Peak Civilization

 I saw this article today and thought it was both funny and scary - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/upshot/inflation-economy-analysis.html Even the article itself says that understanding how the economy works is still something of a "black box." This shouldn't inspire confidence in anyone that "things are under control." Apply the same analogy to brain surgery, airplane engines, or water quality monitoring - "Uhh, we don't really understand how these things work, but feel free to trust your life to them." I mean, it's not like we're talking about the system that everyone in the first world, and to a lesser degree, much of the third world, depends on. We don't know which direction prices are going, what money is really worth, and exactly how much rot there is in the whole thing, but trust us - we know what we're doing. As I outlined in my previous post, the reality is that we're living off the largess of past generations that ...

 People are looking at supply line issues as being an inconvenience. Go to your favorite store, find out they're out of Oreos or toilet paper. There are vague rumblings about Christmas being ruined this year, too, because there won't be many toys in stock. Eh, maybe celebrate the old-fashioned way by spending time doing things together as a family and getting drunk off the eggnog? The photos of ships sitting offshore is a little nice eye candy between the news reporting on the latest homicide-by-lawn sprinkler and a cute polar bear who thinks it's a kitten. What has not really been considered, even by people who write on the subject, is that supply chain issues have a cascading effect in a world that is run on funny money. Business is conducted through debt, both short and long term. People take on debt to buy materials to make products, to pay their employees, to ship things, pay for physical plants. Shipping companies have long-term loans on their ships, credit accounts f...

The Gavin Newsom recall should have been a whole lot closer than it was. If you take a roughly fifty percent approval rating, a forty percent disapproval rating, and split the ten percent undecided, it should have been something like a 55/45 split to keep/recall Newsom. Instead, it went around 64-36. Even the people who didn't approve of the job he was doing were apparently more than a little vexxed at the thought of having Larry Elder as the next governor of California. It's a little hard to blame them, too. Elder is a Trump sycophant who, like many other media figures on the right, seems to make his money from hitting the talk show circuit and reciting the typical talking points about Biden and company. Could the Republicans have won California? It's a good question, but I don't think it's going to be answered, because the Republicans do a great job of self-sabotage without appealing to the MAGA crowd. Elder became the front runner on the right because of that sup...

It has been something to watch the collective skull of the left burst open like a dead whale carcass over the possibility of Trump running in 2024. I don't think there has been a greater example of someone living rent-free in people's minds than that of Trump over the last five or so years. From the time he won the candidacy up through this weekend, it has been nonstop Trump. Trump the traitor, Trump the insurrectionist, Trump the sore loser, Trump the Russian candidate, and so on. If it weren't so far-fetched, people would probably be claiming that Trump invented covid to wipe out Democrats in major cities like New York. Trump was a has-been the moment he took office, and that hasn't changed since he left office. Outside of the trademark "Trump scowl" (which I think he ripped off from Ben Stiller in Zoolander), and trying to get exposure on cable news and any other place he can show up and press the flesh (insert your own jokes there), he is becoming complete...

There is always a sense of things coming to an end as autumn arrives. Leaves fall, plants die from the frost and cold, crickets call to each other with desperation, and birds migrate south. Harvests are collected, the last bounties of the growing season before all food becomes trucked from across the country or preserved. There are also all kinds of festivals and holidays, including Halloween and Thanksgiving.  Tom Rush sang a wonderful son about the approach of autumn as well. But September, the first month of fall, has also come with events that seem to leave a deep mark on the American mind. In two days, we'll be observing the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Anyone over a certain age today, perhaps 30 or so, will remember where they were when the planes hit the World Trade Center. If you are like most people, you initially thought that the first plane hitting the building might have been a pilot error or some other sort of accident. When the second plane hit, it was quite clear that ...

A quick Google search for "coronavirus dashboard" brings up some not-so-great news. Taken nationally, figures are nearly half of what they were at the peak, and three or so times what they were this time last year. Some places, especially the ones that are harder hit than last year, are seeing smaller rises, or even a steady pace of new infection. That was with Delta, and no one knows what Mu is going to do. Coronavirus mutation rates are significantly higher than previously thought, and vaccines and natural immunity seem to lose their effectiveness with each new variant. This makes sense, given that antibodies can recognize one virus structure and may be less effective at locking on to others. Keep the analogy simple, work a jigsaw puzzle sometime and have a piece that looks like it should fit, but doesn't quite really fit. You can push it down and sort of make it work, but you know it's not really right. Viruses and antibodies work sort of the same way. An antibody ...