Facts known:

1. Healthy young children have an effective death rate of zero.  

2. Ordinary, healthy adults are at very low risk of having a serious, critical or fatal outcome.  "Serious" is defined as "in hospital required."  "Critical" is defined as "ICU/Intubated/extraordinary measures."  Fatal is obvious.

3. Co-morbidities, or serious age (>65) dramatically raises the risk of bad outcomes -- by a factor of ten, twenty or even a hundred.

This virus primarily attacks the lungs.  It causes other symptoms but the bad outcomes occur when you are essentially asphyxiated.  Those who have compromised pulmonary capacity (e.g. persons with COPD, diabetes with complications, old people with seriously compromised physical output capacity, asthmatics, etc) are at much higher risk.

While we do not have accurate data, which is likely because our governments don't want to characterize this, or quite possibly because they haven't bothered to do the backwork to do so, we can draw some reasonable inferences.

1. This infection causes some damage to the oxygen/CO2 transport mechanism, centered in most cases around the lungs.

2. A healthy person, not an athlete but an ordinary healthy person, can typically sustain a range of 1 MET (sleeping or sitting quietly) to roughly 10 METS.  Each MET is about 3.5 VO2 points, more or less.  Thus, if you know your VO2Max you know, more or less, what your METS capacity is.  (This relationship isn't exact, but the estimates you can get without a lab test are close enough for this purpose.)

3. Moderate exercise (e.g. walking at ~3 mph) requires somewhere around ~3-4 METS.

4. Vigorous exercise is typically defined as 6 METS or above.

5. Climbing Stairs has been shown to be somewhere between 8 and 9 METs, or materially into the vigorous exercise realm.

6. Many runners, even reasonably-elderly ones (e.g. myself) can radically exceed 6 METS.  In my present (not peak) condition, which is down a couple of VO2 points from typical, I can sustain about 13 METS.  Therefore 6 METS is not really all that impressive at all.

Incidentally, in a few months of effort you can go from a capacity of ~5 METS to quite close to 10.

People do it all the time; it's called Couch-to-5k and while it takes effort most people can accomplish that in ~3-4 months.  You could start now, but I know damn well if you're on the couch now you won't, so I won't bother trying to urge you to fix that.

Now let's contemplate what all this means.

First, if you cannot climb stairs without becoming winded you're in quite a bit of trouble and it doesn't matter whether that's due to asthma, COPD or just generally poor physical condition.  Presume that you get hit hard enough that this bug takes 5 METS out of your peak capacity at its worst.  If you can only barely reach 6 you're at risk of death!  Add some cardiac compromise and the risk goes up quite materially.

I have long harped on the "any size is beautiful" thing, or the "fix it with pills" deal when it comes to diabetes.  That's flat-out bullcrap and now we're going to have hundreds of thousands -- or even a couple of million people find out why.  None of that virtue-signalling garbage will do a thing for your capacity to move oxygen and CO2 and this virus attacks that ability.  You either have the reserve capacity or you don't.

Don't means you're DEAD.

Further, ICU and similar medical interventions will only change a few of these outcomes.  The reason is somewhat complex, but it hinges on the fact that the body has to fight off the virus before it kills you.  There is only so much medicine can do, irrespective of how invasive, when it comes to oxygen exchange.  You can't run 100% O2 down someone's windpipe, forced or otherwise, for more than a few hours; after a day or so that actually causes temporary lung oxygen transport damage, which of course is going to make a situation like this worse.  The maximum concentration that can be tolerated indefinitely is about 50%, which is roughly double that in the atmosphere, and in addition mechanical ventilation is not as efficient as natural to start with.  What this means is that while an ICU can give you some margin back, it's not much.

A rush on hospitals will likely kill more people by a wide margin than it saves.  The reason is simple -- if you don't have the virus and rush the hospital thinking you do the odds of being exposed approach 100%.  If you're "at risk" and rush the hospital, and 10% of those "at serious risk" wind up dying, then the hospital has to save one person for every person who rushes the place whether they get in or not.  It's not at all hard to imagine a situation where this kills ten times as many people as would otherwise expire!

Further, if this gets into a NICU it will probably kill every premature infant in there.  You need to think very carefully if you have a kid in there about the implications of this in that a failure to be completely effective while scrubbing in will hose every kid in there, and if hospitals aren't freaking about this well they had damn well better right now.  Infants wind up in NICU specifically due to pulmonary compromise; that's the issue with premature infants.  For obvious reasons those wee ones have no spare capacity to fight something like this off.

That, along with a general rush on hospitals, would be bad so let's not do that, eh?  Panic will serve nobody and is likely to get a sizable number of people killed.

There are roughly 1.5 million in nursing homes. By definition if you're in a nursing home you are incapable of taking care of your basic daily needs on your own. This almost-always correlates with being unable to sustain any sort of material physical oxygen demand.  All of these people are at very high risk.

There are about 16 million Americans with COPD, most of them as a result of smoking.  With any stage of COPD you are at severe risk with this infection.

Then there are those with diabetes, mostly Type II.  This amounts to almost ten percent of the US population, or around 30 million Americans.  What's worse is that another 80 million+ have pre-diabetes, essentially all of those Type II.  The risk here is less-clear.  To the extent that these conditions are potentiated or accompanied by severe obesity, and it frequently is, the exact management status of the diabetes is not going to be anywhere near as important as the person's general capacity to process oxygen.

So can we put some numbers on this?

Yes, but we need a denominator, and there isn't an accurate one.  The bad news is that given our offshoring and "globalism" insanity over the last 30+ years and the "necessary" re-arrangement of our households to accommodate that such that one person going to work is no longer possible for most families we have a huge problem, like it or not.  As a result of YOUR greed, avarice and allowing the invasion of the lower end of our labor pool by unskilled illegal invaders and sending the medium-skilled jobs to China and India we no longer can keep the kids home and teach them there where they won't get the bug, bring it home and infect you or, much worse, grandma.  Your kids are going to get it and you're odds-on to get this thing too over the next year or so in no small part for this very reason.  The good news is that your children are very unlikely to be seriously harmed by it.

You (and especially Granny) -- not so much.

(By the way, give a big hug and wet virus-laden kiss to the Democrats, Republicans along with yourself and your friends for cheering onward this garbage.  If you think this is the worst of such bugs, and thus the worst-case outcome, you're nuts -- this is a preview of what will come again, and next time has even odds to be worse than this one. Maybe we ought to cut that crap, along with the open borders garbage, out eh?)

Since that's a guess let's assume you get it, and try to figure out how bad your odds are in that instance.

For those who have a METS capability in excess of 10: You can climb stairs for an extended period of time, you can hike on moderate to severe trails without having to stop frequently (or at all), you can jog or run a 12 minute or better pace for an extended period of time (several miles) without having to stop or walk. Your odds are very low of needing even basic medical intervention (e.g. a doctor visit) and vanishingly small of having a severe, critical or fatal case (likely less than 1 in 1,000.)  However, do not be surprised if the virus forces you to curtail your physical activity, perhaps by quite a lot.  In other words you might have a really bad time of it but not hospital-grade bad.  We're talking about odds of materially less than 1% for any medical intervention required of any sort, and under 0.1% for hospitalization or worse.  BTW the good news is that virtually all healthy children from toddlers to the age of 10 or so fall into this category.

For those who have a METS capacity under 10: This includes anyone with unmanaged asthma, COPD, who cannot climb more than a few flights of stairs sequentially without being winded or forced to stop, etc -- your odds of NOT having a serious or worse outcome go down rapidly with decreasing METS capacity.  If you have asthma make damn sure it's controlled; that's typically not an actual shortage of oxygen transport on a physiological basis, but rather from spasms and similar, and as such is unlikely to correlate, if controlled, with more-severe outcomes.  If you have compounding cardiac involvement that also limits physical activity that is a severe negative on top of lung issues because the last thing your heart needs is trouble in getting oxygen.  If you're incapable of even moderate exercise (that is, you can't sustain a walk for a few miles without becoming winded) you are at extremely high risk and should do everything you can to avoid exposure.  Those with serious health conditions, especially immune system disorders or cardio-pulmonary function trouble may have odds as bad as 1 in 10 of getting their ticket punched -- or worse.

Unfortunately the odds of a vaccine being developed, tested, and manufactured before you contract the virus, that is, before the next 18 months to two years, approximates zero.  Therefore there is nothing but bad news if you're severely compromised and can't do anything to fix it.

So with this all in mind I'll take some wild guesses here on mortality.

We're going to lose an additional 10-25% of the people in nursing homes beyond those that normally expire in a given year.  This sounds nasty but it really isn't -- the median nursing home patient dies in about six months!  In other words while this is going to make the news (as it certainly did at Kirkland) the difference between cacking right now and six months from now isn't really very significant.  It will make for a hell of a lot of press and scare the bejeezus out of people but in terms of outcomes and economics it's not going to matter much.

The much larger impact is going to be on those people who have COPD and similar disorders.  I will not be surprised at all if 20% of those people die within 12 months as a direct and indirect result of this virus and there is nothing that can be done about it as COPD is not only progressive there's no medically known way to reverse it.  SE Florida has huge areas where Sunday mornings feature an enormous percentage of the patrons at various eateries sucking down carbs by the plate-full, most of them ridiculously obese and many of them are toting around oxygen cylinders.  More than a few, astonishingly, drag said cylinder outside with them in the middle of their meal to have a cigarette!  A huge percentage of those people are going to die when they get the virus and there's nothing that can be done about it.

If you're seriously compromised as a result of diabetes and/or severe obesity it's definitely worth getting the damned carbs out of your pie hole right now.  Every bit of compromise you can get rid of in that regard, and every pound and point of insulin resistance or hypertension you can remove will help if you accomplish it prior to getting the virus.  I know, I know, you can't give up the pasta, potatoes and cake, choosing green veggies, eggs, cheese and meat instead.  This time it's not just the size of your ass, it's whether your ass survives that may be stake.  Choose wisely because if 10% of those people die we're talking about a couple of million additional corpses.  That will matter both in terms of public perception and economics.

If you're not into athletics taking up a severe training regime is likely counter-productive in that the last thing you want to do is get well into oxygen debt if you have a bug like this, especially if you have some sort of cardiac problem you're unaware of.  However, moderate exercise, if you're not currently doing it, cannot hurt and may help if undertaken outdoors in clean air.  Not only are there unlikely to be virus particles you can inhale there and nothing you can touch that has virus on it, but in addition even a couple of additional points of VO2Max provide you with a bit more margin when, not if, you get the virus.

Finally, there's luck.  There apparently are two serotypes of this thing going around -- the older version, and then a second serotype that is "younger" and more virulent.  What's not clear is whether you gain any cross-immunity from getting one before the other; if not then you definitely want the bad one first, since if you get the bad one while recovering from the less-bad you're already compromised and that raises the risk of very, very bad outcomes.  On the other hand if one is partially protective you want the lesser one first because it may blunt the impact of the bad one.  Right now there's no science on this, so take your coin and toss it; this is a pure luck of the draw thing right now.

When someone runs a pack of lies intended to commit theft of trillions while allowing brigands to go free and steal, you should force them from office.

If they refuse to leave then the people should contemplate whether their government continues to enjoy consent of the governed.

And if that contemplation leads the people to the conclusion that it does not, then said government is dissolved.  It may leave in peace or may leave otherwise but the people have every right to compel it to leave.

This is the foundation of America.  You cannot believe that America is a valid nation, with a valid government, and not adhere to all of the above.  If you do then you're Hitler, Mao, or Pol Pot.  You have no more right to continue to be in said government than they did while they were murdering millions.

Thus, I give you Sanders:

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., on Tuesday compared the push to combat climate change to the response to the attack on Pearl Harbor as he unveiled legislation that would declare a “climate emergency" and demand a massive-scale mobilization to tackle it.

“In some ways...I’m reminded today in terms of the crisis that we face in climate change about where the United States was in 1941 when it was attacked at Pearl Harbor, and what happened at that point, having to fight a war on two fronts in the East and in Europe, the United States came together and within three years it had created the type of armaments program that was necessary to, in fact, win the war,” he said in a conference call with reporters.

This is a lie in all respects.

It is intended to steal trillions from United States citizens.

It is intended to enrich other nations at the expense of said citizens.

It is intended to enslave.

And under the 13th Amendment, it is unlawful, it is unconstitutional, and those who adhere to it must be forced to leave.  Here, now, today, and by any means necessary.

I submit the following facts, which cannot be disputed.

• Human activity is responsible for approximately 3% of CO2 in the atmosphere.
  
  
• Humans are not harmed, nor are any animals, by CO2 levels even more than double that in the atmosphere today.  In fact, the average CO2 level in an American home is twice that of the outside air.  This is simply due to the fact that we limit air exchange with the outside on purpose for energy efficiency reasons, and humans (along with pets) emit CO2.
  
  
• During The Medieval Warm Period, roughly 900-1300 AD, global temperatures were approximately 1-1.5 degrees Centigrade higher than they are now.  There were exactly ZERO SUVs, coal-fired power plants and similar on the planet at the time.  The Vikings explored Greenland at the time and gave that land mass it's name, cultivating both crops and domestic animal food sources including horses, cattle, pigs, sheep and goats.  More than six hundred farms have been found and excavated on Greenland, proving that this was the case.  Post-1300 or thereabouts when the Little Ice Age began these all became non-viable and were abandoned.  I note that the Medieval Warm Period not only did not end the planet from an ecological basis it was thriving, as demonstrated by said civilizations, during that time.
  
  
• During the Maunder Minimum, part of the Little Ice Age, the River Thames froze.  We know this happened because there are paintings, among other historical records, created at that time (~1660) which survive today.
  
  
• Temperatures today are well below the maximum set during The Medieval Warm Period; we have exited The Little Ice Age and the planet is naturally warming.  For exactly how long that will continue cannot be determined but it is important to note that the Earth is currently in an interglacial period, which will eventually (long after everyone currently alive is dead) end.  When it does the planet will cool dramatically, as it has many times through the millennia.
  
  
• This is not the only such anomaly during the time of recorded history.  The Romans enjoyed a similar warm period right around the time of Christ.  Perhaps not coincidentally, a cool period coincided with Roman collapse.  One does not have to wonder why that would have completely hosed the Romans.
  
  
• Climategate exposed an enormous amount of intentional fraud on the part of those promoting the "Global Warming" nonsense, along with their intentional destruction of their claimed original source data.  This is, today, long-documented truth.

There is a long history of scientific fraud associated with various "environmental causes", many of which brought political changes predicated on lies that were directly responsible for massive numbers of deaths.  Here are two of these, one resulting in deaths and one not:

• During the period from the early 1940s to roughly 1975 there was a great deal of concern that the planet was entering another Little Ice Age.  TIME Magazine wrote stories and ran covers about the planet almost-literally freezing over.  This is just one of many scaremongering games politicians and so-called "scientists" have run on the subject of climate and other ecological "disasters."  AOC is not old enough to have been alive when this occurred, but I was and remember it well.  Scientific "consensus" was that we were facing imminent disaster.  Of course the truth, now known. is that we never were, as it never happened.
  
  
• So-called "scientists" also claimed, with much fanfare and universal consensus, that DDT was responsible for the thinning of eggshells among various bird species and, if the substance was not immediately banned, would lead to the destruction of all aviary species and ultimately the planet.  This screamfest culminated in the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson.  It was all a fraud.  This is not my assertion, it is that of multiple PhDs, including published articles by same.  The resulting ban on DDT, undertaken by our EPA who knew they were lying, had overstated human exposures from the environment by a factor of 1,000 and never corrected the record, along with other governments worldwide who also went along with the fraud, literally killed millions in the ensuing years by allowing malaria, which had been seriously curtailed by mosquito abatement using DDT, to rebound.  This single fraud, all based on alleged "scientific consensus", killed more people than the entire Holocaust; the people who ran that crap managed for many years to rack up between a million and two million deaths annually.  Not one politician or so-called "scientist" was ever held to account for what was one of the largest genocides ever perpetrated on the human race with nearly all of the victims being brown or black. 

Next up we have the inconvenient fact that with humans being responsible for approximately 3% of all CO2 in the atmosphere (the rest is natural) even if we wanted to we could not drive the climate sufficiently to do damage via CO2 emission.

It's simply impossible from a standpoint of physics.  Approximately 2% of all gases in the atmosphere have an absorption spectrum that renders them involved in the so-called "greenhouse effect."  Of that CO2 is only about 3.5% of the total.  In fact nearly all of the gas that is involved in absorption and radiation of solar energy is water vapor.

Never mind that CO2 isn't a "pollutant."  Find anything green in your home or outside and look at it.  About 50% of what you see was once CO2.

CO2 is in fact scarce on a historical planetary basis.  It has been this low only once before for any length of time in the planet's history -- about 300 million years ago.

Further, and very damning, the so-called "measurements" used to make the claim of increasing CO2 levels "in the modern area" are also a scam.  They were cherry-picked; a look at a scatter graph of actual measurements and applying a best-fit curve shows that levels were near 500ppm in the early 1800s, long before we drove SUVs and burned coal or natural gas for electrical power.  This fact is, of course, conveniently omitted and yet this data is public.

It is certainly true that CO2 levels are higher now than they were 50 years ago.  This is good, not bad, in that it feeds plant growth.

This is beneficial, not dangerous.

Now here's the other problem with the base claim: "Human CO2 rise is causing warming."

From early 1900 to roughly mid-century the Earth was warming and CO2 levels were going up modestly.  Since then CO2 levels have risen at roughly three times that rate but temperatures have not gone up faster than they were before.  The rate of increase has not changed even thought he alleged "driving" factor has roughly tripled in impact.

There is no correlation and therefore the claim is, on a scientific basis, false.

Remember: Correlation cannot prove causation -- it can only suggest that it might be true -- but a lack of correlation disproves causation.

Why is the correlation missing if CO2 in fact captures photons, which we know to be true, and thus can cause warming?

Physics tells us why.  CO2, like all gases, has an absorption spectrum.  That is, it only absorbs certain wavelengths of energy.  The problem is that there are only so many photons of energy at that spectra emitted from the Sun that strike the Earth's atmosphere; once you've absorbed them all more CO2 in the atmosphere doesn't do anything to make the planet warmer because there are no more photons of the appropriate spectrum to be absorbed.

This is physics and those are laws, called such because there is no way to violate them.

Finally, none of the so-called "climate models" of the last 20 years have verified.  The expected rise in temperatures did not happen.

An inconvenient truth: We don't have enough carbon-based fuels on the planet to drive planetary CO2 levels even to the level inside your house.  Long before we got there we'd run out of economically-extractable fuel sources and be forced to use something else.  But government doesn't have to do anything to accomplish this; basic economics will do it all on its own as the cost of extraction rises since we continue to burn up the easier to get at, and cheaper, sources first.

Now let's look at what does correlate -- Ecliptic and Elliptical orbital variation and sunspots.  In fact, if you overlay those three factors on the actual temperature record for the last thousand years you find near-perfect correlation.

Does CO2 "cause" warming?  There's no evidence for it and the lack of correlation in fact disproves it.  In addition physics and thermodynamics argue against it as well.  There is no evidence to support the claim and plenty of evidence to support, on a correlation basis, that natural orbital, cosmic ray and sunspot activity is responsible, none of which, obviously, has anything to do with the number of SUVs being driven or whether we use coal and oil for fuel.

Now let's tackle one final claim: In 12 years -- just over a decade -- we're all dead if we don't stop emitting CO2.

That's so laughable that it should result in an immediate hanging for anyone running that crap in a political context.  Why?  Because through most of the Earth's history CO2 levels were dramatically higher than they are now and far beyond the so-called "runaway" level being pontificated.

If such a "runaway" was going to occur it would have happened millions of years ago and killed everything on this rock -- we would not be here.

This is a fanciful lie at the level of open and outrageous fraud; nobody should be able to run that crap and evade prison or worse.

Oh by the way, before I leave this specific part of the topic, let me make a further observation: After the Soviet Union fell suddenly "measured" temperatures started to shoot up.  Want to know why?  A large number of on-Earth temperature stations were in the former Soviet Union.  The Soviet Government, being Communist, paid for fuel at outposts based on the reported temperature; thus, there was a strong incentive to lie and under-report temperatures, especially in the winter.  Most of those stations went offline when the USSR fell but those that did not suddenly and magically started reporting true temperatures which instantly were materially warmer -- a literal impossibility since no time had passed.  The so-called "climate scientists" know this but have not removed that data as knowingly invalid -- on purpose.  In addition surface observations are naturally concentrated where there are people -- which biases the numbers upward due to well-known "heat island" effects (e.g. masses of concrete, blacktop, a thermometer in proximity to an A/C condenser, etc.)  All of this means the error band is wider than the signal (~2 degrees C, typically) and is majority biased one way -- upward.

In other words surface observation data is worthless since there's no possible way to accurately correct the historical data. 

We do have, however, for the last 40 years or so, high-quality satellite data.  It shows the same slope as prior to the 20th century; in other words yes, it is getting warmer -- but increased human emissions of CO2 is not the cause as the rate of change has not increased.

So let's put this in perspective: Will the planet likely be about a degree Celsius warmer in 2100 than around 2000ish?

Probably.  Unless we're entering into a solar minimum -- which we might be -- and if we are, you're going be rather surprised at the temperature deviation starting in the next 10-20 years or so because it's not going to be upward!

Are we the cause of any of this, and if we were to cut CO2 emissions would we stop it?

NO.

Period.

There's one final point.  Let's assume all of the above is wrong; humans are the cause of global warming, it's going to get a lot hotter in the next 100 years, well over 2 degrees Celsius, and we all need to cut all greenhouse gas emissions dramatically to stop it.

Then you have a further problem because the very scientists who claim we have 12 years to stop this also state that even if the United States cut its CO2 output to zero tomorrow that we'd manage to prevent...... a few tenths of a degree of increase in temperature.

Doing so, of course, would mean:

• All coal, oil, and natural gas electrical generation is immediately shut down.  We cannot supply the nation's electrical needs without these sources at anything approaching commercially-reasonable costs.  Solar + wind + batteries would triple or more the cost of electrical power.  This would take the $200 electrical bill in the southern states and make it $600 a month, or close to $7,000 a year.  The median family could not pay that under any set of conditions.
  
  
• ALL air travel of any sort is immediately and permanently barred. There is no way to operate an aircraft without fossil fuels; it is simply a matter of energy density.  This means no Air Force, no Naval Aviators, no civilian air travel and no Air Force One.  Delta, American, United, Southwest, Fed-EX and UPS would all be instantly and permanently grounded.  Overseas travel and trade would effectively and permanently end.  Every person currently employed in any such job would be immediately and permanently unemployed.
  
  
• ALL current oil and natural gas heating in homes and business must be shut down and removed.  The retrofit costs to electrical system (e.g. Heat pumps) would be enormous and in areas where temperatures go below freezing heat pumps do not work during that time because the outside coil both cannot pick up enough heat and it freezes.  Since fossil fuels, including wood burning, would be prohibited the only option would be electric resistance heating which is three to five TIMES as expensive.  $500 monthly heating bills anyone?  Who can afford that in the Northern states?
  
  
• ALL current farm tractors and similar cannot be used and must be destroyed.  Farm output would instantly collapse.  We can easily feed the United States today; this would no longer be true.  Our agricultural output would fall by at least 80%.  But, it wouldn't matter because.....
  
  
• All trucks, currently operated by diesel fuel, and all internal-combustion cars would be permanently banned.  Even if you had food on a farm 300 miles from the city you couldn't get it to the city and everyone inside said city would starve.
  
  
• All ships and our Navy, along with our Air Force, would have to be be permanently scrapped.  The only remaining vessels allowed would be either nuclear powered in the case of naval vessels or sailboats.  Anything too small for nuclear plant couldn't exist at all.  No landing craft, destroyers, frigates, etc. There would be no point to a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier since there would be no aircraft.  We wouldn't have to worry about trade with China, India, Pakistan or Vietnam since there'd be no way to get anything here.  All recreational watercraft, from jetskis to the largest yachts, would have to be scrapped and all businesses making those and their components would have to be shut down.  Even a pleasure sailboat would be illegal as they all have auxiliary internal combustion engines which could not be sold, used or fueled, nor could a generator be used.
  
  
• Personal transportation beyond the range of single-charge return distance (about 300 miles) would become impossible.  Today you can drive north of 1,000 miles in a day, in your own car.  The best of battery technology, both today and on the horizon, limits you to about 300 miles with no reserve, and a multi-hour charge requirement before you can continue.  This makes your effective ability to personally travel less than one third of today's limit on a daily basis, and you can't decide to get on a plane or train to get around that either because, as noted above, all planes are banned.  Oh, and said "electric cars" would cost twice what fuel on a per-mile basis costs today.  You not only couldn't afford the Tesla you couldn't afford to plug it in to charge it.  Oh, and as for RVs?  Forget it.  Banned.
  
  
• Emergency personal generators are immediately and permanently banned.  Was there just a hurricane, tornado or ice storm and your power is out?  Too bad, so sad.  In the winter your pipes freeze since you can't use auxiliary heat.
  
  
• Re-configuring trains to be all-electric, since diesel fuel is now banned, would take a decade and outrageously increase the cost of rail transport.  There is no feasible way to do this, especially in areas where there is sparse or no electrical infrastructure today.
  
  
• Mass-transit?  Forget it.  Buses?  What are you going to run them on?  Can't use natural gas or diesel.  Now what?
  
  
• Re-configuring personal transportation, not including commercial transport (e.g. trucks, etc) to all-electric would require an approximate tripling of the electrical infrastructure in the United States.  We have no possible way to do so today even with an all-on, decade-long effort using fossil fuels.  It is flatly impossible to provide this level of electrical output using "renewable" energy sources such as wind and solar.
  
  
• Solar, in particular, requires an enormous amount of energy and CO2 release to make the cells; there is no free lunch. You must put the energy in that you wish to later extract.  Since we cannot release any CO2 we also can't make any solar cells.  Sorry, there are no more solar cells.
  
  
• You also can't make wind turbines.  Refining rare earth metals vital to their production requires energy.  The amount of energy returned by said windmill goes negative in this paradigm and thus it makes no sense to build windmills either as the energy to produce the windmill and operate exceeds that which is returned.
  
  
• Finally, renewables such as wind and solar are intermittent; you thus need storage of some sort.  This means batteries or some form or potential or kinetic physical storage.  All require energy to be expended to manufacture and maintain them.  The energy balance of such a scheme is ridiculously unfavorable and, in the case of batteries the environmental damage associated with manufacturing and, in the case of lithium-based cells which cannot be economically recycled, their disposal, is severe.

It just gets worse from here; the bottom line is that a 100% CO2 cessation in the US (or "net zero", which forces capture at additional cost for any CO2 emitted) would instantly collapse the economy and kill an enormous percentage of the population -- likely two thirds or more of those here in America today -- by starvation.  It would ruin our cities by making mass-transit impossible beyond the immediate vicinity of subway stations.  It would also effectively delete our military.

Such a threat to cut CO2 emissions by humans in America, other than by breathing, to zero is a declaration of intent to commit genocide against the American people.  If there's a crime worthy of summary execution, that's it.

Even worse, doing this would accomplish nothing.  Why?  Because the US is not even on the map when it comes to the nations with the largest increases in CO2 production -- both here and into the indefinite future.  If you actually want to reduce CO2 emissions into the atmosphere you must focus on, and enforce, cessation of emissions in those places where that growth is occurring.

In order to to that what you're actually saying is that we must destroy both India and China along with their entire population right now, and in addition we must also make clear that all other nations, from Vietnam to the Congo, may not develop middle-class lifestyles and advance the comfort and security of their people ever or we will destroy them as well as soon as they begin to do so.

Why?

Because India and China are by far adding the most CO2 to the atmosphere.  In fact the United States is roughly net-neutral at the moment (we were net negative a couple of years ago, and net positive last year.) Among other things while most people in the US and Europe already have air conditioners, which are a huge driver of electrical consumption almost none of the people there do.  The count of households and commercial enterprises there utterly dwarfs the United States and the rest of the Western World.  They will not stop advancing whether we like it or not unless we are willing to kill them all -- period.  Nor will Vietnam or, as time goes by the majority of the African continent.

As the global warming alarmist "scientists" admit, even if we cut our CO2 emissions to zero (not net zero, actual zero) it would make no difference in the outcome on a percentage basis.  Therefore the "cut America to zero" does nothing; the only path to achieve their "goal" is to commit genocide on a mass basis against the people of the world to the tune of billions murdered.

The climate screamers know this as well.

In short it's all a fraud just like DDT was and the people pushing it know it -- except that this time they intend to kill tens or even hundreds of times as many people as they did with the DDT scam.

This is another attempted genocide, just as the ban on DDT was, and must be stopped by whatever means are necessary.

The politicians pushing this crap must be ordered to abandon it by the people of the United States, as those who they represent.

If they refuse they must be removed from office.

If that fails then our only remaining choices are being slaughtered by financial ruin, murdered literally by starvation and inability to transport food and basic needs from the much-diminished production capacity to where they're needed, or we overthrow all governments involved in this scam by whatever means are necessary.

When In The Course of Human Events......

The Founders of this nation put forward a very basic premise:

to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them

That no government, no person whether royalty or not, King, Queen or Pawn, can take from one to give to another, to make one lesser than another, to bring remove from one the basics of humanity for the privilege of another.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness

That the very premise of humanity is that one has a right to live, to be left alone to do as one pleases, and to pursue -- but not be guaranteed -- happiness.  The only lawful and proper constraints arise when your exercise of same prevents someone else from having that same peaceful enjoyment.

One cannot have a right to life if one cannot defend it using tools at least as powerful as those who would take it from you.

One cannot have liberty if one is compelled to slavery for another's benefit.

The Founders put together a document called The Constitution.  The debate over it, and what needed to be added to it, is found in The Federalist and The Anti-Federalist; two books that are the chronology of the running debate of the time.  Anyone who claims to have an opinion on the foundations of our nation and why the Constitution is important ought to have read both, as should anyone who claims a right to run for elective office at any level -- state, local or federal.

Chief among the foundation of this nation is The Rule of Law and that it apply equally to everyone, all the time, in each case without exception.  Our government and We The People have made a mockery of this.

Not one illegal immigrant has a right to be here under any circumstance; The Rule of Law says so.  It does not matter whether they personally intended to break said law; that merely encompasses whether they bear criminal culpability for the offense.  If you find yourself with someone else's $1,000 and you did not intend to steal it, but you had no lawful means by which you came to have it you still have no right to keep it.

Calling someone a Dreamer is an insult to America.  Their "dream" is theft.  A thief has no right to keep the spoils irrespective of their personal culpability in obtaining same nor do they have any right to demand respect from anyone else.

Senators Richard Blumenthal and Mark Warner, both Democrats, have threatened legislation that is a rank violation of the First Amendment in response to the Christchurch livestream.  Where is respect for the contract our government has with the people; the terms of which are embodied in The Constitution and its Amendments?

There is no respect because the people of this nation no longer have respect for themselves nor any willingness to hold government to the terms and conditions of its very existence.

Every single person in America should not only watch the Christchurch slaughter they should watch all videos of any extremist Muslim who saws off heads or throws gays off buildings.  It is not possible to understand evil and the only effective means to stop it if you refuse to recognize it exists and watch the errors others made that led them to their demise.

How many gay people would support a person who supports said political and religious philosophies if videos of those adherents murdering gay people by throwing them off 20 story buildings were readily available?  Why do you think Senators Blumenthal and Warner want that content declared illegal despite it being a rank violation of the Constitution to do so?

Governments are banning and attempting to ban such not because they fear copycats: They are banning that speech and literally burning books because faced with the gore, the nastiness and inhumanity of these acts the people may conclude that it was the government itself that sowed the seeds of these acts, conspired with and gave comfort to said people and groups all the while rendering individual people powerless to stop it by infringing on The Right to Keep and Bear Arms -- and did all of the above intentionally.

Were the people to reach that conclusion they'd be correct and in response they might revoke their consent to said government entirely and demand it depart.

A slave is not allowed weapons because he might use them to become free.

Cultures collapse when there is no cohesion remaining -- when the primary means to get ahead is to stomp on someone else's head instead of innovating and when cheating is no longer punished and is celebrated instead.  If that is not curtailed then collapse is inevitable -- it is simply a matter of time.

Whether something is "hate speech" is in the eye of the beholder but irrespective of that The First Amendment protects it.  Why?  Because even the most-vile expression of dislike is one's right to hold and have.  To state otherwise is to state a right to control another person's mind and thoughts -- to not only enslave as to labor but to thought itself.

That is profoundly evil.  It is what the Communist Chinese are doing right now with the Uyghurs, numbering more than 11 million of their citizens.

This very same act is what our government is now calling on "big companies" to do, it is what the left has repeatedly done to anyone who dares speak against their policies and desires whether on college campuses, in corporate America or in the public square and now we have two Senators who deserve an immediate and long prison term for their threat to knowingly and intentionally violate their oath of office and The First Amendment, including the threat to impose said violation by force.

Celebrities with dim-witted children got them into colleges by paying bribes and cheating.  The claim that said students were "blameless" if their test scores were faked or they faked a "disability" to extend time and thus be able to cheat is a lie.  Said "students" are fully culpable yet none of them have been charged; not only did every one of them know they didn't compete on the rowing team (for example) any of them who got an extra hour or two to take the SAT or ACT knew damn well they were cheating, whether they knew their answers were being modified or not.

Why did this happen and why aren't the kids in the dock too?

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

Colleges claim they need "diversity."  That's nonsense; in a meritocracy the best rise irrespective of skin color, race or religion.  The fact is that this "diversity need" is met by lowering standards and allowing unqualified people who cannot do the work into the school.  This was going on in the 1990s and it has only gotten worse -- much worse -- since.  There is, of course, no value in that to a person "selected" via "diversity" if they have to pay full price and will inevitably fail to be able to do the work.  This in turn means someone else gets screwed so they don't have to pay full price and they also don't have to do the work they are incapable of.  The alleged "degree" conferred by said school is thus rendered meaningless; it no longer denotes competence and to prevent that from being recognized and their "brand" destroyed said colleges conspire with employers and governments, both outwardly and not to "require" said "credentials" for an ever-expanding list of "professions."

In short college is no longer about education; it is about grift, fraud, bribery and slavery.  It's a racketeering enterprise writ large and ought to be prosecuted as a felony, starting with the "most-elite" schools.  Is it any surprise that a tiny bit of the bribery began six months earlier with so-called "standardized" testing that really isn't and claims of being on a soccer team that were false?

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

The Fed is prohibited from buying anything other than government backed securities.  Fannie and Freddie paper have on their face the statement that they have no such backing; go online and view any of their prospectuses.  I pointed this out more than 10 years ago with a copy of the front page of one such offering out of thousands; every one bears the same statement.  That the government bailed them out does not matter.  The Fed's transacting in same and their continued ownership is illegal.  Rather than change the law (which might provoke a debate over exactly what The Fed "prints") they simply ignore the law and you let them.

The Fed's legal mandate under the law is for stable prices.  The Fed's chair and other governors make dozens of speeches a year and testify under oath before Congress to their intent to violate the law with their "2% inflation target."  Congress could change that law but doing so might provoke a debate over exactly what The Fed "prints" and so instead both Congress and The Fed ignore the law and you let them.

The truth is that Money is a medium of exchange which you acquire by producing something of value to someone else.  It facilitates trade because it is fungible -- that is, you don't need to transact in oranges, chickens or hours of programming a computer; all three can be reduced to money.

You cannot print money because it is impossible to materialize a television, a car, a piece of computer software, gasoline or electrical power out of thin air.

You can print credit, which spends like money.  But if you emit credit then what you are claiming is that someone in the future will produce a thing to legitimate what you did.  If the people refuse what's left?  Force -- slavery in point of fact.

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

A Pakastani American named Imran Awan worked for Democrats in Congress from 2004 - 2017.  While doing so it is rather apparent he ran a spy ring inside Congress and stole Congressional computer equipment, much of it with the knowledge of Congressional Democrats.  Prosecuting him would have inevitably drawn those Democrats into what could have easily wound up being criminal culpability including spying for foreign nations.  So they let him go despite proof that he wired more than $280,000 to Pakistan -- funds that very well might have been used to facilitate terrorism!

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

It is a felony to restrain trade, attempt to monopolize or fix prices among people who are supposed to be competing.  The medical industry does it every single day.  Why not when the example set is that if you're rich or powerful (and they are both) you could even spy for a foreign nation and get away with it.  We could literally dispose of the entire federal budget deficit, all of the Federal debt, all of the state and local pension problems and cut property taxes in half or more if we put a stop to this crap.  They do it because despite the law they have no fear of prosecution.  Why should they?

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

I can, through hard work, earn a mid-six-figure income and have multiple business ideas that I'd like to develop.  I've done it before and can do it again.  But given the above examples, along with the myriad things I've watched big business do in the last 20 years and get away with all of them -- acts that were I to do myself I would be prosecuted criminally and go to prison, why would I?  If I was to undertake any of those risky ventures and put my capital and intellectual effort at risk any of those people could illegally undermine my product or service, putting me out of business or simply steal it.  Unless I was willing to personally kill the persons responsible there is nothing I could do about it and I'd go broke.  I will not undertake such a venture for as long as all of this crap exists, and that's why.  I instead choose to hike, ski, run, drink beer and enjoy a much lower stress lifestyle.  I do not need any of the trappings of wealth; they're options.  When my time comes to die those ideas,  products and services intentionally left undeveloped will die with me instead of being produced.

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW.

The Christchurch shooter, obviously nuts, wrote a "manifesto" which governments are actively trying to suppress your ability to read.  In it he pointed out an inconvenient truth -- that there is no nation with a material white population percentage in which white women are reproducing at a replacement or better rate.  That is, unless this changes white people will eventually go extinct.

We bemoan a little fish, frog or bird disappearing but there is literally not one word in the media about the most-productive and innovative differentiated group of human beings ever to walk the planet heading directly for extinction by their own voluntary decision.  Why are white women choosing not to bear children?  Maybe it's because a goodly number of them have come to the same conclusion I have -- that there is no rule of law -- and thus unless they're so rich they can cheat like those who did so to get their kids into college their offspring have no chance of success on a merit basis and they thus make the entirely reasonable decision not to create children at all.  After all why would you willingly and intentionally bring a child into this world if you believe they are going to be enslaved and mercilessly robbed for their entire lives?

Rather than correct that problem governments instead are importing people who have not yet made that determination or worse, believe and are explicitly promised that they can simply put their hand out and force others to provide whatever they want and need -- and thus those people make the entirely reasonable decision to breed like rabbits!

WE HAVE NO RULE OF LAW AND WE ARE GOING TO LITERALLY EXTINGUISH WHITE PEOPLE THROUGHOUT THE WESTERN WORLD AS A RESULT.  AS FURTHER POPULATION SEGMENTS ARE TAPPED TO BE THE VICTIMS OF SAID POLICIES THEY WILL CHOOSE NOT TO REPRODUCE AS WELL AND INEVITABLY THEY WILL ALSO GO EXTINCT, ONE AT A TIME.

We have in fact become so depraved that our own government is giving cats diseases on purpose to study them and even though those diseases are easily curable and the animals could then be adopted out that takes a bit of effort and more than a a nickel in cost so they kill them instead.  That would be bad enough but our government is also importing cats and dogs from nations around the world for the purpose of meat to feed said study subjects, practicing animal cannibalism.  We can't be bothered to use byproducts of human food production; you see, that might cost a bit more money.

I'm not the only one who recognizes this; here's another article pointing out many of the same things.

America is extended, riddled with debt and too reliant on ever more debt, past its growth peak, incapable and unwilling to address structural issues. Both political parties have given up on dealing with debt, illusory monetary policies such as MMT are invented to render structural issues as irrelevant. Meanwhile wealth inequality keeps expanding from administration to administration no matter who is in charge with voters distracted by the ideological divisions of the day, not trusting their leaders or each other.

And all this with 3.8% unemployment. What will this all look like during the next downturn? Nobody knows. Rome showed us to not take civilization for granted. It also showed us to not ignore structural problems before they become too large to tackle.

Sven may be hopeful but I am not.  I'm not alone either.  Charles Hugh Smith has written a number of columns on this same point, including just recently.

I challenge you to show me just one "grand idea" or modern stock market rocketship that is not a scam in some form over the last 10+ years.  Netflix, as just one example, effectively stole their entire distribution infrastructure, which is very expensive, through various forms of browbeating and when that was threatened they got the government to mandate their ability to force non-customers to pay for what they wanted during the Obama Administration.  Then, when Obama left, both he and his wife got a multi-million dollar contract from the company.  You don't really think that was the kickback payment to the former President since the stock went from ~$5 when Obama took office to nearly $400 now....

I've written on many of these other firms, in detail, over the last decade.  None of them would exist were there an even-handed enforcement of the law for the simple reason that all of them violate the basic law of business balance: The more people who touch a transaction the more it costs -- always.  The reason for that is simple: Nobody works for free and if you think you've found someone who is someone else is stealing from them because no rational person will perform work that benefits only someone else.

THERE IS NO RULE OF LAW.

This can't -- and won't -- change without Americans rising up by the millions and demanding that it stop and be willing to enforce that demand by whatever means are necessary.  This does not mean violence is required but until and unless those who claim to be "our leaders" believe that any such demand has the force of the people behind it and will be enforced should they stick up their middle finger toward common people once again as they have done for the last 30+ years they have no reason to stop stealing, stop rigging the system and stop screwing everyone else.

There's no reason for me to be hopeful because there is no reason to believe that Americans, say much less the people in any of the other developed, western nations will in fact demand this crap stop.  In fact there is every reason to simply sit back and enjoy what little time is left, given that within the next six years tipping points will be reached in the US on a budget and monetary basis that will destroy the illusion of "growth and prosperity" and from which there is little or no chance of recovery.

I get asked this a lot, so here are my thoughts.

First, two disclaimers -- I'm not a doctor.  Second, I've got a lot of data, but it's all mine so it's all anecdote.  All I can back it up with is a few friends who have similar or identical gear to what I use.

So with that said, here we go.

First, alcohol (drinking alcohol now, not the non-potable versions!) are ethanol.  They are a form of carbohydrate.

But alcohol is a special carbohydrate.  Unlike the common sort in foods ethanol is preferentially metabolized -- that is, it is burned first before other carbohydrates. This is why you get drunk (instead of it "mixing" with all the other carbs and being taken up slowly, which would mean you'd have to drink on an empty stomach to get drunk at all) but at about one drink per hour, you also burn it off at the same rate no matter how much food you eat.

Like all other carbohydrates, however, ethanol also produces the same sort of boost/crash response that you get from other fast carbs, and in fact since it burns first it's arguably the fastest carb.  This is why when you're drinking you often want food and is why "bar food" is inevitably high in carb content (e.g. french fries, etc); the bar owners are not stupid and they sell what people want to buy.

There are two basic problems with drinking alcohol in any amount as it relates to a keto lifestyle.  The first is that booze inherently is anti-ketogenic, although if you keep it to one drink in a day you can remain in a ketogenic state and have that one drink, provided you are performing some amount of exercise (so as to keep glycogen stores very low.)  The problem is that the second drink, and any non-keto food you might consume due to the cravings that alcohol does produce, is almost-certainly enough to knock you out of a ketogenic state.

There used to be a book out there from the early 1900s called "The Drinking Man's Diet."  Unsurprisingly, it called for consumption of essentially zero carbohydrate; the reason is that alcohol consumption greatly potentiates weight gain if you eat carbohydrates.  Why?  Because it's metabolized first and thus the rest of the carbs you take in wind up being stored as glycogen and, if your glycogen stores fill it goes directly on your body as fat.

So that's the keto-related bad news, basically.  But unfortunately the bad news doesn't end there and it's not ketogenic-specific.

I own a Fenix 5x, which I wear basically all the time (except when doing some sort of work that might damage it, such as working on my car, and when it needs to be charged) including overnights.  It's an incredible piece of equipment which I bought mostly for its performance tracking under exercise and its mapping functionality, which is a safety feature when I am hiking in the backcountry ("never lost" as long as it can see the sky and has power.)  No, it's not a substitute for a map, compass and knowing how to do land nav, but it's convenient and, in my opinion, was well-worth the investment.

It also gives me a hell of a lot of data across my entire day.  One of the things it allows me to do is track the quality of sleep, heart-rate variation (which maps to your stress level) and resting heart rate.  And this is where the second piece piece of bad news comes from.

I can tell you from looking at that RHR and HRV (stress) level during my time sleeping on which days I have had zero alcohol intake, on which days I had one drink, on which days I had two, and on which days I had more.  The "more" doesn't matter; once you pass the second one in a day from a stress point of view you may as well get hammered.  My accuracy rate just looking at this piece of information alone is astoundingly high -- and when it's wrong, it's never wrong on the low side (that is, indicating less stress than my booze intake indicates.)

The first drink will raise my resting heart rate by a point or two and delay my systemic stress level from dropping into the lowest category by a couple of hours.  The second by two to four points and costs me half the night in terms of getting into that "resting" state from a stress point of view.  Third and beyond?  You're screwed in terms of actually getting anything that's called "rest" when you sleep.

This has profound implications if you are interested in athletic performance as well.  There's simply no way you will be well-rested and able to perform at peak capacity if you've had anything to drink for two to three days prior to the event.

This is utterly repeatable, every time, has been since I've owned this unit from the first day forward and anyone that has access to that data is going to be able to figure it out without knowing anything else about you.  A couple of friends of mine who have similar units have told me that they have identical results, and I've confirmed this as they've let me look at their data briefly and told them which days they went out to the bar.  I was right -- every time.

For this reason putting such data in the "cloud" and allowing anyone else access to it is a profoundly bad idea.  You don't need an AI to process this, just a pair of eyeballs!

It would be utterly trivial to determine your consumption of booze and "box" you from which it would then be trivial to do things like charge you more for insurance.

The above, by the way, assumes your alcohol is liquor and there are no sugars in whatever you mix it with, if anything.  Straight-up Scotch, vodka-and-(diet) tonic, etc.  Beer and wine also contains carbs that are not from the alcohol; those have to be counted too and it's almost-impossible to know what the non-booze carb content is with the exception of a handful of "light" beers that advertise it -- because unlike actual food the manufacturers don't have to tell you, and they typically don't.  When it comes to craft beer you may get away with one pint glass (or 10oz for high-gravity) of beer but you won't get away with the second in terms of ketosis.  The same issue presents itself when it comes to wine.

So if you're asking whether drinking alcohol is compatible with living a ketogenic lifestyle, the answer is "maybe."  The maybe is that if you are actively trying to lose weight then no, it isn't, and by the way, it doesn't matter what form of food intake you're using in that case because alcohol will poison all of them in terms of weight loss.  The old saying that "he has a beer belly" is not bullshit, in short.  One of the worst ways to sabotage your metabolic systems is to screw with your hunger regulation -- while it's possible to ignore that it takes an amount of willpower few possess.

If you are very studious about avoiding any sort of other carbs, except for nutrient-dense green vegetables, then you can probably remain in a ketogenic diet with one drink a day, assuming you are an average-height male.  Women have it tougher simply because on average they're smaller and alcohol is typically not "sized" in terms of the size of the drink to match body size and mass.  This means that for most women that first drink is going to be borderline.  Your odds of remaining in a ketogenic state improve if you are engaged in a material amount of vigorous exercise daily (defined as at least 15 minutes of effort in heart rate zone 4 or 5) as well.

But beyond one drink it doesn't matter if you're trying to live a keto lifestyle.  You will get knocked out of a ketogenic state with the second beer or mixed drink essentially every single time and it is likely to require 48 hours or even more to return to it.

So yeah, if you have one night a week you have a few beers and such you basically took a 7-day ketogenic state and turned it into a 3-4 day one. That's half.  If you're already where you want to be in terms of body mass and metabolic state you can get away with that once a week and probably not harm yourself all that much.

But if you do that twice in a week you can forget it.

The worse news, however, is that ketogenic or not that second drink costs you substantially in terms of impacting your overall body stress level and quality of sleep.  The third one destroys both and it will require 48-72 hours of abstinence before things are back to normal.

This, incidentally, is wildly out of kilter with what the so-called medical "experts" will tell you.  They all say that one drink a day is not harmful and may even be protective; that the second one is probably "neutral" and real serious harm starts with the third (and gets rapidly worse with increasing quantity.)

Nope.

The trivially documented disruption starts with the first drink, the second does very material damage to the quality of your rest and beyond that you may as well get rip-roaring trashed in terms of cardio and overall systemic stress.

I'm sure a far more-strict analysis is almost directly dose-dependent -- for example, the damage done to your liver.  But here I'm not focusing on the long-term chronic effects from drinking too much -- those are both well-known and basically impossible to argue with.

This is simply looking at the data in the context of consumption of "routine" amounts of alcohol if you are trying to live a healthier metabolic lifestyle.

Let me make a few observations.

First, eight years ago, and again four years ago, America elected a President.  Fully half, give or take a couple of percent, disagreed with the outcome.

There were exactly zero riots, fires, "mass protests" and similar following that outcome despite the fact that half the population vehemently disagreed with it.

This time around, not so much.

Now I want you think very carefully about the following.

Most of the land mass of this nation is owned and resided upon by people who are in "red" (that is, the winner this time) areas of the country.  With the exception of certain urban centers and right along the Mexican/Texas border there are very few "solid" blue areas.

Those urban centers consume roughly 90% of the energy and food in this country yet they comprise 5-10% of the land mass.  The "red" areas produce 95% of the food and energy this nation consumes and occupies 90-95% of the land mass.

Do you really think that doing something like eliminating the last pieces of the structure our founding fathers put in place to prevent tyranny of the majority from being able to take hold is a good idea?

A little history lesson: Prior to the 17th Amendment ratified in 1913 it was impossible for the Federal Government to shove any program down the throats of the 50 states.  That's because the state legislatures had effective control of the Senate and could recall their Senators.

The House was elected by the people, the Senate was elected by The State Legislatures (and could be recalled by same) and The President was elected by the Electors, which were voted for in the popular vote.

The latter provides a modest but real increase in the representation of "flyover" states; that is, those with lower population counts.  In other words it is a check and balance in the ultimate tyranny of democracy.

Yes, I said democracy is ultimately tyrannical -- because it is.

America is not a Democracy.  It is a Constitutional Republic.  This is very important; in a democracy 50%+1 can render the 50%-1 slaves by mere vote.  Those who are in the minority in a democracy have no rights at all.  Democracy is best represented by two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner.

We are all minorities in some form or fashion.  If you're gay, black, yellow, male, female, whatever -- all it takes is some other set of groups to get together and decide to oppress you, and in a democracy you're fucked.

America's founding fathers put in place two systems to prevent this.  The first was the bicameral legislature; a House elected by the people at large and a Senate elected by the State Legislators.  This structure guaranteed that a landmass that amassed 50%+1 of the population (not even in the same state or states!) could not band together and shove down the throat of the States any policy measure because you needed the concurrence of more than half the state legislatures, where each were delegated but two votes to their Senators who were accountable to said legislature, to pass anything at all.

This evaporated with the passage of the 17th Amendment.  Now you only needed 50%+1 of the people in a given state to pass anything you wanted and they could all live in a tiny percentage of the land mass -- such as is the case with Illinois where more than half the population lives in the immediate area of Chicago.

What came right after that?  Prohibition, shoved down the throat of the States, less than 7 years later!

What also came after it was an unbridled expansion of the Federal Government into state affairs.  Indeed, virtually everything became a "legitimate" federal matter.  Why?  Because it was impossible for the States to prevent it.

Do you think the founders were wrong to do what they did, and the 17th Amendment corrected that?

If you believe so then please consider this.

Ever drive through small town America?

Hell, how about "not-so-small-town" America?

Many of these towns look like something out of a WWI or WWII European war movie.  There was one factory or maybe two, but now it sits empty, weeds growing out of the parking lot as high as your head, all the windows are broken out and the roof has caved in.  Over on the outskirts there's a Walmart that pays $9/hour, but only offers 20 hours/week.  The factory paid $30/hour, full-time, plus benefits and food, power, medicine and beer cost half of what it does now. 90% of what formerly were little diners and shops in the "center" of the town, which might have one actual traffic light, are gone -- boarded up and often literally falling apart.  There might be one bank left, a branch of a big national chain, and maybe an antique store.  Maybe.  All the factory jobs left for China and Mexico and everything else died when the middle-class incomes to support them disappeared.  We did that as a nation with our "progressive" and "global" agenda driven by the 50%+1 that live in the closest big city 200 miles away.

The locals who used to work in the fields within 10 or 20 miles from that town are all unemployed too.  Why?  Because the illegal Mexicans came and we refused to throw them out.  They work for a few bucks a day in cash, no taxes, no unemployment, no nothing.  No American can live on that; the embedded cost of just trying to stay alive would leave you with zero.  But the Mexicans work hard and then sleep 10 to a single-room apartment, which incidentally is a total shithole as you'd expect given that density of occupation.  They don't care; it's better than what they had in Mexico, you see, and they can Western Union home some of the money.  This is the face of "immigration", mostly illegal, that really exists in this country.  They brought their third-world shithole here and while it's a little bit better than what they had in the process of doing it they dragged us into the gutter with them.

The people who lived in that town did and most who are still there do go to church every weekend, and some go again during the week, usually on Wednesday.  There's usually one, sometimes two churches.  Every one of them has the word "God" or "Christ" in the name on the front.  They mean it when it comes to their faith and in addition that's where all the local people shake hands, exchange chit-chat on the last week and, for younger people, it's where they meet one another.  You know, girls and boys.  Yeah.  Faith is real there, you see, and it's Christian. But from your point of view that's deplorable and that "those people" don't like the idea of making a wedding cake for a gay marriage is deserving of a federal lawsuit and loss of the bakery (which is, as a result, now closed -- putting yet more people out of work.)  The people who live in these towns don't see your point of view as a civil rights matter but rather as attacking God.

What was left after the factory was displaced isn't enough to run a "service economy", which is why it never showed up there and the old business buildings are all boarded up.  Nobody can afford $8 lattes on a $9/hour wage for 20 hours a week and nobody would want them if they could.  There's probably a McDonalds on the outskirts, and a couple of self-serve gas stations with a convenience store.  It sells cheap beer and lots of it to the locals who have nothing to do but drink and then go to church and pray for forgiveness for last night's 12 pack.  None of the jobs at any of these places, except maybe the store manager, makes more than $9/hour and Obamacare has forced all the regular workers down to 20 hours a week on top of it.  Try living on $180/week gross sometime -- before FICA and Medicare is taken out, never mind gas for the car and the rapidly-escalating car insurance bill -- and you might understand.  Yes, I know the car is 15 years old and runs like crap.  What do you expect on under $1,000/month of income?

This is what 40 years of sending jobs overseas with "trade deals" did.  It's what Amazon did.  It's what Walmart and its Chinese supply line did.  It's what "progressive America" did, and then to add insult to injury the teachers in the public schools tell all the kids that Mommy and Daddy are bad people and hate both the planet and their own kids because they don't drive a $30,000 Prius or a $60,000 Tesla.

This is everywhere in rural America.  Get in your car and out of your comfort zone some time and you'll see it. It's not far from wherever you are.  I've driven through dozens of these formerly-alive places in the last six months -- every one of them dead today, but full of real people.  I never met one such person that was a racist, xenophobic asshole, but they're not very happy, and the people they're unhappy with are those very same folks you wanted to keep in office in Washington DC.

If you think the destruction of small town America is confined to farms you forget the other half -- energy.  Would you like your lights to work?  Many of those small towns are dead because of the insanity of our energy policy -- or lack thereof, tied to left-wing whackjob nonsense.

Now you want to add insult to injury when they show up to vote, exactly as civics tells them we have a right to do, and a large number of you in the cities did not show up.

They bought into the message of bringing American jobs back to America and ejecting those who have no right to be here.  You call them xenophobic, racist and small-minded -- they call it a shot at decent employment for the first time in 30 years.

They believe in the Henry Ford model of American business, and they're not wrong to do so.  Make the product here, pay the people well enough to be able to afford it, and you'll do just fine.

They win the election, in short, and you lose.

Then you decide to be a sore loser and loot, burn, beat people, issue threats, cry, whine on social media and try to obstruct everything by any means possible -- legal or not.  You bus people in to "protest" and riot, you "petition", you raise hell in short -- oh, and all this after you implored the other side to "respect the outcome of the election" and lambasted them for suggesting they might want to merely count the ballots twice!

Note again, as I pointed out above, that eight years ago, and four years ago, these very same people were on the losing end of your stick exactly as they had been for the previous three decades yet they did none of the above.  They understand duplicity and your double-standard quite well, seeing as they did the honorable thing and respected the outcome twice in a row despite getting screwed sequentially both times.  The only thing your brand of government offered them in the end was Medicaid or worthless "health insurance" through the exchange; the former has no doctors that accept it within 20 miles and the latter has a $5,000 deductible before it pays anything, which is utterly laughable when you consider these folks have a gross wage of under $1,000 a month.

Now the question:  Are you prepared for the possibility they might decide en-masse that they're done with this crap -- and with you?  That they're not going to take it any more?

What if the people who live in the "red" areas, that is, those who produce the food and energy that are consumed to the 90th percentile in the "blue" areas, decide they're not going to do that for the blue areas any more?  What if their middle finger goes up, in short?

Remember, we allegedly do not permit slavery in this country any more -- which means that which someone owns they have the right to sell - or not sell.  They have the right to produce - or, more to the point, not produce.

What if the people who peacefully conceded the result of two elections over the last eight years despite vehemently opposing the outcome decide that if the "blue" folks can riot, loot, beat people who vote the "wrong way" and similar they will not accept any further election result that doesn't go their way, and instead of rioting or burning things they will simply shut off the flow of food and energy to said "blue" areas?  After all, you don't value them at all -- you consider them subhuman, racist, xenophobic, deplorable and irredeemable -- all at once.

I'll tell you what happens if they take that decision: Every major city in the country would go feral within hours.

Within days those cities would not be blue, they'd be blackened and reduced to ash as those very same "protesters" you like so much loot, burn and shoot at each other trying to get the last scraps of food and fuel remaining.  They would then probably try to come out of the cities and take by force what had been denied them, only to run into a major problem - the "red guys" have more guns, they know the land because they live there, and more importantly they actually hit what they aim at, having had plenty of practice feeding their families with deer, wild boar and similar.  Mr. Gang Banger against Mr. Deer Hunter isn't a very fair fight, when you get down to it.

Oh by the way there's a phrase for what this would mean, if you haven't figured it out by now: Civil War.

Is that what you want?

It's where your actions are headed, if you keep doing what you're doing -- and nobody knows exactly where the tipping point is.

Better think long and hard, those of you in the "blue" places who are running this crap.  You do not have a snowball's chance in Hell of being able to grow enough in the way of crops on the landmass you control to feed a tenth of your population and every squirrel in your trees would be shot dead and eaten within an hour after this began.  Silent spring indeed.  Never mind the fact that most of you "wonderful snowflakes" couldn't shoot, skin, butcher and cook a deer -- or even a squirrel -- if you had to.  Never mind that a good 80% of you couldn't manage to run one mile if you were being chased by someone interested in eating you.

The day that cellophane-wrapped chicken stops showing up in the grocery store is literally the day 90% of Blue America starves.

Nobody in their right mind wants such an outcome.  But where do you think this all goes if you keep it up, eh?

Every bit of it has been enabled by the 17th Amendment and tyranny of the majority -- a tyranny you wish to increase by doing things such as abolishing the Electoral College.

There's a very good reason our founding fathers designed a Constitutional Republic instead of a Democracy.  They understand the problem with democracy: It doesn't work.  Democracy always ends up leading to riots and civil war, because exactly what the blue folks are doing now escalates until everyone starts shooting everyone.

A Constitutional Republic avoids this outcome because even a very large majority cannot infringe the rights of everyone else -- even when the majority lives in big, concentrated places like cities.

That was the magic sauce of the original design in our legislature and Presidency.  It's why we have an Electoral College -- to provide a bit of "overweighting" to those places that are utterly crucial to the cohesiveness and survival of the nation as a functional republic -- that is, a bit more balance against tyranny of the majority of 50%+1.

We got rid of the biggest check and balance with the 17th Amendment and I have, for decades, maintained that whenever America finally is declared dead and done, and the book is closed, that will be written in as the reason our nation's political system failed.  It's the only Amendment we cannot reasonably repeal, because to do so would require the sitting Senate to vote itself out of a job.  I'm sure you can figure out how likely that is.

But we can avoid doing more violence to our Constitution -- and we had better, or the outcome, given the annals of history available to anyone who cares to look, is quite certain.  If you want to see how this turns out should you keep pressing the issue go have a look at the map of how many states Trump won .vs. Clinton, or how the county-by-county map looks.  You'll see a lot more red of various shades than you will blue.

The bottom line?  Go ahead and be a sore loser.  Go ahead and whine.  Go ahead and try to change what our representative process led to.  Go ahead and decide to loot, burn and beat.  Refuse to accept the result of the election, if you insist.  Hell, go ahead and try to threaten or even bribe the electors!  Make sure you tear down the last little bit of foundation and structure inherent in the design of the legislature and executive of the United States.  Who needs it; it's all in the name of being "progressive", right -- even if when counted by landmass, counties or states the election was a landslide for Trump.

Just don't be surprised, if you keep it up, that at some point, given that you're utterly reliant on those you're abusing for the basics of life -- the loaf of bread, the gallon of gasoline, the electricity that powers your lights -- they decide they've had enough.  That day your supply of cellophane-wrapped meat and plastic bag full of bread disappears like a fart in the wind.  There comes a time when those who you've put the boot to for so long, and then try to deny the ability to change things peacefully through the representative process our founding fathers gave us, decide that despite their religious beliefs and good manners they're not going to service you on their knees any more.

Don't be dumb enough to think you can keep doing what you've been doing forever because you can't and if you go too far there will be no warning, no second chances and no saying you're sorry.  It'll just happen starting with one final stupid act -- and then we all lose.