You’re explaining the situation quite well, but this is the result of our free trade policies. The only solution is obviously tariffs. That’s what made us strong and powerful, and precisely why every other country uses them against us. We can’t sit back and watch anymore as we rack up more trillion dollar deficits.

It seems our trade deficits have brought on such a precarious state (high debt, a powerful China, hollowed out middle class). Agree or disagree with the tariffs, we clearly need to reverse these trends & continuing to trade cheap consumer products for our productive assets back home doesn’t seem the way to do it.

“Oh you don’t have to be rich to not work, Peter. Take a look at my cousin. He’s broke, don’t do sh*t.”

Little Office Space humor 🙂

The super power Russia buys gas turbines from the 3rd world Iran and pays in raw materials.
No further comment needed.

Absolutely agree Rich. I think the fact that there is more than one mitochondrial lineage makes the argument that there is one common ancestor quite unlikely.

My Dad was a huge Raiders fan in the 70s when he was a Navy Captain, commander of support services at Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo CA. He compared the job to being the mayor of a city. The base had a football team that competed with football teams from other military installations. Your tax dollars at work, folks. Just before one game the Bay Area was hit by a huge rain storm. The football field was saturated, unplayable. My Dad, in the true spirit of Coach Madden, said “Hold my beer” and called whoever was in charge of the local Marine helicopter squadron. The pilots needed to have a certain number of flight hours each month, so Capt Smith ordered them to fly to the football field and hover over it. The field dried enough for the game to be played. Not sure who won, as if it mattered. A legend was created.

If I tried to identify as black and got caught, I’d be rightly mocked. So a man pretending to be a woman, even to the point of getting castrated and surgically split open to create a pegina, should be similarly mocked.

I bought a Kryptonite lock in 1978 after a thief clipped my ridiculous flimsy chain I had used to secure it to a sign post. Unbelievable but true: a security guard at the hospital where I worked caught the perp red handed and saved my bike.

I didn’t get into to Harvard but made it to the Harvard of the Midwest, Carleton. I dropped out junior year because it sucked there. They’re all about being Woke now, so they suck worse. 50th class reunion approaches and I won’t be going.

When I was an aspiring pre-med in the 1970s I encountered a black orthopedic surgeon named Daniel Gaither at the hospital where I did a summer externship. He was popular, successful and brilliant. Twenty years later he was killed by his estranged wife, who then committed suicide.

This why we can’t have nice things.

I guess I’m ignorant. I thought juries decided facts, not law. If the perp killed her, the judge imposes sentencing. How can first degree murder and manslaughter be a binary choice here?

I used an inheritance from my maternal grandparents to pay for a remodel and addition to my house. Does that mean I have to let a black family move in? Maybe Daunte Wright’s kid?

I’m interested in the Kim Potter trial because it’s in my backyard and another attempt to bury a cop who really screwed the pooch. How does a veteran of many years, one who trains and supervises, make the mistake of grabbing a Glock thinking it’s a taser? Maybe girl cops working in a woke environment are a bad idea. Ironically she was justified in shooting the perp for trying to drive off but said the wrong magic phrase when she capped him.

A PhD in counseling? Give me a break!

As a supporter of police it pains me to say this, but they aren’t your friends when it comes down to it. Have a lawyer present if they ask you to come downtown. Or answer a couple of basic questions and ask them if you are free to go. Then walk away. If arrested, for sure don’t give any statements without a lawyer present.

My pronouns are so forth and so on and what have you. Those aren’t pronouns you say? Well they identify as pronouns, so there you fascist!

A few years ago Minneapolis North High school was on the ropes, ready to close. No no no! It had do many good memories for the folks. So it remained open, lots of $$$ were spent. How did that work out?

Legalize all recreational drugs and the mid and low level drug peddlers will be out of work, plus they’ll still be committing crimes by selling on the street instead of a state regulated dispensary. The cartels will cut prices to get their men in business and killings for market share will continue, as will killings over being cheated or in the course of robbing dealers. So the white hipsters will have legal weed and the ghetto folk will keep dying.

Horse face. Sad.

Incest, thy time is approaching. Billionaire marries his granddaughter in order to evade inheritance tax.

Glad to learn leftists now think borders are important.

My colonoscopies were with “conscious sedation “ a cocktail of Fentanyl and Versed, meaning I was awake but retained no memory of events. The Fentanyl was an incredible high. I understand how people get hooked on it.

Antifwocky

With apologies to Lewis Carroll

‘Twas chillig, and the commie chodes
Did riot and arson in the nabe:
All flimsy were the LEO-toads,
And Kenosha outraged.

“Beware the Antifwock, my son!
The perps that lie, for you to catch!
Beware the Byecep bird, and shun
The slanderous Bingersnatch!”

He took his ARpal sword in hand;
Long time the manky foe did thwart—
So rested he by the dealeree
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Antifwock, that makes all flame,
Came rioting through Kenosha street,
And blustered as it came.

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The ARpal shaft went clicker-crack!
He left it dead, and kept his head
And went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Antifwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas chillig, and the commie chodes
Did riot and arson in the nabe:
All flimsy were the LEO-toads,
And Kenosha outraged.

I thought he was not guilty and that the prosecutor was inept but I had my doubts the jury would acquit based on the likelihood they will be targeted and worse. He’s not out of the woods yet. Jerry Nadler and other leftist freaks are talking about Federal charges plus there’s the risk of a wrongful death suit. He should collect a handsome settlement for defamation from various media outlets. Brandon can’t be sued, although he was merely a candidate when he opened his big yap.

Pointing a rifle at the gallery. Keeping it classy. Let’s get Alec Baldwin to play the ADA in the movie.

To paraphrase Ilhan Omar: some people had tailgate parties that got out of control. Climate change had a lot to do with it.

Of course if you have an open warrant or were merely showing your b***h your displeasure, by all means resist the police to the max, preferably with Obamaphone recording.

Covid “deaths” under President Brandon now exceed those under President Trump, despite all the vaccines. Maybe it’s time we realize COVID isn’t going away. Average age of the Covid dead is 82. Average age of shooting dead is maybe 20. Does that suggest anything?

Let me get this straight: it’s OK to give puberty blockers to young girls so they can look like boys, then perform sex organ mutilation to complete the process and tell society that gender is personal choice, but not OK to require athletes getting full ride scholarships at the premiere Division I track and field program in the USA to lower their body fat so they can win championships. Got it.

Charming girl. Those face tattoos are frosting on the cake. Looks great in orange too.

Graeber was a red diaper baby, so we may assume he was indoctrinated from day one. He also died from acute pancreatitis, an illness very common to alcoholics. Maybe that’s why he got the boot from Yale. He lived a rich life for a supposed anarchist. Inequality? In his every breath.

I think Rittenhouse has a much more clear cut case of self defense than the Georgia boys, although apparently Georgia had a law (since repealed) allowing citizens arrests. Still, they used pretty dubious means of attempting the arrest. Aubrey, not the brightest bulb on the tree, grabbed the shotgun and took a slug in his midsection. Kyle was chased and attacked, giving him the right to defend himself.

It’s fashionable to trash Big Pharma for pushing opiates but my recollection of practicing medicine in the 90s is that the medical Establishment invented the idea that we schlub doctors weren’t treating pain. We were very stingy about prescribing even Tylenol with codeine. Then pain became the Fourth Vital sign and we were supposed to never let patients suffer. That’s when the tsunami began to build. I never for a second believed the nonsense about OxyContin being non-addictive. Plenty of doctors closed their eyes and ears from that moment on.

Steve, are you going to review this or do I have to buy the book?

So now in the name of equity dance clubs should be forced to play “music” invented by and for people who are LITERALLY criminals!

Must mention The Human Stain by Phillip Roth, later a film starring Anthony Hopkins, which addresses passing and the origins of our Woke insanity. Also Pinky, 1949 film by Elia Kazan about a woman passing as white.

Do Canadian colleges and universities use standardized test scores anymore to admit students?

She looks exactly like you think she does.

Except the AMA has gone totally woke, so your doctor in ten years , if black, got into medical school with test scores and GPA a standard deviation lower than her white classmates.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Apparently Delphi reads iSteve.

I am looking for agents to help market my science fiction novel THE CHRONOKINE but having no success. Possible reasons: maybe it’s not good enough, it’s about time travel by a white college student, it’s critical of communism. Working on an alternate history about a Compton gangbanger who crosses paths with OJ Simpson the night his ex-wife is murdered.

The first hint of trouble came when the Navy put girl sailors on ships.

When Hollywood gets around to remaking Apollo 13, the three astronauts (Lovell, Haise, and Swigert) will be black, female and gay.

Matt Yglesias wrote ten years ago that urban crime was going down, despite his being randomly assaulted by a couple of thugs. Not a knockout game, you MAGA creeps! Wonder what he’s writing now?

Not directly related to the shooting but worth mentioning: Ramsey County Attorney just announced new policy of not stopping cars with expired plates, equipment violations and tinted glass. Giving a green light to thugs who wish to drive around armed. St Paul PD is already hamstrung. Bob Fletcher, the cop doing the voice over, is County Sheriff and very old school.

Next step: start moving all those tired works by white people to the basement, replace them with street graffiti, statues of George Floyd, free admission to all people of color.

I was thinking of writing down her name in case I have the misfortune being signed to her care but then i realized she will no doubt have a special practice exclusively devoted to queer women of color so I stopped worrying.

The Washington post article mentioned that Kizzy’s group hoped to have a vaccine ready by the middle of2021. How’d that work out? We have had a bunch since January,all from those nasty white men. Kizzy can keep focusing on her hair.

The recent spate of inserting blacks, interracial and gay couples into advertising certainly helps gay and nonwhite actors’employment chances. In the end it’s a virtual Potempkin village. It doesn’t reflect reality, it won’t change attitudes (If anything will harden them),and products will sell if they’re good, not because two lesbians made out on camera.

Glad to help. It grates terribly that Dr. Fauci gets such misplaced adulation when could not see this blindingly obvious, simple point about humidifiers.

It isn’t even in dispute. No scientist that examines the issue thinks that breathing dry air is good for this. But mostly the lowest hanging fruit just rots on the vine.

Dr. Fauci has seemingly never thought about how innate respiratory immunity- and especially so-called mucocilliary clearance – works. Innate immunity is the part of the immune system that protects against all invasion, as compared to adaptive immunity which is the development of specific antibodies.

Innate immunity is incredibly important because it is all you have until the body figures out how to make specific antibodies.

In addition to mucocilliary clearance moist air keeps the throat and lungs from drying out and developing fissures that are entry points for the virus.

Something Dr. Fauci has certainly never even thought about, in 40 years on the job. To me he is the greatest symbol of clown world of all.

Except that whites don’t live the longest. Hispanics live longer and so do Asians. In fact the gap of Hispanics over whites is larger than the gap of Whites over blacks:

African Americans: 75.54 years
White Americans: 79.12 years
Hispanic Americans: 82.89 years
Asian Americans: 86.67 years

https://www.thebalance.com/the-racial-life-expectancy-gap-in-the-u-s-4588898#:~:text=African%20Americans%3A%2075.54%20years,Asian%20Americans%3A%2086.67%20years

Our execrable overlords can’t be bothered to check the most basic facts.

That is a very interesting theory. Abuela is dying of COVID in Mexico City so you drop her off at the ER in LA? I don’t live near the border but I don’t think that border security is THAT weak.

I don’t know if this is a smoking gun, but it sure shows motive by one of the key decision makers, vaccine expert Paul Offit:

From Science Magazine back in May:

“Offit, who wrote a book about an infamous 1955 manufacturing accident of a polio vaccine that crippled hundreds of children, worries the impending U.S. presidential election is driving Warp Speed to set unrealistic deadlines. “The thing that really upsets me is I’m trying to think what’s the month after October? Oh, right, November,” Offit says. “I think the current administration may say, ‘This is our October surprise, this is this is my gift to this country, look what we did.’” Offit sits on a committee that is organizing COVID-19 vaccine trials in the United States—the National Institutes of Health’s public-private Accelerating COVID-19 Therapeutic Interventions and Vaccines—and says members were not consulted about BARDA’s investment or the proposed clinical trial. ”

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/doubts-greet-12-billion-bet-united-states-coronavirus-vaccine-october

So back in May we learn that “Offit sits on a committee that is organizing COVID-19 vaccine trials in the United States” and he is “really upset” that there could be a vaccine in October.

Ugh.

The vaccine results, which were slowed until after the election, are glorious: 100% effectiveness (!!!!) against severe disease.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/11/absolutely-remarkable-no-one-who-got-modernas-vaccine-trial-developed-severe-covid-19

“One must do better than to argue that Nazis were unpopular, not least because they weren’t.”

Well they are the most unpopular thing in the world in 2020. Which is why trying to use them boost a political movement is like trying to use a boulder as a floatie in the swimming pool. Surely it must be role-play and not genuine, because nobody would actually try to win like that. It is really interesting that this crew can remain perpetually in 1937, as if nobody knows yet how things will out.

AE, how common are these LARPers? Because you seem to have three commenting all at the same time, unless there are two sock puppets.

“The current mania for hunting down former clerk-typists and auto mechanics is only about a decade old.”

Nope. Bro, the project started in 1947. By 10 years ago it was already basically over because most of the people involved were already dead.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Historical_Documentation_Centre

“All except a few high-profile war criminals were left unmolested during the Cold War and for some years thereafter. ”

Nope.

“According to the centre, about 40,000 Nazis have been tried for war crimes since the end of the war, and most were found guilty.”

Are any of these people even able to read? How do they manage to inhale through the right opening?

” it won’t change the fact that for every German killed, roughly 3 Soviets, 2 Brits and 1.8 American soldiers had to die.”

I am afraid I will get dumber just by interacting with you, but here goes:

The Wehrmacht had 4.5 million military casualties to America’s 400 thousand. Your ability to do basic arithmetic is much less than what my eight year old could do when she was six.

Germany succeeded in getting their cities firebombed and their country flattened. Germany never touched US, and became an American charity case after the war.

Ever since the war people have made a hobby of locating old former Nazis in hiding and putting them on trial, to humiliate and kick them around some more. Such winning.

Everyone idolizes the Nazis? Your social circle must consist mainly of Internet ‘friends’ if you think that, because this is what, 2% of the population? One suspects your dear Internet friends are Feds.

Was Biden about a welfare check so Spencer doesn’t have to depend on his mommy?

Hey genius, you can’t get much welfare when Biden needs to take care of 11 million amnestied illegals.

“The above comment would be true if the vaccines were %100 percent effective. But they’re not, they’re only 90% effective. I can still get sick even if I take the vaccine.”

If you get sick of COVID after the vaccine, it will be a very mild case. In the trials, none of the severe cases of COVID were in the vaccinated group. In that sense, the ‘ineffective’ 10% group may actually have life saving partial immunity.

I am completely against forced vaccinations. People are legally allowed to get euthanized and do cocaine and heroin in Oregon, but you have to get vaccinated? GTFO

And it is also impractical. If 40% of the population doesn’t want it, what is the plan to round up 130 million people? We couldn’t even achieve contact tracing in the US.

Actually, the comment was spot-on. The Nazis were the biggest failures — achieving the exact opposite of what they wanted.

And NeoNazi LARPers F-‘ed up Trump’s presidency too. Because of their retarded role-playing in Charlottesville in 2017, Trump spent the rest of his Presidency playing defense on race.

The media was looking for a comical villain to smear Trump with and the LARPers played the part perfectly. The media smeared Trump with those LARPers right up through the 2020 debates, damaging him badly for the election.

Did these LARPers hand Biden the win? Trump could never shake their stench. And to boot, retard-in-chief Richard Spencer backed Biden, and I assume his 2-digit-IQ followers did the same.

I expect Jeffrey Toobin will sign on as executive producer.

I agree with this.

One interesting aspect is that social media magnifies the violence, making it seems worse than it is. The left couldn’t get very far with their destruction before they started looking really bad.

When MLK was assassinated 50 years ago, the centers (many blocks) of maybe 100 cities were burned.

So the destruction then was orders of magnitude larger what it was during the summer of 2020. Unless you are a fan of Confederate and Christopher Columbus statues. Among Confederate and Christopher Columbus statues the losses were staggering nationwide.

“Yet dumbass Trump voters want to end the shutdown.”

Trump voters aren’t interesting in wrecking the country to hurt their political opponents.

Gold is up about 20% in the last year which is substantial but given all that has happened, I am surprised it isn’t more. CPI is up just 1.4% year-over-year.

The DXY is down about 5% year over year, but it seems to be squarely in the middle of its 30 year average.

I agree with you, AE, that we are seeing some alarming things but the dollar has been on a slow, controlled burn for the last 100 years. We’ve had a slow inflation for generations. US GDP is down 4% y/y but Europe is down closer to 10% y/y. I am not seeing shortages of things or spikes in prices. Where food spiked a bit earlier in the year, it seems to have settled back down.

The economy is a crap sandwich for many and a few giga-companies have most of the profits. But some would argue that this is a good thing. If tons of people are working very hard for crap wages doesn’t that help the empire?

People need help and they aren’t getting it. Isn’t that great for the national bottom line?

You talk about how the Fed is conjuring out of thin air — and if that worked, why don’t they just do that endlessly. Well they aren’t doing it endlessly. It seems gold went to $2000, they stopped printing, and it settled back down to $1900.

I mean, are we really trashing the dollar worse than we always have, a little bit at a time, over the last 100 years?

Biden is campaigning on a big tax INCREASE, right? I hate Biden because he slurs heritage America with every sentence and he is apparently up to his eyeballs in pay-for-play corruption but that sounds like fiscal responsibility. Clinton actually got to a surplus with tax increases.

Maybe Democrats are better positioned to deliver austerity because they control the narrative. Trump is tap dancing as fast as he can for blacks and for what? Dems can deliver a shit sandwich of austerity for blacks and the poor and have the media sell it. Trump has actually delivered pay increases and low unemployment and for what?

Trump deserves enormous credit on the economy.

How in the F do you ‘shut down’ the economy including all tourism, international travel, entertainment, restaurants and most gatherings of any kind and still end up down only 4% on the economy?

I and our gracious blog host both expected collapse conditions, such as -40% GDP or something and unimaginable disruption. Through a large but limited amount of money-printing to ward off a deflationary spiral and a herculean amount of hopeful bullshit, Trump has managed to talk up the economy back to nearly where it was. Animal spirits are central to the economy and Trump blew his wad of animal spirits into a hopeless America and perked her right now.

Does anyone think Joe Biden can do the same?

It is a miracle that a substantial share of the country considers their economic situation better than a year ago.

I think a word on Bill Gates is order because if wokeism is a secret elite plan for power then surely Bill Gates is in on it.

But let’s not build Gates up to be some kind of god. He started a company that makes operating systems and they became the monopoly standard. If you own the only port in the world, it is impossible not to be rich. Given that most computers in the world run Windows, maybe he would even be a trillionaire if he were a better businessman. Gates stepped down as CEO 14 years ago. He hasn’t been in charge in ages.

Look at John McAfee. Software tycoon and crazy kook.

We think this all must be part of Bill Gates’ plan because he is so rich that he must have it all figured out. But a gigantic share of Gates’ success is simple luck and the fact that the world needs one computer operating system and Windows became it.

My sense is that Gates is an aspergery genius who doesn’t understand the social connections most people rely on. He also has a messiah complex because he got so incredibly lucky in life. But he pushed world lockdown that crushed social structures (something he doesn’t understand as an aspergery guy) and did NOT stop the virus.

It fact I think Bill Gates’ aspergery nature makes him insensitive to the damage of the left because it is in the social sphere where he is a dunce.

So no, I don’t think all of what we are seeing is an elite plan. In chaos people look hard for patterns that may not be real.

An incredibly rich post.

I strongly disagree that wokeism is either intentional or a great plan for elite power.

1 – Social trust is central to high GDP countries. Wokeism ruins that. Civic Nationalism, often derided in places like this blog, is actually sensible if social trust and GDP maximization is your goal. Wokeism is taking a dump in the civnat pool.

2 – The woke activists have repeatedly set up a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos’ house in DC. 4D chess, amirite?

Elon Musk, who is basically the smart set’s only viable hope for a green future and a space future, has been at the edge of cancellation this year and he had to dare California to arrest him simply for keeping Tesla operating.

The thinking that all this chaos is part of an elite plan is not unlike the QAnon belief that Trump would suddenly arrest 10,000 evil deep staters any day now.

Sometimes chaos is just chaos.

3 – A depressed population, ground down by leftist ideology, doesn’t make good soil for prosperity. The 20th century was a continuous proof of that.

I think the real situation is that elites narrowly protected things in a certain economic domain, and the leftist onslaught was less contested in the social sphere because it was indirect. But low birthrates, low social trust, demonization of white men and loss of the social capital once provided by churches will drag down the world of the elites in the end.

The idea that Biden would govern from the center is absurd.

(1) The ‘center’ is very far to the left, so even if Biden operated as a centrist, the definition of ‘centrism’ for Democrats in America today is really left wing extremism.

* You literally cannot call out transgenderism on Twitter as the fiction it is without losing your right to speak forever.

* Free speech is stone-cold dead for the center of the Democrat party. They are happy with all of the censorship of conservatives, and from big tech particularly. You can search “Surprise, Surprise: FBI Can’t Find Any Evidence Althea Bernstein Was Racistly Set on Fire by Four Classic Wisconsin Fraternity Boys” — the long and specific title of a recent iSteve blog post, and this blog does not even come up.

* California, which is our biggest state, is literally working on slavery reparations even though no former slaves or slaveholders have been alive for generations. If Republicans aren’t around to block stuff, that is where they are.

* Biden can’t stop talking about white nationalism, which is a really far-left talking point.

* He said he won’t support borders. That is extremely far to the left.

These are not reasonable people.

(2) The left is in a state of complete lunacy now. These are not reasonable people at all.

* They are willing to shut down schools and the economy essentially without limit for a virus that has proven to be not incredibly dangerous. It turns out that ‘shutting the economy’ gives us a loss in GDP of just 5% if numbers are to be believed (frankly it seems like things must be far worse than the numbers suggest) but who knew what would happen. Shutting down endlessly very well could have shattered the system with loss of 50% of GDP right now. Essentially they have been shooting at the head of system with live fire now and we have seen just a surface wound but the fact that we got lucky doesn’t mean they aren’t lunatics. They just tried to kill the system.

Elon Musk, the number one innovator in the world by a large margin, had play a game of chicken and invite them to arrest him personally. They declined, but it wasn’t obvious how it would play out.

* Their narrative during the Trump era has been one insanity after another.
– White nationalism as the threat to the system is so visibly absurd.
– The police as the enemy? That is madness.
– Russia controlling our elections? Again, not at all reasonable, yet Russia collusion nonsense ran for 3 years
– Literally cancelling and deleting voices on YouTube advocating against shutdown.

In each of these situations reasonable voices hardly emerged from the left. The left has deeply harmed cities, universities and schools and left-wing states most of all with their shutdowns and leftists have not intervened. Crime soars in left-wing cities and they don’t stop it. Their constituents and voters, poor and minorities, were the ones most wrecked by lockdowns and they were totally okay with it.

These are not reasonable people.

The idea that the pendulum just has to swing back may be true but not in the short run. The Soviet Union had a dumb system endlessly until all the ruin in the nation was used up. Venezuela has lost perhaps 1/3 of its population in a few short years and yet still it proceeds.

The left will not be stopped by sensibility. They never are. They will only be stopped when the system starts to break. And even then, there is no guarantee that reasonableness will emerge.

“It’s not economic collapse we’re predicting here, it’s the unraveling of the international credit system and an increase in consumer prices. It’s not the same thing and if the Fed stopped pushing for monetary stimulus, it would happen today. ”

AE — I think an argument can be made that the reverse is true: If the Fed stopped stimulating, prices might significantly fall. This is a real risk that I think you discount. With inflation breathing down one’s back, one is forced to run harder. You can’t put your money in a mattress and are forced to do something. That is a good thing, mostly. Deflationary depressions seem to be particularly bad. Money is the lubricant for the economy and when everyone hides their money in fear, mutually beneficial transactions do not happen. You have capable and talented people and businesses that simply do not do their thing because the money isn’t there to pay them.

During the great Depression you had crops rotting in the field while farmers went bankrupt. Farms went to banks who didn’t operate them. Meanwhile people went hungry across America. The credit collapse sucked the money out of the system and productive people had no way to transact.

Oil prices earlier in the year went to zero. If they had been allowed to stay there, oil producers would have had no ability or incentive to produce and soon the whole economy would have ground to a halt and there would have been no food (which is largely produced by oil) or products in stores delivered by oil, or utilities.

The Fed’s extraordinary stimulus prevented a seize-up. This is why gold-as-money doesn’t work very well. It doesn’t move easily and money as lubricant must flow easily. In a crisis gold-money can disappear as it is held in fear, and then there is little money to transact with and real economic activity plummets.

Inflation and money is way too complex for me to understand. I got a 1600 on my SAT in 1995 and I can’t begin to understand it.

And so I must follow the data. Following the data is the way through. It is the mantra of this blog on all other topics besides money.

The Fed follows the data humbly and that is a very good thing, because this is way beyond them and most of us.

After seemingly large stimulus, the 12 month change in consumer prices is 0.4%, so the stimulus was, if anything, a bit conservative.

https://www.bls.gov/cpi/

In food, the most inflationary category, it is 4.1% and in energy it is -9.0%.

I cannot claim to understand things at their bottom — I can only look at the data. We don’t have inflation right now.

If terrible inflation comes next year or five years from now we will know it, but that is a problem for another day. Between now and a year from now, my family has to eat thousands and thousands of meals and use a huge amount of energy to survive. A full-on deflationary collapse is not something most people can get to the other side of. If that happened and we went from 1% producing all the food in extreme abundance to everyone doing a crap job of trying to grow 5 calories in their garden, not only would we all go hungry but all of the things people are actually skilled at would not get done.

Some say the future is 1984 or Brave New World.

Who would have guessed that Scooby-Doo had it all along?

And even more so going forward with facial recognition.

“Domestically, at least Trump didn’t screw the economy up, but I’d not praise him for heedless federal spending.”

I’d give him an 8/10 for 2017-2019.

I would give him a 25/10 for 2020.

I mean how the F do you shut down the economy (which is what the Democrats did) and end up down only 4% at the end of the day. Every other country did much worse. He had to talk up the economy like crazy while mere mortals like myself lost hope. He had to stimulate as money velocity collapsed.

Home improvement and tech have been booming to partly make up for the loss of hospitality and leisure. Industry seems to be generally continuing.

And there isn’t much inflation either.

That is about five orders of magnitude above expectations.

Trump has been outstanding on a macro scale:

– Amazingly pacifist
– Steers the economy far better than can be hoped for
– Inspires and talks up the economy in a way that avoids deep recessions
– Endures extreme attack like nobody else could
– Actually tries hard at fairness and civic nationalism
– Represents faith and the hope, forgiveness and optimism that goes with it

And the opposition is horrific:

– lifting up criminals over the law abiding
– favors the insanity of endless lockdowns
– is intellectually dead, embracing censorship broadly and deeply while engaging in primitive groupthink centering around bland politically correct nonsense
– does not favor excellence but rather a victim heirarchy
– is mostly atheistic, which is ultimately nihilistic

America could really use a miracle right now. I’ll be praying.

It is a damn shame that America doesn’t really get a fair shot to choose its future, with Chris Wallace shitting on the process.

But maybe when the left takes charge and we all get clubbed over and over on the skull by the Gods of the Copybook Headings, we will gradually learn. The Gods of the Copybook Headings can beat us relentlessly without getting tired. The left laughably thinks Donald Trump is their opponent.

As I have said in the past, the left’s great failure is that it thinks its enemy is Trump and conservatives.

This is wrong. Its enemy is reality.

* “Gay marriage” will forever be empty nonsense, biologically speaking.

* “Transgender” stuff will forever be empty nonsense, in the realm of reality.

* Feminist ’empowerment’ that leaves women childless simply doesn’t work.

* Socialism doesn’t work. It never has.

* You can ‘solve’ racism endlessly, but groups that couldn’t innovate or invent won’t suddenly start doing so. You would only replace competent with incompetent until it all falls apart.

* If you shut down fossil fuels your economy will be monkeyhammered.

* Crime won’t go away if you keep blaming phantom racists who aren’t committing the crime while allowing actual criminals to go free.

* If you destroy trust, you won’t have enough cooperation for an economy. Without law and order people retreat to primitive systems and the economy loses its power.

* If you replace Europeans with third world immigrants, you will become like the third world.

* If you can’t tolerate free speech you will be ignorant because your wrong ideas won’t be corrected.

* If an organization gets too woke, it fails at its core competencies because you can only have one primary mission.

* The left’s victory must be a pyrrhic one, because their ideas are all wrong. The intellectual collapse of the left was reflected in the response to the pandemic. Shutting everything down was positively insane, and the fact that the left wanted to do that shows they are lunatics. 2020 showed that the left will not self-correct but will crash.

This is all incredibly painful to go through, but nature bats last and she bats 1000. The Gods of the Copybook Headings will not be denied.

At least Trump has made his stand. Now if there is decline (I mean real CIVILIZATIONAL DECLINE), I think the left owns it lock stock and barrel.

The questions are biased and loaded to set up attacks against Trump but where Wallace really crosses the line is where he rejects Trump’s answers and follows up on the attack:

– Regarding healthcare and a plan to replace Obamacare

– Regarding climate change and ‘belief in science’

– Regarding the advice of experts on COVID vaccine

– Regarding critical race theory banning as banning ‘racial sensitivity’

– Regarding race and condemning ‘white nationalists’

– Regarding spreading COVID at rallies

– Regarding Trump’s taxes and how much Trump paid in a particular year

It was bad enough that Wallace devised ‘questions’ that were in fact sharp attacks on Trump.

But in every one of these cases, Wallace snapped back at Trump AFTER Trump answered to try to drive home the attack. So not only did Wallace come up with ‘questions’ to make Trump look bad, Wallace wouldn’t let go even after Trump answered well, generally trying to hit Trump again.

Here are Wallace’s ‘questions’ — this is all Wallace here:

“President Trump, you nominated Amy Coney Barrett over the weekend to succeed the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Court. You say the Constitution is clear about your obligation and the Senate’s to consider a nominee to the Court. Vice President Biden, you say that this is an effort by the President and Republicans to jam through on an appointment in what you call an abuse of power. My first question to both of you tonight, why are you right in the argument you make and your opponent wrong? And where do you think a Justice Barrett would take the court? ”

“Mr. President, the Supreme Court will hear a case a week after the election in which the Trump Administration, along with 18 state Attorney Generals are seeking to overturn Obamacare, to end Obamacare.”

“Over the last four years, you have promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, but you have never in these four years come up with a plan, a comprehensive plan, to replace Obamacare.”

“That’s not a comprehensive plan.”

“You, in the course of these four years, have never come up with a comprehensive plan to replace Obamacare, and just this last Thursday you signed a largely symbolic Executive Order to protect people with pre-existing conditions five days before this debate. So my question, sir, is what is the Trump healthcare plan?”

“What about pre-existing conditions?”

To Biden: “Sir, you’ll be happy. I’m about to pick up on one of your points to ask the Vice President, which is, he points out that you would like to add a public option to Obamacare.”

“Mr. Vice President, if Senate Republicans, we were talking originally about the Supreme Court here, if Senate Republicans go ahead and confirm Justice Barrett there has been talk about ending the filibuster or even packing the court, adding to the nine justices there. You call this a distraction by the President. But, in fact, it wasn’t brought up by the President. It was brought up by some of your Democratic colleagues in the Congress. So my question to you is, you have refused in the past to talk about it, are you willing to tell the American tonight whether or not you will support either ending the filibuster or packing the court?”

Biden refuses to answer and Wallace does not push it. Trump tries to get an answer and is cut off by Wallace.

“All right, the second subject is COVID-19, which is an awfully serious subject. So let’s try to be serious about it. We have had more than seven million cases of coronavirus in the United States and more than 200,000 people have died. Even after we produce a vaccine, experts say that it could be months or even years before we come back to anything approaching normal. My question for both of you is, based on what you have said and done so far, and what you have said you would do starting in 2021, why should the American people trust you more than your opponent to deal with this public health crisis going forward? In this case, the question goes to you first, sir. Two minutes, uninterrupted.”

“Okay, gentlemen, gentlemen. Let me move on to questions about the future because you both have touched on two of the questions I’m going to ask. Focusing on the future first, President Trump, you have repeatedly either contradicted or been at odds with some of your governments own top scientists. The week before last, the Head of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Redfield said it would be summer before the vaccine would become generally available to the public. You said that he was confused and mistaken. Those were your two words. But Dr. Slaoui, the head of your Operation Warp Speed, has said exactly the same thing. Are they both wrong?”

“I want to pick up on this question though. You say the public can trust the scientists, but they can’t trust President Trump. In fact, you said that again tonight. Your running mate, Senator Harris, goes further, saying that public health experts quote, “Will be muzzled, will be suppressed.” Given the fact that polls already show that people are concerned about the vaccine and are reluctant to take it, are you and your running mate, Senator Harris, contributing to that fear?”

“Okay. When it comes to how the virus has been handled so far, the two of you have taken very different approaches, and this is going to affect how the virus is handled going forward by whichever of you ends up becoming the next president. I want to quickly go through several of those. Reopenings. Vice President Biden, you have been much more reluctant than President Trump about reopening the economy and schools. Why, sir?”

“President Trump, you have begun to increasingly question the effectiveness of masks as a disease preventer. And in fact, recently you have cited the issue of waiters touching their masks and touching plates. Are you questioning the efficacy of masks?”

“I want to ask you both about one last subject because your different approaches has even affected the way that you have campaigned. President Trump, you’re holding large rallies with crowds packed together, thousands of people.”

“But are not worried about us spreading disease?”

“Are you not worried about the disease issues, sir?”

“The Federal Reserve says the hit to growth, which is going to be there, is not going to be nearly as big as they had expected. President Trump, you say we are in a V-shaped recovery. Vice President Biden, you say it’s more of a K-shape. What difference does that mean to the American people in terms of the economy? President Trump, in this segment you go first.”

“Gentlemen, we’re going to get to your economic plans going forward in a moment, but first, Mr. President, as you well know, there’s a new report that in 2016, the year you were elected president, and 2017, your first year as president, that you paid $750 a year in federal income tax each of those years. I know that you pay a lot of other taxes, but I’m asking you this specific question. Is it true that you paid $750 in federal income taxes each of those two years?”

“Sir, I’m asking you a specific question, which is-”

“No, Mr. President, I’m asking you a question. Will you tell us how much you paid in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017?”

“… if you were to be elected president focuses a lot on big government, big taxes, big spending. I want to focus first on the taxes. You propose more than $4 trillion over a decade in new taxes on individuals making more than $400,000 a year and on corporations. President Trump says that that kind of an increase in taxes is going to hurt the economy as it’s just coming out of a recession.”

“Mr. President, let me pick up on that. You would continue your free market approach, lower taxes, more deregulation, correct?”

“You talk about the economy booming. It turns out that in Obama’s final three years as president more jobs were created, a million and a half more jobs, than in the first three years of your presidency.”

“The issue of race. Vice-President Biden, you say that President Trump’s response to the violence in Charlottesville three years ago, when he talked about very fine people on both sides, was what directly led you to launch this run for president.”

“My question for the two of you, is why should voters trust you rather than your opponent to deal with the race issues facing this country over the next four years? Vice President Biden, you go first.”

“All right. I want to return to the question of race. Vice President Biden, after the grand jury in the Breonna Taylor case decided not to charge any of the police with homicide, you said it raises the question, “Whether justice could be equally applied in America.” Do you believe that there is a separate but unequal system of justice for Blacks in this country?”

“This month, your administration directed federal agencies to end racial sensitivity training that addresses white privilege or critical race theory. Why did you decide to do that, to end racial sensitivity training? And do you believe that there is systemic racism in this country, sir?”

“What is radical about racial sensitivity training?”

“That’s exactly my question. There has been a dramatic increase in homicides in America this summer particularly, and you often blame that on democratic mayors and democratic governors. But in fact, there have been equivalent spikes in Republican led cities, like Tulsa and Fort Worth. So the question is, is this really a…”

“I do want to talk about this issue of law and order though. And in the joint recommendation that came from the Biden-Bernie Sanders task force, you talked about quote re-imagining policing. First of all, what does re-imagining policing mean and do you support? If I might finish the question, what does re-imagining policing mean and do you support the Black Lives Matter call for community control of policing?”

“And I want to get to another subject, which is the issue of protests in many cities that have turned violent in Portland, Oregon, especially we had more than a 100 straight days of protests, which I think you would agree, you talk about peaceful protests. Many of those turned into riots. Mr. Vice-president you say that people who commit crimes should be held accountable. The question I have though is as the democratic nominee, and earlier tonight, you said that you are the Democratic Party right now, have you ever called the Democratic Mayor of Portland or the Democratic Governor of Oregon and said, “Hey, you got to stop this, bring in the National Guard, do whatever it takes, but you’d stop the days and months of violence in Portland.””

“Excuse me, sir. You had never called for the leaders in Portland and in Oregon to call and bring in the National Guard and knock off a 100 days of riots.”

“You have repeatedly criticized the vice president for not specifically calling out Antifa and other left wing extremist groups. But are you willing tonight to condemn white supremacists and militia group and to say that they need to stand down and not add to the violence in a number of these cities as we saw in Kenosha and as we’ve seen in Portland.”

Trump: “What do you want to call them? Give me a name, give me a name, go ahead who do you want me to condemn.”

“White supremacist and right-wing militia.”

“When the president seeks a second term, it is generally a referendum on his record but vice president Biden, you’d like to quote one of your dad’s sayings, which is don’t compare me to the almighty, compare me to the alternative. And in this case sir you are the alternative. Looking at both of your records, I’m going to ask each of you. Why should voters elect you president over your opponent in this segment, President Trump you’ll go first, two minutes.”

“The forest fires in the West are raging now. They have burned millions of acres. They have displaced hundreds of thousands of people. When state officials there blamed the fires on climate change. Mr. President, you said, I don’t think the science knows. Over your four years, you have pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accord. You have rolled back a number of Obama Environmental records, what do you believe about the science of climate change and what will you do in the next four years to confront it?”

“But sir if you believe in the science of climate change, why have you rolled back the Obama Clean Power Plan which limited carbon emissions and power plants? Why have you relaxed…?”

“All right, Vice president Biden. I’d like you to respond to the president’s climate change record but I also want to ask you about a concern. You propose $2 trillion in green jobs. You talk about new limits, not abolishing, but new limits on fracking. Ending the use of fossil fuels to generate electricity by 2035 and zero none admission of greenhouse gases by 2050. The president says a lot of these things would tank the economy and cost millions of jobs.”

“What about the argument that President Trump basically says, that you have to balance environmental interests and economic interests? And he’s drawn his line.”

“Wait a minute, sir. I actually have studied your plan, and it includes upgrading 4 million buildings, weatherizing 2 million homes over four years, building one and a half million energy efficient homes. So the question becomes, the president is saying, I think some people who support the president would say, that sounds like it’s going to cost a lot of money and hurt the economy.”

“All right, gentlemen, final segment, election integrity. As we meet tonight, millions of Americans are receiving mail-in ballots or going to vote early. How confident should we be that this will be a fair election, and what are you prepared to do over the next five plus weeks? Because it will not only be to election day, but also counting some mail-in ballots after election day. What are you prepared to do to reassure the American people that the next president will be the legitimate winner of this election. In this final segment, Mr. Vice President, you go first.”

“You’re going to be able to continue. You have been charging for months that mail-in balloting is going to be a disaster. You say it’s rigged [crosstalk 00:01:04:11], that it’s going to lead to fraud. But in 2018, in the last midterm election, 31 million people voted mail-in voting. That was more than a quarter of all the voters that year, cast their ballots by mail. Now that millions of mail-in ballots have gone out, what are you going to do about it? And are you counting on the Supreme Court, including a Justice Barrett, to settle any dispute?”

“No. Excuse me. Vice President Biden, the biggest problem, in fact, over the years with mail-in voting has not been fraud, historically. It has been that sizable numbers, sometimes hundreds of thousands of ballots are thrown out because they have not been properly filled out, or there is some other irregularity, or they missed [crosstalk 01:06:28] the deadline. So the question I have is, are you concerned that the Supreme Court with a Justice Barrett will settle any dispute?”

“We can keep talking. In eight states, [crosstalk 01:07:27] election workers are prohibited, currently by law, eight states, from even beginning to process ballots, even take them out of the envelopes and flatten them until election day. That means that it’s likely, because there’s going to be a huge increase in mail-in balloting, that we are not going to know on election night who the winner is, that it could be days. It could be weeks until we find out who the new president is. First for you, sir. Finally, for the vice president, and I hope neither of you will interrupt the other. Will you urge your supporters to stay calm during this extended period, not to engage in any civil unrest? And will you pledge tonight that you will not declare victory until the election has been independently certified?”

The thing that has alarmed me most is the sense that the left isn’t intelligently dominating but is instead dragging us along with their madness.

Look at the ways they hurt themselves:

– The rapid decline of cities in 2020
– The shuttering of public schools and universities
– transgender stuff specifically makes a mess of transgender people
– mass immigration breaks the budgets of leftist districts and wreaks their social programs
– sports is the biggest showcase of blacks and integration — this is wreaked with racial and political messages

This blog has been more accurate most of the time and especially on social science topics than virtually anything else in the whole universe of scholarship by following the data remorselessly, shining light after brutal light.

On economic topics, there has been a focus on narrative and less focus on data, which is different from the rest of the blog, and accuracy on economic topics has suffered.

I agree that it doesn’t feel right that the US exports so much less than it imports. The deficit spending seems wrong.

And yet the data are what they are. Inflation is low. Beef prices are up but chicken is down. Milk is about the same. Gasoline is steady. My grocery bills are actually down because I got scared about the economy and started shopping at Aldi’s.

AE — you are brilliant, but I believe the data needs to lead.

Regarding the seemingly strange dollar strength, I think the story of the two friends encountering the bear is relevant.

“Why are you lacing up your shoes, you can’t outrun a bear.”

“I don’t have to, I just have to outrun you.”

US companies seem to be gaining global market share, especially in software and Internet, which is apparently much more profitable than physical things — because they are quasi-monopolies while things are commoditized.

That Mark Zuckerberg’s company should be worth more than Exxon Mobile plus GE plus all the airlines plus all the car companies and more seems like rot.

F this gay world as Heartiste would say.

Point is, I am no Libertarian.

I hate that the US is apparently largely an ad agency and tollbooth owner. It feels like we are a nation of grifters.

Facebook has 2.5 billion active users. Control of the Internet and the ability to extract profit from the globe through that seems less honorable than making physical things, but the money is very, very real.

Microsoft, worth far more even than Facebook, is the computer platform of the world and they have a product that everyone must have that has a marginal cost of exactly nothing at all.

The economy is ugly as hell, but that is why it is ever more important to follow the data.

Just because it looks vomitously disgusting, doesn’t mean it doesn’t work.

On social matters, the AE blog laps the combined power of all the sociology departments in America simply by looking at the data while everyone else is grossed out.

I suggest on econ matters, this blog could use a little more data.

It is hateful that our tech overlords are immensely profitable with quasi-monopolies but that is the world we live in. They are the economic centers of America. Yuck. And they don’t seem to be crumbling.

Inflation is currently subdued.

https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/current-inflation-rates/

https://www.multpl.com/inflation/table/by-month

The giant bolus of stimulus during the spring wasn’t followed by many more. The fed flooded the market but then stopped.

Gold remains stuck below $2000 as if that is a ceiling that the Fed is actively creating.

I do believe that the Fed can control inflation to a reasonable extent. I mean, they are. The powers that be do NOT want to blow up the system.

Slightly off-topic but quite important I think:

Steve, several months ago, you used Manaus as evidence against the notion that humidity protects against COVID. Well things in Manaus are looking very, very good. The death rates from COVID were far less than anticipated. Humidity is possibly the best way to reduce the COVID case fatality rate and Manaus does not refute this. Manaus did fairly well in the final accounting.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/the_americas/brazil-coronavirus-manaus-herd-immunity/2020/08/23/0eccda40-d80e-11ea-930e-d88518c57dcc_story.html

“The human destruction in the Brazilian city of Manaus would be “catastrophic,” physician Geraldo Felipe Barbosa feared.

But then, unexpectedly, it started to let up ­— without the interventions seen elsewhere.

These neighbors were hospitalized with coronavirus. Their vastly different journeys show the depths of Brazil’s rich-poor divide.

Hospitalizations of coronavirus patients plummeted in the state from a peak of more than 1,300 in May to fewer than 300 in August. Excess deaths in Manaus fell from around 120 per day to practically zero. The city closed its field hospital.

In a country devastated by the novel coronavirus, where more than 3.6 million people have been infected and over 114,000 killed, the reversal has stunned front-line doctors. Manaus never imposed a lockdown or other strict containment measures employed successfully in Asia and Europe. And what policies did exist, many people ignored.”

The one strong point in favor of masks is that they let people open up again. The psycho left wanted to shut the economy down. Bill Gates talked about shutting the economy down **for years**!

When the pandemic came many tradesmen did not miss a day of work, popping on a mask and then continuing on their way. It would be great if all those woke NBA players wore masks while they play, you know, to be a good example to us all.

Unemployment is 8.4%. This is astonishing considering the economy was shut down the way it was.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/unemployment-rate-unexpedctedly-tumbles-august-payrolls-come-line

My view has come to be that the left is a rabid dog that always needs something to bite. Masks are better than lockdowns, which are insane tyranny.

The left will push destructively one way or another. Railing against climate change was actually good because people can shake their fist at the weather harmlessly and the weather won’t get ruined as a result. I much prefer that to the current fad of “actively promote crime.” I’d love to get the focus back on climate change because the rabid left can chew on that all day long without breaking the system.

AE, you are great but…

It isn’t good to be defeatist or act like it is over. Even with demographics it isn’t over.

The answer is simply work hard and have a bunch of kids. Have a ‘Great Depression’ mentality with your budget, even if you have a great job and bring in good money, and things will be financially fine.

I know at least half a dozen pro-life Catholic families that are high functioning, well-educated and have 9 to 11 well-behaved kids. You can totally support that many kids to a decent level in the suburbs on just a $100,000 income if you have a depression mindset. The older kids help with childcare, cooking and mowing the grass and you do local recreation instead of trips to Europe and skiing. You shop at Aldi’s or Costco. Grandparents help with the kids.

In fact 9 to 11 kids is a natural number of kids to have if a woman is married by 25 and doesn’t practice birth control.

My wife has only given me six descendants so far, but we didn’t marry very young and that includes quite a bit of birth control over the years. I am fairly selfish but it isn’t crushingly hard. At the end of the day the number may be 7 or 8.

America had a *sustained* fertility of 7 kids per woman for around the first 200 years of its history.

What are some aspects of high fertility?
– Religiosity
– A genuine pro-life attitude
– Don’t play the scene until you are 38 years old. Just court with a vision of marriage. If you have a rule that sex is supposed to be within marriage, you won’t goof off and waste your youth and neither will she
– Don’t waste your life with video games or idolizing other men playing sports.
– The man has to find a decent career and work hard to make money. The woman can’t put career above family.

If you don’t have any kids, you will **need** immigrants to wipe your ass when you are Joe Biden’s age. Trust me, that is a job that only your own kids and immigrants will do.

You are charming, trying to get polite commenters banned.

No sock puppetry, no name change, just shortened full name for privacy. I notice you aren’t using a real name at all.

JSOM — MD is my state, genius. You haven’t made any argument. I comment here hoping for people not so far beneath my level. It is hit and miss. In any case, the seasonality will come back around soon enough.

California, Texas, Florida, Georgia, Arizona and Louisiana are probably in great shape going forward. Mild climates lack the seasonality in respiratory illness of places with serious winters. Worldwide, Brazil and Mexico should be good going forward. In such places, locals likely have less natural immunity compared to people in cold climates to seasonal respiratory ailments and summer offers no special improvement in respiratory health so they have had to face Covid without respite. Yet with the benefit of continuous humidity, their final death rates will be lower than colder climates.

Meanwhile, New England, the mid-Atlantic, the Midwest and the northern tier as well as northern Europe and Canada are likely to get a second wave in winter. In these places, locals have some innate immunity to respiratory ailments and seasonality is huge, so R0 is low in summer and high in winter. In climates with hard winters, respiratory health is far higher in summer than in winter, when very dry indoor air is very damaging to respiratory immunity. Northern places that are patting themselves on the back are presently in the eye of the hurricane.

This is foreseeable but most people can’t see the obvious. I am sure northern places will totally not realize that they need to humidify indoors — especially in hospitals and nursing homes — to ameliorate COVID this winter and will therefore get hit with a second wave much more severely than they need to be.

Steve, it is great that you bought 3 humidifiers early in the pandemic but you live in Southern California. It is the places with serious winter that get dangerously dry indoor air (such as in the 20% range) which need humidifiers to increase respiratory health and immunity in winter. Maybe you can send those humidifiers to a northern relative this winter and save a life!

“In reality, Antifa have been rioting for 83 days straight in downtown Portland.”

Thank goodness they are so incompetent. The original Communists murdered 100 million people and took control of close to 1/3 of the land surface of Earth. These bozos can’t even hold a few acres and haven’t succeeded in burning down a single building in 83 days of trying.

The challenge is not to overreact and fight back or your life will have problems.

“One thing that’s made Zoomworld work is prior connections, as you point out. Once those social bonds fray we have a problem. How do you onboard a new employee (if we ever do that again) in this environment? Virtual Zoom team meeting isn’t going to do it.”

Yes, I have wondered a lot about this. I was trained in person, and got to know everyone I work with that way. I don’t have any friendships or close working relationship with anyone I didn’t know in person first.

Like this?

“Black Americans Now Account for the Highest Increase In Gun Sales of Any Demographic”

https://www.blackenterprise.com/black-americans-now-account-for-the-highest-increase-in-gun-sales-of-any-demographic/

“instead we get NADA after almost FOUR years of his Presidency”

Trump declared gun shops an essential business during the pandemic. That is a pretty big deal when everything but grocery stores was shut.

The left wanted to close all the gun shops in America. Instead we have the most gun sales in American history.

It is pretty pro-gun to stick with the status quo. The status quo is a firehose of guns to the people.

The thing with gun ownership is that it can’t be reversed politically.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tasneemnashrulla/new-zealand-gun-owners-surrender-guns-christchurch-attack

“New Zealand’s Gun Owners Have So Far Voluntarily Surrendered 37 Firearms — Of An Estimated 1.2 Million — Since The Mosque Shootings”

By comparison, Americans own well over 400 million guns.

Basically Americans buy the number of guns in the entire nation of New Zealand, approximately every week. Americans buy as many guns as Australia or the UK have in their entire countries, every month.

The effect is that true power is in the hands of the public. Real totalitarianism is essentially impossible here.

You could ban the sale of firearms tomorrow and there would be a total overabundance of arms in the hands of the public for millennia.

The stupid left has visions of political domination but it is all devolving.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/new-jersey-gym-owners-license-revoked
“New Jersey gym owners tell Tucker business is ‘open as usual’ despite license revocation”

The percentage of kids homeschooling in America is effectively 100% for now. The percentage who look at that as a permanent solution is off-the-charts high.

https://www.studyfinds.org/scared-for-school-parents-homeschooling-kids-covid-19/
“Scared For School: 4 In 5 Parents Considering Homeschooling Kids This Fall”

Leftist cities are faced with gigantic chasms in their budgets and the cities, dominated by the left, seem permanently wreaked.

Just look at what has happened to the cities. If 50% of the office space in urban areas is no longer needed, there will be an overhang and depressed prices on office space basically for the remainder of American history in all American cities. That seems conservative. Essentially 0% of office space is being used in America right now. Retail too. What remains? Where would the revenue come from?

In terms of money, there has been a huge flight to bitcoin and gold already.

With universities all online, who will want to pay $60,000 per year going forward?

Democrats will find it sucks to lead a declining nation. Frankly to be a political leader going forward and trying to fight the decline will feel like eating feces morning, noon and night.

““Second Amendment enthusiasts” are indulging in faux freedom. A weapon is a weapon only if you have some intent to use it; and America’s gun-loving cucks have shown no intent to use theirs.”

After 1945 America never used a nuclear weapon. And yet nuclear weapons became the basis of American hegemony. America tells all its allies what to do and they obey, more or less.

Only a quarter of police officers have fired their weapon even once in their entire career.

https://www.guns.com/news/2017/02/18/survey-fewer-police-officers-fire-their-service-weapons-than-americans-think

And yet the power is real.

I would argue that Americans aren’t remotely under *actual* physical duress. Nobody is hungry. Most people have never been physically assaulted or robbed.

But if you want to see where guns really matter, look at South Africa.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_South_Africans

“The Statistics South Africa Census 2011 showed that there were about 4,586,838 white people in South Africa, amounting to 8.9% of the country’s population.[41] This is a 6.8% increase since the 2001 census. According to the Census 2011, South African English is the first language of 36% of the white population group and Afrikaans is the first language of 61% of the white population group.[6] The majority of white South Africans identify themselves as primarily South African, regardless of their first language or ancestry.”

It’s astonishing that whites in SA can hang on at all, and without guns, they would be wiped out quickly without question.

Some thoughts:

(1) Things haven’t gotten remotely bad in actual practice. While the rhetoric doesn’t seem to bode well, the reality on the ground is still very safe.

(2) It doesn’t take a lot of actual gun use to show power. That couple in Missouri merely flashed a couple of guns and it was enough to completely shock BLM. BLM hasn’t entered private homes anywhere in America to my knowledge.

(3) Consider the LA riots and the legendary rooftop Koreans. How many shots did they actually fire? Hardly any. And yet their section of the city was entirely spared.

I keep praying that Nick will be accosted by some yutes on a dark night and relieved of his iPhone, ten minutes of consciousness, and a unit of blood. Spare his life, ok?.

It looks like Steve Sailer has been disappeared from Google. If I Google “isteve unz”, I get “About 53,300 results”.

But there are only four pages of results presented, less than 1/1000 of the results. And none of them are the Unz blog. That seems brand new.

Meanwhile, on Bing.com, “isteve unz” gives the blog as the first result.

This is some weird kind of censorship.

Your argument assumes Soros is a fundamentally decent person like you or me. It seems clear me that he is motived by hatred. There is a reason mainstream philanthropy stays away from violent, extremist or Marxist organizations. Mainstream philanthropists don’t actually want to hurt America. Soros literally does.

This is a cross post from Sailer. Hopefully not off topic since it relates to institutional legitimacy –>

The legitimacy of the 2020 election is already lost. I feel like this is the discussion that needs to happen at a national level. There has already been far too much political censorship and political violence to say otherwise. The only cause for the left to stop its excessive censorship is recognition that their own political legitimacy is lost because of extreme censorship and political violence.

On political censorship:

1. A massive share of Trump’s 2016 support on social media is suspended. Just looking at Twitter alone (which has actually been better than other platforms) influential and widely followed figures like Katie Hopkins, Charles C. Johnson, Jared Taylor, Alex Jones and everyone associated with Infowars, Baked Alaska, Laura Loomer, James Woods for many months, Zero Hedge for many months, Owen Shroyer, Turning Point people, Milo, RS McCain, Anthony Cumia, Martin Shkreli, Heartiste, Vox Day…. it has been a steady loss and never all at once, but taken as a whole the effect has been an overwhelming systemic censorship.

Now Trumps number one memesmith Carpe Donkum is permabanned on Twitter.

2. Trump’s own tweets are openly interfered with.

3. All of unz.com is censored by Google and Facebook.

4. Vdare losing its domain registration is extraordinary.

5. Here is Project Veritas capturing Facebook censorship:
“If someone is wearing a MAGA hat I’m going to delete them for terrorism” – Lara Kontakos, Content Moderator

6. Meanwhile left wing agitator Shaun King called for violence against white churches and Andrew Jackson statues this Monday morning on Twitter and by Monday afternoon there were attacks against St. John’s Church and an attempt to tear down the Jackson statue — both attacks taking place feet from the White House. (Jackson won the War of 1812 in which DC was burned to the ground). Shaun King faced no consequences on Twitter for his immediately-acted-on call for political violence. Every one of the conservative bannings on Twitter was for far less.

On violence:

1. Who dares hold a right wing rally anywhere? The threat of physical violence is much worse than it ever was in 2016. The police are the enemy because they try to stop the violence.

2. Who dares have a Trump sticker on their car, or wear a Trump hat near any population center?

3. Where even Trump can’t stop left-wing violence at his own rallies with massive law enforcement at his disposal, what hope is there for organizers of lesser rallies?

4. Here is a Wisconsin State Senator on the ground, unconscious after a vicious beating just a few hours ago. I can’t image he is okay.

A journalist on the scene:
“I believe this is State Senator Tim Carpenter. Minutes earlier he told us the protesters assaulted him. Then he collapsed walking towards the Capitol. We called paramedics. An ambulance is here now.”