patrick.net

omicron did not "slam labor markets." covid policy did. and it was entirely avoidable.
el gato malo 5 min ago

CNBC would appear to wish to have us believe that the drop in jobs was caused by “the variant” as though this was some act of nature instead of an act of government.

it is not. this is a deeply misleading framing intended to obscure causality rather than reveal it. ...

we’re living though needless damage to no useful effect at.

this is NOT the virus.

it’s the predictable and unavoidable output of deeply stupid public health policy.

the damage since this began has been acute and severe. “2 weeks to flatten the curve” was, as many of us were screaming right from the beginning, the commencement of the nastiest economic hit to jobs and small business per unit time in US history and probably in global history. ...

it’s really very simple: places that locked down harder got no better outcomes on covid. but they got much, much worse outcomes on economic and societal damage.

this was all known and knowable.

the base prior for pandemics was to never, never do this. ...

at this stage of the game and with this much clear data at one’s disposal, it’s pretty absurd to still be trying to blame upon a virus that which’s fault lies with public health response.

BIDEN’S INNER CIRCLE MAINTAINS CLOSE TIES TO VACCINE MAKERS, DISCLOSURES REVEAL
As concerns grow about a global “vaccine apartheid,” watchdogs worry that the Biden administration is primed to favor profits over people.
Lee FangLee Fang
March 24 2021, 11:18 a.m.

A Faction of Karens

Biden is failing because his policies are designed to appease the hypochondriac wing of the Democratic Party rather than the median voter.

Biden's choice to help with his SCOTUS pick is a BLM board member, CRT promoter and defund-the-police supporter – NONE of which he mentioned when he announced her
Minyon Moore, 63, was tapped by Biden to help him pick the first black woman justice on the Supreme Court
She sits on the board of Black Lives Matter Global Foundation, which touts defunding the police
Biden has tried to distance himself of that movement
Moore is a close friend and promoter of Kimberle Crenshaw one of the founding architects of critical race theory
She has been a political consultant for Jesse Jackson, Kamala Harris, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden
She will suspend her political consulting and work with BLM whiles she advises on the top court pick

Regular gas reaches $6.21 a gallon in Los Angeles

The Ukraine debacle showcases Joe Biden’s many failures
Thanks to his energy policy, the US is helping to fund Russia’s military adventurism

February 23, 2022

Snap quiz: who was president when Vladimir Putin gobbled up Crimea?

If you said Barack Obama, go to the head of the class.

What countries did Putin invade while Donald Trump was president?

Related Stories

Never Trumpers play 4D chess over Russia, lose
Biden’s weak words on the Russian invasion
Putin is looking to rebuild Russia’s empire
Was Russia’s ‘rape’ of Ukraine inevitable?
The invasion the West had feared
If you said “None,” you get to stay at the head of the class.

This is a harder one: who was president when Putin once again violated Ukraine’s borders, sending in Russian troops to two breakaway regions in Eastern Ukraine?

I say that this is harder because the obvious answer — “Joe Biden” — is not really, or not wholly, correct.

Joe Biden is an empty shell. On good days, he looks like a mannequin. Really, though, he is a puppet, a creature controlled by others. I have called those others “The Committee.” I am not more specific because I do not know for sure who has seats at that table. Anyway, if you said “Joe Biden” in response to the question, you get full points only if you added an asterisk next to his name.

To appreciate what we are up against, ponder Joe Biden’s performance at this roundtable about Ukraine. A reporter asks, “Do you think you may have underestimated Putin?” Biden smirks, looks vacantly about the room, and then picks at his teeth. Answer came there none. The president of the United States, ladies and gentlemen. It is an unnerving exhibition.

A few observations. First, remember that during the 2020 presidential campaign Joe Biden, or some member of The Committee, emitted this tweet: “Vladimir Putin doesn’t want me to be president. He doesn’t want me to be our nominee. If you’re wondering why — it’s because I’m the only person in this field who’s ever gone toe-to-toe with him.”

Vlad and Joe go “toe-to-toe.” Who wins?

Donald Trump often remarked that it would be “a good thing, not a bad thing” if the US got on well with Russia.

That sent some of my neocon friends into a tizzy.

“Doesn’t Trump know that Putin is a murderous thug who kills journalists, thinks the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a tragedy, and aims to restore as much Soviet territory as he can to Russia?”

Precisely. And that is why it would be important (note the subjunctive) for the US to get along with Russia.

Ronald Reagan’s mantra — “Peace through strength” — was also Trump’s, which is why he spent a trillion or two restoring the military that had been depleted during Obama’s eight years of folly and why he did everything he could to project American strength.

He did not, however, start any wars.

If you want to influence a potentially hostile foreign leader, especially one presiding over a state in demographic and economic eclipse, and double especially if that state happens to be sitting on thousands of nuclear warheads, it is imperative to keep the channels of communication open.

Speaking of economic matters, do you remember the good old days when America was energy independent, nay, when it was producing so much energy that it was actually a net exporter? Probably you do. It was was recent as 2020.

Then came the Biden administration. One of their first acts was to shut down the Keystone Pipeline, a major source of energy production, not to mention thousands of jobs in the US. At the same time, they green-lighted the Nord Stream 2 pipeline to bring gas from Russia to Germany. In response to Putin’s excellent adventure in Ukraine, the German chancellor Olaf Scholz, suspended certification of the pipeline, but since Germany, having shuttered its nuclear power plants, is heavily dependent on the gas supplied from Russia, it is anyone’s guess how long German resolve will last.

I bring in gas in order to present you with this cheery data point. In 2020, when Donald Trump was president, the price of natural gas was $4.36 per 1,000 cubic feet. In 2021, with Joe Biden presiding, prices more than doubled, averaging $9 per 1,000 cubic feet. Not only does that mean that it costs more to heat your house this winter. It also means means that the US is helping to fund Russia’s military adventurism.


I am not sure that most Americans could locate Ukraine on a map. And the truth is our interest in the region is negligible. It has been important to Hunter Biden’s cash flow, it is true, and it has furnished Joe Biden with an opportunity to display his thuggishness on television, but it is a thoroughly corrupt state that is teetering on the edge of economic collapse. Some cynical commentators think that the media and The Committee are riveted on Ukraine as a way of distracting attention from such things as runaway inflation, the stock market disintegration, and the institution of police tyranny in Canada. Sounds plausible.

In any event, as my friend Roger L. Simon observed, the crisis in Ukraine is entirely on Joe Biden. We’re told that Biden’s approval rating is down to 39 percent. That’s the official number. The real number, I suspect, is in single digits.

Weakness invites predators.

While the US military fought a two-front battle for change—climate and gender—the Russians prepared for war.

While the US military and intelligence apparatus conducted a coup to remove a president over his mean tweets, Russia laid out plans to restore the Soviet Union’s sphere of influence.

While the US shuts down its own petroleum production industry, Russia made Europe its oil slave.

Yet, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is only a small symptom of the end of America.

If you take a look at the world as a whole instead of focusing on the crisis of the moment, you realize quickly the United States holds little influence. Its former title as “leader of the free world” evaporated on January 20, 2021, and it took the free world with it. Here’s a quick survey:

The US is about to grant Iran permission to build nuclear weapons

Canada, Australia, and Austria are police states

Saudi Arabia, long an American puppet regime, now ignores US calls to increase oil output

Iran is dictating terms of a new nuclear weapons treaty to US stenographers

Yet, the symptoms of America’s collapse are much broader and deeper than the attention-grabbing images in Ukraine.

America Is China’s Puppet

First, China announced new sanctions against Lockheed-Martin and Raytheon for daring to sell defense parts to Taiwan. The United States government has not responded. Or has it? The next hidden story might be Biden’s response.

The US Department of Justice will soon end President Trump’s policy of protecting US intellectual property and military intelligence from Chinese espionage out of fear of being called “racist.” The DOJ has already begun dropping charges against Chinese spies. Now, under pressure from Chinese spies who work for America’s major research universities, Attorney-General Merrrick Garland has signalled the US will let the Chinese spies ship American technology, including military secrets and biological weapons research, to China.

While Biden was talking tough to Putin, who ignored the bluster, Biden continues to kowtow to Xi. The Biden administration ignores the recently announced pact between Russia and China to combat the US and Europe. Via Zero Hedge:

And while the West is united against Russian actions in the Donbas, just as it is united against a possible incursion by China in Taiwan, Russia's stance on the matter is clear: hours before the Winter Olympics opened two weeks ago, Putin and Xi Jinping declared that they are backing each other over standoffs on Ukraine and Taiwan with a promise to collaborate more against the West.

Russia and China are simply behaving the way unprincipled victors behave. They know that America is defenseless at the moment.

They watched how the US media and Deep State sabotaged the Trump administration—breaking laws, wiretapping, conducting show trials in the Senate, framing Trump allies.

They saw Black Lives Matter and Antifa extort over a billion dollars from US corporations by burning American cities nearly to the ground.

They’ve seen Biden’s dementia advance to the point he sent his half-wit vice president to a security summit last weekend.


They’ve watched the US military abandon, not only Afghanistan, but its own purpose by making climate change, inclusion, and transgenderism its new mission.

They watch in amazement as the US government invites millions of foreign, illegal aliens across our Southern border.

In all of this, Xi and Putin recognized America for what it has become: an empire grown tired of its place in the world, a nation ashamed of its own existence. The US is like Muhammad Ali in his first fight against Leon Spinks.


When I write about the end of America, I’m telling you the truth as best I can see it. It’s better to be prepared for calamity that doesn’t happen than unprepared by one that does.

Regardless of where this all goes, you can’t deny that the US is on the ropes, confused, and tired.

Why wouldn’t Putin take Ukraine? Why wouldn’t he take Poland? Why wouldn’t Xi take Taiwan and possibly Japan? What’s stopping them? Certainly not America’s woke military.

America Has Not Yet Begun to Stumble

Believe it or not, Biden has been in office just 13 months. Even if Republicans were to take the House and Senate in 2022, China and Russia will have eleven more months to do whatever they want. (And, frankly, if I were a Republican member of Congress, I would give Joe Biden no additional authority. Authorizing this particular president to use military force anywhere in the world would be like authorizing a drunk 15-year-old to drive a Corvette.)

A Republican Congress under Biden would be just as feckless and feeble as it was under Obama. Only a handful of Republicans in the entire country have the spine to challenge a Democrat president, and the FBI and DOJ will keep those renegades in check.

Meanwhile, American citizens are more divided than at the outset of the Civil War. The left does not want to share the same land mass with Trump supporters, and vice versa. Neither political faction would lift a finger to stop Putin from annihilating the other side. As Dr. Ben Hunt explained back in 2015:

There’s one inevitable consequence of significant political polarization: the center does not hold. Our expectation that The Central Tendency carries the day will fail, and this failure will occur at all levels of political organization, from your local school board to a congressional caucus to a national political party to the overall electorate. Political outcomes will always surprise in a polarized world, either surprisingly to the left or surprisingly to the right. And all too often, I might add, it’s a surprising outcome pushed by the illiberal left or the illiberal right.

That’s why I began warning about the end of America. Not because I thought I’d get some jollies reading long, angry emails from old friends. I took no joy in that. I did it because it was the truth as best I could discern.

And those early warnings did not suggest fighting to the end. For good reason. The end had come and gone by that time. The Tea Party and Trump were our last hopes. As Phylis Schlafly said in December 2015:

“He [Trump] does look like he’s the last hope [for America],” Schlafly said. “We don’t hear anybody saying what he’s saying. In fact, most of the people who ought to be lining up with him are attacking him. They’re probably jealous of the amount of press coverage he gets. But the reason he gets so much press coverage is the grassroots are fed up with people who are running things, and they do want a change. They do want people to stand up for America. It really resonates when he says he wants to ‘Make America Great Again.’”

Trump has now come and gone. He never really got a chance to Make America Great Again because Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, the DOJ, and the media didn’t want America to be great again. And Biden has undone all of Trump’s incredible accomplishments in just one year. Dementia Joe has three years remaining.

America Is In Decline

By every measure, America is far worse off than it was five years ago when Trump took office. The foundational decay of our culture and institutions is now obvious to all, especially Russia, China, and Iran. Trump may not have drained the swamp, but he proved beyond a doubt the swamp exists, it’s toxic, and it’s the source of that nauseating odor that’s been choking us since Reagan rode off into the sunset.

“But, Bill,” you say, “what about the Durham investigation?”

The Durham investigation will go as far as the Deep State thinks it needs to go to avoid an all-out revolt from the right. And no farther. They’ll give us one or two scalps belonging to people we never heard of. (Ever hear of Ghislaine Maxwell before Epstein didn’t hang himself?) Then, John Durham will accept his well-deserved retirement.

If Durham tries to go too far, he’ll be fired. Never forget that Durham reports to Merrick Garland and serves at the pleasure of Joe Biden. And there are plenty of judges waiting to grant defendants’ motions to dismiss.

“But, Hennessy, Trump will be back in 2025!” Perhaps. Assuming the people who tried to rig 2016 and succeeded in rigging 2020 decide to leave things to chance in 2024. (I don’t think they will.)

But, even if Trump or DeSantis becomes the 47th president, what will he inherit? A military composed of trannies to who hate half of America and an officer corps comprising Antifa and BLM terrorist, China occupying most of the Pacific Rim, and Russia’s borders returned to 1988? A nuclear Iran? Germany aligned with Moscow? Eight million new illegal immigrants carefully distributed to key districts in swing states? A national debt too large for me to display on a single typed line?

Come to think of it, the oligarchs might have every intention of letting Trump walk into that booby trap.

And to which federal agency would Trump or DeSantis turn for support? He can’t fire civil servants. The people he appoints to run those agents can’t make their employees implement policy or law. As Bill Bennett found out when he was Secretary of Education, the Secretary has the helm, but it’s not attached to rudder. The permanent bureaucracy does not answer to the Executive Branch nor to the Legislative Branch, but to the Bureaucracy alone.

2016 was America’s last chance. We did what we could: we elected Trump.

At the time, most of us believed America wanted to be great. It didn’t. It wanted to watch Netflix and eat candy and play dress-up games.

Little did America know that Netflix, candy, and pretty dresses exist only because of America’s greatness. We are trust-fund kids living large on the principal because the interest wasn’t good enough anymore.

Ever wonder why there’s a worker shortage? Sure, the Covid money is part of the problem. But it’s also because a large number of Americans have no desire, no intention, of contributing to the society. At least two generations were raised from birth to do only two things: consume and complain. Except for a tiny few who went off to Afghanistan and Iraq, those generations have reached their 40s without ever having sacrificed for a greater good. They believe in their truth and their passions which have no connection to reality.

And despite all the symptoms of the West’s decline listed above, the West’s obsequious response to Covid was the most obvious sign of collapse.

Putin Watched the Lockdowns Like a Wolf Watching a Herd of Sheep

When I walk through my local stores, I’m struck by the mask wearers. Most are under 40.

I did a quick survey in Walmart last week. Estimating ages, I found that 80 percent of people under 30 wore masks. 100 percent of school-age children wore masks even if their parents did not. Of those whose age I estimated between 40 and 70, about 30 percent wore masks.

These demographic clusters represent different cultures, not just different generations.

The younger generations from which warriors emerge are weak, afraid, and submissive.


The woke military.

BTW, I live in a rural, suburban area that’s about 65 percent Republican.

For 200 years, Americans refused to kowtow to authority. We were founded on the idea that we are the authority. We created our government, gave it its mandate, drew its boundaries of action, and reserved the right to change its members or abolish it altogether.

For the last 80 years, the West mimicked this American attitude. But sometime between the storming of the beaches at Normandy and the celebration of transgender military officers, Americans surrendered their right to institute and control government.

Predators smell weakness. Putin and Xi rule over cultures that believe power belongs to the government. They were held at bay by the West’s opposite belief that power comes from God through the people. The Soviets never feared the US government as much as it feared US citizens. The people were always the wild card no invader could subdue.

But we’ve lost that fearsome mystique, at least in the predators’ eyes.

America’s subservience to vague authority, our willingness to close our shops, shutter our schools, abandon our churches, and cover our faces proved that we lost the magic that made us unique. Like Russians or Chinese, we would do whatever the authorities told us for own good. We would rat out our disobedient neighbors and wear a mask to prove our allegiance to the state.

Having lost our fearsomeness as a people, Putin and Xi could now measure their ambitions only against our government’s ability and willingness to stop them. Looking at the Biden White House, they find a president unwilling even to exit a conquered nation with dignity. A man who refuses to defend American intellectual property from its enemies.

Ukraine was there for the taking.

If you are made of the stock that conquered the American frontier, band together with others like you. We have a new nation to found.