The thoughts of a journalist/libertarian–conservative/Christian husband, father, Eagle Scout and aficionado of obscure rock music. Thoughts herein are only the author’s and not necessarily the opinions of his family, friends, neighbors, church members or past, present or future employers.
The country has at least two major problems just now: rampant inflation and rampantly increasing murder. (I’m putting to the side for the moment three others, to wit, frantically stoked identity obsession, enforced Woke conformity in academia, and historically inept and deluded political leadership).
In one easy graph, here’s the picture with inflation.
As you can see, the aggregate money supply (M2) is now 50% higher than it was just two years ago. This is not because of Putin, supply bottlenecks, corporate greed, or imprudently low interest rates. It’s because, starting with Trump but at this point mostly under Biden, we decided massively to increase the amount of money out there — mostly by printing millions of government checks — without producing any corresponding increase in goods and services. So now we have inflation at levels never seen by most of our citizens.
But it’s worse than that. Not only did we not increase the supply of goods and services during the antic increase in the money supply, we decreased it through COVID lockdowns — lockdowns we were told initially were a temporary measure to “flatten the curve” of hospital admissions (remember that?), but turned into months, and then more than a year, of intentionally grounding the economy.
So what we have is exactly what you see. Trillions more dollars chasing fewer goods.
Did you enjoy your $1400 Treasury check? I hope so (if you got one — I didn’t), because it’s going to be costing you, and the country, a lot more for a lot longer than the government, and this Administration in particular, ever lets on — or is going to be able to fix just with interest rate manipulation.
And then there’s crime. I have previously documented the steep rise in violent crime over the last several years — a rise the Left no longer bothers to dispute or even fuzz over as “transient” (that particular tentacle of complacency got moved to the inflation front). Today I want to tell you about a different but enormous problem that’s been below the surface for years. It was aptly summarized in this report by the Pew Foundation, a center-left outfit but one that produces honest and useful research. Here it is in one sentence:
Most violent and property crimes in the U.S. are not reported to police, and most of the crimes that are reported are not solved.
Yes, it’s all true. The crime reports you hear about in the MSM aren’t giving you the real story and instead are vastly understating the amount of crime in the country.
The Pew report continues:
In its annual survey, BJS [the Bureau of Justice Statistics] asks crime victims whether they reported their crime to police or not. In 2019, only 40.9% of violent crimes and 32.5% of household property crimes were reported to authorities.
Got that? Only two-fifths of violent crimes and fewer than a third of property crimes even get reported. Do you recall hearing that from Merrick Garland?
BJS notes that there are a variety of reasons why crime might not be reported, including fear of reprisal or “getting the offender in trouble,” a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help”…
Gosh, maybe it’s not a great idea to defund the police, at least if you want a fighting chance of getting your property back or at least of getting the thief prosecuted.
Most of the crimes that are reported to police, meanwhile, are not solved, at least based on an FBI measure known as the clearance rate. That’s the share of cases each year that are closed, or “cleared,” through the arrest, charging and referral of a suspect for prosecution, or due to “exceptional” circumstances such as the death of a suspect or a victim’s refusal to cooperate with a prosecution. In 2019, police nationwide cleared 45.5% of violent crimes that were reported to them and 17.2% of the property crimes that came to their attention.
You have less than half a chance that, if and when you report your mugging to the police, they’ll be able to do anything about it, and less than a fith of a chance that the guy who ransacked your house while you were on vacation will ever be prosecuted, and still less that you’ll get anything back.
But wait, there’s more! Of the crimes that are reported, the most frequently committed are the least frequently solved. All of the following are cleared less than a third of the time: Rape/sexual assault (32.1%); robbery (30.5%); theft (18.4%); burglary (14.1%); car theft (13.1%). And Pew did not even attempt to track drug offenses — an all but impossible task given that drug use is in some sense voluntary (until you become addicted, when “voluntary” becomes a cruel joke); and no one turns in his supplier. But over 100,000 of our fellow citizens died from drug overdoses last year, a new and dreadful record.
This is the real working of our supposedly “draconian” criminal justice system. When you take a look at the hard numbers, they tell you that, in terms of providing accountability to hoodlums or justice to victims, it’s less like Draco and more like an underfed poodle.
Otis is a ray of sunshine compared with James Howard Kunstler:
These quandaries and conundrums form a toxic cloud of cognitive dissonance blanketing America like a cosmic miasma of wickedness. We have got to turn the tables on these ghouls running things….
It looks like someone has called room service in a certain Swiss Fortress of Solitude and ordered der Schwabenklaus’s ass to be handed to him on a platter with a side of sauerkraut. The assisted suicide of Western Civ, Euro division, has been interrupted by peasant uprisings, first in the Netherlands, now spreading to Germany, Italy, and Poland. The farmers are on the march. They are coming for you, Klaus, and your World Economic Forum’s legion of implanted government goblins.
The governments of virtually all the nations of Western Civ have become enemies of their people. It’s been obvious in the USA for quite some time, but our preposterous attempt to turn Ukraine into a forward NATO missile base next door to Russia finally revealed the villainous rot in Euroland, too. Cut yourselves off, Germany, from Russian oil and natural gas? Whose bright idea was that? (Hint: Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who else? He supposedly runs that joint, doesn’t he?) Plan B, you Deutsches Volk now realize, is to burn your furniture to stay warm at Christmas.
America’s gambit to goad Russia into a Ukrainian quagmire turned into such a mighty fail that the US news media doesn’t even report on the doings there anymore. Which are: the Russians sent in their junior varsity and systematically wiped up the floor with Ukraine’s 250,000-man, NATO-trained (ha!) army of neo-Nazis. That is not an empty pejorative, by the way. They really are explicitly true believers in old Adolf’s mid-20th century program of exterminating the Russ people next door. Mr. Putin wasn’t kidding around when he highlighted that feature of his operation.
So, now the heart of Euroland looks forward to a new era without energy and without modern industry, meaning what? Well, without modern life (maybe without life, period). Der Schwabenklaus outlined that pretty clearly, too, with the by-now shopworn slogan that “You vill own nussing and you vill be heppy.” It was such an absurd maxim that many who pretend to think took it as a sort of joke. And, let’s face it, Klaus really does appear to be a comic figure — the weirdo tunic he sometimes wears, the Hollywood B-movie accent. But not so many are laughing now as the lights go out from Galway Bay to the Gulf of Riga.
If not the sinister Schwabenklaus, then, who or what entity is behind this world-ending mischief remains a matter of baffling consternation. Quite a few people, otherwise not insane, say we’re in thrall to some hovering alien presence not-of-this-Earth somehow directing our own destruction. Personally, I find that a bit silly. The most persuasive real-world clues point to China’s Communist Party (the CCP). Where did the “Wuhan Flu” (Sars C-19) emanate from? (Trick question.) At whose 2019 Wuhan World Military Games did the first outbreak occur? (Ditto.) Whose policy model was adopted in the US and Euroland for dealing with that punk-ass virus with lockdowns? Which current President of the USA has been on the payroll of the CCP for nearly a decade via shady business deals grifted up by his son? Hmmmm.
This latter saga of R. Hunter Biden is so well-publicized in its grotesque details — smoking crack and cavorting with Russian whores on-camera — that it seems like just another Netflix series. But guess what? It’s really real. And so are all the deal memoranda and emails on Hunter’s laptop, which has been in the passive possession of the FBI for three years. And you mean to tell me that no one has done anything about it? How is Director Chris Wray still walking around a free man?
Meanwhile, the very people who helped engineer the Wuhan Sars C-19 virus — and the mRNA “vaccines” now proving way deadlier than the virus — are still in the employ of our government: Anthony Fauci and former NIH Director Francis Collins (currently “Joe Biden’s” chief science advisor in the White House at $300+K-a-year). The effrontery! Notice, too, that, having winkled the Pentagon into “vaccinating” all our troops (including our military women-with-penises and men-with-vaginas), we now have an army programmed to drop dead on any battlefield they find themselves at without an enemy firing a shot. How do we even propose to defend North America if, say, China took a notion to seize our land by main force?
These quandaries and conundrums form a toxic cloud of cognitive dissonance blanketing America like a cosmic miasma of wickedness. We have got to turn the tables on these ghouls running things.
This week, a serious rebellion has sparked off in Europe. The Dutch government moved to seize the land belonging to about a third of its farmers, supposedly to cut nitrogen-oxide emissions so as to satisfy WEF-inspired EU 2030 climate goals. There is more horseshit in the government’s policy pretexts than there is on the farms of Holland, so the farmers have formed a tractor army of rebellion, blocked highways and border crossings, and mixed it up physically with the police. As I said at the beginning, the revolt against official climate change psychosis is spreading quickly to other European countries.
Perhaps the non-elites of Europe have realized that they were played for chumps. (They were.) They went along with the “vaccine” mandates only to learn now that their countrymen are dropping dead at suspiciously alarming rates, and maybe it has something to do with those shots they lined up for so obediently. And they can see the vast loss of jobs and income ahead as their industries have to shut down for lack of fuel. And they can see how their governments seek to starve them and force them to freeze to death a few months from now. So, it’s game on and governments are about to fall across Europe, and God knows what kind of strife will erupt out of that. BoJo is going in the UK… Holland’s PM Mark Rutte may be next… Olaf Scholz after him… and Mario Draghi in Italy. Look out below.
As of this writing Friday morning, we have no idea what the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe might signify — except, perhaps, the ominous beginning of a global trend.
Abe’s party won a supermajority in Japan’s Parliament. That is not necessarily incompatible with Kunstler’s “ominous beginning of a global trend,” which, truth be told, I have been predicting for several years because of this country’s overheated politics.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 