It is a literal Camp of the Saints – except, of course, it would be totally racist to mention that. So nobody does.
So let’s try and keep it cool and statistical. America has increased its population by over eighty-two million people in the last three decades. Or about ten million more than the entire populations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland combined. That’s officially. Unofficially, there are also tens of millions of the “undocumented”.
For purposes of comparison, three years ago Trump was reported as allegedly despairing of all the riff-raff from “sh*thole countries” and wondering why America didn’t get more immigrants from Norway.
Well, there are five million Norwegians. So, even if every single Norwegian moved to America, it wouldn’t make any difference.
Not on this scale of demographic transformation. Right now, a population the size of Wyoming is walking into the country every two months. Why do you think Democrats want to get rid of the Electoral College? Because, if you believe in “counting every vote”, why should a half-million Wyomingites get two senators but not the July/August intake at the Rio Grande?
Visit The Washington Monument While You Still Can
Lincoln got what he deserved.
“We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the New World Order.”
NEW – Australian public health chief: "We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the New World Order."pic.twitter.com/ksRxh1vShF
— Disclose.tv (@disclosetv) September 9, 2021
h/t WPB
What Would We Do Without Experts?
I suspect we are currently witnessing the catastrophic end of this metaphysical power of legitimacy that has shielded the managerial ruling class for decades. Anyone even briefly familiar with the historical record knows just how much of a Pandora’s box such a loss of legitimacy represents. The signs have obviously been multiplying over many years, but it is only now that the picture is becoming clear to everyone. When Michael Gove said ”I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” in a debate about the merits of Brexit, he probably traced the contours of something much bigger than anyone really knew at the time. Back then, the acute phase of the delegitimization of the managerial class was only just beginning. Now, with Afghanistan, it is impossible to miss.
It’s why you keep coming back to SDA — to read think pieces on questions I raised five years ago.
Coulda Had A Pipeline
Never let a crisis go to waste: OPEC+ Rejects Biden’s Call to Pump More Oil
Reuters reports that the oil cartel, which now includes Russia, sees no need to increase oil output beyond its current levels.
Gas prices in the United States have shot up since January 2021, increasing more than 40% in that period. This and Biden’s monetary spending policies are contributing to historic levels of inflation surging well beyond the average American’s pay increases.
Biden canceled the Keystone XL Pipeline and canceled oil and gas leases via executive orders on his first day in office. He faces lawsuits over those actions while they contribute to the rise in energy prices. The instability his decisions have caused in Afghanistan could have yet another negative impact on the economy.
Last week, Biden asked OPEC+ to increase production, prompting derision and reminders of his executive orders that harm U.S. energy production. He has his answer.
Related: From 11:15 a.m. Thursday, August 12 to a little past 4 p.m., Monday, August 16, President Joe Biden did not appear in public.
Its A Good Thing Dementia Joe Is On Vacation.
Taliban enter Kabul and demand SURRENDER.
As the Taliban advance accelerates, the US is scrambling to evacuate more than 10,000 American citizens from the capital, with officials said to be trying to strike a deal for Taliban fighters not to descend on Kabul until the US can pull everyone out.
However, a senior US official told the New York Times the Taliban have warned the US it must cease airstrikes or else its extremist fighters will move in.
Scarce capital
What prolongs the life of a terminally ill fiat currency? The struggles of the debtors. And that struggle is getting a lot harder, especially if you live in a large metropolitan area.
The housing affordability chasm in Metro Vancouver is measured in a new report by the National Bank of Canada, which found that an annual household income of $253,000 is now needed to afford an average house in the region worth $1.47 million.
It would also take 411 months (34.3 years) of savings to cover the down payment for this home type, with a saving rate of 10%.
Your Moral And Intellectual Superiors
Maybe the debt will hyperinflate itself?
This podcast discusses the current exponential rise in debt and how inflation is not a solution, but rather a sign of terminal economic decline. It’s really the financial equivalent of Stage 4 cancer.
But actually, hyperinflation is going to be at the very end. It’s total collapse. It’s collapse of civilization. When people can’t buy food and energy.
For those who don’t have time to listen to the podcast, the interview is conveniently transcribed.
“Mayor Lori Lightfoot” Is Not The Name Of A DC Comics Character
But it should be.
How does she remain mayor of America’s third largest city? The same way Joe Biden became President of the United States.
Setting the Stage for the Takeover by Global Technocrats
Mark Carney knows how to run your life better than you do.
The World Is Being Run By Stupid People
Fueling the fire
With a capital structure beaten to a pulp by pandemic restrictions and climate change goals whose objective is to murder immensely profitable industries, it’s quite likely that supply and demand imbalances are anything but temporary. About the only thing you can be certain of is that the arsonists at the central banks will keep stocking up on gasoline.
Lane’s speech is an attempt to brush off worries about faster inflation that could prompt Canadians and investors to anticipate an accelerated exit from emergency monetary policy settings. Annual inflation in Canada already hit 3.4 per cent in April,…
O, Cascadia Subduction Zone
The Oregon legislature has passed a bill allowing the homeless to occupy and public space and that local communities must rewrite local laws and ordinances to allow it.
In my city they are living in all of my local parks, biking trails, even on school grounds. I don’t have a single green space to take my nieces and nephews to in the city. The only place they removed them from was along the waterways as they were dumping feces into the untreated water supply for the city of Portland.
Listening to people at the bars, markets, streets and elsewhere I foresee a rise in vigilantism in the near future.
Smile!
Canada’s national police force broke privacy law by using controversial facial recognition software that put innocent Canadians in a “24/7 police lineup,” the federal privacy commissioner says.
The RCMP conducted “hundreds” of searches of Clearview AI’s database of billions of photos scraped from the public internet, including social media sites, without consent. The company lets law enforcement and private business then match photos against that database.
It was illegal, according to privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien — both Clearview AI’s collection of images without consent, and the RCMP’s use of that database of unlawfully collected images.
Clearview’s practices amounted to “mass surveillance,” Therrien concluded, and the RCMP’s use of its database broke the Privacy Act.
“The data involved in (facial recognition technology) speaks to the very core of individual identity and as both commercial and government use of the technology expands, it raises important questions about the kind of society we want to live in,” Therrien concluded in his report.
The RCMP initially denied it used Clearview AI, both publicly and to the privacy commissioner, who is an independent officer of Parliament.
After a joint Toronto Star and BuzzFeed News investigation found the Mounties had paid for Clearview’s services, however, the force publicly admitted to using the controversial tools on a limited basis — predominantly for identifying victims of child sexual exploitation.
But Therrien’s office concluded that not only did the RCMP initially “erroneously” say it had not used Clearview, the force “did not satisfactorily account for the vast majority of the searches it made.”
Debt reset
As governments of all levels in nearly every nation have removed all the brakes on the debt engine, there are plenty of us wondering how and when the end game will occur. Many believed that the implosion should have happened long ago, but as Keith Weiner, CEO of Monetary Metals, explains in this op-ed, fiat dollars have a very captive audience, like it or not. Although the analysis refers to the debts of the United States, rest assured that Canada is in a much deeper hole.
Leaving aside that there is no political will to even attempt [to pay off the debt]—most people seem happy to borrow more to spend more—it isn’t even mathematically possible.
A banquet of seed corn
You know things are getting bad when the frenzied purchase of consumption goods starts to outstrip investment in dividend-earning plant and equipment. Why expend effort to create more seed corn when you can just gorge yourself on whatever is already in the bin?
A bigger concern for Canada might be real-estate dominance. Statistics Canada’s latest tally of gross domestic product on June 1 shows that residential investment has rarely been a bigger part of the overall economy. That’s great for real-estate brokers, but bad for competitiveness, because it suggests that houses are becoming a magnet for precious investment dollars that could be put to more productive uses. As Evan Siddall, the former head of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., tweeted in April, “Housing is mining our economic future.”
Destroying the world for all
This detailed takedown of Mark Carney’s vision of the new socialist utopia should send shudders down the spine of anyone who has an affinity for a society based on the principles of free markets.
Carney draws inspiration from, among others, Marx, Engels and Lenin, but the agenda he promotes differs from Marxism in two key respects. First, the private sector is not to be expropriated but made a “partner” in reshaping the economy and society. Second, it does not make a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but worse. Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and more poverty: “Assets will be stranded, used gasoline powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,” he promises.
But somehow the new socialism will not be socialism as usual. This time it’s different. We can because we must. The threat is too great to permit any argument. It’s surprising that as he was picking out choice quotes from Lenin for his book, Carney missed this one: “No more opposition now, comrades! The time has come to put an end to opposition, to put the lid on it. We have had enough opposition!”
Temporarily Unexpected
Euro zone inflation surged past the European Central Bank’s elusive target in May, heightening a communications challenge for policymakers who will happily live with higher prices for now but may face a backlash from irate consumers.
Inflation in the 19 countries sharing the euro accelerated to 2% in May from 1.6% in April, driven by higher energy costs to its fastest rate since late 2018 and above the ECB’s aim of “below but close to 2%”, data from Eurostat showed on Tuesday.
The figure is also above expectations for 1.9% in a Reuters poll, likely intensifying talk that structural forces, not just transient factors, may be behind a surge.
“Everyone saw it coming, but still it is starting to make a lot of people sweat,” ING economist Bert Colijn said. “Inflation is returning rapidly at the moment at a time when news about economies is increasingly upbeat and labour markets are profiting from the reopening.” […]
Still, getting through this period is more a communications exercise for the ECB. The bank has already made clear that this is not the sort of inflation it is looking for after nearly a decade of undershooting its target, so policy will remain loose for years to come.
For one, the surge in inflation is temporary, even the most conservative policymakers argue.
Because everything is temporary. (h/t Chris)
David Murrell comments: Statistics Canada released its first-quarter 2021 income-and-expenditure accounts data on GDP, and the corporate media completely missed the important part of the story. The media reported that nominal GDP rose by 5.3%, but did not report that this number was composed of a 2.9% increase in the GDP price deflator, with only a 1.4% increase in real GRP (a low growth number).
Maybe the $24 million dollar cabin will pay for itself…
As asset prices rise thanks to zero percent interest rates, this was inevitable. Unless pandemic-induced isolation leads to higher incomes for some reason I’m unaware of, these buyers will eventually find themselves owning assets that they actually can’t afford.
Sales in Muskoka increased 267 per cent in April from a year earlier, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. The median price for waterfront properties, at the same time, rose more than 70 per cent to $890,000, although Harding said listings tend to begin above the $1-million mark.
The desire for waterfront properties grew among Canada’s wealthy as pandemic-induced isolation measures kicked in. Both Harding and Richard Scully, the agent selling the $24-million lakefront property, said it’s normal to have anywhere from five to 25 offers on a property. Cottages tend now to stay on the market for no more than 10 days, when it used to take 40 to 50 days to close a sale, Harding said.