists from the business school I attended (yes, I am one of those MBAs), providing their economic outlook. Most of it was just regurgitated generalities and philosopher king bullshit – bullshit I now detect since I am more discerning than when I was younger. It sucks to realize that many of my professors were mostly full of shit. The one saving grace I have is that thankfully my old company paid for my MBA – I’d be very bitter if I had ponied up 6 figures for that crap.

    Since March 2020, I’d say economists are only second to doctors in revealing how over-inflated are their reputations.

    26
    • As an untrained ‘conamiss I have a great way of determining the number of jobs that one can find online. That is, jobs that can be applied for on-the-line. You see, I go to the job aggregator sites and select the ‘list all jobs’ option. I get a list of all said jobs! And how many! I can even whittle it down by county!

      It’s amazing. And no maff needed. Now, mark you, this is no way to tell how many jobs are going in the country as a whole, but when you compare the current number to one you got, say, six months ago, and six months before that, you can judge relative increase in this arena. Still, all with no maff!

      “Since March 2020, I’d say economists are only second to doctors in revealing how over-inflated are their reputations.”

      Indeed. The people who came closest to describing how reasonably regulated markets work (i.e. the healthiest sort) were, I think, the Awwwstrians. Ludwig von Mises did a decent job, in my opinion. He didn’t tend to use a lot of maff. The over-application of maff to fields that do not deserve it is a real problem. Many of the less rigorous ‘sciences’ do this; I suspect in an effort to look credible.

      But it’s not just that it makes it look credible, it also makes it very impenetrable – and this is of paramount importance. Because it means very few can understand and review – thoroughly – your work. So you can’t be wrong! That said, I doubt modern peer review committees are even interested in deeply reviewing an idea in a paper – that is actual hard work. Worse still, imagine if it was a good idea that overturned something you believe in with all your heart?

      There are fields where maff has been invaluable (excepting maff, where one would expect it to have value): fluid mechanics, acoustics, aerodynamics, shock physics, civil engineering, geo-technical engineering, soil mechanic, &c. But when it appears in the softer sciences, you may be being shafted. Shafted royally.

      I must ask, what do they teach in an MBA? I am generally curious as to the answer, as well as your experiences in this program?

      • In general, and MBA teaches the business management tools a future business leader would need to be successful. There is useful material, in more fundamental things like Accounting, Basic Financial Management, Operations Management, Corporate Finance, etc. Obviously you can take courses geared toward your future expected career, focused in things like real estate, trading, marketing, private equity, etc.

        Overall, unlike undergrad classes, the courses are geared less towards the mechanics and more towards the thinking and decisions a business manager/leader would need to make using these tools.

        The broader point is that the academics are not worth what they charge so these philosopher king economists can rake in several hundred thousand dollars per year. The education is useful for someone not having a business background (say science, engineering, law) to gain the tools to move from the engineering lab, for example, to managing the business.

        The ultimate value is the credential, which opens doors in your career (though less than it used to as businesses are getting wiser to the skills of MBAs), and the network you develop for future jobs, business relationships, etc.

        And my business school was and is now even moreso overrun with smelly Indians, whom I’d guess are spending part of their dowry in the US to gain access to corporate leadership positions and displace whites.

      • Art has been discredited. Anything involving people should ultimately be an art. Not that numbers don’t have their place in, say, medicine for instance, but the best doctors have a feel for their patients.

        This reduction of everything to the material, the measurable, is maybe the single most important factor driving the dumbing-down of society.

        People wonder why the kids are autistic phone zombies. Maybe mercury in the vaccines is a symptom of a greater dehumanization?

    • The demographic disaster is becoming very difficult to paper over, in this case from an economic basis. There’s no nation whose economy will get better if they import cities worth of Afghans, Haitians, etc.

      12
  23. It was a throw away line in your post, I realize, but it astounds me that the fake Oval Office hasn’t drawn more commentary. What a bizarre thing! One can’t help but conspiracy theorize – is it easier to green screen from there or something? Playing “if Trump did this” is a mug’s game, of course, but… imagine if Trump did that. Rachel Marrow would do a month’s worth of shows on it…

    20
    • “Rachel Marrow would do a month’s worth of shows on it…”

      Interesting typo. She does look a bit like a marrow.

      The Oval Office thing is bloody weird. When I read that line, I did think that it would have been picked up on far more. But in Cloud/Cunt/Carny/Prison World, it probably isn’t bizarre enough.

      • Stupid autocorrect. But yeah, you’re right — this is Clown World, so something that would be extremely fake and gay by the standards of even 10 years ago doesn’t even rate a shoulder shrug now.

        • Amongst normal people, I suspect such things do still raise more than a shrug. Unfortunately, the sorts who love/trust Legacy MSM sources have already made a deal with the devil, and see it as all natural. Just normal, baby!

          I guess that’s the point now: the naked and overt demoralization. You know, “I see the same thing in every LMSM outlet… it must be true”. Anyhow, it’s to be expected.

          I did share a nice piece of moral outrage with a coworker some days back. Said coworker has a niece with three kids, from three different fathers (the disgusting term ‘baby daddy’ was used – did this come from blacks? Dunno.), one of whom is bleck. Says coworker “I’m not racist but it’s just weird, I mean he looks different. My husband thinks it’s ridiculous.” Says she then further: “My parents (the blecklet’s great grandparents) can’t get over it. They keep saying ‘We just cannot warm to him like the other grandkids.'”. Crikey.

          I said to her there’s no need for the “I ain’t no racist” prefix round me; and we both shared a look of disgust. Turns out we are horrific bigots. Horrific I tells ya.

          And don’t get me started on the three kids with three different fathers. It is all so tiresome; and incredibly common – another sign of our demoralization. And another sign that many cannot be saved. Sad.

          End rant.

          28
          • I see a minor league version of this all the time with tradespeople, the cable guy or whatever — they come over, wearing one of those stupid Karen Kloths the company requires, and I say “you don’t have to bother with that around me.” The look of relief in their eyes is truly frightening — how many Covid Cultists must they have to deal with, day after day after day?

            18
          • @Severian I have to point out that our visitors break both ways on the mask. Some when told are relived and dump it in their car, while others get a wild eyed look like I asked them to play with a half-loaded revolver (all men BTW). There is a third group though, the “I would take it off but my workplace would fire me if I did”; I feel bad for those guys.

          • Went out to dinner with a long-time friend, childhood into our 50’s, the other night and he announced he’s going to be a grandfather – of a mulatto. This guy’s father was a total race realist. The kind of guy who, if a black family had moved in next to him would have shoveled their walk, shared cookies with them, etc., but who would have never lied to himself about their difference in station. As for my friend, I would estimate that I’ve heard him use the magic word well in excess of a thousand times. I honestly had no idea what to say to him. At one point he did mention to another member of our party that he’s feeling “a little more excited than I was when I first heard about it.” But it’s an act, isn’t it? There will be some sort of affection for the child, simply because of the genetic bond, but not nearly as much as would have existed if his daughter had bred with a Caucasian.

          • Reply to KGB: Your friend will be more closely genetically related to any other person of White European ancestry on the street than to his own mulatto grandson. And said child will be a ticking timebomb – once he reaches adolescence all bets are off. If your friend’s father was a race realist, he didn’t impress it upon your friend strongly enough for him to pass that down to his own daughter. Family tragedy all the way down.

      • So, Rachel Marrow it is from here on out. She does have the vaguely gelatinous quality of marrow.

    • Soon we aren’t going to have elected representatives that can be considered even real by the standards of 20 years ago. We’re already almost there. Trump may well be the president with true agency, limited as it was.

      • Max Headroom 2024!

        The photo making the rounds that reveals the fake oval office during the great potato penetration was not surprising to me at all. What stood out to me was the entire media corps playing along, taking the appropriate camera angles and such. Thats the insult.

        There are no doubt fake sets of all kinds all over. But when the media is so captured by the regime that they wont report on small details, like from where they are actually reporting and why, well then the entire thing becomes a theater of the oligarchs and is suspect from top to bottom.

        Of course by the time most people notice, Max Headroom has already been “voted” in.

        23
    • Apparently, rigging up Biden with earpieces and teleprompters is difficult in the real WH, so they created the fake one where they can animate him without people noticing.

      18
    • The Q-tards must be having a field day over it. This proves Trump is still in the real Oval just waiting for the right moment to pull the trigger on those 6 gorillion unsealed indictments!

      11
      1
      • I know the Q tards will never catch on, but look, guys, two data points:

        1. Even The Smartest Genius Who Ever Geniused has (mostly) stopped Q-tarding; and
        2. So has the Left, both of which should let you know beyond a doubt you’ve been scammed.

        They’re all aflutter about “domestic extremism” there behind the razor wire in Tubman, DF, and not even they make any Q noises anymore. How dumb do you have to be to stil… ahh, screw it, we know the answer.

        8
        2
        • We’re about five years into the Q thing now, right?

          I visit no mainstream sites and consume no mainstream media whatsoever, my tastes and attitudes are very strongly “extremist”- and now “terrorist”-leaning, and I’ve still yet to see *anything* Q—except fake-and-gay Vox Day being wrongly optimistic about Trump’s Caesarism (which never existed, obviously—and *always* obviously).

          Precisely nothing that our rulers and their cutouts believe is even slightly real. So everything they do is…

          There’s some terror for ya.

          5
          1
      • Funny-sad-true. The whole thing is a green screen; eyes off-set reading prompter, hands waving cold fronts thru Omaha while pointing to Kansas city.

        In the olden days we knew the weather man was not, in fact, standing in front of an animated map of the USA. Seems now the desire to believe something, anything, is real, has people bench-pressing cogdis the size of a Volkswagen just to feel connected.

        Deepfakery is no doubt adding some pullies and leverage to enable some pretty heavy lifting. But in the end the mass hypnosis is so thick and the cogdis fatigue so great that even Ron Burgundy closing off with “Go f*ck yourselves San Diego” would result in half the population believing he said “Good luck San Diego”.

        When the most fundamental aspects of observable reality can be questioned from both sides of the great divide – and then embraced as two distinct realities, we are at a point where dialogue across that divide is just two teleprompters running script.

        Some or most people simply will not be moved away from their own green screens. We are all in this together. A dark winter is coming. So Lets go Brandon!

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        • Let’s go Brandon! [clap-clap-clapclapclap]. Let’s go Brandon! [clap-clap-clapclapclap].

          Next to “Can’t be ‘elped; it’s me nature, mate,” that’s the best thing to carve on Western Civ’s tombstone.

      • Peabody, my brother and his wife are mild Qtards.

        I was laughing to him about an extreme Qtard that I met who believes that Trump is still President and asked, “When will they give up on Trump?”

        My brother answered me with determination, “2024.”

      • I remember back in 2017 when a freind told me about the “sealed indictments”. It made no sense, and it never happened.

        false flag

  24. The main areas where politicians have been delivering are whatever donors want and whatever the SJW have been told to be hysterical about such as men in dresses are women and all non whites are oppressed by Whitey. You can see this in their educational programs, FBI priorities (what leftist violence?), prosecution and torture of Jan 6th, harassment if mothers who don’t like CRT, censorship of bad whites, etc. The Democrats deliver for their base if it doesn’t conflict with the needs of the donors. Of course, they also always deliver for Israel but that is one of the main priorities of the donors.

  25. If the Democrats could get all their bills passed this year, I’ve heard the total would something like $12 trillion. You would think somebody in the GOP would be shouting about that, but at this point I think they know that most “conservatives” who are not actually part of their grifting racket have given up on government .

    • On AM radio yesterday I heard a clip of old Comrade Bernie. Of course trillions of pork is on the table so he has come out of his burrow to see his shadow. He was pounding the table about how the bill should be AT LEAST $7.5T but being a good statesman he could see “compromising” to $3.5T “for the time being…to keep the process moving.”

      The GOP meanwhile starts “negotiating” from $2T or somesuch. Whatever happened to ZERO. Anyhow, the whole thing is like divorce court where your lawyer has already made the deal with the other lawyer over a hotdog at the turn. But their real “work” is just beginning as they try to keep the illusion of a fight going so they can run their meters; a lot of ruin in a long marriage.

      Conservatives at this point: “Just give her everything she wants”, to which Counsel advises “I recommend against that, but if its what YOU really want…”

      At least in my story he might keep his old pickup and be able to go fishin between those two jobs he has to pay her for “a lifestyle she has grown accustomed to expect”. Our problem is worse. US “I want a divorce.” Them: “hahahaha. No.”

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    • KY, you’ve clearly got a head for figures. My guess is that we blew past the limit where we would ever pay our debt back during W’s prosecution of the Iraq War. I just can’t get that concerned at this point. Response?

      • I used to torment my liberal Mom by saying, “Why don’t we just send everyone a check for a million dollars and then everyone could be a millionaire?”

        At this point, I don’t think I could muster the engergy to object to such a proposal.

  26. I guess if the economy is strong, people wont complain too much about the social stuff. We can forgive the two sets of rules.

    • The economy is who we are. So yes, maintaining that illusion is essential. But there are two other problems. One is the economy that is real vs the Economy of the State. The other is fatigue.

      The high stonks, profits, fedgov manna and other metrics of the cloud can be “strong”. But joe sixpack just isn’t feelin it. Inflation is a big factor.

      But so is the spiritual death of work itself that comes as a result of decades of harvesting goodwill from productive workers while replacing those workers with cheaper invaders, retarded millennial girls, and diversity hires with fake credentials. And then twisting the knife by insulting legacy workers for not embracing third-world living standards that their parents avoided on just one “working-class” income.

      How many shit sammiches for lunch does it take before a good worker just phones it in? Or sandbags. Or sabotages. Or walks. Or all in sequence because now he needs to get a shot to do a job he no longer cares to tolerate.

      On another ‘dissident’ forum just this morning: I am tired of hearing about the border, but this vax stuff needs to stop!!

      The war on us has too many fronts. People who are awake to any of it are likely tired of all of it already and the real fight is yet to come.

      The question is coming up often now as to why they are forcing a reckoning among the badthinkers; turning the shit sammiches into a hill of shit to die on. I don’t know. But when working backward from the current year I find that “the social stuff” aka the culture war was a loss that is much greater than whatever economic shenanigans come next. We can re-build economies. Much harder to re-build who we are and our spiritual abundance.

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      • The vax stuff is nothing compared to the border. Sure, in the worst case of the vax stuff we end up with up with some people dying from the vax and electronic dossiers, but that’s nothing compared to 2 million foreigners per year. With the border and immigration, it’s been the worst case for most of my life.

        But the vax stuff is novel and more directly personal to people.

      • The war on us has too many fronts. ”

        THis is a good point. Its possible that a small drop in personal wealth/comfort could push normie over the edge.

  27. The best pencil is actually a mechanical. Staedtler, with a 2mm lead. It is the best because it is a drafting pencil – do you young ignernt wippersnappers know what drafting is?

    Get off my lawn you little chits!!!

    And have a good weekend.
    🙂

    • I agree. I thought I mentioned it, but I use mechanical pencils and I have a Staedtler with me always. Best eraser ever made. I do everything in pencil.

      • At my first programming job back in the 1980’s, the guy I worked for had a PhD in fluid dynamics. He used to write out all his instructions for me in pen (no email, internet, etc., back then). He said his memories from graduate school were so traumatic that he could no longer use pencils without having flashbacks.

      • Pencils make so much more sense. Up here in Canada we get -30C in the winter and they freeze. +30C in the summer and the friggin things explode in your pocket.

        I think you hit the nail on the head with our leaders though. Either we do something about them, or they are going to do something about us. Or to us.

        The only weak spot (maybe) in the lecture is the bit about how our leaders think they are going to magically change people into perfect communists. Like – sure, Bernie, that horse faced latina chick and the loonier element of the left are yapping about it and for sure, they are making political miles on it and no bones about it.

        But – the oligarchs. All these guys are business men and managers. A lot of them started out in the garage or out of their homes like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Zuckerface and the other usual suspects. They SHOULD understand something about human nature, I think? They should also understand commies to a certain degree…? Once our idiot rulers unleash that monster… a lot of those guys are gonna die along with us peons. Mao Tse Dung was ruthless with rich people, as was Stalin and pretty much every coloured tyrant in the Turd World. I simply cannot fathom what the reasoning process is with these guys or what is going through their heads.

        • It’s not communism it’s fascism, or corporatism as Mussolini called it. National Socialism, which has now morphed into Global Corporatism, will be very, very good to the so-called Captains of Industry.

          6
          1
        • It is inverted totalitarianism: the bankocracy controls the government.

          In fascism, the state controls the corporations.

          state = virtual person possessing sovereignty.
          government = apparatus which manages the state’s affairs.

      • I prefer my Frito Bandito eraser. Of course, using around the wrong person could result in the erasure of good ol’ Ostei, and that would be a terrible, terrible tragedy, indeed.

    • My first real job was as a draftsman. Had to make blueprint copies in a separate room as the chemicals used were terrible.

      Mechanical arm T-Square, three sided rule for converting sizes. Those were the days. Hunched over the board trying to make deadlines.

      I mooched an old board from my cousin who wound up buying the place. Put wheels on it and now it’s in one of my barns. I use it the old way, to lay out crop locations. Even designed the farmhouse I built.

      I can’t put a finger on it, but working over a board, the light shining down and thinking about the task at hand has a therapeutic effect for me. I think it may have to do with creating something merging with my hands.

      Sorry to drift off like that.

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    • I’m in my early 20’s and my high school actually had a 1 semester class in drafting. It was tough for me because I had to learn how to be neat and precise. The tools were outdated because of funding, but I enjoyed it. You had to pass the class before you could go and do computer-aided drafting.

      I think regular drafting vs computer-aided (Solidworks, Inventor) helps you understand what it is you are making better than just moving a house and stroking keys.

      Moving your hands across the paper is important for the brain

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    • When I was 20, I changed my major from philosophy to mathematics. Buying my first mechanical pencil was a rite of passage. I still love those devices.

    • Didn’t NASA spend over $1M to develop the space pen back in the 60s, whereas those dumb Russkies just used pencils?

        • Thanks for this. I figured they’d be made by a private company, but my point is it was financed by NASA. I tend to believe this because outside of NASA, I don’t see a viable commercial demand for something like this. I think i will buy one for the cool factor.

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