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Category: Politics

  • Civil War by Proxy?

    California and Federal government are increasingly hostile in open. California has years of experience in ignoring Federal laws, some notable example issues being cannabis, immigration, and gender identity.

    On the other hand, California has used its soft power as a major economy to enforce environmental and consumer standards on the rest of the states and even abroad.

    During Biden(?) administration, Californian values seemed to become the US standard regardless of other states’ opinions, and California became more assertive also in foreign and trade policy, most notable event being the summit with president Xi and Biden in San Francisco (preceded by a climate lobbying visit of governor Newsom to Beijing.) Various California politicians were also courting China, although also opposite happened. Does anyone still remember 2022 when the then Speaker of the House, California representative Pelosi flew to Taiwan and caused jitters over potential armed conflict between USA and PRC? (Whether this was part of a policy by a bigger faction within the administration and if so, which one of them is murky to me.)

    Now, the issues between quite untethered California and the Federal government have finally come to boil. The trigger to me seems to be the transgender athletes competing against girls, where the Federal government sees California Title IX application to this issue as violation and the regular people just unfair. California continued this practice, despite warnings from Washington DC, and the current administration threatened to withhold Federal funds for California sports. Thereafter, Newsom threatened to withhold the Federal share of California state taxes, a move somewhat reminiscent to the Nullification Crisis prior to the Civil War in 1800s.

    Meanwhile, a group of Antifa or similar group(s) coordinated an attack on ICE that had done a raid in Los Angeles.

    This attack is curious because of its organization and its timing coinciding with the spat over ideologies and money. Reminiscent of the coordinated wave of violent riots in summer 2020, there were clashes between pro-immigration protesters in New York on the opposite side of the continent.

    More importantly, both the Los Angeles mayor Karen Bass and governor Newsom publicly refused to help to quell the rioters, even opposing the Federal efforts. The rioters were attacking Federal law enforcement with stones and were painting graffiti putting things in fire. In fact, a roster of California political people have come in defense of David Huerta who got arrested for participating in the riot, but their support to anti-Federal action.

    President Trump has authorized the use of 2000 National Guard (update: now 4000 plus 700 marines), and the Department of Homeland Security is bringing in reinforcements.

    I am writing this in Helsinki-Vantaa Airport, waiting for a flight that would take me back to California Bay Area via Frankfurt am Main and Los Angeles Airports. By the time I have landed, well before the time I can post this (I need to add links to sources), we will see if the California or Federal authorities have caved in. If the California stops protecting the violent mobs, removes transgender athletes from girls competitions and possibly even ponies up some tax tithes to Federal government, the incipient civil war will be averted. If the Federal government fails to enforce its rules also in California, I fear that this was the opening shot of the active phase of the disintegration of the United States. Worst case scenario, neither gives in, we may have active civil insurgency in multiple blue states by the end of the summer. The most likely outcome will be a frozen conflict, that is: both sides will pretend nothing significant happened but neither will acknowledge that the other side might have won.

    I also predict there will be lots of pundits dissecting irrelevant minutiae from the utterances of either side, and thanks to the strong left bias of the main stream media, the reporting will mostly support California and its allies, meaning tailwinds for civil war or mostly peaceful disintegration of USA and headwinds for peace and prosperity. The biggest losers will be the regular people trapped in the middle, looting and violence disrupting supply chains, especially for groceries and fuel, and then collapsing the teetering economy in general.

    Update: Much has happened since Sunday. California did not capitulate and the National Guard activated in Los Angeles is up to 4000 and 700 marines are in readiness. When I arrived on Sunday evening to Bay Area, I took the BART from airport to hometown. The train did not take or drop passengers at Embarcadero station due to political activism nearby, but let out a handful of burly police officers and while the train waited a couple of minutes next to the platform, I could observe the officers running and so did a couple of the people already there. There was still a crowd waiting for the next train or something, though the trains had started skipping that station for the duration. Sorry, no video footage of that.

    More ominously, a Walmart heiress is funding (in a small part) a nationwide call for unrest June 14th, another weak indicator supporting my hypothesis that the riots that started last weekend are part of elites’ civil war, raging over  who gets to loot the treasury.

    In social media there are reports of incidents in Denver, Charlotte (NC), Boston (MA), Chicago, New York City and Atlanta, things are escalating fast. This indicates that this is not a question of secession (California from USA) but of civil war by proxy between the progressive left and the conservatives over the control of Federal government. The presidency and the Congress are currently held by Republicans, but vast swathes of the administrative state are governed by the Deep State currently (mostly) promoting leftist ideologies (reasons for that are too long to expostulate in a single post and in any case speculative to the tinfoil hattery territory.) Individual states and their administrative apparati are a hodgepodge of ideologies, but the Left Coast in general and California in particular is the current vanguard and bastion of progressive establishment, so troubles beginning here makes sense.

    Meanwhile, governor Newsom and Federal officials are still discussing about who pays what.

    On a side note, a major food distributor supplying thousands of supermarkets got hacked last week and food distribution is off kilter. When I yesterday visited a grocery, they had a sign on meat counter apologizing for ‘warehouse issues’. I did not ask the cause then because I had not then seen this piece of samizdata news yet. I wonder if the food shortages and riots at the same time are a coincidence?

    Finally, whether true or not, the possibility of a fleet of robotaxis fleeing LA riots in order not to get burned by Mexican flag waiving ‘mostly peaceful’ protesters shows what kind of timeline we are living in. In any case, Waymo services have been suspended in downtown LA are for the time being.

    Looks like I need to pick some canned meat while it is still available.

  • Interesting Things I Wanted to Post

    I don’t usually work on Sundays (the day of rest and so on), but the recent news about heightening tensions between two nuclear powers have been alarming. No, not the war in Europe, or the slow boiling in Middle East. I am talking about India and Pakistan. Here is what I get from the non-mainstream news/commentary streams I follow.

    Negligible Chance of Mushroom Clouds

    Apparently, there was a terrorist attack in Kashmir where 26 Indian tourists were killed. This region has been contested by Pakistan and India for decades and occasionally, a war has flared up. India blames the attack on Pakistan, which claims innocence. Regardless of truth, the relationship between the countries tensed up, as in India giving 48 hours for all Pakistanis to get out of the country, whereas Pakistan closed Indian borders and Pakistani airspace from Indian airlines, while revoking visas from Indians and telling the Indian government to reduce their embassy size to 30 people, no military attaches allowed. India informed that they will no longer recognize the Indus River Treaty, which allocates the rights over this common river between the two countries. This is very important, because Indus river waters about 80% of Pakistani farmland, and if India were to block the water, it would create a famine that would collapse Pakistan. Pakistan has informed that if India messes with Indus river, it will be an act of war. Presumably, India has already been accused of flooding some Pakistani villages along Indus tributary. The same podcast claimed that there has been clashes along the border, not just small arms fire but actual artillery shelling. This is before the formal declaration of war. The Indus river question is an existential threat to Pakistan, which is estimated to have at least 170 nuclear warheads and has a first strike policy. India is estimated to have over 160 nuclear warheads and if things escalate, we could see mushroom clouds, though this is still a very small possibility.

    Oddly enough, when president Trump was asked about this issue, he seems to hint that United States will stay out of this conflict. That would be a refreshing novelty, a war that USA is not starting or participating in.

    Earthquake (Space) Weather

    A Podcast that YouTube recommended to me says that the magnetic field of the Sun is weakening. Apparently, this may be somehow connected with the likelihood of big earthquakes. Sun’s magnetic field weakens and strengthens by 11-12 year sunspot cycles but the peak magnetic field has been weakening over the latest solar cycles (data starts in 1970s, so we don’t know how things were earlier). This presentation fits the hypothesis that solar weather including sunspot activity triggers earth quakes that has been making rounds around interwebs for some time, except that in this presentation it is the weakening solar magnetic field that creates sunspots and correlates with the frequency of big earthquakes.

    The earthquake – sunspot connection has been explained by the effects of space weather on telluric currents, i.e., the electric currents going through Earth, telluric currents being stronger along fault lines. Living within a walking distance from Hayward fault, I have been interested in earthquakes, waiting for the Big One.

  • Estonia Has a Russian Problem

    No. I am not talking about their eastern neighbor, though the relationship between the two countries is currently even more strained than normal.

    I am talking about their Russian speaking stateless minority that is about 17% of their population (when Russian speaking citizens are included, the percentage climbs to 27.4%). I think that when Soviet Union collapsed and Estonia regained its independence, the native Estonians wanted to kick out the Russians and other Soviet nationals that had been imported or migrated into their country since the WWII, refusing to give citizenship to anyone who did not assimilate enough to pass the Estonian language test, but I thought that the sentiment had faded during the over three decades since, or at least something had been done to resolve the issue of large fraction of population being stateless. If I correctly remember, the newly re-emerged Russia had not wanted to take the Russians and other Russian speakers from Estonia, and I suspect many of the Russian speakers had been born in the country. Without Russian or Estonian passport, these people became stateless. To me, having about 17% of your population as a stateless minority, especially when preparing for war against their supposed native country seems very dangerous.

    An opinion poll comparing Estonian speaking, Russian speaking and bilingual households shows a clear rift in the opinions and attitudes of the ethnic groups. As far as I have seen, the Western media, of course, only publishes the Estonian speakers predominant opinion. The Russian speakers, anyways tend to follow their own media landscape. The pollsters comfort the readers (or themselves) telling that the Russian speakers are not a monolithic group and there is a diversity of opinions among them. This is true, but aside from the commonly differing prevalences of opinions between the linguistic groupings, the other two messages I got from reading this poll were 1) the difference in opinion about Ukrainian war between the region containing Tallinn (more pro-NATO and hawkish) and the rest of the country, and 2) the clear agreement between all groups that ethnic conflict within Estonia is possible, with Estonian speaking majority believing in it more .

  • Klaus Schwab Has Resigned

    Last weekend, it was announced that Klaus Schwab has resigned from his position as a chairman of WEF. He had been one for 55 years, and was one of the faces of the technocratic globalism that the transnational institutions and Western governments have been pushing on the populaces. You know, things like 15 minute cities, CO2 taxes, energiewende, digital IDs, central bank programmable digital currency, the Great Reset and modified RNA vaccines.

    Now it is said that he has resigned as a consequence of a whistle-blower that had implicated Klaus Schwab and his wife in fiscal (and possibly other types) of improprieties, with the WEF board having a sudden emergency meeting. Somehow I doubt this reason – whistle-blowers do not just conveniently appear after 55 years of people not noticing chairman’s practices. I suspect this has more to do with the disastrous effects of the current forced changes on economy and the cultural blowback against the zealous insistence on the Veblen ideologies of the elites enforced with a surveillance state. Since I have not detected WEF to show interest in actual well-being of the masses, rather than the insistence that masses must adapt to their betters’ vision of the Greater Good, I think Klaus Schwab’s ouster has more to do with the smarter members realizing that sawing the branch they are sitting on, i.e., destroying the countries they live in, is not a viable long-term strategy. Even bugout countries, like New Zealand, would sooner or later be destroyed by technocratic practices.

    In a WEF’s Davos meeting about a year ago, Blackrock’s Larry Fink who also sits in WEF’s Board of Trustees, surprised by praising xenophobic countries which had instead of immigration invested in AI and robotics. At that point I took it as a bad omen – what are they planning to do with the people replaced by AI and robotics? In retrospect, I think that was an outward sign that there will be changes within WEF.

    In summary, I think Klaus Schwab was forced out after his vision of New World Order had proven to be a failure.

  • How Many People Are There in China?

    Sometimes, the conspiracies of the West like chemtrails or other forms of weather modification and QAnon become boring and it is fun to look at the conspiracies in the East.

    One of the more intriguing conspiracy theories (to me) is the claim that China has way fewer people than the official 1.4 billion.

    I first encountered this claim some years ago, but did not pay much attention to it. The message sounded too crazy and was promoted by Falun Gong, which has a real reason for a grudge against the CCP government. I am also pretty convinced that part of the anti-China messaging is or was funded by US government as a psy-op against a competing power.

    However, while the figures as low as 300 to 400 million Chinese left (in the Peoples Republic of) seem extreme, I can believe fewer than 1.4 billion, probably no more than 1.2 billion, possibly below 1 billion.

    My reasoning being:

    1) There are government tendencies for inflating population numbers. In places like Nigeria, where the funds from central government are allocated partially based on provincial populations, and corruption is common, local leaders have a pressure to report their populations generously. I suspect Nigeria does not actually have over 200 million people. So many of their princes have died, that the mortality among the peasants must be horrendous. Ahem.

    Similarly, in United States, we do not know the population even at the accuracy of million, which I suspect in part resulting from allocating federal resources like Congress seats based on state population.

    Also, having a large (potential) labor force is believed to improve the economy numbers (although not universally), which is why many Western countries have been importing people en masse.

    2) Related to governmental pressures is the individual financial fraud. Duplicate (or multiplicate) social security accounts have in abounded, at least in earlier times, whereas 100 billion in social security payments have apparently been paid to people with temporary or no social security numbers, maybe half of it obvious fraud. Since China has in recent years implemented a Draconian social credit system, I don’t know how much an individual can bilk the government there by double IDs though private sector frauds are too prevalent to list here.

    3) Mass immigration has generated a global population of hundreds of millions.Many of these individuals are undocumented, which I presume are still in citizenship lists of their home countries while being part of the head count in their current locations. I remember an apocryphal story in Europe about people getting paid social security by two countries, presumably being counted as part of the population in both. I do not know if this inaccuracy includes dual citizens or just undocumented migrants. In case of China, I think their hukou system is pretty water tight within China’s borders, but I also think that millions, maybe tens of millions of Chinese have slipped over the borders, all over the world. These Chinese exist, but reduce the population at home.

    4) Chinese population policies have been a demographic disaster. One Child Policy meant that many of the Gen-X were not allowed to be born, reducing the population growth rate. Now there are too few Millenials and even fewer Gen Z and the young people are too stressed to reproduce. Yet, China’s population was supposed to have grown during the 1970s – 2010s, though at least the recent year’s have officially had negative population growth.

    Therefore, even if we don’t go with the active depopulation hypotheses,

    I don’t think the current global population exceeds 7.5 billion, and would not be hugely surprised if it were as low as 7 billion people.

  • Death Spiral

    How do you kill a city?

    So many people complain about the homeless problem (which is very visible in many California cities), but these people and their plight are a symptom of a deeper malaise.

    It is claimed that people are homeless because they cannot afford an apartment. Actually, many of the homeless are homeless, because they get kicked out of any normal apartment due to mental illness, drug habit or just for being nasty neighbors and tenants. Poverty is a common companion of mental illnesses, drug habit and antisocial behavior. Supportive housing rarely works, the restrictions to their lifestyle are considered intolerable and most of the hardcore homeless prefer their freedoms. Which in California are accommodated. Not saying that freedoms are intrinsically wrong, I just would weigh them against infringement of other people’s rights for safe enjoyment of parks and other public places.

    In any case, California has some freedoms not available in other states, such as freedom to use cannabis products and the de facto freedom to shoplift wherever and, in many cities, to camp on sidewalks. This has led to an exploitable situation as the fuming taxpayers are told that the reason the sidewalks are choked by drugged out homeless that support their habit by shoplifting because there is not enough affordable housing. Let’s collect a new tax or municipal bond (funded by taxes) to build affordable housing to homeless.

    Homeless advocacy organizations mobilize for this initiative, after all someone must administer the funds to the indigents. Signature collectors are hired to ask good citizens (“are you a registered voter here?” to sign a petition for the tax / bond initiative. Politicians speak warmly for (or rarely against) the initiative. There may be an advertisement campaign, at which point a thinking voter should get alarmed – why would anyone pay for an advertisement campaign when hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars are proposed to be raised for ‘common good’?

    Nevertheless, many voters will back an initiative that sounds good without thinking about the long term effects. Once the initiative passes, property or sales taxes are raised, and now the small property owners and small retail businesses are in trouble. The property owners increase the rents making both apartments and small businesses renting their spaces less affordable, Poorer tenants fall behind and get evicted or move somewhere cheaper. The business owners may hang on a bit longer, raising their prices until the customers disappear, and they, too disappear. With loss of tenants, the properties will undergo distressed sales. Which was the purpose of the original initiative.

    A property developer (with sufficient contacts to the municipal bureaucracy and politics to smooth the permitting) will buy the distressed property cheaply and develop it into ‘affordable’ housing. Which somehow does not reduce the swarms of homeless camping on the sidewalks, possibly because they are still free to camp there and the homeless advocacy organizations are flush with funds to use on homeless services.

    Meanwhile, the older residents are losing their homes and the main streets are becoming ghost towns of shuttered and graffitied empty shopfronts. The city is hemorrhaging jobs and residents, with homeless numbers increasing, despite well-funded homelessness services and more affordable housing being built.

    The solution is obvious – let’s raise the taxes to deal with the homelessness and lack of affordable housing! Or maybe, stop using the homeless to exploit the tax payers to enrich the local moneyed interests.

  • Hot Statistics

    Everyone knows the Hockey Stick model of global temperature changes in our measurement record. Late 20th and early 21st century average temperatures have increased in a worrisome manner resulting in many UN climate summits and VIPs flying around in their private jets. Now, according to a recent Freedom of Information request to UK’s Met Office, over 100 of the 302 weather stations listed as supplying temperature averages do not exist. The Met Office declined to tell “how or where the alleged ‘data’ were derived” for these over 100 sites that do not exist.

    This is not just UK issue, NOAA has been claimed to fabricate data for over 30% of their reporting sites by taking the averages of the surrounding stations to represent a defunct, or a ‘ghost’ station, although the numbers at least are labeled as estimates. In UK, some closed weather stations ‘continue’ with similar reported estimated monthly data.

    Unreliable measurements from the actually existing weather stations are another large problem. Nearly 8 out of 10 Met Office sites are rated in junk classes with error margins ranging from 2C to up to 5C, or unsuitable for climate data reporting. The default classification for Met Office weather stations is 1, “unless manually adjusted” so there may be more unreliable data sources.

    The disproportionate closure of rural weather stations compared to the urban ones has further skewed the average temperatures, because urban environments tend to generate heat islands, so loss of rural stations will increase the average temperature of the remaining measurements.

    While unreliability of measurement data was discussed in terms of Net Zero in The Daily Sceptic, I wonder about its effects on near term weather forecasts. Maybe the invented data is also being fed into models predicting daily weather?

    Muhos, Finland, in February

  • The Problem with Burping Reindeer

    “It became necessary to destroy the village in order to save it”, (said during Vietnam War, where the United States went to help French with their Indochina, ending with Vietnamese eventually kicking out France, USA and China.)

    To me, the modern environmentalism increasingly resembles this insane sentiment.

    Last year, there was an uproar, when Reinhardswald in Germany was slated to make room for wind turbines ‘necessary’ for Energiewende.

    How much of this was hype and how much was counterhype, I don’t know (though I suspect my search engines show me very biased results.) On my recent trip to Finland I saw the changes in the countryside, big wind turbines can cause. It takes lots of land and removal of trees or elimination of agricultural fields to build a wind park.

    In reality, it may be environmentally less harmful to build nuclear reactors than wind turbines (depending on how you calculate EROI – my Google searches were inconclusive because the studies were either old or seemed to be shilling for one form of energy or another), and they kill fewer people (not to mention them having smaller radiation plume) than coal plants.) While there remains need for petroleum, its increasingly difficult extraction reduces its EROI, which means that in future it will probably remain as a raw material for industrial processes, maybe special fuel for internal combustion engines.

    Nevertheless, EU (including Germany) is dedicated to net zero project, which increasingly begins to seem like some weird suicide / flagellant cult with reduction in living standards (rationing energy by rising costs, attacking food production, limiting transportation and movement, and increasing housing density) and reduction in human-accessible territory.

    All these projects, while openly posted on-line, are presented so that opposing voices are portrayed as conspiracy theorists and antienvironmentalists. But is it a conspiracy theory if they themselves tell everyone their plans, or worse, their actions?

    At least the most fanatical theses from the now destroyed Georgia Guidestones are not openly touted. There are people, other than just me, who would consider the reduction of world human population to 500 million from (official) 8 billion or by over 93% rather genocidal.

    But the Green New Leap is not just for UK, Germany, Netherlands or Ireland. Finland, too, is planning ambitious net zero targets, and I mean really ambitious, as in lauded by WEF.

     Most of Finland is above 60° latitude, about the same level as Alaska or south end of Greenland, mostly more north than Yakutsk in Siberia. Energy is of utmost importance there. Roughly speaking, a person can survive a few minutes without air, a few hours without heating, a few days without water and a few weeks without food.

    Finns have survived without fossil fuels for centuries, but that was by burning wood, which is also not OK with the eurocrats – small particle pollution will kill! Presumably freezing to death is more efficient and environmental. At least the official media reassures the Finns that saunas are safe from this regulation. For now. Anyways, the war against Russia and certain realities of energy production have resulted in complications in banning wood in energy production.

    Meanwhile in China, 2024 began to build 94.5 GW worth of coal power plants and resumed 3.3 GW of suspended projects according to two think tanks. Only 2.5 GW of old capacity was closed 2024. (Side note: with China’s economy tanking and exports faltering, what do they need this new energy capacity for?)

    But what about the reindeer burps?

    Indeed, according to our reliable news media, a study was published that Lapland will not be able to meet its greenhouse targets by 2035 because of the large emissions from its agriculture, namely the reindeer. Which as ruminants are burping too much methane, which is a greenhouse gas. Unfortunately, I could not find a link to the original study to check the claims, and to see if the researchers were in earnest or if this was some sort of reductio ad absurdum-document to demonstrate the futility of the Net Zero targets.

    However, assuming the reporting is true, reindeer are part of the Arctic ecosystem, and even if the semidomesticated populations in Lapland were counted as human livestock, those globalist net zero plans that would involve reducing the number of large ruminants, such as grazing cows and sheep, come dangerously close to messing the ecosystems by removing large herbivore guild from the food network. While I can see the point in reducing the use of feedlots and grain / soybean based fodder in ranching, eliminating free-range foraging herbivores is IMHO insane.

    Ironically, the climate war against cattle (products) is not fully compatible with the idea of rewilding the land, which presumably involves switching domesticated large herbivores with wild large herbivores to the net zero effect on burps per acre in case of free grazing animals. Large scale rewilding is currently hypothetical rather than practical, as the numbers of large wild herbivores are insufficient for the switch. Humans and their cattle, pets and pests account for about 96% of terrestrial mammal biomass. The remaining about 4% is everything else from Etruscan shrew to elephant. Cows alone are ~40% of Earth’s land mammal biomass, meaning there are no replacement herbivores. And without ungulates, the grassland ecosystems will collapse.

    But back to the reindeer burps.

    When it comes to climate, worrying about the relative inputs of reindeer burps vs the rest of the nature makes even less sense. In Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai eruption January 2022 estimated 146 million cubic meters of Pacific salt water causing a couple of years of cooling with effects possibly lasting for the rest of the decade. The atmospheric CO2 concentration near Australia and New Zealand increased from the expected 412 ppm to 414 ppm, about the size of interannual fluctuation on those parts.

    When we consider this and other volcanoes, and the coal plants of China and the rest of the world (not to mention everything else that produces greenhouse gases, such as termites), how much effect would it have on the atmospheric chemistry and global climate change if all the reindeer in Lapland stopped burping?

  • So Long, British Empire, Where Sun Never Set


    Sun set there on March 21st, 2024.

    France still has Overseas Collectivities and Overseas Territories in Atlantic, Pacific and Indian ocean, meaning sun is still shining there (unless it is very cloudy.)

    The third global empire, Spain, lost its status as Empire where Sun never sets on 1898 (lost a war and Philippines to USA.) Based on a rotating map (and my unreliable eyes), the other contenders, Dutch, Germans, Portuguese and Russians apparently did not at their peak reach sufficiently around the globe to always remain within daylight borders

    So it looks like the French won the Game of Empires. For now.

    (Countries with overseas military bases, like USA, do not count. The territories have to be internationally recognized colonies or dependencies officially under full or partial rule of the empire.) 

  • Magic Money Computers

    Apparently, our government had at least 14 of them, 11 in Department of Treasury, Department of Health and Social Services, Department of State and Department of Defense had their own magic money computers too. A Magic Money Computer, according to Elon Musk is a machine that creates money out of nothing by just issuing payments.

    The original Magic Money Computer, Sampo, being stolen from Pohjola by Kalevala raiding party. Sampo of the legend was a magic mill that produced flour, salt and money. (art by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, image sourced from Artvee)

    There has been speculation that such Magic Money Computers would allow fraudulent or erroneous invoices (such as double billing) to be paid regardless of available government funds. However, the truth of the bottomless money pit is probably more about standard prosaic grift – based on the parade of DOGE news, the US Government seems to be full of weird offices where the Directors pay to themselves and their “workers” outrageous salaries and lavish other perks (luxury apartments, luxury offices) and then top it up by (relatively) small embezzlements like expensing their everyday (luxurious) life.

    These money sinks are supplemented by a class of government parasites, ‘NGOs’ (Non-Governmental Organizations, which actually are mostly or fully dependent on government money). ‘NGOs’ (not to be confused with true charities) siphon money from government coffers and can act as money laundromats by donating heftily to nice politicians and PACs and by hiring politicians or their family members with attractive perks and reimbursement packages.

    After hearing more and more about all the ‘NGO’ grift, I felt slightly like a chump for not having founded a ‘charity’ dedicated to “Physical and emotional well-being of an individual” (namely myself),  with the governing board and financial regulators consisting of Me, Myself and I and set up a reasonable monthly stipend of, say $7497.68 including taxes and fees, though for that, I would have needed much better political connections within the bureaucracy (not to mention far more flexible morals).

    Joking aside, Magic Money Computers are a problem because they are not synchronized, i.e., there was some variation between their bookkeeping, estimated to be about 5 – 10%, which can lead to unregulated increase in nation’s money supply. Which is presumably on top of the official increase by the approved deficit spending.

    Officially, the US government does not print money. What happens is that the government issues treasuries which the big banks (primary buyers) buy to sell forward, or to Fed, which buys treasuries from the public by injecting money into the accounts of the selling banks, i.e., creating more money. Banks, of course, use their new capital as a security for issuing new loans via fractional reserve banking, multiplying the money printing effect.

    With Magic Money Computers potentially adding to the money supply, we are essentially talking about unsupervised inflation. In theory, as long as the increase in production (of goods) increases with the money supply, the prices remain steady. If the production of goods increases relative to demand at a greater rate than money supply, resulting oversupply causes price deflation, but if the money supply increases faster than production while demand remains steady or increases, this results either in price inflation or, in case of price controls, product shortages.

    I suspect that the US economy has been running an experiment where it has artificially inflated money supply (by deficit spending) while increasing demand (by paying people to consume and by importing more people) in hopes that the production would increase due to increasing demand (look at all these new workers.) What was conveniently forgotten was the regulatory jungle stifling any private enterprise while the masses of new capital were scooped by the well-connected who used it to monopolize resources needed for private enterprises, either by buying the resources themselves, the legislation regulating how the resources can be used, or the bureaucrats who determine who can use the resources (and how), namely those who are insiders.

    I would further speculate that as an increasing fraction of government money goes to the politicians, bureaucrats and their family and proteges (and paying patrons like megacorporations and transnational NGOs), an increasing fraction of resources, public and private tends to get concentrated to the hands of politically connected oligarchy. Not only does the increased regulation and fewer resources mean fewer small businesses and anemic economy, with political class acting as oligarchy the national ‘free’ enterprise begins to converge towards a top-down command economy. Command economies are very fragile and prone to collapse for multiple reasons that would be a whole another post.

    Let me finish by saying that The United States has been for many years unofficially converging towards the Soviet Model, namely the centralized command economy, and while I have been observing faint signals since the previous decade, now the results are visible in our shops to everyone.

    Take for example, eggs. The number of laying hens has gone down due to cullings, whereas the number of mouths has increased due to immigration. Unlike the mythical Sampo that produced also edible goods, the US government has only increased the amount of money in circulation, leading to price inflation and egg shortages. Magic Money Computers are not helping.

    An old photo from January 2025. Tonight, I saw lots of eggs in a supermarket.

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