Society in General | Science Matters

The True Cost of Imaginary Money

Posted on May 6, 2021 by Ron Clutz

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Lionel Shriver explains in his Spectator article The true cost of make-believe money

Biden commands trillions in the way previous presidents have commanded billions

I like Bill Maher. He’s a rare practicing left-wing comic who’s actually funny. But last week, his routine on cryptocurrency hit eerie harmonics.

That monologue was broadcast in the same week Joe Biden promoted the third of his gargantuan spending programs, bringing his first 100 days’ total discretionary spending proposals to $6 trillion. (Context: total US GDP is $21 trillion.) This lavish largesse would be slathered atop the annual (and growing) nondiscretionary budget of nearly $5 trillion, against $3.5 trillion in tax revenue.

Let’s tweak Maher’s routine, then:

‘I fully understand that our financial system isn’t perfect, but at least, or so I’ve imagined, it’s real. But the American dollar increasingly resembles Easter bunny cartoon cash. I’ve read articles about Modern Monetary Theory. I’ve had it explained to me. I still don’t get it, and neither do you.

‘Dollars are now made up out of thin air and comparable with Monopoly money. We thought we knew that money had to originate from and be generated by something real, somewhere. Modern Monetary Theory says, “No, it doesn’t”… Or as another analyst put it, “Quantitative easing is an open Ponzi scheme”. The Federal Reserve is like having an imaginary best friend who’s also a banker.

‘Our problem here is at root not economic but psychological. People who have been raised in a virtual world are starting to believe they can really live in it. Much of warfare is a video game now; why not base our economy the same way? The conjuring of “borrowed” money from ether, only to have that debt swallowed by a central bank and disappear, is literally a game.

‘Do I need to spell this out? There is something inherently not credible about the Fed creating not just hundreds of billions, but trillions in wealth, with nothing ever actually being accomplished, and no actual product made or service rendered. It’s like Tinkerbell’s light. Its power source is based solely on enough infantilized citizens believing in it.’

Somehow that monologue isn’t as funny in the second version.

While Maher decries the electricity squandered on crypto ‘mining’, at least the color of the Fed’s money is genuinely green. Tap a few keys, and voilà: trillions from pennies on the energy bill. So in the past year, the Fed effortlessly increased the world’s supply of dollars by 26 percent and is on track for a similar surge in 2021.

But is drastic monetary expansion truly without cost?

I’ve made Maher’s Tinkerbell analogy myself, but to explain how traditional currency functions. I noted in an essay accompanying my novel The Mandibles, about America’s 2029 economic apocalypse: ‘Currency is a belief system. It maintains its value the way Tinkerbell is kept aloft by children believing in fairies in Peter Pan.’

In the novel, a fictional economics professor pontificates: ‘Money is emotional. Because all value is subjective, money is worth what people feel it’s worth. They accept it in exchange for goods and services because they have faith in it. Economics is closer to religion than science. Without millions of individual citizens believing in a currency, money is colored paper. Likewise, creditors have to believe that if they extend a loan to the US government they’ll get their money back or they don’t make the loan in the first place.

So confidence isn’t a side issue. It’s the only issue.’

My confidence is going wobbly. Biden commands trillions the way previous presidents have commanded billions, while the public is so dazzled by zeros that they don’t know the difference.

I’ve my quibbles with the particulars. Spending in inconceivable quantity courts waste and fraud. Biden’s American Families Plan casts so many freebies upon the waters as to constitute a de facto universal basic income, and government dependency doesn’t seem characteristic of a good life. Pandemic-relief unemployment supplements (which many Democrats would make permanent) are so generous that small businesses can’t find employees willing to work even for two to three times the minimum wage. Biden is effectively reversing Clinton-era welfare reforms, which moved so many poor Americans from state benefits to self-respecting employment. Financing all these goodies by hiking corporate taxes is popular, but only because few people realize that every-one pays corporate taxes through lower pension-fund returns, job losses from corporate flight, lower wages and higher prices.

But it’s the bigger picture that unnerves me. Zero interest rates have installed an accelerating debt loop. Governments, companies and individuals borrow because money is free. Central banks won’t raise interest rates, lest the cost of servicing all this burgeoning debt bankrupt the debtors. Governments, companies and individuals borrow still more because money is free. The Federal Reserve has already announced it won’t raise interest rates even if inflation climbs, while refusing to cite what level inflation would have to hit before reconsidering. I’ve plotted this story before. It doesn’t end well.

Background on Modern (Magical) Money Theory see MMT: Magical Money Theory

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Is Critical Race Theory Illegal?

Posted on April 27, 2021 by Ron Clutz

The issue is going to be adjudicated in various courtrooms in the coming months. A post at Real Climate Investigations examines the cases for and against policies based on Critical Race Theory (CRT). Critical Race Theory Is About to Face Its Day(s) in Court by John Murawski. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

Critical race theory is about to face a major real-world test: a spate of lawsuits alleging that it encourages discrimination and other illegal policies targeting whites, males and Christians. But unlike Trump’s executive order, which ran into First Amendment problems by prohibiting controversial speech, the lawsuits name specific policies and practices that allegedly discriminate, harass, blame and humiliate people based on their race.

The common thread of these legal challenges is the inescapable logic that making accommodations for critical race theory will erode the nation’s anti-discrimination law as it has developed since the 1960s. This would mean replacing the colorblind ideal of treating all people equally, which has been widely viewed as the crowning achievement of the civil rights movement, with a contrary strategy: implementing race-based policies, which can range from affirmative action to reparations for compensating African Americans for the injustices of the past and for producing equitable outcomes in the future.

“Critical race theory is a Trojan horse of sorts,” said David Pivtorak, a Los Angeles lawyer representing two white men who are suing two California state environment agencies. “It disguises itself as the gold standard of fairness and justice but, in fact, relies on vilification and the idea of permanent oppressor and oppressed races. Its goal is not ensuring that all people play by the same rules, regardless of race, but equity, which is a euphemism for race-based outcomes.”

About a dozen lawsuits and administrative complaints have been filed since 2018, with another wave planned this summer by conservative public interest law firms and private attorneys. Their goal is to draw attention to some of the more pronounced practices and win court judgments to slow down the spread of CRT in K-12 schools, government agencies other organizations.

Proponents of critical race theory say the lawsuits are a form of white denialism that confirms the pervasiveness of the problem that CRT exposes. Many critical race theorists believe that the United States has functioned as an elaborate affirmative action scheme to empower and enrich white males, a strategy that depends on a certain degree of coverup.

“I see these lawsuits as a last gasp attempt of those who benefit from the racial hierarchy to cling to the power and the privileges that have been associated with whiteness from the beginning of the country,” said andré douglas pond cummings (who writes his name in lowercase letters), a business law professor at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock who has taught courses on corporate justice and “Hip Hop & the American Constitution.”

CRT rejects the foundational premises of classical liberalism – such as legal neutrality and individual rights – and from that perspective, colorblindness is not understood as a strategy to overcome racism but as a method to perpetuate it.

“It’s a white ideology,” Burnham said. “Colorblindness really comes into fashion as a means of denying the persistence of racial stratification in the United States.”

The lawsuits face a number of challenges, a point borne out by early setbacks some of the claims have experienced so far, including the defeat of Trump’s executive order on free-speech grounds. In another case, lawyers dropped the discrimination allegations in one of the first such lawsuits, filed in 2018 against the Santa Barbara Unified School District in California, because, they said, students and staff who supported the lawsuit were “deathly afraid” of repercussions if they spoke out and came forward publicly as plaintiffs.

Claimants generally have to prove the alleged discrimination is severe and pervasive. They also have to overcome the freedom-of-speech rights of those who are professing to be dismantling systemic racism. What’s more, lawyers on both sides say that courts traditionally defer to employers and educators to set policy on workplace training and classroom curricula, a built-in restraint on activist judges.

Perhaps the biggest wild card in these lawsuits is the staggering cultural shift of the past five years, during which many of the precepts of CRT have become widely accepted, especially among many in the nation’s intelligentsia and the professional managerial class.

President Biden has adopted the language and made equity part of his platform, including a proposal to establish an Equity Commission “to support the rights of Black, Brown and Native farmers.” Immediately upon taking office, he issued an “Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity” to address systemic racism and “affirmatively” promote equity and racial justice in the federal government. “Our Nation deserves an ambitious whole-of-government equity agenda that matches the scale of the opportunities and challenges that we face,” the executive order states.

The nation’s current anti-discrimination law does not make such a distinction, and would read Kendi’s proposal as absurd as claiming that there’s a meaningful difference between good theft and bad theft; instead, all discrimination is wrong in the existing legal framework, with the exception of limited, narrowly tailored exemptions that are subject to strict scrutiny by the courts.

In one of the more unusual cases, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights agreed in early January with an Illinois public school teacher that her school district violated anti-discrimination law when it implemented a discipline policy that explicitly directed staff to consider a student’s race when evaluating behavioral and disciplinary issues.

The case offers indications that different judges will likely reach opposite conclusions in such disputes: Just two weeks after ruling for the schoolteacher under the Trump administration, the Department of Education put the case on hold when President Biden took office and issued the “advancing racial equity” executive order.

Hovering in the background of these lawsuits is the unresolved question: To what extent does truth provide a defense against charges of discrimination? It will come as no surprise that to conservatives and other critics of CRT its fatal flaw is its factual wrongness.

“The ideology is so patently stupid and racist to the common person that the only way you can implement it or teach it is with an element of coercion, otherwise it would just be laughed at,” said Jonathan O’Brien, the lawyer representing the student and mother who filed the Nevada lawsuit. “That’s why the training sessions are like pressure cookers.”

But if critical race theory is true, as its adherents believe, then labeling the truth as discriminatory smacks of censorship.

The stakes of this dispute couldn’t be higher, at least judging by the rhetoric expressed by both sides.

One of the conservative groups planning to file lawsuits, the Upper Midwest Law Center in Golden Valley, Mich., is in talks with prospective clients who include non-whites, said the center’s president, Douglas Seaton.

Seaton described the abandonment of the colorblind idea as giving up on the nation itself.

“You can’t have a country as diverse as ours without equality before the law,” Seaton said. “It’s a recipe for communal violence, tribalism. You can’t simply proceed that way. You’d be doomed to internecine battles between groups.”

Growing Gap: Rhetoric vs. Reality

Posted on April 25, 2021 by Ron Clutz

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From ancient days of village idiots, communities recognized that some people get caught up into thinking and talking crazy stuff detached from the real world. And if the behavior resulting from being unhinged endangers other people, it becomes necessary to hold the crazies in an asylum apart from the general population. So what to make of Biden’s first 100 days? Systemic Delusion, full of sound and fury, in defiance of the real world. Later on I will go into some depth on the climate fantasies, but the unhinged rhetoric is generalized and administration-wide. No one knows whether the principals (Biden, Harris, etc.) actually understand what they are saying. I am inclined to believe they are only posturing, since those in power behind the throne are emboldened by the advantage of escaping accountability for the results of bad rhetoric and policies.

Examples include calling illegal aliens, not simply “undocumented”, but according to Biden “already Americans.” Legislation expanding voting access to documented citizens is called “voter suppression.” Adding four more Supreme Justices is called “unpacking the court.” A brave policeman who saves two black teenagers from being stabbed by a third is called a “racist.” Biden and his appointees claim the nation is guilty of “systemic racism” without any apology for their own roles for decades in government. But the grandest fantasy and hypocrisy are wrapped in the call for climate action.

Climate stool

Climate Rhetoric is a stool composed of three assertions, all of which must stand for the appeal to be compelling. Of course, the topic itself has been shifted from “global warming” (not scary enough) to “climate change” (not urgent enough) to “climate crisis, or chaos or emergency.” The consensus label is not yet settled, with “global weirding” still in the running. But we know the issue is the same one posted on Obama’s twitter account, back when POTUS was permitted to tweet: “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”

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The Science Leg: Man Makes Earth Warmer.

Many people commenting both for and against reducing emissions from burning fossil fuels assume it has been proven that rising GHGs including CO2 cause higher atmospheric temperatures. That premise has been tested and found wanting, as this post describes: Global Warming Theory and the Tests It Fails. At least five rigorous analyses of relevant datasets failed to discern surface warming due to rising CO2 concentrations. While it is true in the laboratory that CO2 is able to absorb and emit infrared radiation (IR), the effect upon the actual planetary climate system has not proven to be substantial rather than negligible.

The temperature records show warming from time to time, but do not distinguish between natural and man-made warming. For example, consider that all the surface warming since the 1940s can be attributed to three oceanic events.

GMT warming events

The animation is an update of a previous analysis from Dr. Murry Salby. These graphs use Hadcrut4 and include the 2016 El Nino warming event. The exhibit shows since 1947 GMT warmed by 0.8 C, from 13.9 to 14.7, as estimated by Hadcrut4. This resulted from three natural warming events involving ocean cycles. The most recent rise 2013-16 lifted temperatures by 0.2C. Previously the 1997-98 El Nino produced a plateau increase of 0.4C. Before that, a rise from 1977-81 added 0.2C to start the warming since 1947.

Importantly, the theory of human-caused global warming asserts that increasing CO2 in the atmosphere changes the baseline and causes systemic warming in our climate. On the contrary, all of the warming since 1947 was episodic, coming from three brief events associated with oceanic cycles. Moreover, the UAH record shows that the effects of the last one are now gone as of January 2021. Updated to March 2021 (UAH baseline is now 1990-2020)

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Professor Richard Lindzen ended a recent lecture with these words:

I haven’t spent much time on the details of the science, but there is one thing that should spark skepticism in any intelligent reader. The system we are looking at consists in two turbulent fluids interacting with each other. They are on a rotating planet that is differentially heated by the sun. A vital constituent of the atmospheric component is water in the liquid, solid and vapor phases, and the changes in phase have vast energetic ramifications. The energy budget of this system involves the absorption and reemission of about 200 watts per square meter. Doubling CO2 involves a 2% perturbation to this budget. So do minor changes in clouds and other features, and such changes are common. In this complex multifactor system, what is the likelihood of the climate (which, itself, consists in many variables and not just globally averaged temperature anomaly) is controlled by this 2% perturbation in a single variable? Believing this is pretty close to believing in magic. Instead, you are told that it is believing in ‘science.’ Such a claim should be a tip-off that something is amiss. After all, science is a mode of inquiry rather than a belief structure.

The Impacts Leg: The Warming is Dangerous

The second leg consists of impact studies from billions of research dollars spent uncovering any and all possible negatives from warming, everything from risk of Acne to Zika Virus. The delusion is double: Natural fluctuations when increasing are presumed to be negative, and the positive benefits of CO2 concentrations are ignored.

A recent Climate Report repeats the usual litany of calamities to be feared and avoided by submitting to IPCC demands. The evidence does not support these claims. An example:

It is scientifically established that human activities produce GHG emissions, which accumulate in the atmosphere and the oceans, resulting in warming of Earth’s surface and the oceans, acidification of the oceans, increased variability of climate, with a higher incidence of extreme weather events, and other changes in the climate.

Moreover, leading experts believe that there is already more than enough excess heat in the climate system to do severe damage and that 2C of warming would have very significant adverse effects, including resulting in multi-meter sea level rise.

Experts have observed an increased incidence of climate-related extreme weather events, including increased frequency and intensity of extreme heat and heavy precipitation events and more severe droughts and associated heatwaves. Experts have also observed an increased incidence of large forest fires; and reduced snowpack affecting water resources in the western U.S. The most recent National Climate Assessment projects these climate impacts will continue to worsen in the future as global temperatures increase.

But: Arctic Ice has not declined since 2007.

Arctic ice Sept Ave 2020

But: All of these are within the range of past variability.

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But: Weather is not more extreme.

But:Wildfires were worse in the past

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But: Sea Level Rise is not accelerating.

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But: The planet is greener because of rising CO2.

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The Policy Leg: Government Can Stop It.

Reality Check 30 yrs. of climate policy

And the third leg is climate initiatives (policies) showing how governments can “fight climate change.” Some discussion on the wildly improbable notion of powering modern societies with so-called “renewable energy” is provided by Kent Lassman writing at the Washington Examiner Our conversation about the environment is broken. What is the way forward? Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Our government relies on predictive scientific models that are periodically tweaked. With decades of actual data, it is clear the models have consistently over-predicted warming. Yet, these problems are rarely given any cautionary weight in policy deliberations.

We have a half-century of dire environmental predictions that are usually wrong in the same direction. That raises the question of how much science is being undermined by a political agenda. Is the problem models that do not perform or our attachment to the terror of environmental apocalypse?

This fear is the second major problem we must overcome to improve the quality of our policy debate. Fear of carbon dioxide obscures the near-term and very real consequences of radical climate policies that could have consequences worse than those of a warming atmosphere.

Consider the poorest among us. According to the International Energy Agency, Africa will be the most populous region on Earth by 2023. Today there are 600 million Africans without access to electricity and 900 million who lack clean water. Achieving a reliable electricity supply for this population will require a huge investment, about four times pre-pandemic trends, of $120 billion a year, every year through 2040.

That gargantuan figure assumes access to the most readily available forms of energy: fossil fuels. Without such access, lower-income nations will not enjoy improving standards of living, education, and health. Instead, disease and war are their future. Ironically, depriving these people of a carbon economy likely leads to the very apocalyptic conditions we all want to avoid.

Renewable energy can be a crucial piece of a greener energy future, but we need to be realistic about its limits, the costs of production and disposal, and the secondary effects for the communities producing the raw materials necessary, often with child labor.

Last year a Dutch government-sponsored study concluded that the Netherlands’s renewable energy ambitions ALONE would consume a major share of global minerals. Considering that the U.S. consumes 30 times more energy than the Netherlands, the study concluded: “Exponential growth in [global] renewable energy production capacity is not possible with present-day technologies and annual metal production.” The report also determined that meeting the goals of the Paris climate agreement would require the global production of some metals to grow at least 12-fold by 2050.

An effective climate strategy must be itself sustainable. That requires some measure of humility and an honest evaluation of real-world trade-offs, the linkage between energy use and human welfare, the technological vulnerabilities of alternatives to fossil fuels, and how little we know about the future of something as complex as climate.

That uncertainty demands honesty about the confidence we have, and ought to have, in what we know and can predict. It is a feature, not a bug, of sound climate policy. It should inform understanding of both benefits and costs that flow from any policy choice.

The lives and livelihoods of real people are at stake. We have a responsibility to be clear-eyed and humble about real-world consequences. That means admitting when we are wrong and, equally important, when someone with a different view has a valid point.

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California on the Road to Ruin

Posted on April 24, 2021 by Ron Clutz

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The Golden State is a shining example of paradise lost by wrong policy choices pursuing a “woke” agenda. Since the Biden-Harris regime intends to Californicate the entire nation, it is critical to understand and avoid the wrong road taken. David L. Bahnsen writes at National Review The Great California Exodus. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

A look at why droves are leaving the state

What caused and continues to cause the exodus out of California is not tax burden, or regulation, or cost of living, or housing prices. Rather, it is the burden, and regulation, and cost of living, and housing prices, and more.

There is no evidence that the declining appeal of staying in California is simply a tax protest. On top of being walloped by taxes, one takes fiscal hit after fiscal hit — property taxes that average $5,000 per year for a lower-end middle-class home with no frills and that can easily approach $10,000 per year for the most mundane of tract homes. Utilities, car registration, insurance, and education expenses are all in the top decile.

One is being asked to pay a lot more to live in California, and yet education results are abysmal, crime rates are unacceptable (the state has the 14th-worst rate of violent crimes per capita), the electricity grid is a debacle, and the job market has hollowed out. (The CEOs of great California companies have maintained homes in Menlo Park or Palos Verdes; recent factory or plant expansions of the companies have gone to Nevada, Arizona, and Texas.)

The value of living in California has declined but the cost has not been correspondingly reduced; in fact, it has exponentially increased. A business cannot survive when it raises prices while simultaneously making a worse product. Neither can a state.

California made a choice to adopt a cost structure perfectly tailored to the needs of its public-employee unions. (The same could be said of Greece.) Policy-makers have made a conscious decision to make no effort whatsoever to diversify the state’s revenue base. The extreme revenues that highly specialized companies in Silicon Valley have earned bought legislators time as they came out of the great financial crisis. But the dysfunctional dependency on a technology tax base in the go-go 1990s and the subsequent dot-com bust taught Sacramento nothing. Today, the state depends on a revenue base narrower than ever before, even as debt levels, pension-funding needs, and infrastructure needs are at code red. One need not ignore the blessing of high capital-gain revenue when Big Tech flourishes, but to assume that the gravy train will continue is perilous.

For the leftist ideologues who have brought about the exodus, an unexpected turn of events is taking place. The Left underestimated the impact of the pre-pandemic outmigration. It was never good for the fiscal and cultural health of the state that so many, after weighing the pros and cons, voted with their feet. One can be forgiven, however, for thinking that the Left was not all that shaken up by 650,000 middle-class people per year realizing that, in Texas or Arizona, they could buy more house for less money, with a smaller tax burden and greater job prospects for their kids. The “don’t let the door hit you on the way out” mentality of so many lawmakers was hardly disguised, especially while another social-media company was making an IPO or a new venture-capital fund was ringing the cash register.

But the newest development in the Left’s fatal designs for this state is a game-changer. It is no longer just a family of four making $90,000 per year packing up the U-Haul and headed to Utah for a better life. The leftists themselves have had enough. The tech wizards of Palo Alto realize they have artisanal coffee shops in Denver, too. The cultural appeal of California has spread outside its own borders. Middle-class traditional families had already made the cost–benefit analysis of leaving the state, but now the gravy train has caught on as well. The Hewlett-Packards and the Teslas and select Silicon Valley gurus capture headlines now as they pack their own version of a U-Haul. What lies ahead for the state is ten years of a slow build of this same dynamic — even the cool kids are getting out of Dodge.

Legislators make conscious decisions sometimes. So do middle-class families. And guess what? So do hip, tech-savvy Millennials.

American Covid Phobia

Posted on April 20, 2021 by Ron Clutz

Kylee Zempel explains in her Federalist article Americans Are Irrationally Afraid Of COVID Because The Ruling Class Has Demonized Risk

‘Why do so many vaccinated people remain fearful?’ David Leonhardt asks with a straight face in Monday’s New York Times newsletter.
Let me tell you.

Leonhardt opens with a story about judge and Yale University law professor Guido Calabresi, who for 30 years has been telling his students a tale he crafted about a god who came to society to propose an invention that would make their lives better in nearly every way. It would afford them extra quality time with loved ones and enable them to see sights and perform tasks they wouldn’t otherwise be able to do.

The cost? The god would select 1,000 young people to strike dead.

The professor would then pose the question to his students: Would you take the deal? The students’ answer would almost always be no. “What’s the difference between this and the automobile?” Calabresi would ask, revealing the moral of the story.

Leonhardt concludes in the Times that we accept the cost of automobile fatalities because it has always been an aspect of our lives. A world without cars and thus the risks they carry is a world we really just can’t imagine for ourselves. Our comfortability with vehicles, Leonhardt says, is an example of human irrationality when calculating risks. While people tend to focus on minuscule risks such as airplane crashes or shark attacks, we gloss over much riskier activities such as driving.

“One way for a risk to become salient is for it to be new,” Leonhardt says, likening the salient risk of Calabresi’s fable to COVID-19. “That’s a core idea behind Calabresi’s fable. He asks students to consider whether they would accept the cost of vehicle travel if it did not already exist. That they say no underscores the very different ways we treat new risks and enduring ones.”

Americans Used to Embrace Risk

Leonhardt’s assessment might be true to an extent. But the fact is that vehicles, which have always been risky, do exist, meaning that Americans at one point were willing to take that risk. At the turn of the 20th century, Calabresi’s fable wasn’t a fable at all. It was a reality, and Americans decided the risk was worth taking.

Thus the explanation can’t just be that we assign different treatments to “new risks and enduring ones.” It’s that Americans of today are orders of magnitude more risk-averse than our predecessors, and thus are more paralyzed and less productive. For a virus, Americans have chosen to cater to the most irrationally COVID-terrified voices among us, making us not only more paralyzed and less productive, but also increasingly less free.

COVID Terror Isn’t ‘Natural’

That’s where Leonhardt’s analysis almost completely diverges from reality. Irrational fears about COVID-19 are not “natural,” nor are they merely the result of salience and newness. It isn’t inherent in the human spirit to be terrified of things that pose such little risk for so much of the population.

These irrational fears are manufactured. They’re instilled by folks like Anthony Fauci, who said just last week that “No, it’s still not OK,” when asked whether vaccinated or unvaccinated Americans should be eating and drinking inside at restaurants and bars. Infection counts are still “disturbingly high,” he said, again fueling the fire of illogical COVID terror.

“Even after you’re vaccinated, social distancing, wearing masks are going to be essential,” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki warned in February. Meanwhile, corporations and the federal government are teaming up to make you prove you’re not unclean with a “vaccine passport” so you don’t pose an existential threat to your fellow citizens, blue-state leaders and bureaucrats are double-masking even after they’re vaccinated and saying “it is possible” we’ll still be wearing face masks in 2022, and Biden’s COVID adviser is saying the pandemic in the United States is still a “Category 5 hurricane” even after millions of Americans have been inoculated.

So no, it isn’t “natural” that the vaccinated continue to cling to irrational fears. It’s a direct result of scare-mongering and lies and an unwillingness to do any type of risk assessment until a Pfizer cocktail is coursing through one’s veins. It’s the predictable outcome after a year of terrifying rhetoric and fudged data, in which The New York Times itself played a role (see here, here, here, here, here, and here) — and continues to.

Resist the Culture of Fear

Either the Times author is too simple to connect those dots, or he’s part of the media and “expert” ruling class that still wants Americans to buy into their social experiment so they can keep normal citizens on a short leash as they craft the culture they desire of herders and sheep, haves and have-nots, and engineers and cogs.

Leonhardt is right about one thing: Most COVID fears are completely irrational. But The New York Times doesn’t get credit for pointing this out more than a year after the world went into lockdown and lives have been destroyed. When conservatives and Americans of goodwill tried to make risk assessments early on, they were excoriated by the corporate press for being selfish and conspiratorial murderers and rubes.

The irrationality of COVID fears didn’t start with the vaccine — and won’t end with it either. Today’s risk-averse Americans have decided en masse that safety is paramount, risk is unacceptable and therefore freedom is dangerous, and dissenters are malicious.

This brings us all back to Calabresi’s fable. American greatness, with pandemics as with automobiles, doesn’t come from 21st-century Yale students afraid of their own shadows. It comes from the types of Americans who can identify the dangers of the Model T, recognize that risk-taking is the sine qua non to human progress, and say, “Bring it on.”

Cogito ergo sum→→Sentio ergo ita est

Posted on April 16, 2021 by Ron Clutz

Historians consider that this René Descartes statement epitomizes the spirit of the Age of Reason. The 17th century philosopher was looking for an unalterable foundation to build the knowledge, a fixed point from which knowledge could be erected. The quote comes from the Discourse on Method by René Descartes, writing which altered the course of history, ushering in a transformation also known as the Enlightenment.

Sentio ergo ita est

Now we have a new awakening and a shift away from reason and objectivity in favor of emotion and subjectivity. The effects of this spirit are apparent in the Twitter mobs, legacy media propaganda, in academic intolerance, and extends into virtue signalling corporate executives. H/T to Pat Frank for his recent comment summarizing this distubing retreat from rationality. Excerpt in italics with my bolds.

“In woke “science” there is no falsifiable hypothesis. In its place, we have the official orthodox consensus view.”

These areas of science have succumbed to sociology and culture studies. They not only include Covid and climate change, but extend to gender dysphoria, critical race theory, white supremacy, intersectionality, implicit bias, systemic racism, efficacy of diversity/equity/inclusion (DEI; right-think/quota/prejudice), the root cause of crime, and on and on.

These areas make claims that political extremism and violent riots have leveraged to the status of knowledge. Pseudo-knowledge. Things not true that are accepted widely and hotly.

Their general category is the subjectivist narrative. They assume what should be proved, the assumptions are granted the status of evidence, and all the studies are self-confirmatory.

Equivocal language and the flabby tendentious thinking of critical theorists (academic third-raters, all) makes subjectivist narratives the perfect tool for the political demagogue.

This is where universities are headed. Intolerant, prejudicial mediocrity fiercely overseen by Commisars of right-think.

Overseen because university presidents and boards, and heads of national labs, will be judged by their commitment to right-think. If an unseemly interest in merit undercuts DEI, the Commisar will see to their exit. Today, disemployment; later on, execution.

To this, the halls of science have surrendered.

It seems far too many scientists are just methodological hacks. Unable to distinguish knowledge from pseudo-knowledge, the cultural theorists have effortlessly rolled them over.

Background from previous post Revolution: Sentiment Now Overrules Sense

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Dominic Green describes the sociopolitical coup in his Spectator article Meghan ’n’ Joe’s empire of the sentiments. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Biden dispenses serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes

If your facts don’t care about my feelings, then my feelings aren’t obliged to care about your facts. The facts in Joe Biden’s energetic, inspiring and exhilarating address to the nation last night were frequently as unsteady as the speaker. But the feelings that Biden expressed were, unlike the previous president who must not be named, unimpeachable.

He knows how it feels, he said with that now-customary surge of anger, as if he’s not fully in control of his frontal cortex. And we know how it feels when someone says they know how we feel. Consider everything fixed: COVID, racism, opioids, deficits, the collapse of the schools, the children at the border. The Therapeute-in-Chief is here, dispensing serotonin the way Barack Obama dispensed drone strikes.

It doesn’t matter whether Biden means what he says, any more that it matters whether Meghan Markle told the truth when she implied that her son was denied a prince’s title because he might have dark skin. It’s the feelings that matter: feelings of security, empathy and contentment, and especially the feeling that Nietzsche correctly foresaw as the root feeling of modern life, resentment.

The result is the rule of sentiment over thought and symbols over reality. The Biden administration didn’t invent the moral and humanitarian disaster at the southern border. But it has produced a new crisis by altering the laws to satisfy sentiment.

It feels cruel to return unaccompanied minors, as the Trump administration did, and to hold them in prison-like conditions, as both the Obama and Trump administrations did. But the fact is, Biden’s policies have fostered a greater cruelty.

Biden has created new incentives for human trafficking and the worse kinds of child exploitation.

The result is a surge in border crossings that even a professional euphemist like secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas calls ‘overwhelming’, and the spectacle of would-be illegal immigrants kneeling at the border while wearing t-shirts reading ‘Biden let us in’.

This is what Biden gets for taking a knee as a craven genuflection to BLM. This is what he gets for accusing Donald Trump of being a racist and sadist for caging unaccompanied minors — even though Biden was vice president when the cages were built, and even though Biden now presides over a greater influx. And this is what we get: a theater of the sentiments, in which the actors and audience are so jaded that their senses and check books can only be stimulated by that reliable and obscene soap-opera trick, putting children’s lives in the balance.

Asked if the word ‘crisis’ applied, the President’s spokeswoman, Jennifer Psaki, refuses to call it anything at all — because she would feel bad, and we would feel bad, and Biden would look bad, if we called it for what it is. It is easier for the administration to resent the Mexican children for putting us in this moral bind, and resent the Republicans, who aren’t short of their own resentments when it comes to immigration, for making hay with it.

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The fact is that this is a crisis. It reflects the corrupt failure of Washington DC and the cold self-interest of corporations who want cheap labor, unions who don’t want it, and, in the middle, the upper-middle-class donors who dislike foreigners who don’t speak English, but need them to bus their tables, do their lawns and wipe their children’s backsides.

Given the complexities of the facts and the appeal of a flight into sentiment, it’s no wonder that this week the administration and media did direct us to pity the children. Meghan and Harry, that is.

Jennifer Psaki commends Meghan and Harry for the ‘courage’ it took to sit down with Oprah and make unsubstantiated allegations against his family. Their kind of fact-light, sentiment-heavy self-promotion and self-therapy was, Psaki told us, one of the areas that Biden is ‘committed to in the future’.

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Biden’s increasingly vague routines of empathy are the symbolic face and velvet glove of a bureaucracy of the sentiments whose offices run from government to the media.

Biden is very old. After him, the gloves will be off and the face will be hardened with more than Botox. We’ll get this decayed form of democracy good and hard, and we’ll be told it should feel good. And that’s a fact.

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Covid Cult Oppresses Public

Posted on April 12, 2021 by Ron Clutz

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Multiple businesses were vandalized after an anti-curfew protest turned into a riot in Montreal, Quebec Sunday night. François Legault, the Premier of Quebec, announced Quebec’s Covid-19 curfew will be pushed up from 9:30 PM to 8:00 PM beginning Sunday due to rising Covid cases.

Thy children shall suffer … and other commandments of the Cult of COVID By Donald S. Siegel, David A. Waldman and Robert M. Sauer at NY Post. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The Cult of COVID’s spread has been made possible by an alarmingly powerful public-health establishment and large corporations.

For years, we’ve heard that a growing share of Americans don’t identify with any religion. But the past year has witnessed a remarkable religious revival in a nation that was supposed to be fast-secularizing. Only, the religion in question is grim, hopeless, more akin to a cult than true faith — and decidedly imposed from on high.

We’re speaking, of course, of the Cult of COVID, the fastest-growing religion in the United States and across much of the developed world, a religion whose spread has been made possible by an alarmingly powerful public-health establishment and large corporations.

The Cult of COVID has its own clerical elite, its own commandments and even modesty norms. And like any cult, its fanatic adherents shame and silence heretics for defying the public orthodoxy.

The faith’s First Commandment: Thou shalt stay locked down.

For the first time in history, healthy, asymptomatic people of all ages were “quarantined” and placed under virtual house arrest for long stretches.

It’s hard to remember now, since they’ve become a part of our lives, but lockdowns and “reopenings” are an unprecedented imposition on our fundamental rights to work, study, do business, freely associate and worship (God, not the COVID deities).

It’s equally hard to remember, but the COVID clerisy told us the lockdowns would last a few weeks at most, until we “flatten the curves”; we did that, months ago, yet the liturgy of lockdowns goes on.

Then there’s the faith’s Second Commandment: Thou shalt wear a mask.

So essential is this modesty norm that even those who are fully vaccinated continue to wear surgical masks whose effectiveness is questionable at best. We are told that the vaccines are overwhelmingly effective — yet not effective enough, apparently, to disrupt the liturgy of lockdowns or to obviate the mask requirement.

Next commandment: Thy children must suffer.

Like most barbarous cults, the Cult of COVID demands child sacrifice, albeit less overtly bloody than the ancient pagan variety. Pagans practiced child sacrifice in order to appease supernatural beings. Likewise, under the Cult of COVID, the educational development and physical and mental health of our children have been sacrificed on the altar of Absolute Safety, one of the cult’s most capricious and hard-to-appease deities.

The priestly class of epidemiologists, school officials and union leaders — the latter are especially important in the cult’s hierarchy — are tasked with carrying out this dark liturgy. The media supply the chorus with predictions of imminent doom if children and their parents don’t continue to sacrifice their freedom and social and academic development.

CDC director Dr. Rochelle Walensky became emotional at a recent White House coronavirus press briefing — her voice breaking as she warned that the US is facing “impending doom” as COVID-19 cases rise again.

The children of the poor suffer especially for lack of access to affordable, healthy food. All children pay the price by being deprived of real learning and physical activity.

The disregard for kids’ wellbeing may seem callous, but such is the Cult of COVID: Even and especially the president of the United States must pay obeisance to the cult’s supreme hierarchs, teachers-union bosses.

Which brings us to one of the cult’s most central teachings: that you and your family aren’t individuals with rights and liberties.

Instead, you are germ factories, whose movement and social interaction must be severely limited. The media lionize the experts who have imprisoned us. Politicians claim to “follow the science,” when, in reality, they are really following the cult’s edicts, which are impervious to reason and evidence — for example, evidence that children transmit the virus at a much lower rate than do adults, or that outdoor transmission is so negligible as to render wearing masks in the open downright ridiculous.

If you don’t remember choosing to join an irrational cult, well, nor do we. And nor do millions of people across the West now called to participate in its bizarre, cruel and never-ending liturgies. Whatever your religious beliefs, this was one religious revival America didn’t need.

Donald S. Siegel, is a professor of public policy at Arizona State University, where David A. Waldman is a professor of Management. Robert M. Sauer is a professor of economics at the University of London.

Voting Systems Connected to Internet

Posted on April 10, 2021 by Ron Clutz

More discoveries regarding computer voting systems used in the 2020 US elections. Patrick Colbeck reports Modem Chips Embedded in Voting System Computer Motherboards. Excerpts in italics with my bolds. H/T Gateway Pundit

While all of the attention has been focused upon manipulation of election results via software, there has been very little attention paid to hardware. Malware can be embedded in hardware as well as software. That’s why the following discovery unearthed by Attorney Matt DePerno during his investigation into Antrim County election fraud is so important.

What was discovered?

SEE Exhibit 6 in Antrim County Lawsuit

ES&S DS200 voting machine was found to have a Telit LE910-SV1 Modem Chip installed on its motherboard
Chip utilized a commercial Verizon SIM card with an Access Point Name (APN) configuration specific to the ES&S DS200 provisioning.

ESS DS200 Motherboard with Telit LE910-SV1 Modem Chip

What does the Telit LE910-SV1 Modem Chip do?

-Enable communication between voting system equipment and election servers
-Designed to operate on a virtual private network
-Testing has revealed that the same SIM card could be used in a separate wireless hotspot device. This device could then join the same APN as the ES&S voting machines.

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Why is this important?

– ES&S equipment is used in eight Michigan counties: Alcona, Bay, Emmet, Grand Traverse, Kalamazoo, Macomb, Mason, Roscommon
-It demonstrates that computers can be connected to internet without any discernable ethernet or external modem connection
-It demonstrates that Dominion Voting Systems are not the only electronic voting system with security vulnerabilities
-It is very difficult to detect unless you pry open the machine case to investigate the hardware
-It drives the imperative for disciplined hardware certification as well as software certification
-Anyone with access to any SIM card could have pre-programmed access to the APN.
-It demonstrates how electronic voting systems could be connected to the internet with minimal risk of detection.

Additional Reporting on Michigan Election Fraud Attorney Matthew DePerno Releases Michigan Elections Forensics Report – 66,194 Unregistered Ballots Tallied in JUST 9 COUNTIES

Background from previous post Data Mining for Election Fraud

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Jay Valentine explains in his American Thinker article Election Fraud Hotspots – 10% of the Data are 70% of the Fraud Jay is an expert in uncovering insurance fraud and points out that the same analyses will disclose fraudulent ballot patterns. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and images.

The more our team looked at the 2020 election fraud from publicly available records, the more it appeared to have similar characteristics to property casualty insurance fraud.

Beginning in November, like many citizens, we witnessed election fraud possibilities any sentient person would investigate. Having backgrounds in fraud detection, particularly in the property casualty insurance business, Medicaid fraud, and cyber fraud, gave us a curiosity that never dissipated.

Our interest is 100% in data analysis. That means looking at the actual votes, the addresses, the information about ballots reported to Secretaries of State. While there are all kinds of other fraud, the best way to light it up is with data analysis.

Not just the statistical stuff with the graphs and Greek symbols, but old fashioned rows and columns. Nothing illegal, just the same public data Google uses to profile someone for new running shoes.

If Jesse Morgan did drive a tractor trailer truck with 100,000 ballots from New York to Pennsylvania, how can we find out? Chris Wray and our hardy pals at the FBI may not want to open that truck’s back door, but we do – with database analysis.

Every one of those ballots has a person’s name and address. The ballot is cast, illegally for sure, and counted. The local government is involved as well as the U.S. Postal Service officials at that particular location. That makes this sovereign, industrial election fraud.

They can hide the truck. They can claim it never happened. They cannot hide the record of the ballot.

Imagine yourself trying to fake 100,000 ballots. Even with some of your pals, lots of them, sitting around tables with pizza and Cokes and #2 pencils, it’s daunting. Every ballot needs to tie to an address. Each ties to a name. This is fraud infrastructure.

While you and your friends are filling out 100,000 ballots with Biden circles, do you think you took the time to use a different, real address for every one of them? Or, more likely, did you use a small group of addresses over and over? You get the picture.

If you filled out birth dates, did you use a different one every time you thought about it? How about those surnames? They are tied to real people and they better live in Pennsylvania.

We are getting reports some Secretaries of State are modifying mail-in ballot data to hide the tens of thousands of ballots received before they were sent.

This is a very bad idea.

Fraud data is like the world’s messiest crime scene.

Think of your worst nightmare crime scene with blood, bullet casings, broken furniture, spatterings, and that is how complex a fraud database is. If a criminal alters a crime scene, they always make things worse for themselves. They leave traces of who they were. More troublesome, they leave traces of what they are trying to hide.

We are thrilled people are trying to alter data after the fact.
They are leaving tracks like a dinosaur walking through a field of peanut butter for database tracking.

Citizen election fraud investigators are coalescing across multiple states sharing information, fraud profiles and actual data. We are helping with fraud investigative expertise and search technology beyond anything commercially available.

Our thesis is that 70% of all 2020 election fraud will be tied to 10% of the records. Like insurance fraud, election fraud has cultural affinities. It also has geographic patterns and links to a small number of people who deliver the overwhelming amount of fraud.

Cultural affinities?

We broke a major insurance fraud ring showing a group of Somali immigrants, living in the same building, driving the same car, had scammed a major insurance company. Sure they did, they knew each other. This happens all the time; the data show it.

Election fraud is no different. People who hang out together may have similar world views. If they are aggressive enough to join in an election fraud conspiracy, they don’t bring in strangers, they bring in friends and family. This kind of relationship shows up as a hot spot in data visualization.

Data visualization shows hotspots – like red wine stains on a white tablecloth.

Isn’t it interesting that 634 people with the same birthday, including the year, live at these seven addresses? Digging deeper, look, the address is not a physical location, it is a UPS store with mailboxes. That’s a crowded P.O. Box!

Look here, different family members live in different mailboxes with the same surname. The mailboxes are consecutive numbers, too! That’s so convenient for Thanksgiving dinner!

This is what industrial fraud starts to look like and there are plenty of data from December Secretary of State data files to prove this.

In fraud analysis, connections count big time. Industrial fraud is by definition a connected enterprise with a few actors driving lots of transactions. As we build a likely fraud database, think more of Ancestry.com rather than those rows and columns.

Ancestry.com allows you to build a family tree. As you build it, your family connects to other families. Those families add their long lost relatives you did not know existed enriching the tree. Connections count.

That is what an organic election fraud database starts to look like. Here, let’s do one!

Billy X has 239 people living in his one-bedroom Pennsylvania house and they all voted. All public information. Billy should be proud of his diligence.

We connect Billy via 100 social media posts floating on the internet using a web crawler. Look, Billy is a steward for the local trade union. He hates Trump.

Data visualization indicates Billy corresponds with Sally B. and Mortimer W. They live in Virginia. They too, hate Trump; so says social media. Our new friends in Virginia interested in election fraud start adding their data about Sally and Mort. Here are two addresses for Sally and they tie to over 600 registered voters. Mort has over 150 living in his one bedroom flat.

This is how it looks, folks. This is just the surface of what can be found from current, available, public records, social media and internet communication. We can go hundreds of layers deeper and it is delivered in the blink of an eye.

So when you freak out about H.R. 1, which is terrible, remember, they may have Marc Elias in their corner but the Patriots have data, technology, and adversaries who leave dinosaur tracks.

My Comment: Those of us who watched the 2020 election go off the rails are waiting and hoping for the perps to be caught. Forensic audits with competent analysts are under way in Arizona with Maricopa officials trying to block it. Ballot audits in Montana and New Hampshire turned up irregularities large enough to change the results. The ‘Scan the Ballots’ Effort Is Moving Forward In Georgia Involving Jovan Pulitizer’s Technique of Forensically Reviewing Ballots from the 2020 Election (here). The Georgia exercise shows what is a proper election forensic audit. A 2020 audit will review all the ballots, not just a sample. Every ballot will be reviewed for the paper the ballot is on, the ink used, the shape of the circles being filled in, the sequence of the ballots, the creases in ballots, etc. This type of physical review, just of the ballots, will identify invalid ballots. These ballots can then be reviewed and eliminated if no proper excuses for their oddities are available. This can be done for every ballot in every audit.

A random thought: What if Pelosi dropped her idea of contesting the Iowa seat won by a Republican by six votes because she was warned what an in depth analysis would show? And another: What if Biden’s handlers are in such a rush to overturn everything because they know what kind of dirt will be coming out in coming months?

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Beware Biden’s Push for a Global Taxation Regime

Posted on April 9, 2021 by Ron Clutz

Dan Mitchell writes Three Reasons to Reject Biden’s Tax Harmonization Scheme for “Global Minimum Taxation”. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some images.

Way back in 2007, I narrated this video to explain why tax competition is very desirable because politicians are likely to overtax and overspend (“Goldfish Government“) if they think taxpayers have no ability to escape.

The good news is that tax competition has been working.

As explained in the above video, there have been big reductions in personal tax rates and corporate tax rates. Just as important, governments have reduced various forms of double taxation, meaning lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains.

Many governments have also reduced – or even eliminated – death taxes and wealth taxes.

These pro-growth tax reforms didn’t happen because politicians read my columns (I wish!). Instead, they adopted better tax policy because they were afraid of losing jobs and investment to countries with better fiscal policy.

Now for the bad news.

There’s been an ongoing campaign by high-tax governments to replace tax competition with tax harmonization. They’ve even conscripted international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to launch attacks against low-tax jurisdictions.

And now the United States is definitely on the wrong side of this issue.

Here’s some of what the Biden Administration wants.

The United States can lead the world to end the race to the bottom on corporate tax rates. A minimum tax on U.S. corporations alone is insufficient. …President Biden is also proposing to encourage other countries to adopt strong minimum taxes on corporations, just like the United States, so that foreign corporations aren’t advantaged and foreign countries can’t try to get a competitive edge by serving as tax havens. This plan also denies deductions to foreign corporations…if they are based in a country that does not adopt a strong minimum tax. …The United States is now seeking a global agreement on a strong minimum tax through multilateral negotiations. This provision makes our commitment to a global minimum tax clear. The time has come to level the playing field and no longer allow countries to gain a competitive edge by slashing corporate tax rates.

As Charlie Brown would say, “good grief.” Those passages sound like they were written by someone in France, not America

And Heaven forbid that countries “gain a competitive edge by slashing corporate tax rates.” Quelle horreur!

There are three things to understand about this reprehensible initiative from the Biden Administration.

Tax harmonization means ever-increasing tax rates – It goes without saying that if politicians are able to create a tax cartel, it will merely be a matter of time before they ratchet up the tax rate. Simply stated, they won’t have to worry about an exodus of jobs and investment because all countries will be obliged to have the same bad approach.
Corporate tax harmonization will be followed by harmonization of other taxes – If the scheme for a harmonized corporate tax is imposed, the next step will be harmonized (and higher) tax rates on personal income, dividends, capital gains, and other forms of work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.
Tax harmonization denies poor countries the best path to prosperity – The western world became rich in the 1800s and early 1900s when there was very small government and no income taxes. That’s the path a few sensible jurisdictions want to copy today so they can bring prosperity to their people, but that won’t be possible in a world of tax harmonization.

Data Mining for Election Fraud

Posted on April 2, 2021 by Ron Clutz