A response to Colonel Lang

Sir:

At the end of the day, Trump is a consummate showman. He is extraordinarily clever and knows that the diluted pablum that the left so enjoys is not fun for the popular audience and it does not keep eyes on him. So the tweets and the playing to the audience is all bent around keeping eyes on him.

I think that is the key to understanding his presidency. He draws the eyes and the loathing of his political opponents. He hogs the whole spotlight and draws the fire. All the while the folks down in the trenches will bust their butts seeing how much they can deconstruct while eyes are on the good Mr. Trump.

I am one of the low-to-mid-level minions of the federal government. My peers in the belly of the beast have a pretty good idea of what is coming down the pike.

Remember, along with freeing folks from regulation of a bureaucracy, you can also cripple a bureaucracy by adding more internal regulation to decrease its ability to accomplish the external mission. We are just now starting to see that at the VA.

Nope, what Donald tweets about, and what meta-scale fights he picks with the hippies are just window-dressing. The real work is going to be down in the trenches and how much regulatory stripping can be done.

I would posit that Donald is stirring up the shit to keep folks eyes off the prize, the sunsetting of the suspension of the debt ceiling. Granted, it is political drama and not especially a real thing, but that is the club that Donald will use when it comes time, but by stirring up the noise about other things, it keeps the opposition from noticing you moving out your rooks.

Nope, I think that you are right about staging a scene casting the Democrats as a bunch of grown children having a tantrum. That will cripple the Dem's ability to react to the partial unbuilding of the federal edifice.

A Lingering Aftertaste of Kool-Aid

My friends are all around my age.  Professionals.  Educated. Several are retired now, living the good life and doing the equivalent of clipping coupons.  I am happy for them.

But everyone in the group, save for a couple of outliers like your humble correspondent, absolutely loathe the asshat in the White House.  Now, if you are reading this, and don't know me personally, let me clarify some points.  Donald Trump is neither the Antichrist, nor is he at all temperamentally or intellectually qualified to hold his current office, but then, who is?  At the end of the day he is a clown with a reach that exceeds his grasp.

Nope, Donald is nothing but a tabula rosa; he reflects the anger and hopelessness of a part of the culture that encompass Mitt Romney's 47%, Barack Obama's God and guns crowd, and Hillary Clinton's deplorables.

But folks my age and in the upper reaches of the socioeconomic scale really don't like to think of the folk that support Trump as fully human. After all, we all have ours.  If you don't have yours it must be a moral failing on your part.   Worse yet, they all know of the bottled violence and the available armament in the crowd that they so loathe and are sorely afraid.

I always suggest a re-read of "A Tale of Two Cities".   You can draw similar parallels in any number of more recent social dislocation where an oppressed majority rose against a comfortable elite.  

The Dirtiest Word

Every thing I read says there is no inflation.

I want to know where the fuckers shop.

House Prices are to the moon, it's not inflation, its a bubble.

Rent prices go up with the house prices.  Apparently that's not inflation.

Gas prices have gone up the last couple months...that isn't even figured into inflation.

Eggs and milk are most certainly higher.

Have you seen the price of healthcare.

Look, the government is paying the bulk of its bills with borrowed money.  Tell me how you can do that without increasing the money supply?

More money in circulation, I don't care what the "Official Statistics" say.

Prices are up, you bet your sweet bippy.

But "They" keep telling us there is no inflation.

Immigration and Resource Depletion

The hard question that bedevils the discussion about the politics of immigration is the underlying question that no one seems to want to address.

We have a mythos here in America that we are nation of immigrants.

This is a true statement to this point.

But the immigration that made America the country that we are today was selected as a policy because of the seemingly unlimited access to resources and land that characterized a fairly empty continent awash with resources and an undamaged environment.  

During the immigrant phase of the country's development, we were in a system characterized by an expanding resource base and and expanding energy base.   In such a setting, immigration makes sense because it allows growth of both the productive capacity and the consumer base that is mutually dependent on it.

I would posit that those preconditions no longer exist.  Oil production and exploration in the US peaked in the early 1980's.  The Iron Range is mined out. We have destroyed a major chunk of the local agricultural capacity that used to feed the cities that is surrounded it and replaced it with McMansions.

We are just now getting a handle on reducing the environmental damage from the growth period characterized by the period of open immigration.  It will take centuries to return it to an undamaged state.

There are approximately 310 million people in our country.  We have 100 million people "not in the workforce".  The greater bulk of the jobs being created are low-wage and/or part time jobs that are not compatible with a independent lifestyle in our current socioeconomic model.

In other words, we are currently in a system where resources are becoming more scarce.   This trend is amplified by the steadily decreasing availability of usable energy.

Simply put.  Immigration is a policy for appropriate to an expansionary (e.g. anabolic) system.  It is a nightmare for a compressive (catabolic) system.

Batshit

I have not been writing because everyone seems to be losing their minds.

I am keeping my head down and my mouth shut until such time I manage to make a little bit of sense concerning the direction that the country is proceeding.

This is nuts.

Be very careful out there.