The headline number made Biden jump for joy, particularly after ADP did its frequently-abysmal job.

But as those of you who follow me know, I've tracked this report with my own private data set for more than 20 years.  I noted what looked like a dislocation on Stocks-n-Jocks this morning and want to bring it to broad attention.  It may not be what it appears; it's too early to be sure.  But if it is the CDC and others are actively hiding something very profound, nasty, and worse than Covid-19's toll last year.

The red highlight is the running 12 month difference between the column the arrow points to.  This is the non-institutionalized civilian population, defined as all persons 16 or older who are not in prison or otherwise in an institution (e.g. mental hospital.)  It has historically run around 2 million a year for the last couple decades, with some notable divergences (there was a very large spike upward in the early 2000s, for example.)

Note that to increase or decrease this rate adults have to screw about 17 years earlier, since it takes 9 months for the bun in said oven to emerge and then 16 more years before said child is counted.  The only other way is for a large number of people to enter or leave institutional life (e.g. being imprison) or...... for them to die.

There was a lull in 2019 which, if you think about it, makes sense.  What was going on in 2002-03?  A nasty recession, right?  Do you bring kids into the world when that happens?  Not as many.  Ok, that's explained.  Likewise, there was a dip in 2017 associated with the 2000 Nasdaq crash.  Ditto.  And so on.

But what was going on economically in 2004/05?  We were in the middle of a very strong economic recovery, were we not?  Indeed, unemployment had just gone under 6% and was falling, heading to under 5%.  The employment:population ratio was stable to improving and we were posting up huge employment gain numbers -- figures from 1.3 million a month to over 3 million.  It was the best of times; the market was roaring, employment was strong and people were having sex.

This trend started in January and, at this point, has destroyed fully half of the workforce expansion -- one million working-age Americans -- thus far.

I'll be watching this.... closely.

I'm not sure how you could actually make for a worse situation.

The eviction moratorium was "allowed" to expire, so they say.  Except that's not what happened.

Landlords and others sued, it went to the USSC, and the decision was taken to force expiration as-scheduled rather than issue an immediate injunction.  There had been conflicting decisions from lower courts which is how you basically always get into the USSC in the first place.

Kavanaugh issued a rather-stern warning: Any future extension had to be done by Congress, as the CDC had exceeded its authority.

I don't really care what the CDC claims in terms of authority.  The Constitution is very clear: The government can take private property for public use but must pay for it at fair market value.  Money has time value, which is why you must pay your mortgage or rent on a given day.  You can pay early (voluntarily surrendering the additional time value) but not late without being penalized.

I remind you: Trump did this originally. Yes, Biden continued it, but who did it in the first place, knowing damn well what the 5th Amendment says?

If the government wishes to suspend that obligation for an alleged public purpose, no matter how good the purpose and how just it must pay the money that it prevented the landlord from receiving.  It can, entirely constitutionally, create a debt by the person who it pays on behalf of but it cannot threaten to fine and throw people in jail for collecting a privately-contracted housing agreement.

We can have a debate over whether the CDC is acting wisely but that's not the purpose of this column; indeed, such a debate becomes whole of government really, really quickly -- including DHS/HHS busing known Covid-positive illegal immigrants all over the United States and dropping them in communities with zero quarantine requirements and even without notifying local officials so they could show up and impose one.

But this column is about the very narrow question: Does the last clause of the 5th Amendment still exist?

And if it does not, since I do not recall any formal, constitutional process to revoke it, perhaps you can inform me in the comments why anyone should pay any attention to any law at any level -- local, state or federal?

After all if the highest law of the land -- that which all other laws must conform to -- is toilet paper then perhaps its time for us to start drafting a document that begins "When in the course of human events...."

Then again, if you want to know why the CDC and Biden did this, just read this column and note the date.  We have allowed this to go on for decades, haven't we?

The political screaming class must really think we're stupid.

Well, maybe we are.  Just look at the last 18 months or so.

We're told that we must prevent evictions because there's a "pandemic."  Well, during said "pandemic" we paid people to stay home.  We hiked the minimum wage.  We're told, by the numbers, that per-capita income has gone up.  That means people have more money, not less.

So what, over the last 18 months, did those people spend the money on?

Obviously, if they're facing eviction, what they didn't spend the money on is their rent.

Why pay the rent when you can't be evicted for not paying it?  Why, let's instead buy..... booze!  How about bong hits!  Weed stores are essential businesses.  So are liquor stores.

Paying people to not work was thought of as compassionate.  What if it was really training them to, well, not have to work and expecting that their landlord would simply swallow all of the taxes and operating expenses, including of course maintenance on the building and grounds, of their residence?

The last employment situation report says that the average hourly wage is up $1.05 over the last year to $30.40.  Among production and non-supervisory employees there is not one category in the table (B-8) that shows an hourly wage under $15 and several are more than double that figure.

There is almost-literally a help-wanted sign in every single business window in America.  This begs the question; is the "beggar" you see standing on the corner less than 100' away from a store with said sign in the window truly broke and homeless or is he driving a Lexus and grifting you?  More than once I've seen the latter; said "beggar" walks to his car strategically in a parking lot, removes the tattered shirt and changes into some perfectly-good shorts and a shirt which happens to be in the very nice late-model car he has the keys to.

I used to find such people sad examples and believed that most of them probably were actually homeless and down on their luck.  The more-ragged were likely drug or alcohol-addicted and perhaps mentally compromised as well.  Years ago when I lived in Chicago it wasn't uncommon for me to offer one of the street bums my doggie bag from a nice restaurant and have them turn it down; all they wanted, you see, was a fiver so they could get a cheap snort of booze or their particular drug of choice.  "Hungry and homeless" eh?  Well, the latter perhaps, but the former not so much.

The last few months have disabused me of this notion; someone who is actually hungry and homeless can have a job in 15 minutes.  They might not like that specific job, but it's a job.  Some of them -- like the local Kroger -- are even are advertising they pay daily which removes the argument that you can't go to work because you need the money now, not in two or four weeks.  Work today, get paid today.

But even that doesn't do it.  The other day I was in said Kroger and half the self-checkout lanes were shuttered.  Why?  They only had one person on to watch over the shoppers and keep them from walking out with a full cart of groceries they didn't pay for.  Do you really think they wouldn't have immediately hired someone who is facing eviction when they have a sign in the window offering to do exactly that?

I'm out of patience -- and tolerance -- for the screaming class of political pantywaist nonsense peddlers, no matter which issue it may be on.  When it comes to economics at a personal level its quite-clear: Why work when someone will pay you to sit around and get stoned?  We've done exactly that, and instead of paying rent with the money what was bought was beer and bong hits.  We're told we're "racist" if we restrict EBT to actual nutritious food instead of junk, packaged, obesogenic crap and thus the local gas station convenience store lets you use EBT to buy things that make you fat and, I remind you, that makes you more-likely to die of the coof.

Given that we knew more than a year ago that being obese was a serious risk factor for Covid-19 wouldn't an intelligent thing to do be to slam the door on that bull**** and restrict government food assistance to actual healthy food?  Of course it would have.  If it's a fast carbohydrate then you can't buy it with EBT.  Oh, but that would been inconvenient say the screaming harpies.  Indeed it might have -- but it also might have kept some people alive when we didn't pay them to pack on another 50lbs.

Never mind the other part of the problem at present, which is that the landlords all have to pay their property taxes but are not getting any income.  Does Blackrock care about this?  No, they go to the Fed and get a nice zero-interest loan to pay them with.  Can the small property owner -- the small-business landlord -- get that zero-interest loan?  Of course not.  He or she is forced to sell -- to Blackrock, of course, which also gets another zero-interest loan to buy them out at a loss, then jacks up the rent.

A hand up is a job.

A hand-out is the destruction of the work ethic and generation of more Beautiful Ones, except when it comes to humans for some odd reason they're not all that beautiful when smiling at you with teeth rotted out from smoking meth.

Then again, in the mouse experiments, we didn't put mouse-sized crank pipes in MouseTopia, did we?

Ever hear of MouseTopia?

Someone brought it up on my forum; I knew about it, having read a couple of articles decades ago.  It was very interesting because it applied to a creature that, many believe, is rather stupid -- that is, driven by simple primal instincts.  Eat, drink, avoid being eaten by a cat and, of course, screw.

The mouse, to be specific.  

As it turns out it's a bit more complex than that.

A scientist built what should have been utopia.  A closed system with no shortages of water, food, places to nest and, of course, no predators.  The expectation was that the handful of male and female mice would, without any pressure to contain their numbers, eat, drink and screw themselves literally to death, consuming all space available since there were no other constraints.  There was no problem with clean air, water, food or the means to dispose of waste; ergo, population would expand exponentially until all space was consumed.

You know, like it was predicted in the 1970s and such with humans.

It started as predicted but rapidly did not work out that way.

Long before the mice reached physical constraints bad things started to happen.  The social order of raising little mice and imprinting on them what was necessary to turn them into prolific creatures broke down.  Eventually the mother mice stopped allowing their babies to nurse and the young mice stopped caring about anything at all, other than eating, grooming and sleeping.  Some got extremely aggressive and started attacking and raping anything that moved -- even where there was no possibility of reproduction (e.g. raping other males.)  The birth rate fell, infant mortality soared and, ultimately, reproduction stopped entirely.

There was no equilibrium reached nor was the limit resource exhaustion, which was the original expectation.  Instead the social order broke down and ultimately the entire population under test went extinct.

Several permutations followed in an attempt to try to figure out what the hell was going on, including removing some of the mice from that environment once reproduction had ceased and transplanting them into a new environment where there were only a few mice.  The transplanted mice refused to breed and all eventually died out anyway, despite now being in a spare space with, once again, no predatory pressure and lots of resources.

As far as I know nobody has ever identified exactly what changed, when, or how to interdict it.  Perhaps its as simple as "without adversity against which a species must struggle society eventually fails and even the most-base reproductive drive is lost."

You'd think that would be a human or at least primate construct, but as these experiments showed you'd be wrong.  Social constructs, even if they're not what we think of as "social" at all, are inherently and inescapably part of necessity with any sexually-reproducing animal.  If you lose that you lose the entire population of a species as without reproduction the outcome over time is certain.

One of the claims is that "inequity" causes such outcomes.  Really?  When everyone has access to enough, how is there inequity?  Isn't inequity really a codeword for I don't have to lift a finger to have everything I need -- or even want?  Doesn't this inherently come from destroying the natural selective process of being better and doing better leads to better outcomes, which by definition cannot wind up in equality of result?

And isn't getting rid of that dynamic, when you get down to it, a recipe for disaster?

Look at the last 18 months.  Despotism is nothing new and seizing opportunity when a hidden bogeyman comes to call isn't new either.  How many times have High Priests shown up with various nostrums, from waving crosses to Holy Water to blood on doors to ward away evil?  Is it not true that 100 times out of 100 such persons were, in fact, completely full of crap?

The man who discovered that washing your hands before delivering babies prevented women from dying was literally drummed out of medical practice and pursued even beyond that to the point he was driven insane.

Is what we're seeing now really any different than what we've seen before?

They cut your head off as a heretic, didn't they.

What are social media companies doing today?

Something to start your day thinking about....... and whether we're headed for the same outcome as the mice.