COVID19 Factors We Should Consider/Current Events

[Mark Rippetoe]

Here is some good news for California: Shasta Indian Nation to get homeland back in largest land return in California history

Fewer lakes means less water, less water means fewer Californians. I hope they move to Oregon and Washington, and leave Texas alone.

[Jason Donaldson]

Macron and African leaders push for vaccines for Africa after COVID-19 inequalities | AP News

French President Emmanuel Macron joined several African leaders on Thursday to kick off a planned $1 billion project to accelerate the rollout of vaccines in Africa, after the coronavirus pandemic exposed gaping inequalities in access to them.

And yet,...

COVID-19 pandemic death rates by country - Wikipedia

C19-deaths-worldwide.jpg

Sounds like that's not a bug, it's a feature.

[Nicholas Laureys]

Karl Denninger has written time and again that the ZIRP policies of the past 30+ years helped a lot of really dumb or inefficient business ideas that otherwise would have died, thrive. He also keeps warning people not to buy into the MSNBC hype that the stock and Real Estate markets will not significantly correct downward, since the Feds are are forever on the cusp of lowering rates.

Why are low borrowing costs so essential to our economy being all-powerful and fearfully respected? I remember just as the rest of you the macro-economics 101 classes showing how government subsidies help stimulate businesses and markets that (would) have otherwise failed. What I can't grasp is why these businesses and markets are failing in such a widespread way that only subsidies (ZIRP and rate cuts) can save them - especially when our American economy is so often considered the gold standard for a strong, successful, innovative capitalist market economy.

My best guess for now is that once manufacturing and natural-resources discovery and refinery (oil and gas) were extracted from our economy, the remaining services industries could only succeed with risk-free entry into the market in the form of ZIRP and free money. And the innovative industries needed ZIRP to survive and thrive as well, since all of their components (transistors, computer chips....even raw resources like steel or cement at times) had to be imported rather than built domestically at home, which added a layer of risk to achieving success that only low borrowing costs could mitigate.

What am I missing?? How is it that our economy is so powerful and innovative, if it can only thrive, or, hell, even just survive, with free money polices!?

[David A. Rowe]

Here is some good news for California: Shasta Indian Nation to get homeland back in largest land return in California history

Fewer lakes means less water, less water means fewer Californians. I hope they move to Oregon and Washington, and leave Texas alone.

They should build a big dam on tribal lands. I trust them to be water stewards better than whatever passes for government in that state.

[Matt Jackson]

Wow, I did not expect all the banks to be closed today!
Is Juneteenth suddenly a Federal Holiday? HOw was that advocated and lobbied for, if African Americans are a disenfranchised, oppressed ethnicity? Who is advocating for and passing these things, on behalf of whose interests, in order to gain whose loyalty and support in future elections? Juneteenth becoming a bank holiday without any significant push back from the ethnic and cultural majorities would be hilariously inane if it weren't so pathetic.
Where does the line in the sand get drawn again? This whole slow-boiled frog metaphor has taken on a new meaning if banks and businesses can be forced to close at the whims of political preferences so easily. And the 'fight or flight' psychological response has IMHO attained a new alternative: fight, flee, or secede in disgust. Fleeing is a reactive response to fear while disgusted secession is a choice to become indifferent to insanity rather than try to fix it. Who would possibly want to raise children and morph and adapt and concede and negotiate to continue existing in such a culture?

Juneteenth IS a black Federal Holiday. It doesn't really mark any real event as such, which is bizarre. It's claimed it kind of represents when on June 19th 1865 in Galveston, Texas, some black people learned that slavery had ended in the United States. It does doesn't even memorialise the Emancipation Proclaimation or the 19th Amendment. It doesn't matter that none of it really makes sense.

It's a perfect example of how confused, disparate and incoherant American society and culture has become, and also shows the direction of things. Most NPC White Americans will, with a shrug and a scratch of the head, say to themselves "Well, okay, I guess. It's another Holiday. The banks are closed. I don't even know what this is about, but whatever". To thinking White people it emphasises just how alien the country has become. Your reaction is healthy and normal.


National Holidays used to be holidays that represented a kind of American national consensus about who you are, and what you stand for as a country. This is a holiday that would have been unthinkable 50 or even 20 years ago.

The Dems purported it to be "nice" and "pleasant" "inclusive" gesture, to remind black people that they are Americans. Well, it doesn't do that. It does just the opposite of promoting unity.

All it does is illustrate, to blacks themselves and also everyone else, is that blacks are a unique group in America. It emphasises their disinctiveness and separateness in America. Of course, again, and again, it's also used to talk about the scourge of systemic White racism.

It shows that the American political system has no core idea about what the country is even about, and will cater to whatever fashionable idea is trending at the time. You're right about this being the logical end result of a country founded on Liberal thought, though - a country which tries to be everything to everybody.

Combine that kind of philosophical worldview with reality of this statistic (which seared itself into my brain when I first read it in 2011 and changed my political trajectory forever), and let the march of time take over. What will America look and feel like?
Census: Fewer white babies being born | CNN

[Subby]

Karl Denninger has written time and again that the ZIRP policies of the past 30+ years helped a lot of really dumb or inefficient business ideas that otherwise would have died, thrive. He also keeps warning people not to buy into the MSNBC hype that the stock and Real Estate markets will not significantly correct downward, since the Feds are are forever on the cusp of lowering rates.

Why are low borrowing costs so essential to our economy being all-powerful and fearfully respected? I remember just as the rest of you the macro-economics 101 classes showing how government subsidies help stimulate businesses and markets that (would) have otherwise failed. What I can't grasp is why these businesses and markets are failing in such a widespread way that only subsidies (ZIRP and rate cuts) can save them - especially when our American economy is so often considered the gold standard for a strong, successful, innovative capitalist market economy.

My best guess for now is that once manufacturing and natural-resources discovery and refinery (oil and gas) were extracted from our economy, the remaining services industries could only succeed with risk-free entry into the market in the form of ZIRP and free money. And the innovative industries needed ZIRP to survive and thrive as well, since all of their components (transistors, computer chips....even raw resources like steel or cement at times) had to be imported rather than built domestically at home, which added a layer of risk to achieving success that only low borrowing costs could mitigate.

What am I missing?? How is it that our economy is so powerful and innovative, if it can only thrive, or, hell, even just survive, with free money polices!?

You have a business, I have a business. I borrow money at 3% and you don't because you correctly ascertain that neither of us can pay back loans. I use my loan to add to my income and thus lower my prices, increasing my customers, taking them away from you. You can either go out of business or borrow a loan you can't repay to stay afloat and hope/lobby that you can borrow at 2% in the future to pay off the 3% loan.

Once one business starts doing it, everyone else has to do it to keep up.

[Mark Rippetoe]

All it does is illustrate, to blacks themselves and also everyone else, is that blacks are a unique group in America. It emphasises their disinctiveness and separateness in America. Of course, again, and again, it's also used to talk about the scourge of systemic White racism.

This is true.

It shows that the American political system has no core idea about what the country is even about, and will cater to whatever fashionable idea is trending at the time. You're right about this being the logical end result of a country founded on Liberal thought, though - a country which tries to be everything to everybody.

But this stops short of the actual situation. The American Political System is run by the Democrat Party, the permanent employees of the government, and their mainstream media (which includes Fox News). They don't care what the country used to be about. They only care about staying in power, and they will use any means necessary to do so. The polls are shifting in Trump's favor now. I sincerely hope he has his affairs in order.

[Mark Rippetoe]

https://x.com/VDHanson/status/1803438088490008800

Victor Davis Hanson
@VDHanson
Anatomy of a Full Leftwing Meltdown

The media is afire with warnings of the impending Trump “dictatorship”. Celebrities, the Squad, and Biden administration grandees vie to conjure up the most nightmarish things that Trump might do to them.

What drives their current mounting hysteria?

1) The Left feels it may be heading to an historic 1972 McGovern-like or 1980 Carteresque blowout. And it is terrified at this late date that it cannot do anything either about the escalating dementia of Joe Biden, or the terror instilled by the specter of either a President or continued Vice-President Kamala Harris.

2) It knows that a first-term novice Trump had a successful four years, and that he now is savvier four years later—and far more likely and able to overturn the entire four-year Biden catastrophe and thus enjoy an even more successful second term.

3) It fears that all it did to destroy democracy—the Russian collusion hoax, the Russian disinformation laptop farce, the two first-term impeachments the moment the Republicans lost the House, the Senate trial of ex-President Trump as a private citizen, the effort to remove Trump from state ballots, and the five criminal and civil show trials designed to bankrupt the leading presidential candidate and keep him off the campaign trail—might boomerang on the Left.

So, it is in full panic that its unconstitutional efforts to destroy Trump will obviously be used against itself—given it knows that if it returned to power it would go after its enemies in precisely the same, any-means-necessary ways that it had sought to destroy Trump. That is, they have destroyed norms and have established dangerous new precedents that they just assume, given their Jacobin nature, must rebound against themselves.

4) The Left is terrified that growing voter repugnance now extends even to traditional Democratic constituencies—Latinos, Blacks, Asians, Jews, the young, and even the college educated. And the Left privately grasps that these defections are fueled not just by the obnoxiousness and dementia of Joe Biden, but due to his far-left agendas that left us with abhorrent inflation, wild unsustainable federal deficits, a lethal open border, 10-million unaudited and often dangerous illegal aliens, foreign policy catastrophes, woke racial and tribal disunity, spiraling urban crime, and cultural extremism. Leftists accept that while in secret they blame the cognitively challenged Joe for their dilemmas, deep-down they know that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”—that is, in their own failed revolution that has utterly repulsed Americans and nearly destroyed the country.

5) In the next five months, the Left and Democrats know that they must pander to try to save themselves. But the more Biden panders, the more obvious, repugnant, and counterproductive the pandering becomes. The public is growing sick of Biden’s 11th-hour groveling to save himself from his self-created oblivion. And the more in his last days as President he drains even more the strategic petroleum reserve, the more he cancels student loan debt, the more he abandons Israel to win a few thousand votes in Michigan, the more he pressures the Fed to lower interest rates, the more he flips on tariffs, and the more he grants blanket amnesties to illegal aliens—all the more the country at large becomes disgusted at the low effort to temporarily appease particular voting blocs at the expense of the general interest of the country.

6) As we watch the Left go through the proverbial cycles of “denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance”, it will increasingly deny the accuracy of supposedly inaccurate swing state polls, then angrily damn the supposedly clueless, deplorable electorate, then turn to all sorts of dreams of remedies (changing or violating more voting laws being the most prominent), then get sullen about the entire American project, and only finally accept the inevitable of what likely lies ahead.

[Stump]

More on what's going down in Idaho.

https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1804124590727430232


Induced food shortages.

[wal]

These people have rapidly become the most embarrassing society on earth.

And I sure am ashamed, but what do you expect with the folk running this country. We have wall to wall Labor (Democrats) running both Federal and State governments.

Australian Premier Creates Ministry In Charge Of 'Changing Men's Behavior'

Looks like Australia has decided it's no longer necessary to pretend the pan-western demasculinization (denazification) program isn't actually happening.

The State you are referring to is the southern State of Victoria, I don't want to go there, it has gone the way of your State of California.