Inflation

Consumer Price Index y/y: average of utility costs, gasoline and electricity 1941-2022
Inflation for items most people spend majority of their income on

I think y/y means 'year on year' which just means we are looking at the annual inflation rate.

ZeroHedge is dependably a fount of gloom and doom. This post (where I found the above graph) is mostly about how the government is lying about employment which, given their record about lying about everything is no shock. Tyler uses a lot of jargon, but the upshot seems to be that fewer people are working more for less.

Links

Hard to believe, I know, but stupid government energy policies are getting even stupider:

• Power Company Seizes Control of Thermostats in Colorado During Heatwave
• Filling Gasoline Cars Could Become Cheaper Than Charging EVs In The UK
• G7 unveils plan to enforce Russian oil price cap
• Nord Stream gas supply to EU stopped indefinitely – Russia's Gazprom

Meanwhile, Washington continues its descent into madness:

• Biden's hateful rhetoric against Americans presents the GOP with a sterling opportunity
• Washington refuses to grant visa to Russia’s interior minister to attend a UN summit

On the plus side, Greenpeace continues to tilt at windmills:

• Greenpeace drops boulders in UK sea against ‘destructive’ fishing

Madeleine de Vercheres

Statue of Madeleine de Vercheres

More from Caroline Furlong's post about books:

Another novel I recommend is Ethel C. Brill’s Madeleine Takes Command*. It tells the story of Madeleine de Vercheres, the fourteen-year-old French-Canadian girl who saved her family’s fort from being overrun by the Iroquois Nation when the latter attacked. With the help of her twelve- and ten-year-old brothers and an old manservant, Madeleine held the Iroquois off for a week. Some of the soldiers who were supposed to be guarding the fort were killed or captured along with the male habitants who farmed the land, while the rest had taken the lack of Iroquois activity to mean it was safe enough to go hunting.

Having seen her mother direct the defense of the fort in a prior raid and lost her eldest brother in battle against the Iroquois, Madeleine was not so sanguine. Along with her brothers she kept the women and children safe until relief arrived from Montreal. It is a fascinating story, and I have to say that Madeleine has been one of my personal heroines ever since I read the book. It is not a novel with which I will part willingly.

She's talking about a novel, but it seems awfully specific, so I check and there really was a Madeleine de Vercheres and she really did save the fort.

The Virginian

Bronco Buster - Frederic Remington

I'm reading Caroline Furlong's post about books and she mentions The Virginian. Ho boy, that triggered a memory. High school English class, Bexley, Ohio, 1965, Miss Pfaff presiding. We were supposed to be reading this book all along but I had been avoiding it. It finally came to a head and me and another kid (Danny Metzger, maybe?) were threatened with a Horrible Fate if we did not sit down and read the dang book. Me, I stayed up all night reading the dang thing. The next day Miss Pfaff interrogates us. She asks if we read the book. We both claimed that we did. I know I did. After we escaped the Horrible Fate, Danny confessed to me that he had not read it. It was a pretty good story.

I remember one particular scene. The new guy and a cowboy approach the local hotel / tavern / restaurant and wash their hands outside the door. There is a grungy towel hanging there, so the cowboy asks the young woman at the door for a fresh one, which she supplies. Our new guy soon learned that you didn't get a fresh towel each time you showed up, you only got one when the towel had reached a certain state of grunginess. 

Tom's Diner

Tom's Diner

I've been there.

How Fauci Came to Power

Richard Fernandez explains in Single Point of Failure

Ashely Rindsberg explains in How Dick Cheney created Anthony Fauci

Basically, nobody was watching.

National Politics

Gasoline Prices 1980 2022

I skim a lot of stuff on the internet and I think I have a pretty good idea of what's going on. To me, it looks like the Democrats are systematically destroying our country. I could be wrong, but that's what it looks like to me. I quit looking at any of the major media players because I kept coming across stories that sounded like bullshit. Maybe I'm just not looking at things the right way, or maybe I haven't seen the light, but here's where I am and to me it looks like the Democrats are just plain evil.

Now if a majority of the voters in this country felt like me, we could be sure that come the elections this fall the Democrats would be booted out on their rumps and a new batch of upstanding, Republican citizens would be sworn into Congress. But I'm not sure how much of the federal government's malfeasance is apparent to the average voter. About the only thing that is going to be apparent to everyone is that gas prices are now five dollars a gallon which seems outrageous when gas cost two dollars a gallon two years ago, but how many people remember that? It was so long ago it seems like a dream. People who live in big cities have surely noticed the increase in the number of homeless people camped out on city sidewalks, but again, it's been going on for so long it becomes hard to remember if there ever was a time when there weren't homeless people camped on the sidewalks.

I don't watch the news on broadcast TV, but a big proportion of voters still do. Digital is making gains, and while there is more diversity in the digital realm, I suspect there are a few big players who have the largest audience share and it probably mirrors what's coming from broadcast news. 

I'm not sure it matters, because the vast majority of news is propaganda, and propaganda is designed to tell people what they want to hear. If you think things are going great, you're going to listen to people tell you things are going great. If you think the world is going to hell, you're more likely to listen to people who agree with you.

Anyway, I don't know which way the wind is blowing. I hope it's blowing the right way, but I have no clue.

And what if the mid-term elections do result in the wholesale replacement of Democrat Congressmen with Republicans? Will we any better off? Maybe, Republicans seem to be slightly better grounded in economics, but given the quagmire we are in I'm not sure they will be able to stop or even slow our headlong plunge into catastrophe. And the Republicans are just as much in bed with the big industrial complexes as the Democrats, so we probably won't see any changes there. The Democrats have shown a big bias to the medical- and educational-industrial complexes. If the Republicans gain the upper hand we might see a shift toward the military-industrial complex.

We really need a new party that doesn't have these longstanding understandings with the giant corporations, but getting a new party off the ground, much less gaining a foothold in Congress is going to be a giant uphill battle that will take decades. You are going to need an army of dedicated true believers, and where are you going to find the financing to fund that? And who is going to decide whether your faith is pure enough? Gah. We're doomed.