patrick.net

How do you not have medical insurance? California mandates medical insurance:

With all of the obese poor people in the US (who are rich by global standards) I call BS on that chart. No fucking way 12%. 85% should be going on diets and skipping meals though.

Kill Irish Butter so Germany can sell Bose Radios in Buenos Aires.

The financialized economy was primed to blow up in September of 2019 when symptoms of severe distress materialized in an arcane corner of the system known as the reverse repo market where banks loan each other money on extremely short term, usually overnight, to provide so-called “liquidity” — meaning the appearance of solvency. The crisis expressed itself as a dangerously sharp rise in interest rates. The Fed came up with enough liquidity to paper over the crisis, and then, miraculous to relate, the Covid-19 “emergency” a few months later gave them cover to “print” trillions of dollars and distribute the “money” rapidly into the on-the-ground economy where people bought the things of daily life.

The result of that monetary mischief was today’s inflation. Inflation, of course, is one way of going broke. You have a lot of money that is increasingly worthless. The other way of going broke is deflation, where you have no money. In the aggregate of a deflation, nobody will have any money, so at least you’ll have company in the misery of being broke. My guess is that a grievous deflation is where the current situation is headed. Deflations are provoked when people and companies can’t meet their debt obligations — can’t “service” their loans (pay interest), or pay back contracted sums of borrowed money, or simply can’t pay their bills. Every loan that goes bad causes some money to disappear — poof! — and when a whole lot of that happens there is no money.

The Federal Reserve digital currency is a kind of last resort way around that. It is a simple way for the system to pretend there is a lot of money around when there really isn’t any. It has the huge additional advantages, by way of computerized accounting, to allow the authorities to control what everybody spends their money on, especially the ability to block the purchase of this or that: a train ticket, gasoline, meat, if the authorities feel like it. It also enables the authorities to extract taxes, duties, and penalties at will, without any cooperation from the citizen. A Fed digital currency would be a giant step into the worst kind of exquisitely targeted tyranny. The excuse, of course, would be a “national emergency.”

A digital currency would likely first be tested among the most indigent in society, those with little or no income. It already is, actually, in the debit cards currently issued to illegal border-jumpers. Their card accounts are refilled monthly, making this the equivalent of a guaranteed basic income. Next, this privilege will be extended to the lower economic ranks of American citizens, and so on upward, until the whole middle-class and even the higher levels are enlisted, and then the authorities will have the ability to push everyone around.

That’s the hypothesis, anyway. I don’t believe it’s going to work. The authorities have underestimated the number of citizens who know what it means to be sovereign individuals. They will decline to be pushed around. They might even push back, start stomping on the blob’s tentacles as it reaches across the land. The citizens of one region or another of our country might go so far as to establish their own money, which would make them sovereign regions of sovereign individuals. That is going to be a problem that the blob and blobism cannot overcome.

https://twitter.com/DougAMacgregor/status/1736951701414805540 1:12 minutes

🎯 Dave Smith on Why the Culture War Was Socially Engineered

“The people did not wake up one day and decide we want to have a national conversation about chicks with d*cks.”