Pondering

What the government induced disruption of the employment market looks like from a consumer’s perspective – #2.

This sign is becoming more common during business hours. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

My wife and I are seeing firsthand the impact of turmoil in the employment market to include restaurants that have to close for the day because no staff showed up to work. One restaurant is making up stories about masks being government-required.

Previous post on this topic was back on 6/4/21:  What does the economy wide staffing shortage look like to a customer?

This discussion will highlight disruptions I have seen in our local community in the last month. We will discuss separately the wide range of government actions which have caused this turmoil.

In the meantime…

Daily Bulletin – 11/25/21 – “Sorry!” Customers with prepaid Thanksgiving meal orders find doors shut at Boston Market in Rancho Cucamonga – The only employee showing up at the Boston Market stored in my hometown put a note on the door saying

“No employee showing up today… We are unable to fulfill the orders! We are sorry!”

(more…)
By Jim Ulvog, ago

One of the reasons why we are seeing record setting high inflation: staggering, astronomical level of federal spending.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The amount of money Congress has pumped into the economy in an attempt to fight the Covid pandemic is staggering. Don’t quite have enough adjectives to describe the amount of money that is forced into the economy without any corresponding increase in production.

The amount spent directly on the pandemic is more than four times the annual budget at the federal level.

This is one of the primary reasons we are seeing inflation rates running at a thirty year high.

A close cousin on the list of inflation causes is the Fed flooding the economy with liquidity.  See previous discussion: Just how much money has the Federal Reserve created out of thin air and injected into the economy?

I’ve pulled together the amount of money appropriated by Congress in 2020 and 2021 which are focused on fighting the pandemic and stimulating the economy. Here is my tally, with amount of funding in billions of dollars, date Congress passed the legislation, and name of the program:

(more…)
By Jim Ulvog, ago

Flaming hypocrisy from the ruling caste – private jet edition.

Typical private jet during four hours in the air will emit about as much CO2 as an average person will generate during an entire year. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The demand for private jets is soaring. Those jets generate massively more CO2 emissions that any commercial flight.

The ruling caste, who think they rule over us, have no hesitation to use heavily polluting private jets to scoot around on their planet hopping fun times.

The pandemic has been generous to the super rich.

CNBC – 11/25/21 – The rich are getting richer – and they’re fueling a private jet boom – Demand for private jets is soaring. Even used jets are getting hard to find.

The super-rich are taking their private jets to go around the Covid restrictions on commercial flights.

(more…)
By Jim Ulvog, ago

Educational institutions continue to shrink two years into the pandemic.

College classroom. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The double whammy of Covid pandemic and government policies in reaction to the pandemic continue to hammer the educational sector. Unsettling thing is to consider these articles only discuss the current impact and not the long-term destruction of education for all students from pre-K to grad school.

Articles for you to consider:

  • Columbia University settles for a refund of fees their class-action lawsuit claiming refund of fees and tuition.
  • Freshman enrollment in colleges and universities continued to decline in fall 2021. The anticipated return of students who skipped matriculation in fall 2020 has not happened.
  • As an indicator of what is likely happening in all primary and secondary schools across the country, Washington state public schools estimate enrollment for the next two years will be down another 4.5% from their February 2021 estimate.

TaxProf – 11/27/21 – Columbia Settles Covid-19 Class Action Tuition Refund Suit For $12.5 Million – Looks like Columbia University got off easy. Students there established a class and were suing for refund of tuition and fees because they were prohibited from in-person classes and instead attended an Ivy League school on their monitor.

(more…)
By Jim Ulvog, ago

Evaporating freedom, Australia edition. A good, but not yet final, solution.

Australia has a special camp for forced quarantines. Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

A year ago you would have been considered crazy, cuckoo, one of those tin foil-hat-wearing-nut-jobs if you had been so irresponsible as to suggest what is described in the next two articles could ever, ever happen.

A year after such predictions would have been laughed at, the Australian government is sending out the military to forcibly relocate people into a “quarantine camp” with fences and barbed wire.

The untried, unconvicted, and unsentenced crime? Testing positive for Covid.

The military is also forcibly relocating anyone who is in “close contact” with someone who tested positive for Covid.

Yeah, that is really happening.

Quarantine camps. Forcible relocation.

(Side note – I should have posted this yesterday, before the we’re-all-gonna’-die Omicron variant generated closing of borders and shutting of air travel. Had better post it before Monday morning because by then we might learn that the loss of freedom in Australia is old news.)

Zero hedge – 11/23/21 – Australian Army Begins Transferring Covid-Positive Cases, Contacts to Quarantine Camps – The Army has started forcibly transporting people from the Northern Territories to a quarantine camp which the government has built in Darwin.

(more…)
By Jim Ulvog, ago

“Mass killings under communist regimes”

The article Mass killings under communist regimes at Wikipedia provides a valuable, yet incomplete, compilation of the mass killings carried out by various community regimes.

To make the article more widely available and preserve it for posterity, it is republished here without photographs, excerpts & note, or citations. I may post it again with the extra material. This is a superb summary of the deliberate slaughters carried out by various communist dictatorships over the last century.

A variety of reports provide credible information that communism (and its sibling socialism) willfully killed over 100,000,000 people during the 20th century.  We must remember the death toll knowingly created by communism. Please remember these were intended consequences of deliberately implemented policies.

It is most appropriate to publish this article on Thanksgiving Day as we celebrate the freedom and abundant bounty that God has blessed us with in the United States.

This article is printed with permission of Wikipedia Foundation, Inc. under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license, also referenced as CC BY-SA 3.0. That license allows anyone to share and adapt the licensed material.  Conditions on the license require the material be properly attributed and anyone else may use the material under the same license.

I am publishing the material verbatim as found at Wikipedia without the photos. You may use anything in this post and this post only under the same licence.

For your awareness, remembrance, and future pondering, here is the alternative to capitalism, democracy, and freedom:

Mass killings under communist regimes.

Mass killings under communist regimes occurred throughout the 20th century. Death estimates vary widely, depending on the definitions of the deaths that are included in them. Estimates account for executions, deaths from man-made and intentional famines, as well as deaths that occurred during forced labor, deportations, or imprisonment.

In addition to “mass killings,” terms that are used to define such killings include “democide“, “politicide“, “classicide“, and “genocide.”

(more…)
By Jim Ulvog, ago

More bad news on the health front.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The bad news just keeps rolling in regarding the Covid pandemic, or perhaps we should now refer to it as endemic. It’s beginning to look like there’s not a whole lot we can do to stop or even slow the pandemic. We continue to see reports showing horrible side effects of the economic and social shutdown.

For your consideration:

  • There have now been more deaths coded to a Covid cause in 2021 than in 2020. Keep in mind this is with widespread vaccinations.
  • An actual scientist with experience developing vaccines points out that it is almost expected that we will see situations like in Gibraltar there there is an extraordinarily high vaccination rate and simultaneously an extraordinarily high infection rate.
  • The number of deaths from drug overdoses has skyrocketed since early 2020. Hmm.  What could have caused that? Is there something that happened in, oh, say March 2020 that might have led increasing number of people to abuse drugs?

There have now been more Covid deaths in 2021 with widespread vaccination than in 2020 without any vaccinations. 

On 11/22/22 the John Hopkins database reports 771,118 deaths from coronavirus.

On 11/22/21 the CDC reports the following death tally of “all deaths involving Covid-19.” This category is defined as “Deaths with confirmed or presumed Covid 19, coded to ICD-10 code U07.1.” Their account:

(more…)
By Jim Ulvog, ago

More flaming hypocrisy from our ruling caste. More protests around the world.

Image courtesy of Adobe Stock.

The list of high visibility public officials who do not feel the need to lower themselves to follow the rules mandatory for you and me just keeps growing.

For yet another weekend, protests were taking place around the world against mandatory vaccinations, useless lockdowns, and the Bitte Deine Papier (your papers please) vaccination passports.

News reports for today:

  • President of American Federation of Teachers blows off mask requirement during panel discussion. Oh, Sen. Schumer boogies the night away sans mask even though legal diktat requires it.
  • Two reports on protests across Europe.

The Epoch Times – 11/7/21 – Teacher’s Union Head Apologizes for Note Wearing Mask Indoors, Says People Has a “Hard Time Hearing” – The president of the American Federation of Teachers Randi Weingarten spoke at a conference in Puerto Rico without a mask. Other speakers were are also maskless.

(more…)
By Jim Ulvog, ago