I talk a lot on substack, and IRL, about building alternative systems and institutions. I talk about the need to re-localize the economy, especially about food but about all essentials, generally. I talk about the importance of skills and knowledge. I have been talking about that most of my adult life.
That has always been the chief complaint, especially though not entirely from women, you are so serious. Soooo serious, I most often reply. Sometimes I feel like the least serious person around, but then how in hell can anyone take America and the West seriously these days.
The interesting thing about this chart is, 2016 was shortly after the second to last time they printed like 10trillion to buy up the wreckage of the crisis with, the 2008-2015 Great Recession. The Dow Jones peaking for a bit above 40,000? I’m pretty sure they printed more than 10trillion during and after Covid, probably closer to 20tril when you add in the national debt.
I think it was around 2012 when I first come up with the idea of dropping a few bankers in the Marianas Trench for a deposit on a better future. I’m pretty sure covid wouldn’t have happened if we had. Lately I am thinking Fauci, Gates, Daszak, Baric, Collins, Hotez, Morenz.
well, maybe now the threads are really, truly getting pulled out into the light.
this is a sort of pivotal acid test moment for america.
if we sweep this under the rug and let fauci and collins and morens and daszak and baric and health hobbit hotez skate, we’re in real trouble.
if you can walk away from this, you can walk away from anything.
if there is no accountability for this, it’s just plain over. will the last congresscritter out please turn off the lights.
this can be the leading edge of a broom that sweeps clean and leads to the drastic reduction or even elimination of these disturbingly dishonest and self-serving agencies and the profiteers and patrons who rule them like feudal fiefdoms, or it can be the failure of nerve that sets up the next calamity.
there’s no middle way and “business as usual” is just not going to cut it.
The Dow is trending in the 40,000 range while the petro-Dollar is in shambles. The Biden Admin destroyed the petro-Dollar by way of trying to destroy Russia. Russia is comparatively thriving as the world continues to buy it’s oil and gas with something other than the dollar. It is like Trump rising in the polls the more the Biden Admin and adjacent media and law enforcement try to destroy him. If you think the universe does not have an hilarious sense of humor, lawyer Michael Cohen flailing in his own web of lies is like the epitome of the 91 trumped-up charges against Trump. The latest scuttlebutt is, they want Trump to win so when the economy collapses Trump and Republicans get the blame. I expect if that is their plan, that will work out about as well as their wars in Ukraine and Gaza, their sanctions, their lawfare and their censorship. They can’t but break everything they touch.
What is going to be their next excuse to print 30tril? Except they are going to officially destroy the Dollar the next time they print trillions as cover for their incompetence (and malice.)
A Plan to Restore American Democracy. What an earnest title. Less than half the number of my subscribers read my last piece. I get it, it is spring, I would rather people are out gardening, gaining skills, doing useful things IRL, not indoors reading my Substack. Probably though I am not the only writer on Substack seeing their numbers down, something like a 6-7% a reduction in emails opened, below the average, the last month or more. It is only May 2024 and people are already feeling overwhelmed. But also, I’m not sure very many people care about restoring democracy or think it is even possible, or even for some of my readers, advisable.
What if it is too late to build alternative systems and institutions, rebuild the local economy for essentials production, make local food production resilient? I look around at my local economy and I don’t see anything like awareness or readiness for crisis. Everything I see is people acting like continuity of the American Experiment in conspicuous consumerism is guaranteed, forever and always.
But then I have said for a long time too, nothing really is going to change for greater societal resilience, except by necessity, and clearly people do not think it is necessary.
So, there is probably nothing more lame than me complaining on Substack that my local IRL community is not resilient. Lately I have been taking more steps to be more engaged in my local community. Since I started this Substack almost two years ago, I have been marginally employed or not at all, spending more money than I am making. That is not resilient. So I set in motion restoring the remodeling/building business I had in the city, here in the small town I grew up in. I started reaching out in February, and already I am booked up half the summer, building decks, remodeling bathrooms, winterizing garages, repairing damaged this and that, etc big and small jobs, making as many connections and signing on with as many clients as I can.
Speaking of that, I’m already thinking about taking on employees, though thinking more about it, if I pay a guy $25hr, I have to charge $75 to make it worth my time watching over him, the cost of lenocracy, those feeding off my business, is so great.
I grasped the concept in an instant but I had to invent a word for it. The word I came up with is “lenocracy.” The first part of that word comes from leno, the Latin term for a pimp. Yes, what the word means is a government of pimps.
Let’s unpack that phrase a little bit. If, as the saying goes, prostitution is the world’s oldest profession, then pimping must be up there in the oldest half dozen or so. What makes a pimp economically interesting is that he adds no value to the exchanges from which he profits. He doesn’t produce any goods or services himself. His role is wholly parasitic. He inserts himself into the transaction between the sex worker who provides the service and the customer who wants it, and takes a cut of the price in exchange for allowing the transaction to happen.
This kind of parasitic interaction is far from unusual in economics, but it’s not always as common as it is now. There are societies and eras in which most economic activity is mediated by pimps of various kinds, and other societies and other eras in which such arrangements are relatively rare (and often harshly penalized). Right now, in the modern industrial world, we live in an economy where nearly all exchanges are subject not just to the exactions of a single pimp but to whole regiments of pimps, each of whom has to be paid in order for the exchange to take place. Furthermore, this orgy of pimping is sponsored, controlled, and mandated by government at all levels and by the holders of political and economic power more generally. Thus, lenocracy.
On the one hand I very much want DC to collapse, and most of the lenocracy that has sprung up facilitated by the empire, to collapse with it. I don’t care what happens to all those lenocrats who would lose their blood sucking, bullsh*t jobs. They can go pick onions in the fields, the migrants they have been importing can watch over them, is how little I care.
On the other hand I would like the empire to sustain awhile, so I can make some dollars before they destroy the dollar so I can make myself and my own more resilient, even as we are now more resilient than most.
So, between running a business, tending the garden, learning the guitar, reading so my mind does not calcify, oh yeah, I am playing baseball too, for the first time in 25 years, I’m not sure how much energy there is going to be left to give to Substack and my subscribers. There is also a book taking shape, a great challenge of a book; there are only so many waking hours in a day. I have every intention to keep posting, but I don’t know what that is going to look like.
This is not a plea for you to become a paid sub. I am deeply grateful for the five of you. Though even if every single person who read my last post was a paid sub, it still wouldn’t be enough to sustain me as a paid writer.
Meanwhile, the spring garden is mostly planted, the summer veggies are hanging out on the deck waiting to be planted. The shaggy stuff at the top of the picture is too many onions I set. I’ll be giving a lot of them away. To put this picture in perspective, this is the foundation for roughly 20% of the food I and my parents will eat all year.
It is never too late to learn skills, to gain knowledge, to become stronger and more resilient. It is always time to do these things, for yourself and in service to something greater.
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