Meanwhile, all the nonsense that started in January has continued, even as the democrats pretend really hard that the election wasn't "fortified".
Even if I don't have an answer, at least I have finally been able to describe the point that I've been grasping at for four months: the democrats basically control the entire election process, as is demonstrated by the fact that all the fortification has gone without serious challenge in any venue whatsoever. The supreme court itself sidestepped its explicit constitutional duty to hear an interstate lawsuit, because it would have had an effect on the election's outcome. No court has bothered to hear the merits of the cases put before them; not one of the lawsuits ended up presenting any evidence before judges. They were all dismissed on procedural grounds. Before election or inauguration, "You don't have standing because you haven't been harmed." After the election/inauguration, "It's moot, because the event has been held." There is literally no legal avenue that Americans can take which will ensure that each person's vote is counted once, and not offset by fifty ballots generated in a back room somewhere by democrat operatives, or that certain votes only count as 87% of a vote by a rigged machine. The extra-constitutional changing of state voting rules, the federal law aimed at making those changes permanent, the democrat municipal and state governments taking steps to destroy evidence, the press' parroting of the party line, social media canceling people who ask questions--I mean, I could go on and on and on, at length, describing all the fuckery that took place, and bore us all to tears in the process, but it all adds up to the fact that the democrat party has seized total control of how the votes are tallied, which means they control the elections, and that is why they all so desperately insist that the 2020 elections were honest and fair.
I also understand why a party rigs an election. Okay, let's say Boss Bilbo runs the Shire, and the Bilbo Machine has run the Shire for forty years. Only there's an upstart, let's say it's Sam Gamgee, who's decided that Boss Bilbo and his machine are corrupt and has to go. So Sam rounds up a bunch of hobbits and says, "We don't have to vote for Boss Bilbo!" And he gets them all on his side, and come election day, everyone in the Shire votes for Sam to be the mayor. Yet when the votes are counted, somehow, Boss Bilbo won the election with 160 votes to Sam's 80. Meriadoc Brandybuck gets up and opines that the votes weren't counted right, because everyone knows that there are only about eighty adult hobbits in the Shire, yet according to his quick estimate, somehow there were two hundred and forty votes cast.
What do you think happens?
Well, Boss Bilbo has his twelve dwarven friends acting as ward bosses and enforcers; not only do they take the ballot boxes to the counting center on election day but count the votes as well. And then after that, they beat the stuffing out of anyone who raises any question about the honesty of the election. So the next morning, Meriadoc Brandybuck is found with the shit kicked out of him over behind Bag End.
The question is, do the hobbits rise up and fight over this, or does their inherent distaste for adventure (and their great preference for tranquility) lead them just to forget about it? Of course the hobbits just take it, and Boss Bilbo retains his grip on the mayor's seat. No one can challenge Boss Bilbo's power, because not only does he have the political power as mayor of the Shire, but he's got his twelve dwarven friends, and people loyal to him count the votes. So Boss Bilbo can do whatever he wants, govern however he pleases, because no one can oust him.
The point behind the whole exercise, of stuffing the ballot boxes, of cheating on elections, is getting and retaining political power. That's obvious. But where my understanding ends is where we are now: why do people accept it?
That the democrats are satisfied with "we got the most votes", regardless of their providence, is manifest. How many democrat machines, run by "boss so-and-so", have existed? And continued to exist by stuffing ballot boxes and faking vote counts and getting away with pulling a dozen other frauds? And got away with it?
They do these things because they believe themselves entitled to the levers of power, and the "will of the people" is a mere impediment to that right, to be flattered and lip-serviced when necessary, but ignored whenever possible. In this day and age, the people are considered too stupid, too ignorant, too selfish, to be trusted with the franchise, because they demonstrably will not vote the right way. They might elect someone like Trump, for crying out loud.
Having gotten to the point, now, that they can make the ballot counts say whatever they want them to, the American left has no reason to hide what they're doing. Do they?
There is one reason they have to hide it. It's the very same reason that DC is surrounded with security fencing and razor wire, why there's a brigade of National Guard in the city. The democrats know they are walking on a razor's edge right now, which is why Biden emitted that fascist torrent of executive orders, why the military is being purged of "deplorables", why the soldiers must take loyalty oaths, why the capital of the nation is essentially under martial law, why Trump is basically invisible, why democrat legislators suddenly qualify for secret service details, why a hundred other little weird things are happening. They know what actually happened.
Their biggest fear is that the American people will find out. Not just those of us who pay attention, mind you, but enough of the American people that the legitimacy of the sitting government is called into question.
We're all sitting on a powderkeg, here.
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Yesterday I referred to an article which discussed the true level of inflation, and why our government has the speed of the money machine safety-wired to "emergency maximum": government bonds are worth something like 8% less than their face value, but if the government can't sell them, it can no longer spend in deficit. If the government can't spend in deficit, then the inner cities burn--and not that "antifa" nonsense we had last year, but really burn, like "Sherman torches Atlanta" burning. The inner city is kept in check by one thing: the constant flow of government cheese. If that cheese stops-- Well, the people will riot, and they won't limit themselves to a few carefully-selected businesses owned by the "wrong people", but they'll burn everything, including City Hall. So, to pretend that government bonds are still an investment, the central bank itself buys them, to the tune of $80 million per month. The government effectively buys $80 million worth of bonds from itself and pretends that someone else bought them, and thus keeps the ruse afloat.
But I did not realize exactly how bad it is until I read this line:
it took from the founding of our county all the way to 2020 for M1 to reach 4 trillion dollars. But then from the start of the pandemic to today, M1 has gone from 4 trillion dollars to 18 trillion dollars."M1" is a measure of how many actual dollars are in circulation, all over the world. Real dollars, from the singles in your wallet to the $8.75 in your kid's piggy bank to the digital ghosts in your bank's computer that tally what you owe on your house to the $100-odd billion that Bill Gates has. All the American dollars in the world, that's M1.
Understand that the number of circulating dollars isn't wealth. Your house has some intrinsic value, but it's not cash. Most of the value of the American economy isn't cash but assets. Wealth is enumerated in dollars, but it's not actually dollars. That's why we can have a GDP of something like twenty trillion dollars with a global money supply of four trillion dollars. That's where "velocity of money" comes into play, how many times a particular dollar ends up being used in a particular transaction.
But now M1 has risen to $18 trillion. In a year.
According to the laws of supply and demand, more money chasing after any good or service means its price will rise. There are over four times as many dollars circulating now as there were at this time last year. Which means the price of everything must go up 4x.
Do you know why this was done?
Remember last year when the lockdown started? Remember how people bought out the supermarkets, because they didn't know how long they'd be stuck at home? It turned out to be more of a panic than anything else. Toilet paper got scarce because people were panic-buying it by the ton, thinking they wouldn't be able to buy any because they'd be stuck at home and unable to go anywhere.
After that brief boom, people stopped doing anything.
Mrs. Fungus and I were "essential workers" so we kept on keeping on; but a hell of a lot of people were not--like anyone who worked in the restaurant or entertainment industries. We had planned to see several shows over the course of 2020, but they were all canceled. Restaurants closed, bars closed, movie theaters closed--no plays, no shows, no nothing. Small business provides some very large fraction of jobs in the US, but a lot of them were shuttered by the lockdown...and the result was an unparalleled economic disaster.
So the government spent money. Lots of money.
The $600 that every Tom, Dick, and Harry got--that's not much, $200 billion if every person in the US got a stimulus check (and it actually wasn't even that much). Businesses got stimulus loans, too. A lot of cash was handed out, "helicopter money", given out solely to prop up the economy.
Somehow, however, I doubt that fourteen fucking trillion dollars was printed up for that reason. Even if economic activity in a particular quarter dropped to zero (and it certainly did not) that would only total about five trillion dollars that the government had to print to keep GDP afloat. And the one bad quarter of 2020 was not off that far; it was horrendously bad, statistically, but in total 2020 was about $500 billion short of 2019's number...which represents a 2.5% contraction of the economy.
GDP includes government spending, but as already noted the economy did not crash to zero output for three months. But assuming it did, with $14 trillion in new dollars, GDP in 2020 should have been at least $29 trillion, which would be 141% of 2019's GDP, rather than $20-odd trillion, or 97.5% of 2019's GDP.
So where did that money go? How is M1 4.5 times bigger today than a year ago?
I suppose the question is academic at this point. M1 is 4.5 times bigger today than a year ago; and that means that the price of everything is going to rise by a commensurate figure.
We're fucked, in other words.
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Disney is also fucked. Wow.
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Why does the American left have such a boner for going to war against Russia? I really don't get it, unless it's because Russia finally threw off the chains of communism, and the left hates them for doing that?
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All of this against the backdrop of the realization that the Founding Fathers did not envision a situation where their carefully-constructed system of checks and balances failed. They knew men were fallen and they built a system which was designed to limit the power of any one person; but I don't think they foresaw the systematic seizure of total power. Or maybe they thought that the citizens, guaranteed the right to keep and bear arms, would not allow this kind of fuckery to take place.
But I do know that if someone went back in time and told them about the events of 2020, they would--to a man!--be utterly disgusted with their posterity.