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2023-10-01 10:01 by Karl Denninger
in Musings , 201 references
[Comments enabled]  
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It is a core of the Libertarian Philosophy, such as it may be.

The short form is that one may not initiate aggression against another person or their property.

In most views, "initiate" means just that; responding to actual aggression or a credible threat is perfectly acceptable.

There is plenty of debate on exactly where the lines are, and whether this principle is in fact reasonable.  What, for example, constitutes the boundaries of your interest upon which aggression can be recognized as within your right to respond?  Your personal body is quite clear; there is some debate on whether property in all of its potential extents applies (or has only lesser protection or a right of personal redress) and then there are intangibles which get even further into the weeds.

As an example of the latter: Does someone poisoning or (as a possible corner case outright destroyingyour bloodline provide justified response?  If so does that extend only to blood in the first degree (e.g. your children and perhaps your spouse) or does it go further?

Few would argue that defense of others at the moment of risk is enjoined but does that extend to pursuit and redress and, if so, for whom other than your person (e.g. again, your spouse?) and to what extent?

The Government, of course, would argue that they, and they alone have vested such a right of pursuit and redress.  This is illogical; the government is not the most aggrieved party if they're aggrieved at all in many cases.  Indeed, we need only see that governments declare other humans as not worthy of even basic human rights all the time, and always have through history: Witness war, suborning and profiting from slavery of various sorts (the opium wars and what led to them, supply chains to China that operate on forced labor and similar, etc.)

Thus given the clear and in fact unequivocal history, extending well beyond both the time and space of the United States when it comes to government, by what logic would you entrust them to make such a decision rather than expecting them to be only an adjunct?

You see, if you take the position that they are only an adjunct then it is in the government's interest to vigorously investigate and prosecute aggressions against its citizens in every case, especially by those who are not citizens or lawful permanent residents and those committing clear and obvious criminal acts of violence or against the property of others because if the government fails to do so the people have made clear they will do it on their own and, should the government try to stop them, the government agencies and employees involved will be deemed equal aggressors standing with the original criminal and suffer the same fate.

Since the people always outnumber the government by ridiculous ratios (100:1 in the present case, even including the military, and that assumes no defections) and approximately 300:1 if we are talking about all sworn law-enforcement agents then there is utterly no possible way that in the event of such a declaration being made they "win."  Go ask anyone who has been in an actual conflict about that; yes, technology and coordination matter a great deal but the facts are that literal goat-herders threw out both the Russian and American military, arguably the two mightiest military forces on the planet -- sequentially.  Every single member of said military has family and so do law enforcement and related government employees and to go to work and commit aggression that the people at-large rule unfounded they must expose both them and their property to destruction.  Those who fantasize that this is not true have repeatedly seen entire nations ripped apart and turned into unbelievable hellscapes.

The NAP is indeed a good guide and a valid, rational principle around which to organize one's life.  But to go further and to delegate the enforcement of any sort of cessation and redress for aggression aimed at you, or those you love, to government is to give said government the capacity to license said aggression toward you, your loved ones, and your property.

That is exactly what has happened over the last two decades and we have allowed it to happen.

A "Girl in Iowa" and a much-younger one in Texas both lost their lives as a result of our allowing that to take place and the government's decision to grant such a license in exchange for bribes paid by business and political interests who want specific, targeted exemptions to the NAP that apply only to them and those who they give permission to.

That is indefensible both from a standpoint of a reasonable society and ethics, it is at the root of essentially all of the rampant criminality and destruction within our cities along with a huge part of the inflation we now suffer -- and much of it in total arises specifically via the government's refusal to enforce our border.

Contemplate this situation:

You, and your family, live on a large piece of land upon which you grow food and raise small animals for meat.  You do not have any money for a well (or its post-SHTF and there is nobody to drill one anyway) but you do have a cistern of 1,000 gallon capacity and the means to collect rainwater and funnel it in there.  It rains infrequently on your land, but in sufficient quantity, over a month's time, to provide you and your family with sufficient water to be ok -- defined as about 20 gallons per day between the four of you, four gallons of which (one each) is necessary for human life, and the rest for cooking, sanitation and similar.

One night you catch a man with a one-gallon container stealing the water in the cistern.  He can only steal one gallon, as that's all he has for a container.  You're well-aware that this is only one minimum daily ration for him and your cistern is full.

Do you shoot him?

You have to shoot him immediately and in addition you have to post his dead body where others can see it, with a sign explaining why he got shot.  If you don't you and your family will eventually die.  It is a mathematical certainty.

Why?

Because if he gets away with it he will teach others that they can steal your water by mere example if not by direct communication.  Your supply is finite.  You will survive one person stealing a gallon of water but if 1,000 people each steal a gallon you and your family are all dead the next time it fails to rain as expected, and eventually it will.  The first person who steals and others observe or are told that there is no consequence will lead to others choosing to steal as well.  This is an exponential series and zero exponential series are ever sustainable on this rock, as it is of finite size, mass and resource.  Appealing to morality is both stupid and pointless; if that is what you rest your argument on you had better square it with the fact that you are, by doing so, committing suicide and murdering your family, proving that you care less for them than for the thief, at the same time.  What does your God and moral code say about that?

Now let's add to this and make the analysis even more-stark: Unless his theft is one-time, he will not imprint that act on anyone else and you can prove it if you don't kill him immediately you are going to have to kill many more people and the longer you wait the more-likely it is you will need to kill an exponentially-larger number.  You should have a distaste for killing other people generally (only the mentally deranged do not) but if killing must done it is clearly less-distasteful to kill one person than to kill ten -- or a hundred.

No, this doesn't mean you immediately kill anyone who steals a beer from a store.  It does mean you have to have in place a disincentive system so that those who steal, rape, defraud or otherwise take advantage of others don't profit from it and the lesson they impart to others is that it does not succeed and thus it is not worth it -- and this lesson must be in fact imparted in each and every case.  Some individuals will do it anyway -- there are crazy people in every society that will never change, but that's not the point and can never be justification for public policy.  If you fail to put this paradigm into place and enforce it whether through government or private action society exponentially degenerates: First slowly in ways you might claim is perfectly ok, and then all at once -- you will be either economically destroyed or die.  You'll note that Ticker references this in a government and civil order context; the original, linked from it and still available, references it as mathematics and survival.  The laws of mathematics apply to everything, all the time, every time; there are no exceptions and every exponential series looks "just fine" or even beneficial when it begins and in every case unless it has a known endpoint it is not beneficial -- it is bad, ruinous or even suicidal.

You cannot permit mass-migration into any nation without it eventually being destroyed. Those who have less than the people of lower economic standing in the destination nation (why would you migrate somewhere that offers you less than you have now?)in virtually every case have less because they possess less in intellectual firepower, education and the desire to use both and put in the hard work required to advance.  The oft-mouthed lie that their nation is a hellhole and they are migrating to escape it belies the fact that they, and the rest of their nation's population, created and continue to permit said hellhole to exist!  If this is due to stratification by some "elite" the fact remains that the oppressed outnumber said "elite" by 100:1 or more and yet they decided to allow and even voted for that situation in the first place.  Rather than ask us for a case of weapons and ammunition with which to depose the jackals that infest their own nation they migrate because they believe they will get something for nothing where they are heading -- they have little or nothing to offer AND are demanding a hand-out rather than do the hard work with no promise of success, and all of the attendant risks, involved in fixing their own homeland.  The first who come without skills, intellectual capacity, desire to integrate or who expect anything without expending effort in exchange for said goods and services will attract others of equally-poor or even less intellectual and learning capacity.

Each one you admit attracts ten more who see that occur and they will then, if you let the first in, follow.

If you claim this is not the case then explain why every single one of the migrants now here does not spend all of their waking time walking around their "new and beloved home" picking up trash, cleaning streets along with the exterior of buildings and otherwise bettering the nation they claim is so awesome and desirable instead of demanding lodging, food, medical care and similar without a single second of effort being provided in exchange while at the same time trashing everything and everywhere they are.  Why is it that Chicago and New York, among other places, have millions in additional municipal costs?  Is there not some sort of value these people could provide to society, these cities and their residents, even if it is nothing more-complicated or mentally-challenging than manual labor and beautification, of which anyone who can manage a 3,000 mile hike is capable of?

There are no exceptions to this pattern -- not here, not in Europe, not anywhere.

One locust is not a problem as it eats a minuscule amount of your crop but a swarm of them will destroy your crop and kill you through starvation every time.

No society where any element of freedom is claimed to be essential can survive if other than a tiny percentage decide to intentionally damage the person and property of others.  Some people always will; they always have, and that will never change.  It is well-documented that the moneychangers in the time of Hammurabi screwed their customers by issuing more "receipts" for gold than they had on deposit.  This was a "great idea" (and they made great profit from doing it) right up until too many demanded the gold, and then all blew up in their face.

The original Coinage Act in the United States punished counterfeiting with death. Why?  Because no nation can survive if you permit scams and frauds on any scale to become exponentially expansive.  Ditto for stealing horses; if you got caught you were put to death even if you did it in a western town where there was no imminent risk of killing the owner by stranding him without supplies.

A pregnant black woman was just shot as she deliberately drove toward a cop in front of her vehicle that ordered her out of her car.  From any reasonable point of view he rationally believed she intended to hit him rather than comply.  The was much outrage that "she didn't do nothing" and that the cop shouldn't have stood in front of the vehicle as if standing in front of a non-moving vehicle magically became just cause for her to run him over because of who she was -- and she "didn't do nothing" to deserve being obstructed.  Well, she did do something -- surveillance video shows she stole liquor and had a confederate involved in the theft too -- it was not a random, unthinking event that happened on the spur of the moment but rather a planned heist at the store.

If she had stolen nothing the cops would not have confronted her and she wouldn't be dead.  Where did she get the idea she could steal the booze in the first place and in addition form a plot to do so with a confederate?  We all know the answer to that: From the many black people who have been all over the media and news stealing things, including mass-riot-style theft, without consequence.  She was taught that she could steal and we, society as a whole, were the ones who did the teaching.  That is our fault for refusing to demand and enforce that theft when evident and clear be immediately punished in a sufficient manner to make it uneconomic and unpleasant to steal and because we allowed her to be taught this lesson she and her unborn child are dead.  Worse, making excuses for her or even prosecuting the cops involved will teach more black people that they can steal more and neither get arrested OR SHOT because they will now believe they can run over a police officer who stands in their way.

Or worse -- run over people without any provocation, justified or not, at all.  That link is a self-shot video of black people stealing a car, intentionally hitting another vehicle with it and then intentionally, with malice and announced intent, running into a bicyclist (who died!)  There was no "provocation", justified or not, for any of those acts.  Why did these people think they could steal a car, strike another vehicle intentionally and then, by the obvious video and their words demonstrating clear premeditated intent, murder a bicyclist?  Because we have refused to enforce the law against all of the predicate elements and in addition declared that if you're black passing fake money, stealing things and even committing felony assault or worse will not be punished.  We, in our society, taught said persons this lesson.

As a direct result two vehicles are significantly damaged and a bicyclist is dead.

In the late 1970s drug companies, insurance companies and a pharmacy chain all acted to collude and attempt to monopolize.  The government went after them.  They claimed immunity against the law in this regard under McCarren-Ferguson, a second law regulating insurance.  They lost at the Supreme Court, the case was Royal Drug (go look it up.)  It is forty years later and 15 USC Chapter 1, which provides for ten years in federal prison for each person who is involved in an attempt to monopolize, fix prices or otherwise restrain the market has not been enforced even once since and the defense said firms raised against same was found invalid by the highest court in the land.  You would think that the government would have immediately brought hundreds of said charges, locked up a whole bunch of people and put a stop to the entire medical scam that is now responsible for one dollar in three of federal spending and fully one dollar in five of the entire economy, but you'd be wrong.  The refusal to prosecute one group of said people has, as a direct result, expanded exponentially and today essentially every single medical provider, insurance company, drug company, hospital, doctor's office and pharmacy commits acts every single day that facially violate said law as confirmed by the Supreme Court and which is supposed to get every person involved a 10 year date in the Graybar Motel.  No matter how wealthy you are prison sucks; it is a sanction you can't wave off or make all that much less-sucky irrespective of how many billions of dollars you might have.

Medical spending was about 3-4% of GDP historically, about 7% of GDP when this scheme managed to draw legal attention and now it is 20% so roughly one dollar in six spent in the economy is literally being stolen in this field alone and not one person has gone to prison for any of it.  Why should anyone fear prison for these offenses when everyone else who does it not only gets away with it they get rich doing it besides?

The locusts are not just migrants; they are also found in the board rooms of major corporations all the way down to the "drug rep", hospital and doctor's office.

Why do you think Elon (and now other manufacturers) can sell cars that directly exploit near-literal slavery of children in the DRC without which there are no batteries for said vehicles?  Is not slavery and child exploitation illegal?  Apparently it is only for certain slave-owners but it is entirely legal to exploit said slavery so long as you can find someone else to do it in a country that doesn't care!  The same, by the way, applies to basically everything coming out of China.

Square your view on this not being something that should lead to every CEO and other businessperson exploiting same being imprisoned right here, right now with this question -- why is child pornography illegal to possess?  Your mere possession does not harm anyone, right?  You didn't do anything evil to any other person by possession or even distribution of that material, right?

We deem it illegal and will (justly) throw you in prison for it because in order to create that material you must sexually assault a child and that is both illegal and does severe and irreparable harm to the child so possession of the fruits of the criminal act, including profiting from the results, is also criminalized.

So with this fact on the table tell me why everyone who owns a Tesla isn't in prison for exploiting the slavery of children in the DRC and why Elon isn't literally breaking rocks for the rest of his life in the worst prison hellhole you can imagine given that estimates are 40,000 children are so-enslaved doing this and without that happening and the harm to said children there are no electric cars!

Why isn't the CEO and entire board of Apple in prison for manufacturing components and iPhones in China which occurs with forced labor which we know is a fact because Foxconn had to put nets up around their factories to prevent those being abused from committing suicide to escape the Hell they were consigned to.

Oh, its not just Apple of course -- indeed, having taught Americans "this is all ok because we don't jail anyone for profiting from child pornography slavery" basically all large corporations are doing this in every part of our economy.  Just try to buy a pair of jeans or a shirt that wasn't sewn together with said effectively-slave labor.

The only difference between these two scenarios is that Elon is a billionaire and the random scumbag making kiddie porn -- or possessing it -- is not.  Therefore we teach through our actions that exploiting slavery and intentionally harming children is perfectly ok whether the law says so or not provided you don't explicitly depict them being sexually assaulted.  Forcing them to dig up ore in mines or abusing them -- along with adults -- in China is perfectly fine and as a direct result virtually everyone in any sort of large, internationally-linked business over here is doing exactly that.

The difference between locusts and humans is that a locust will not change its fundamental means of mating and survival, and thus to the extent we can we must kill them lest they kill us.  Humans have sufficient agency to decide otherwise but asking nicely has never, in human history, been sufficient -- and thus on the evidence it never will be.

We must not, as a nation, allow any of this sort of crap to stand.

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2023-09-29 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Covid-19 , 401 references
[Comments enabled]  
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You will eventually, if you do this sort of stupid thing often enough, be killed by it.

If you had no side effects at all with the jabs, so far it looks like you're ok.

But 4.2% up to 15%, from this data, got hammered with significant side effects -- and the data is that if you're in that group, you're fucked.  There is no evidence that after some period of time -- we only have two years or so of data at this point, so we can't speak beyond that -- said risk dissipates to irrelevance.  It might not, and until proved otherwise we must assume it does not.

In the middle?  Nobody knows.

Is there anything you can do about this if you're at risk?  The evidence is no.

The evidence is that you are under the gun for the rest of your life, however long that might be.

The snake-oil salesmen are of course happy to sell you something.

There is no evidence, of any sort, that any of these alleged post-hoc "interventions" will do a damn thing -- other than drain your wallet.

Among my associates I'm aware of very, very few people who had no side effect at all despite taking repeated shots.  There are some who had no notable side effects that took one -- or two.  But most people had some sort of bad side effect such as fever, malaise, something beyond a minor discomfort where the shot was given (as would be true for being poked with a pin that had nothing on or in it) and similar.

You're free to discount the above if you wish, of course.  I hold no medical degree and have never claimed to.

What I do claim is that I'm very good at looking at a data set, even without using all manner of high-tech visualization tools, and detecting whether something is "wrong" in it or not.  That is one of the primary reasons I'm very good at crafting software.  Most programmers can't do effective work without diagramming out all the various interconnections, critical paths, flow charts and similar first.  I don't need that and in fact I work better and produce better code without it in most cases.

It was just a few weeks into this outbreak and its failure to follow the claimed patterns that a truly-naive population would have, as described by mathematics, that it was evident that something was different from the theoretical and claimed path put forward by the so-called scientists and alleged "medical experts."  Those who think of problems in an engineering context, as I tend to, call an immediate full stop when that happens until you have a full and complete understanding as to why, directing all your energy there, because when that deviation occurs and becomes statistically meaningful it is mathematically-valid proof that you got it wrong.

Making excuses when you get it wrong instead of stopping right there and now is how people get killed.

If you see cracks in a bridge that should not have a problem with the load it is experiencing and you don't blockade it and the road under it until you understand why they're present you risk it coming down while people are on it and on top of people under it.  Until you fully understand what happened there is only one safe act you can take that halts further damage: Stop.

We knew in the first few months of 2021 we got it wrong.  We knew this because while occasional and very-infrequent "breakthrough" infections in ordinarily immune competent people always do indeed happen when 20 people, all vaccinated, get together somewhere and half or more of them wind up getting the disease anyway that's neither rare or infrequent and the claim that you had active prevention against infection is false.

Then, in the first few months of 2021, uncharacterized (yet) deaths in the CDC reporting showed a very significant elevation, which I reported on at the time.  3-Sigma+ -- which some explained as "well, they're busy."  Except -- if that was "we didn't get to it yet" the other causes all should have seen decreases of the same size in total (that bucket eventually gets mostly moved to the others) and that wasn't the case.  Now, two+ years in, those very statistically-significant elevations are in several other buckets and they're not coming back down, so the excuse that "well, it was missed screenings" is also known false.

If you move the goalposts, which is what we allowed the government, CDC, NIH and our state agencies to do in that situation you are at very high risk of severely injuring and killing people in enormous size because you have proved, beyond question, that you either (1) lied to the public on purpose or (2) didn't understand what you were doing in that you truly believed something that was false.

The CDC wants our trust backThat cannot happen -- and must not -- until and unless the CDC adopts an engineering approach to everything it does starting with a fully retrospective look backward at all the damage it has done by not doing so, and not just with Covid.  The new director has not only said nothing about that she has doubled down on the stupidity of the last three years in the face of proof the CDC got it wrong all the way back to a couple of months after the virus first showed up in the United States.  It is not about "messaging", otherwise known as propaganda, it is about facts.

This isn't about politics folks.

It's about the fact that we permitted a bunch of hacks to proceed once it became apparent that their original claims were false and thus one of the two above situations had to exist as there was no other possible explanation for any of it.

That was stupid at best -- and that's being unreasonably kind.

We are still, to this day, unwilling to hold those to account who did this.

As a result we, as a body politic, have no room to complain when, not if, we (if we were dumb enough to take these jabs) or those we love (ditto) get screwed in some serious way -- up to and including being screwed dead.

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2023-09-24 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Other Voices , 153 references
[Comments enabled]  

This is the easiest damn fishing I'z ever done.....gotta love it, just kicking back on the boat with a cold one or three and watching 'em flop on the deck.  That reminds me -- better get off my ass and put 'em in the cooler before they start to go off.....  Thanks Ish' --- Ed

 

 

Previous installments covered the two most important responsibilities every adult has: eliminating toxic people and time management. Another touched on how much responsibility we have for other adults in our lives. Now it’s time to face the mirror.  There are a lot of strengths and weaknesses reflected back.  Concentrate on the former instead of the latter or clown world wins.

Ultimately every aspect of an adult's life is their responsibility. Not everything is an individual’s fault, but everyone chooses what to deal with and how. Ignoring a problem is valid. After all, there are only so many hours in the day and everyone has different priorities. Often one particular crisis rises to the top and preempts everything else.  This is why time management and taking out the trash are crucial.  Those two actions reduce chaos and free up mental energy for making real improvements.  Otherwise life devolves into a series of triage moments, always dealing with emergencies instead of growth.

Personal growth is a third adult responsibility.

Outside of catastrophes, selecting what to improve is as important as how.  Some aspects are under an individual's control, some can be influenced, and some are random. It is important to discern properly, because only things that can be changed or influenced are worth effort. Also be wary of mislabeling something “random” when it is not.  Pouring energy into things that cannot be changed while ignoring those that can causes suffering and wastes time.  This is as bad as employing a doomed solution to a fixable situation. 

What should someone work on?  Even when not dealing with immediate disaster, it’s the same alert system:  Look for physical or emotional pain points.  Unfortunately, it doesn’t point to a solution, that’s up to the individual to discover.

This is where an internal versus external locus of control matters. People with an external locus of control blame everything and everyone else for their problems. They are losers.  Nothing is their fault or responsibility, nor can they change their circumstances.  People with an internal locus of control take responsibility and change their lives. Which one are you? Who do you want to hang around?  Who will be reliable in a crisis?

Externally focused people will push their problems onto those internally focused.  It’s a good solution for them, someone who accomplishes things will babysit!  Unfortunately, losers drag the caregiver down the failure vortex along with them.

Never be more invested in an adult's outcome than they are.

A Health At Every Size adherent has an external locus of control. The entire belief system rests on one tenant: Weight is completely random.  This is very liberating for human failures.  It’s not the food. It's genetics, magic, and/or medical conditions that make them fat.  They don’t even eat, calories appear out of the air!  They, like every other addict, are slowly committing suicide.  If you have someone like this in your life, do not put more effort into their health than they do.  Instead, concentrate on your own self improvement.

A good way to develop an internal locus of control is sticking with an exercise program.  Going for a walk every day proves to the face in the mirror yes, you can. 

Real self-improvement and responsibilities aren’t flashy. They’re sweaty, gritty, hard work, and boring. It’s a slog.  An internal locus of control is crucial or when the “fun” wears off, so does the new habit. It also removes other people from the equation.  There is nothing wrong with an accountability partner, but what if they aren’t as serious as you?  Ideally people have support for changing their lives, but we’re living through a social collapse.  

Relying on a “gym buddy” for motivation to lift at 6 AM on Wednesday might fail.  Setting good habits like going to sleep early on Tuesdays sets up success. Each step in the process reinforces an internal locus of control: deciding to lift, setting a schedule, going to bed early, pumping iron.  

Health is a common thing to procrastinate. It's understandable, these problems happen gradually and there's often another immediate issue to deal with. Eventually time runs out and diabetes, heart disease, or kidney problems arrives. The good news is health is almost always something you can influence if not out and out control. You determine if you get type 2 diabetes or not. If you already have it, you can put it in remission.  Not your doctor, not big Pharma, you. You can influence how long you live with Type 1 diabetes by eating an extremely low carb diet. There are many conditions that can be managed. None of it is easy, but it is possible and necessary for staying on this mortal coil. 

Responsibility is a moment to moment choice.  If you want a competent tribe, decide to grow, to do the thing every day and draw in other self-reliant people. 

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2023-09-19 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Environment , 465 references
[Comments enabled]  
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There was a march this weekend for exactly that in NYC.

It was rather amusing to watch people parading around arguing for being disrobed, for the street they walk on to not exist, to have no means to get to and from same, for the signs and markers used to make them to not exist and in fact to not have the free time to march at all.

Oh, and to slaughter a few billion people world-wide as well.

You see, without fossil fuels the shoes said people were wearing would not exist.  Remove them now, jackass, and set your own example.

The street would not exist either; asphalt is made out of oil, so you would be walking a dirt street.

Said street would be covered in horse piss, because there are no cars, trucks and similar -- and somehow goods have to get places in quantities that a human cannot carry; ergo, you must use beasts.  Fine, but said beast will piss and crap wherever it is at the time.  You can capture the crap with a diaper, but not the piss.  Thus you will walk in it.

You would not be there because the vehicle you used to get there would not exist.  Oh, you say, we'd use electric trains and such.  Fine, except without petroleum there are no insulators for the wires and thus there are no electric vehicles either.  You could probably use steam without petroleum inputs (there are biological alternatives for seals and oils, for example), but what do you intend to burn to make the steam?  I thought you didn't like burning things?  As for the oils most of those marching have plenty; we'll use them for the source.

There would be no cellphones. Virtually every component in them requires petroleum to manufacture it. The screen, processor, battery, case, sealants, connectors, antennas and more.  If you oppose "fossil fuels" take your cellphone (and computer; same issues) and throw them both in the trash immediately.  In a no-fossil-fuel world they will not exist so you might as well get started now.  Oh, this applies to that nice flat-screen TV you own too.  Throw it out.  You're not a pig and a climate-criminal, are you?

If you're a man you would have no time to march at all because without fertilizers (all you'd have to fertilize with is what comes out of the back of your horse, ox or similar) your crop yields would be a fraction of what they are now.  Without fossil fuels you cannot pump anywhere near the quantity of water now consumed, nor till the land with other than said beasts and there are no pesticides.  All this makes some people happy right up until they realize that now you must work said land by hand and raise small animals to survive, leaving you no time to go wave signs in a city.

If you're a woman you get to join said man in the field because you must produce too or you will starve.  The only exception is if you're literally barefoot and pregnant, thus unable.  The man in that case (and you better keep him around or you and your young children are dead of said starvation) in fact winds up doing your work in exchange for pussy.  So much for your "feminism"; it only works out when there's a lot of economic surplus and hard manual labor is not required to eat, doesn't it?

Oh, but you say, I won't have kids and don't need a husband.  Fair enough.  In 20 or 30 years your body will be broken down from said hard work (as will the man's) -- now who's going to provide enough food for you to eat?  You can't do it anymore yourself and you considered bearing children to be a "burden" unworthy of your "fine sensibilities"; well, unlike today that gets you dead as you get a bit older; nobody 20 years old and able-bodied with a working dick will choose you as the beneficiary of their extra work.  You can't give them children anymore even if you managed to remain sexually attractive and you didn't create any children who, you hope, might have gratitude for the fact that you fed them off your tits for their first months of life!  Oops.

Electricity?  What's that?  You banned "fossil fuels" which means no insulation, no fiberglass to make windmill blades and no solar panels.  A crude metal windmill might produce a bit of power sometimes, and might be able to pump your well water.  When the wind blows.  But without insulation and the oil to go into a transformer you can't move said energy anywhere useful beyond your own small homestead, nor distribute it. 

You get ill.  You want to go to the doctor but he has no medicines; they're all made in some part with fossil fuels.  Organic and inorganic molecular synthesis relies on it.  Never mind IV tubing (vinyl and silicone), the bag to contain the IV (plastic), injection equipment (plastic), the mask you demand someone wear (blown plastic fiber) and more.  Oh, and let's not forget anesthetics; you do know why the ORs were on the top floor of hospitals before they existed, yes?  (Hint: It has to do with not being able to hear the screams from persons operated on without them!)   Ban exploitation of fossil fuels and none of that exists and we're back in the dark ages medically.  Congratulations, we'll send the Priest over to try to banish the evil spirits making you sick.  It probably won't work.

Then it becomes cold.  You know, winter?  How did you say you were going to stay warm again?  You didn't think about that, did you?  You die -- you literally freeze to death.

Modern civilization exists because of the exploitation of carbon.  I don't care if you like it or not; facts don't care about your feelings and banning exploitation of carbon will kill people in size along with collapsing the economy.

No person who argues for this has any business being anywhere near the levers of power, including RFK who has publicly declared he will do so.  He has publicly declared himself a mass-murdering psychotic asshole who has no business in any policy role, period.

And so has every single one of the idiots who marched over the weekend.

You're entitled to be nuts and screw yourself as a consequence.  Its a free country, and even taking personal actions that result in your own death is in fact a right you possess.

But you're not entitled to screw others, and if you credibly threaten to do so we all have a collective and individual right to stop you.

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2023-09-18 07:00 by Karl Denninger
in Musings , 267 references
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Oh I know, now I did it.

Peter approached Jesus and asked him,
"Lord, if my brother sins against me,
how often must I forgive?
As many as seven times?"
Jesus answered, "I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.
That is why the kingdom of heaven may be likened to a king
who decided to settle accounts with his servants.
When he began the accounting,
a debtor was brought before him who owed him a huge amount.
Since he had no way of paying it back,
his master ordered him to be sold,
along with his wife, his children, and all his property,
in payment of the debt.
At that, the servant fell down, did him homage, and said,
'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back in full.'
Moved with compassion the master of that servant
let him go and forgave him the loan.
When that servant had left, he found one of his fellow servants
who owed him a much smaller amount.
He seized him and started to choke him, demanding,
'Pay back what you owe.'
Falling to his knees, his fellow servant begged him,
'Be patient with me, and I will pay you back.'
But he refused.
Instead, he had the fellow servant put in prison
until he paid back the debt.
Now when his fellow servants saw what had happened,
they were deeply disturbed, and went to their master
and reported the whole affair.
His master summoned him and said to him, 'You wicked servant!
I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to.
Should you not have had pity on your fellow servant,
as I had pity on you?'
Then in anger his master handed him over to the torturers
until he should pay back the whole debt.
So will my heavenly Father do to you,
unless each of you forgives your brother from your heart."

So let's analyze.

A King had a Treasury (collected via taxes and various fees) which, he on occasion, loaned out with the expectation of being paid back.  This Treasury, being not in circulation, had no economic impact on supply and demand -- and thus on price.

He made such a loan (or, more likely but the Gospel does not say, a series of such loans) but he was imprudent, and in fact the borrower had no capacity to pay.

This loan, being made in the first instance, was highly inflationary; it added to the supply of circulating currency in the realm, which of course shifts the supply and demand curve and thus results in higher prices.

But, if the loan was prudent and could be repaid, when it is paid the curve shifts back in exactly the same amount, so the inflationary impulse is temporary.  This is a question of balance and timing, but not ultimate effect.

That person to whom the King made the loan in turn loaned part of what he was loaned to another, and that second person could not pay either.  The original King, discovering that he had refused to continue to "pay it forward" and leave the inflationary impact in the economy took out his wrath on the original borrower -- despite the alleged original point of the Gospel (and the First Reading, from Sirach, stating that one must not utilize wrath at all!)

Hypocrisy strike #1; apparently the ban on wrath and anger do not apply to persons in political power.

But the much-larger hypocrisy was found in what Jesus allegedly taught regarding said King in that his "forgiveness" of the loan was no such thing at all.  The King, by his actions, forcibly screwed every other person in the kingdom by placing an inflationary impulse into the kingdom's economy in the form of increasing the money supply without any work being done of equivalent value in exchange for it.  Further, as King he can re-tax it to refill his Treasury for which he is not required to do any work and if he does he screws the people not once, but twice!

This, allegedly, "Christ commands."

Well, if he really did and this is not an abomination of Christ's teachings by man, then he in fact commanded you to screw not just your neighbor but, if you're in a position of political power, to screw everyone else for the benefit of the favored few, or the one -- specifically said person in power.

The correct response of the people who are under such a "King" is to decapitate him for the deceptive act of screwing each and every one of them by subterfuge and fiat, a punishment assessed upon them without the precedent of a crime.

Of course were Christ to have taught that -- a King who deliberately tampers with the economy to benefit a favored few who he allegedly claimed were "servants" or "patrons" yet in fact got to cheat in the economy compared to everyone else; they got fabulously rich while everyone else got the scraps, should be dragged out of his castle and decapitated in the middle of the town square -- we won't have all the economic problems we have today..... would we?

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