RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2023/04/28/bidenomics-recession-return-to-70s-style-stagflation-or-both/

Americans expecting a better economy to emerge three years after the COVID shutdowns will no doubt be disappointed by the first quarter’s GDP gain of just 1.1% with higher inflation. And it’s even worse than it looks.

Of course, President Joe Biden denied the worsening news, saying, “Today, we learned that the American economy remains strong, as it transitions to steady and stable growth.”

“Strong”? Really? No one believes that. As recently as late March, economists were looking for a first-quarter GDP growth number exceeding 3%. Instead, they got 1.1%, down from 2.6% in the fourth quarter and 3.2% in last year’s third quarter.

See the trend?

It’s no accident. The Fed, responding to 9%-plus inflation during the COVID “emergency,” has jacked up interest rates to 5% from near zero, and is expected to add another quarter point in early May during its meeting.

More ominously, a big part of the Q1 GDP slowdown came from businesses reducing their inventories and, for the fourth quarter in a row, their capital investments. Typically, businesses do that only when they expect really rough times ahead.

https://victorhanson.com/civilizational-killers-part-two-debt-and-inflation/

Debt and its twin inflation destroy civilizations. Ancient coins were sometimes called “redheads” as the raised impressed silhouettes of grandees stamped on “silver” coins were the first to have their silver veneers worn away revealing the “red” bronze beneath.

Our paper money is similarly becoming less and less valuable, the more we print of it. Currently, the U.S. owes 130 percent of its gross domestic product, in total about $33 trillion.

The staggering sum has not stopped annual federal borrowing, which may hit $2 trillion this year. The massive borrowing is unsustainable. Yet anyone who tries to cut the massive indebtedness will be smeared as cruel and insensitive.

America apparently shrugs that when the nation faces insolvency, we will deal with the catastrophe the way it is done in the Third World and in antiquity.

One, the state can always pay off its debts by printing endless money and inflating the economy. Germany did that by intent to pay off war reparations to the victorious allies by printing Reichsmarks to the point that they became utterly worthless.

https://victorhanson.com/civilizational-killers-part-one-perversion-of-the-law/

No civilization can continue if its bedrock values and institutions are eroding—especially if the effort to save them is considered worse than their destruction.

When we look to the civilizational decline of the Greek polis, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, or of Europe in the 1930s we learn that erosion is a result of internal choices, and usually a matter of failing to adhere to time-honored customs and traditions, while evolving to meet new threats.

In the case of the autonomous Greek polis, the culprit was the inability of some 1,500 city-states to create a workable federal system for the common defense of Hellas—when threatened by Philip and Alexander. The Roman Empire was not able to maintain a common culture among its 70 million varied residents, nor to increase productivity to pay for always greater entitlements, or to systematize imperial succession, or inculcate Romanity among an increasingly diverse population.

For the Byzantines, it is hard to criticize an empire that sustained 1,100 years of continuous civilization. But in the fifteenth century, it failed to evolve into a partnership with a dynamic Western Christendom, especially after the damage suffered during the Fourth Crusade, to create a common front against Ottoman Islamism. Nor was a shrinking Constantinople able to attract Europeans into the empire, much less to convert Anatolians into Orthodox Christians.

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/trans-marathoner-defeats-14000-women-in-race-after-competing-as-man-months-earlier/?

A transgender runner on Sunday defeated thousands of women in the female category of the London Marathon after competing as a man in the New York City race just months prior.

Glenique Frank, a 52-year old male athlete who now identifies as female, finished in 6160th place out of 20,123 entrants, outpacing 14,000 women.

“Girl power!,” Frank said to a reporter after the London event, flexing his biceps and abdomen muscles for the camera. Frank listed all the other races he’s participated in recently. For all of those, he was referred to as “Glen” rather than “Glenique.”

“My beautiful son stood there” on the sidelines to support, Frank said. “He’s having a baby, so I’m going to be a granny.”

Frank then ran off from the camera, wearing a transgender flag as a cape. The spectacle soon received intense backlash from some female professional runners.

“Males in the F category is UNFAIR for females,” Olympic marathoner Mara Yamauchi tweeted in response to the viral video of Frank.

Yamauchi suggested that Frank’s category switch enabled him to transcend his previously mediocre status. Last November, for example, he ran the NYC Marathon in the men’s category and finished 14,096th out of 26,539, according to Yamauchi.