Farming is Good

Historically, the left has always engaged in propaganda and the suppression of opposing viewpoints in its efforts to achieve and to maintain its goals. Now that Biden’s administration holds power, some of the journalists who helped him get there by waging war on Trump are beginning to discover that the Marxist puppet masters operating him from behind the curtain will not allow them to criticize his extreme agendas to any degree even remotely close to that which they directed at Trump’s – including even his successful ones like lowering taxes for economic renewal, controlling illegal border immigration, and brokering historic middle-eastern peace deals. Google, which operates the New York Times’ email systems, is now the target of subpoenas in-work by Biden’s justice department to turn over the email logs of its reporters. The administration has imposed a gag order on a NYT attorney about the matter, and has even barred NYT executives from discussing the legal assault with their own newsroom – so they cant report on it.

This is where we are with freedom of the press and the first amendment…and the tech/media outlets in the crosshairs on this one are Google and the Times, both of which have been strong defenders of the democrats; ones who have been attacking and censorious of their more conservative political opponents. Why the administration chose the NYT instead of Fox News is anybody’s guess. Lenin borrowed the term “useful idiots” from Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises, but of course he never publicly applied it to the people and institutions that helped make the Bolshevik Revolution a ruthless success until after its success was secured, at which point those people were no longer so useful to him. Blacklists, book-burning (today in the form of digital censorship), reeducation of the young, and now this. The patterns from history are telling.

The repo market appears be dislocating again as reverse repo rates have spiked. However the driving dynamics appear different this time, namely Biden’s profligate $6 Trillion of proposed new spending which is generating an oversupply of cash in the economy. Wall Street banks have been appealing to the Fed to end QE for this reason. The Fed is selling its bonds, largely via through reverse repo, to draw cash out of the system. This is a short term measure that seems somewhat desperate given that these securities will obviously have to be repurchased soon, thus unwinding the cash drain. Runaway inflation is a cycle that previous experience has shown can be very hard to break. While it is true that Volker did break it in the 70s by pumping up interest rates, what is not so well acknowledged is the hit to the national debt that is taken with such rate moves: When the largest borrower by-far is the federal government (more so now than then), raising rates sharply can make servicing the annual interest payments on the national debt a crippling burden. The Fed is so concerned about inflation now that it appears to be preparing to buy government securities. It may come to loggerheads with the Treasury regarding the fiscal irresponsibility that we are being subjected to.

Unfortunately, as I have previously written, we have not yet encountered the effects of monetary-driven inflation; that is still to-come. It has become more widely acknowledged that the inflation we are currently experiencing is driven primarily from supply shortages which stem not from shortages in base production, but rather in the deliverability of products to the consumer market. Because it is expensive for businesses to warehouse excess inventory, particularly perishables like fresh food that require refrigeration, the modern digitally-driven supply chain is designed to be a much faster and more direct on-demand-driven producer-to-retailer based system. That is a great efficiency improvement for the consumers and the businesses as long as all the links in the supply chain are fully operating. But it results in rotting food sitting on delivery docks when any key links break down.

This is what happened as a consequence of the mandated business lockdowns, and many of those who had to vacate those roles are working elsewhere now. For example, there is a dearth of qualified truckers in our economy now. In my post on May 5 for how alternative delivery networks might arise, I used a food-chain example where alternative delivery (cars and smaller trucks) might be used, but it would be more difficult and less efficient to do it that way. There are other effects to the economy resulting from the lockdowns that are also likely to manifest soon. Giving homeowners whose businesses were destroyed 6 or more months of mortgage forbearance is nowhere near the solution that getting them fully reemployed is. The forbearance periods are ending, and many of those who have not replaced the income they had will be unable to keep their homes. This (along with the coming rise in rates) may turn the current scarcity of home inventory into a surplus and reverse the run up in home prices that we’ve had.

Even this supply-shortage-driven component of inflation alone is not close to having run its course yet. Corn prices rose by 32% in Q1, and beef prices by 17%. Chicken costs rose 21% in just the past 2 months, and gasoline is up 41% which has naturally driven up the price of plastic, and hence most packaging, by a commensurate amount. Categorically, food is up 31% over last year’s prices. Futures prices aren’t giving an encouraging outlook either. The cost of a bulk metric ton of olive oil is up 185%. This increase has not yet made its way to the store shelves yet, but obviously it soon will. Because so many countries on various continents all enforced strict lockdowns, the current levels of this inflation driven by their supply-chain breakdowns is quite uniform internationally.

So this leads to the more practical matter of what to do now. There are now plenty of online prepper videos available for consideration, but stocking up now on food, medicine, and fuel with long shelf lives is fundamental. This is at worst-case a money-saving move, and at-best a means to sustain yourself should the shortages become severe and protracted. You can check the online content for all the detailed steps to take and the most vital goods to stockpile. If you can grow some of your own food to supplement the store-bought stuff, that’s a good thing. I’m doing it and am finding it more fun as a hobby than I expected to (I’ve reached gardening age). Putting a week or more of potable water aside is a very good idea. Many of wealthy people have already squared themselves away for off-grid sustainability. A number of them bought water rights and moved a good slice of their wealth into tangible storable assets like fine art.

It can be tricky to take measures to prep for breakdown in such mainstays of society as the food supply while remaining optimistic and positive, but that is a key aspect that is not talked about enough. Probably the best way to do that is to make your plan thoroughly, put all the elements of it in-place ready to be executed, and then just live life day-to-day without thinking or dwelling about it anymore. This includes things besides stockpiling like deciding how you will respond if a hungry un-prepped neighbor comes to your door asking for food or some other help. Its hard not to just naturally help out, but if there are a lot of hungry people around and some of them come to know that you have a stocked larder in your house, you may get other uninvited guests. If you live in an urban area where an organized horde of them could march down your street one day, it would be good to get to know your neighbors better beforehand, and see if you can plan and coordinate with any of them for such possibilities. But if you purposefully over-prep so that you are entirely ready to help them out when they need, you’ll could end-up with grateful neighbors who will thereafter be happy to help when you need someone to water the yard and throw the newspapers in the backyard while you are away on travel. It can be helpful to adopt such positive ways of thinking about the state of affairs.

There is so much going on now at the macro scale that we can’t do much about: electronic money (which some elites may now want a global version of), the purposeful takedown of small businesses and now of our energy infrastructure, the gradual dissolution of property rights, of political dissension and questioning, of free speech, of borders and national sovereignty, and of the right to make your own decisions regarding your health and on what will and will not be put into your body. It is a fundamentally important and worrisome step when vital institutions setup to discover, report, and explore factual truth like science and the media relegate truth-finding to a second-order priority so that they can instead promote and perpetuate pre-determined narratives. Concocting storylines, data, and ‘experts’ to support the narratives is much more complicated and troublesome than simply being truthful. So it is never done for any other reason than to serve the achievement of some agenda that cannot otherwise (truthfully) be made to gain adoption with a majority of the people.

The agenda du jour seems to be some melange of Marxism with a green ecotopianism in which the production of meat and fossil fuel-generated energy is eliminated, and if a few human beings have to go along the way well, that’s always been acceptable (often preferred) by such revolutionaries who are usually so appallingly obstinate, stupid, arrogant, and totalitarian that they will cling to their beliefs, and persecute those who question them, in spite of a preponderance of real scientific and historical data showing how ineffective, misguided, and naive, not to mention brutal, they are. The means and the ends for this new crop of them appear to include universal surveillance, monetary control, thought control, and a greater degree of servitude for us non-elites.

I wrote earlier on May 9 that the “New Battlefields” will be biological and cyber-based (watch for perhaps a more virulent viral strain in 2022…). The recent surge in cyber attacks, combined with their targeting, interests me. Hacker’s used to steal access to peoples’s accounts and use that information to get money from them. Institutional hacking was largely governments going after each other’s secrets. But it seems to me coincidental that recent hacking activity has particularly gone-after the meat industry and the energy industry; the two sectors that the green-left elites like Gates and those in government, the World Economic Forum, and other multinational organizations want to see eliminated.

There were ~40 attacks on food companies this past year. In December the IT firm SolarWinds, which supplies control software to a number of US electrical energy providers was hacked, as was the Colonial pipeline which supplies 43% of fuel to the eastern seaboard, just recently. Biden’s administration did not step in; it let the company pay a $5 million ransom, which will certainly encourage new attacks. He shut down the US-serving Keystone XL pipeline on his first day in office and has followed by mothballing Alaskan energy production in the ANWR reserve. I don’t know what to say about the NSA website hack that just happened – it could have been staged.

The people in government whose job-purpose is to provide for national security, safety, prosperity, harmony, and freedom are systematically destroying all of those things (in many governments around the world). Such failures cannot occur for long in the private sector where the institutions (businesses) are ultimately beholden and accountable to their clients and shareholders, whose individual rights and sovereignty they have no control over. But they have been successfully perpetuated for decades by governments against their citizens after they gained complete control over them by removing their rights, property, access to information, and other resources from them. That is happening here in the US now. Always critically question those who engender fear or hatred in people, along with a response they suggest the people should take. And never listen to another thing Anthony Fauci says, ever.

BTW, it’s probably time to change your passwords (again). As just reported in CyberNews, the RockYou2021 hackers have released data they acquired on a staggering 8.4 billion passwords onto a popular public hacker forum. For some perspective on the magnitude of this hack, consider that there are about 7.3 billion people in world.

Some people make your life more complicated because doing so makes them (at least feel) more powerful. Some do it just because it’s fun for them ….. but it’s likely that both of those things are largely one and the same for most of them.