“If you step back and think about it, the normal man can probably list a dozen things he cannot say in public that he grew up hearing on television, usually as jokes. Then the jokes were no longer welcome in polite company and soon they were deemed “not funny” by the sorts of people who worry about such things. The same was true of simple observations about the world. Somehow noticing the obvious became impolite, then it became taboo and finally prohibited.
The reverse is true as well. Middle-aged men can probably think of a dozen things that were unimaginable or unheard of, which are now fully normal. Of course, normal is one of those things that is now prohibited. It implies that something can be abnormal or weird and that itself is forbidden. The proliferation of novel identities and activities that demand to be treated with dignity and respect is a function of the old restraints having been eliminated. When everything is possible you get everything.
The strange thing about all of this is there is seemingly no point to it. The proliferation of new taboos was not in response to some harm being done. In most cases, the taboos are about observable reality. The people turning up in the public square with novel identities or activities demanding respect did not exist very long ago. If they did, not one was curious enough to look into it. The public was happy to ignore people into unusual activities, as long as they kept it to themselves.
Of course, none of what we generally call political correctness is intended to be uplifting or inspirational. The commissars of public morality like to pretend it is inspiring, but that’s just a way to entertain themselves. These new identity groups are not demanding the rest of us seek some higher plane of existence or challenge our limitations. In fact, it is always in the opposite directions. It’s a demand to lower standards and give up on our quaint notions of self-respect and human dignity.
In the "Demon In Democracy", Polish academic Ryszard Legutko observed that liberal democracy had abandoned the concept of dignity. This is the obligation to behave in a certain way, as determined by your position in society. Dignity was earned by acting in accordance with the high standards of the community. In turn, this behavior was rewarded with greater privilege and responsibility. Failure to live up to one’s duties would result in the loss of dignity, along with the status it conferred.
Instead, modern liberal democracy awards dignity by default. We are supposed to respect all choices and all behaviors as being equal. There are no standards against which to measure human behavior, other than the standard of absolute, unconditional acceptance. As a result, the most inventively degenerate and base activities spring from the culture, almost like a test of the community’s tolerance. Instead of looking up to the heavens for inspiration, liberal democracies look down in the gutter.
Dignity comes from maintaining one’s obligations to his position in the social order, but that requires a fidelity to a social order. It also requires a connection to the rest of the people in the society. In a world of deracinated individuals focused solely on getting as much as they can in order to maximize pleasure, a sense of commitment to the community is not possible. Democracy assumes we are all equal, therefore we have no duty to one another as duty requires a hierarchical relationship.
In the absence of a vertical set of reciprocal relationships, we get this weird lattice work of horizontal relationships, elevating the profane and vulgar, while pulling down the noble and honorable. The public culture is about minimizing and degrading those who participate in the public culture. In turn, the public culture attracts only those who cannot be shamed or embarrassed. The great joy of public culture is to see those who aspire to more get torn down as the crowd roars at their demise.
The puzzle is why this is a feature of liberal democracy. Ryszard Legutko places the blame on Protestantism. Their emphasis on original sin and man’s natural limitations minimized man’s role in the world. This focus on man’s wretchedness was useful in channeling our urge to labor and create into useful activities, thus generating great prosperity, but it left us with a minimalist view of human accomplishment. We are not worthy to aspire to anything more than the base and degraded.
It is certainly true that the restraints of Christianity limited the sorts of behavior that are common today, but he may be putting the cart before the horse. The emergence of Protestantism in northern Europe was as much a result of the people and their nature as anything else. Put more simply, the Protestant work ethic existed before there was such a thing as a Protestant. The desire to work and delay gratification evolved over many generations out of environmental necessity.
Still, culture is an important part of man’s environment and environmental factors shape our evolution. It is not unreasonable to say that the evolution of Protestant ethics magnified and structured naturally occurring instincts among the people. With the collapse of Christianity as a social force in the West, the natural defense to degeneracy and vulgarity has collapsed with it. As a result, great plenty is the fuel for a small cohort of deviants to overrun the culture of liberal democracies.
Even so, there does seem to be something else. Liberal democracy has not produced great art or great architecture. The Greeks and Romans left us great things that still inspire the imagination of the man who happens to gaze upon them. The castles and cathedrals of the medieval period still awe us. The great flourishing of liberal democracy in the 20th century gave us Brutalism and dribbles of pain on canvas. The new century promises us primitives exposing themselves on the internet.
There is something about the liberal democratic order that seeks to strip us of our dignity and self-respect. Look at what happened in the former Eastern Bloc countries after communism. Exposed to the narcotic of liberalism they immediately acquired the same cultural patterns. Fertility collapsed. Religion collapsed. Marriage and family formation collapsed. These suddenly free societies got the Western disease as soon as they were exposed to western liberal democracy.
The reaction we see today is not due to these societies being behind the times, but due to seeing the ugly face of liberal democracy. It is much like the reaction to the proliferation of recreational drugs in the 1970’s. At first, it seemed harmless, but then people realized the horror of unrestrained self-indulgence. That’s what we see in the former Eastern Bloc. Their leaders still retain some of the old sense of things and are trying to save their people from the dungeon of modernity.
That still leaves us with the unanswered question. What is it about liberal democracy that seems to lead to this loss of dignity? It is possible that such a fabulously efficient system for producing wealth is a tool mankind is not yet equipped to handle without killing ourselves. Maybe we are just not built for anything but scarcity. Want gives us purpose and without it, we lose our reason to exist. Either way, without dignity, we cannot defend ourselves and the results are inevitable.”
"The United States government debt runs presently to $34.8 trillion - and gallops by the second, by the minute, by the hour, by the day. Dr. Paul Krugman believes he holds the solution. He believes it would bring an overall stability to the predicament. In the good doctor’s telling: "Congress need merely nick deficits 2.1% each year for the following 30 years. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the United States debt-to-GDP will scale an economy-sapping 166% by 2054." Yet if Congress takes aboard his guidance, 2054’s debt-to-GDP ratio would equal today’s debt-to-GDP ratio - a manageable menace.
Fat Chance: Yet will Congress execute even a modest budget nicking? We are far from convinced that it will. Nor is Mr. Andrew Wilford of the National Taxpayers Union Foundation. From whom: "Krugman’s proposal translates to reductions of over $45 trillion, or more than 40 percent of the projected deficit over that period. This year alone, Congress would have to cut $782 billion from the deficit - just slightly less than our entire national defense budget. Congress struggles just to avoid increasing the deficit every year, imagining that it can easily find the willpower to cut the equivalent of the military budget on a permanent basis is ludicrous. And even if such willpower existed, it would do nothing to reduce our debt-to-GDP ratio or leave us any room to respond to unexpected fiscal challenges or crises."
Former colleague David Stockman directed the Office of Management and Budget under Ronald Reagan. David discovered that the slenderest budget item is sealed deep within fortress walls. It is ringed by armed guards. And they are ready to repel any invader.
Forget About It: For example: David proposed shuttering the national endowments for the arts and humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. They were not proper functions of the federal government, David argued. And there was more than ample private philanthropy to make any shortages good. David says the combined budgets of these programs amounted to a mere six hours of federal spending annually. Six hours of spending - out of a 365-day calendar! But closing out those six hours proved impossible.
David was poor Sisyphus pushing his rock eternally uphill… only to have it roll eternally downhill upon him. David says not even Reagan would cancel these slight draws upon the Treasury.
It’s Hopeless: David ultimately submitted a modest 25% trimming to Capitol Hill. Would Capitol Hill accept this 25% trim? It would not. It ceded David “maybe an 8% reduction for a couple of years until the various K Street lobbies and assorted forces of high-toned culture completely restored the funding.” That is, no elimination. Not even a 25% trim - but an 8% nicking - and a temporary nicking at that.
Here is a question: If you cannot even put a sustained 8% nick in the national endowments for the arts and humanities or the Corporation for Public Broadcasting… how are you going to get true cuts anywhere else? Here is the shortened answer: You cannot. Here is the lengthy answer: You cannot. Thus we heave Dr. Krugman’s modest proposal into our hellbox.
Into the Debt/Death Trap: We are convinced the United States is ensnared with a debt trap. It cannot wriggle free. Imagine a fellow…This is a wastrel sunk impossibly in debt - credit card debt in our example. Spiraling interest payments begin to swamp him. He must take on an additional credit card in order to satisfy interest payments on the original. Yet he must soon take on another credit card… to service the interest on the card he previously took on… which he took on to service the interest on the first. That is, he must borrow money to service previously borrowed money. Reduce the thing to its essentials and you will find: The money he borrows is dead money. It lacks all productive purpose. He is merely shoveling it into a roaring fire. Before he knows what has struck him… he is undone… bankrupt. Well friend, here you have the government of the United States.
Snowballing Debt: It is the reckless and improvident fellow just described - who opens new credit cards to service the interest on existing ones - who is the slave of nonproductive debt. Projected interest payments on the nation’s debt presently will likely exceed $892 billion this year. They will likely increase year upon year. The nation is far along the ruinous path. How far down the ruinous path has the United States strayed?
Mr. Alasdair Macleod, economist: "The day of reckoning for unproductive credit is in sight… Malinvestments of the last 50 years are being exposed by the rise in interest rates, increases which are driven by a combination of declining faith in the value of major currencies and contracting bank credit. The rise in interest rates is becoming unstoppable…"
The interest bill is already growing exponentially… Clearly, it won’t take much more of a credit squeeze and the increasing likelihood of a buyers’ strike to push the interest bill to over $1.5 trillion…Irrespective of central bank policy, the shortage of credit is driving borrowing rates higher, and the cost of novating maturing debt is rising, if the credit is actually available - which increasingly is rarely the case.
It is an old-fashioned credit crunch, not really seen since the 1970s. And it has only just started… The big picture is of an asset bubble which has come to an end. And by any standards, this one was the largest in recorded history. It is our sincere hope this fellow is wrong. It is our profound fear this fellow is correct.
The Fed’s Out of Tricks: Yet cannot the Federal Reserve and its brother central banks reach into the deep trick bag into which they reached last decade - interest rate suppression, quantitative easing and the rest? Will not these magic tricks prove adequate next time? No, says Mr. Macleod. Thus we are informed: "The era of interest rate suppression is over. G7 central banks are all deeply in negative equity, in other words technically bankrupt, a situation which can only be addressed by issuing yet more unproductive credit. These are the institutions tasked with ensuring the integrity of the entire system of bank credit. This is not a good background for a dollar-based global credit system that is staring into the black hole of its own extinction."
Just so. Yet with the highest respect, sir, we have heard this “doom and gloom” before. In fact, we have heard it issue from an orifice upon our very face, the one directly beneath the nasal base. For three decades - at least - these cries have come issuing. And for three decades it has been cries of wolf. In each instance the financial system has been knocked horizontal… it has shortly regained the vertical. Whether under its own steam or assistance from the financial authorities, it has gotten up. Why should next time prove different?
Why This Time Is Different: Here Mr. Macleod inform us why “this time is different”: "This time, the Global South, the nations standing to one side of all this but finding their currencies badly damaged by unfavorable comparisons with a failing dollar, a dollar forced into higher interest rates in a world that knows of nowhere else to go - this non-financial world is on the edge of abandoning American hegemony for a new model emerging from Asia…The pressure for a whole new monetary system for the emerging nations is increasing… There is only one answer, and that is to abandon the dollar."
Thus the United States confronts the wages of its monetary and fiscal sins. It has cast all restraint to the scattering winds. It has sacrificed the morrow upon the altar of the present. And it has made its dollar headache the world’s migraine. We hazard the world - in turn - will make that dollar the United States’ migraine…"
Plead For Money Online; Claim Army Denied Funding"
"An Israeli Special Forces squad from the Shalmon unit, part of the IDF's 551 division, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to acquire necessary military gear. The campaign, titled 'Emergency Gear for Shalmon Squad,' highlights heavy losses suffered during operations in Gaza and the urgent need for specialized equipment like tactical helmets, padded socks, compact binoculars, and more."
"Retirement Nightmare! Hordes Of Retired Americans
May Need To Go Back To Work Just To Survive"
by Michael Snyder
"The Social Security program was instituted to help elderly Americans thrive during their retirement years. Unfortunately, millions upon millions of retired Americans are finding that their monthly Social Security payments are simply not enough as the cost of living spirals out of control. One recent survey found that a whopping 85 percent of U.S. adults now consider inflation to be one of the most important political issues that we are facing, and seniors are being hit particularly hard. In fact, a different survey that was just conducted by the Motley Fool discovered that 44 percent of retired Americans are thinking of going back to work because they need more money to survive…
A growing number of retired Americans are considering returning to work as they continue to battle chronic inflation, according to a new survey published by the Motley Fool. About 44% of respondents said they are thinking about looking for work because their Social Security benefits have not adequately kept pace with high inflation. Needless to say, trying to go back to work in your seventies, eighties or nineties is not an easy thing to do. But if you have to choose between going back to work or not eating three meals a day, I think that the choice is easy.
Today, the average Social Security payment is less than half of what the average retired American spends each month…"The average monthly Social Security payment in 2024 is $1,907, according to the Social Security Administration. But that is just a fraction of the $4,818 that Americans age 65 and older reported spending in 2022."
Of course the current economic environment has been very difficult for all of us. If you can believe it, compared to three years ago the typical household in this country is spending an extra $1,069 per month just to maintain the same standard of living…"The typical U.S. household needed to pay $227 more a month in March to purchase the same goods and services it did one year ago because of still-high inflation. Americans are paying on average $784 more each month compared with the same time two years ago and $1,069 more compared with three years ago."
Sadly, the cost of living is only going to get worse because our leaders just can’t help themselves. At this point, our politicians in Washington have borrowed so much money that we are spending more than a trillion dollars a year just in interest on the national debt. In fact, we now spend more on interest on the national debt than we do on national defense. But instead of slowing down, our politicians just continue to borrow and spend trillions upon trillions of dollars. So inflation is not going away any time soon.
Meanwhile, the number of home foreclosures was up once again last month…"Home foreclosures rose again in May as Americans continue to grapple with the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. That is according to a new report published by real estate data provider ATTOM, which found that there were 32,621 properties in May with foreclosure filings, which includes default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions."
That certainly isn’t a good sign. Needless to say, there have been lots and lots of troubling signs for the economy lately…"In addition to the conflicting rise in unemployment, other signs of deterioration include stagnant retail sales, a slowing of consumer spending, weak industrial production and manufacturing orders, increasing consumer debt, depressed new housing starts, falling annual earnings of full-time employees, and rising commodity prices."
To many of those at the bottom of the economic food chain, it feels like the economy has already collapsed. Today, 20 percent of the entire population of California is living in poverty, and massive homeless encampments have sprouted all over the state. Unfortunately, many more Americans will soon be joining the ranks of the poor because the economy is rapidly moving in the wrong direction.
The outlook is so bleak that even Walmart is closing down stores…"Walmart has decided to close three more stores across the US, bringing this year’s total number of failed locations to 11. The retail giant said these three stores – located in Georgia and Colorado – underperformed financially."
And we just learned that more Pizza Hut locations are being permanently shuttered…"Pizza Hut shuttered 15 locations in Indiana on Friday while more than 120 additional locations are in danger of closing, according to a report from The Times of Northwest Indiana.
The latest closures come after a long-running dispute between the chain and a franchisee. EYM Group, which owns and operates 142 Pizza Hut locations in Illinois, Indiana, Georgia, South Carolina and Wisconsin, was accused of defaulting on millions of dollars in payments owed to Pizza Hut by a June deadline."
A new economic crisis has already begun, but it is going to get so much worse during the months and years that are ahead of us. As we approach the end of this calendar year, we will want to keep a very close eye on the global financial system. There have been a number of ominous signs lately that should definitely alarm all of us. Most notably, the fifth largest bank in Japan just announced that it will be selling off approximately 63 billion dollars in government bonds…
"But if that was the first, and still distant, sign that something was very wrong at one of Japan’s biggest banks (Norinchukin is Japan’s 5th largest bank with $840 billion in assets) today the proverbial canary stepped on a neutron bomb inside the Japanese coalmine, because according to Nikkei, Norinchukin Bank “will sell more than 10 trillion yen ($63 billion) of its holdings of U.S. and European government bonds during the year ending March 2025 as it aims to stem its losses from bets on low-yield foreign bonds, a main cause of its deteriorating balance sheet, and lower the risks associated with holding foreign government bonds.”
See, what’s happened in Japan is not that different from what is happening in the US, where as the FDIC keeps reminding us quarter after quarter, US banks are still sitting on over half a trillion dollars in unrealized losses, as a result of the huge jump in interest rates which has blown up the banks’ long-duration fixed income holdings, sending them trading far below par and forcing banks (and the Fed, see BTFP) to come up with creative ways of shoving these massive losses under the rug.
Major banks all over the world are sitting on gigantic mountains of unrealized losses. If things start going wrong, it won’t take much to induce panic. And once panic starts, it won’t take much to spark a financial avalanche. We are in far more trouble than most people realize, and the dark clouds on the horizon are getting closer with each passing day."
Fentanyl-Addicted Child In Utopian Hellhole San Francisco"
By Tyler Durden
"The radical leftists in San Francisco City Hall need a reality check about their destructive progressive drug policies that have effectively handed out implicit death sentences. A policy course correction is desperately needed as overdose deaths reached a record high last year.
If you have lived or visited San Francisco in recent years, parts of the metro area have been transformed into a utopian progressive hellhole of drugs, death, violent crime, feces, needles, and abandoned retail stores.
As of last year, overdose deaths in San Francisco topped a record high of 800. Open-air drug markets and homeless encampments are widespread in the downtown area. Failed progressive public health policies are responsible for why the city's drug overdose rate is nearly double the nation's. In terms of cities over 500k in population, San Francisco was number four in overdose deaths.
Tens of thousands of drug addicts roam the city streets of the metro area, where the drug of choice is fentanyl. This drug, which is 100 times more potent than morphine, is flooding the nation through President Biden's open southern borders. And it's being cooked by Mexican cartels that receive chemicals from China (read: House Subcommittee Finds "New Evidence" That China Fuels America's Fentanyl Crisis).
With the overdose crisis only worsening, we want to share with readers a heartbreaking short documentary of a kid way too young to be addicted to fentanyl - getting high in downtown San Francisco. This kid should be entering college, or at least working a productive job, and aims one day to start a family and benefit the nation. But no, he's addicted to drugs, wasting his life away in the utopian hellhole of a city.
Citizen journalists are stepping up to the plate since corporate leftist media cannot - nor want to do actual reporting. Instead, they push propaganda from woke leftists in the White House or whatever their mega-corporate sponsors say.
X user jj smith documented his interactions with 19yo Noah. This video was filmed between Oct. 2022 and through at least the first half of 2023 and shows the young addict's life on the streets of downtown San Francisco.
This is the story of a child that was abandoned, Noah.
"The Progressive movement has enabled more drug use in San Francisco more than ever before, and the non-profits who are taking millions of dollars from, have done absolutely nothing to getting kids like Noah help. They feel it's better to hand out tin foil and straws, rather than getting them the help they truly need," Jaime Puerta, founder of Victims of Illicit Drug Use or VOID, wrote in a statement in response to the video.
This heartbreaking short video makes you want to hug your kids - if you got them - and also reflect on the political elites who have created this environment that has sparked a drug overdose death crisis that is killing two Vietnams of Americans per year."
"Problems with drugs and crime on Kensington Ave, Philadelphia's most dangerous street. In Philadelphia as a whole, violent crime and drug abuse are major issues. The city has a higher rate of violent crime than the national average and other similarly sized metropolitan areas. The drug overdose rate in Philadelphia is also concerning. Between 2013 and 2015, the number of drug overdose deaths in the city increased by 50%, with more than twice as many deaths from overdoses as homicides. Kensington's high crime rate and drug abuse contribute significantly to Philadelphia's problems.
Because of the high number of drugs in the neighborhood, Kensington has the third-highest drug crime rate by neighborhood in Philadelphia, at 3.57. The opioid epidemic has played a significant role in this problem, as it has in much of the rest of the country. Opioid abuse has skyrocketed in the United States over the last two decades, and Philadelphia is no exception. In addition to having a high rate of drug overdose deaths, 80% of Philadelphia's overdose deaths involved opioids, and Kensington is a significant contributor to this figure. This Philadelphia neighborhood is said to have the largest open-air heroin market on the East Coast, with many neighbors migrating to the area for heroin and other opioids. With such a high concentration of drugs in Kensington, many state and local officials have focused on the neighborhood in an attempt to address Philadelphia's problem."
The divide between the elite and the rest of the people became intolerable.
The guillotine solved the problem. How will the widening
canyon between America’s elites and the “little people' be solved?
by Bill Bonner
"The assertion that men are objectively equal is
so absurd that it does not even merit being refuted."
- Vilfredo Pareto
Poitou, France - "This just in, MSNBC: "CBO: Increased Immigration will boost US growth." Once again, statistics take on a life of their own... and become a policy goal.We listened to the talking heads explaining it. A young woman declared that US fertility rates were declining. She seemed to think this - another statistic - was cause for great concern. Who will pay taxes? Who will increase US GDP growth? Where will we get our teachers, firemen, and hedge fund managers? Who will pay the interest on our national debt... now more than $1 trillion per year?
So many dumb ideas... so many silly numbers. America’s elites created a debt-drenched economy that needs growth - in credit, in sales, GDP and tax revenues - just to stay in business. And now we need to have more children... and open the borders, say the public policy experts, in order to pay for past policies.
“American women have only 1.6 children,” explained the authority. (Another statistical mirage... we’ve never met a couple with 1.6 children.) “We need two children per couple, just to stay even. We’ll have to make up the shortage with immigrants.” There are 330 million people in the US. But we need more!
Spare a thought for the poor Swiss. Yes, they live longer. They have more money. They are not involved in foreign wars. They have little crime. Their streets are clean and safe. Their borders are orderly. But... Swiss women have only 1.5 children... and the Swiss GDP is only 2% of US GDP. And if every penny of Swiss GDP were put to the task it wouldn’t even pay the interest on our debt pile.
Keeping the show on the road - with more spending, more debt, more firepower…and now, more immigrants - is the main goal of US elites. Policy choices follow.
Elitism: Two weeks ago, we laid out one of our ‘shared secrets.’ Today, we give you another one: elitism. Excess immigration may actually lower wages and living standards for the average American. But immigrants are a source of low-wage labor... and help the system survive. The elites are for it. It is not flattering to be called an ‘elitist.’ It generally signals that you think you are better than others... and should be granted special privileges.
Here at Bonner Private Research we use the word in a purely descriptive manner. Elitism is not a disease... it is not a sin... it is not a mistake. It is just how societies operate. Our guiding light in this regard is the great Italian economist, Vilfredo Pareto. You probably know him as the author of the 80/20 rule. Always and everywhere, he said, 80% of the work will be done by 20% of the people... 80% of your profits will come from 20% of your investments... etc.
No matter what you call your government, there are always a few people - an elite - that actually runs things. Louis 14th, for example, was an ‘absolute monarch.’ But Louis did not collect his taxes himself... nor win his wars... nor design and stitch his uniforms. His rule was made possible by what Javier Milei calls the ‘casta politica’ - the political caste. Likewise, they were the apparatchiks and nomenklatura who ran the Soviet Union. And they were the Nazi Party members who ran Hitler’s Germany.
Today, in the US, we have politicians, lobbyists, CEOs, influencers, economists, kibitzers and hobnobbers. They allow citizens to vote... often with surprising and disruptive results. But the main decisions and lasting policies are determined by the elites. They control the public conversation.
A Widening Canyon: Typically, when a society is new, and/or small... there is little difference between the elite 20% and the rest of the population. They are neighbors, friends, business associates... the parish priest... the local judge... the small-town mayor. But over time, the elites pass more and more laws... and write more and more regulations... gradually gaining more and more control over the rest. Gradually, too, their views and interests diverge.
That is what happened in France before the revolution. The aristocracy grew more and more distant from their own properties... and from the lives of their tenants and peasants. They lived in great splendor, wearing precious silks and velvets... and eating sumptuous meals (even while millions of ordinary people - in the 1780s - shivered and starved). They granted themselves special privileges... and even exempted themselves from taxes. Eventually, the divide between the elite and the rest of the people became intolerable. The guillotine solved the problem.
How will the widening canyon, between America’s elites and the “little people,” be closed? Tune in tomorrow."
"What does a Russian typical brand-newSupermarket look like inside? Opened only days ago, join me on a tour of DA! Supermarket, which is Russian-owned and has more than 220 locations in Russia."
"The current economy is putting many businesses on the brink, and Costco is no exception. Execs seem deeply worried about the company's performance in recent months because sales have been weakening all across the board. Even though buying in bulk can save consumers’ money down the line, for many, shopping in big quantities isn't making financial sense anymore. Faced with higher bills in other categories, such as energy and housing, Americans are foregoing large purchases and preferring to take advantage of sales at traditional retail stores to manage their escalating monthly expenses.
Rivals like Walmart, Amazon, Target, and Aldi are all offering discounts on thousands of products to improve their sales this summer. On the other hand, Costco never offers promotions to its customers, and people must pay membership fees to shop at its stores.
Although that model has been a successful one for the company for many years, consumer patterns are changing right now, and they are having a major impact on Costco's bottom line. That's adding a lot of pressure on the warehouse club as shareholders are being met with disappointing results, which could put the company in huge trouble in the months ahead, according to financial analysts.
This year, Costco's stock already took a beating. Despite its astronomical growth since the pandemic, almost doubling in price, in March, the stock tumbled by 7.6% in a single day as the retail chain missed second-quarter revenue expectations and signaled a negative impact from gasoline prices.
In May, the same occurred as investors observed evidence of a slowdown. So far in 2024, Costco's monthly sales numbers haven't been great, and for nine straight months, they've been below 5%. And while it did look like they were improving in the final months of 2023, in January, they dipped back down to just 3%. This is problematic because Costco's stock trades at 41 times its earnings. At such a high multiple, investors anticipate significant growth. If these figures don't recover swiftly, the stock might experience a substantial drop, as noted by experts in a Motley Fool article."
"Earlier this month, I gave a talk in Colorado. I got in late, but it was OK because I knew they were putting me up in a really nice hotel, one I remembered staying in before. As I walked to my room, I was struck by how run down the hotel was. The furnishings seemed staid. The walls were scuffed. The decor was tired. Even the electronics in the room were old. Weird, I thought, this hotel used to be new and trendy. Then it hit me: It used to be. Time had passed. I might have been in my twenties the first time I stayed there! And then it really hit me: I used to be new and trendy. I’m pretty worn down myself! Those same years have been working on me, too.
There is a similar observation from Seneca. He’s visiting the house he grew up in and is lamenting the poor state of the landscaping. All the trees that lined the road on the way in were dying. Then he realized, this wasn’t a maintenance issue. The trees, which he had planted himself were dying…of old age. And he himself was not in much better shape.
I’m writing this birthday post - my 37th birthday and my 12th post in this series - in a COVID brain fog (I picked it up on my book tour). I’m not great at math, but when I was born, life expectancy was roughly 75 years…that puts me at the halfway point. I know medicine is better these days but that still hits me. It hits me like the vibe of that hotel hallway.
Not that I feel old. If anything, I feel like I am at the height of my powers creatively. I love my life. I love my work. If you told me that this was the halfway point of my life, I’d be grateful. In fact, if you told me this was the end, I’d feel pretty good about that too - I have well more than 37 years to show for the 37 years I’ve gotten. So with that in mind, I thought I’d pass along some lessons I’ve learned this year (and beyond) as I have in previous years (check out 36, 35, 34, 33, 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, and 26).
1. “We’ve got nowhere to be and nothing to do,” my seven-year-old said a couple of weekends ago when we tried to prod him to finish something up. He was right and I’m trying to make this a little bit of a mantra. It’s not exactly true but it’s a nice counterbalance to my more natural inclination of doing, doing, doing.
2. I’m not sure I’ve ever opened a social media app and then after logging off thought, “Wow, I’m so glad I did that.”
3. Conversely, I have never taken a walk without thinking, after, “I am so glad I did that.”
4. George Raveling told me that when he wakes up in the morning, he says to himself, “George, you’ve got two choices today. You can be happy or very happy. Which will it be?”
4b. Voltaire put it another way I love: The most important decision you make is to be in a good mood.
5. I was talking to a friend and he said something I can’t stop thinking about: “Having a contrarian view that turns out to be correct can be a brain-destroying experience.”
6. One more from George: he told me a story from when he was a kid - “George,” his grandmother asked him, “do you know why slave owners hid their money in their books?” “No, Grandma, why?” he said. “Because they knew the slaves would never open them,” she told him. To me, the moral of that story is not just that there is power in the written word (that’s why they made it illegal to teach slaves to read), but also that what’s inside them is very valuable. And the truth is that books still have money between the pages. My entire career has been made possible by what I read.
7. There is a fine line between complacency and using your success to be more deliberate and intentional. Or maybe it’s not such a fine line…that’s why I’m trying to use that advice from my 7-year-old to remind myself that if success doesn’t afford you the luxury of picking your shots (or some autonomy over your schedule), what good is it?
8. Epictetus said that an athlete doesn’t think about whether a throw is good or bad. They just catch it and throw it back. This is life. Everything is a catchable throw. You gotta get there and then you gotta toss it back.
9. Another sports analogy…the great ones tune out the crowd. It’s been a journey for me to wrap my head around tuning out not just the cheers but the reality of the fact that the bigger your audience is, by definition the bigger the amount of people who don’t like you also. (I shudder to think how many people out there think I suck…so I don’t think about it!)
10. “‘Rich’ is how much you see your kids,” I’ve been saying at Daily Dad. “‘Power’ is how much power you have over your own schedule.”
11. I don’t have any goals. None. I have things I like doing—writing, running, etc—and I do them. My only goal is to keep doing those things. Results and accomplishments are the byproduct of this process.
12. Gandhi was once asked what worried him most. His reply? “Hardness of heart of the educated.” When I look around right now, I think of this hardness of heart - the embrace of cruelty, ‘owning the libs,’ etc - as one of the big problems of our time. But that’s always been there. There has always been dark energy in human affairs. What is more alarming is the way that good people have become utterly exhausted and detached as a result of going on eight years of resisting this energy.
13. By the way, that’s what the dark energy is after. They don’t actually hope to convince a majority of anything. They hope to exhaust a majority and then grab the steering wheel for a bit (again or for a bit longer). That’s what happened during Reconstruction. That was what Southern politicians hoped for during Civil Rights. That’s the movement afoot right now (both candidates are the same et al).
14. “You just have to keep going back,” the civil rights attorney John Doar said. You can’t let them wear you down. You can let them make you give up.
15. If success - more knowledge, more ability, more money, a promotion, whatever - doesn’t make you a better person, it’s not success.
16. Along similar lines, a friend of mine was torn about leaving a very important job that a lot of people would kill for, but made him miserable. I told him, “If you can’t walk away, then you don’t have the job…the job has you.”
17. It’s amazing the amount of work we’ll put into humoring other people. It’s amazing what we’ll put up with from other people. It’s amazing how patient (or how many times we’ll repeat ourselves) we can be with a clueless colleague or client. Yet we just cannot bring ourselves to figure out how our own children can stand to watch YouTube videos of people playing video games. We can’t bear to ask them to do something a third time. We just cannot remember the names of our spouse’s friends or that thing they were telling us about. What the hell?
18. Speaking of hotels, you know you can just leave when you’re ready to go. Checking out is for amateurs…
18b. What I’m really saying is figure out how the pros–the people who do whatever you’re doing, be it travel or banking or shopping for a car or whatever–do it and see what efficiencies you can pick up. See what assumptions can be questioned.
19. I struggle with calibrating how to have high standards without hanging oneself on them. Of course, deciding willy-nilly what time you start each day is a recipe for slowly, steadily drifting towards starting later and later. On the other hand, sweating five minutes here or there -especially when what you’re rushing through is school dropoff or traffic that’s outside your control - is a recipe for misery and missing the point. A book, for instance, is a project that takes months and years. Pace yourself accordingly.
19b. This is what John Steinbeck was talking about when he talked about the ‘indiscipline of overwork.’ It was, he said, the falsest of economies (more about that here).
20. Why did it take so long for me to get a water bottle to carry around? What percentage of my issues as a child - and arguments I’ve gotten into as an adult - were the result of mild dehydration?
20b. The other day I had just enough ice in there that the water and the ice had sort of combined into a slush. It just hit me that this was the kind of pleasure that Epicurus was chasing. It’s not much…but it’s so wonderful.
21. Like a lot of men of my generation, I’ve learned about this concept of “mental load” in relationships (the way, unthinkingly, a lot of responsibilities, emotional obligations and tasks are placed on women). This has necessitated a lot of changes in my life, not all of which have been easy. But I will say this concept has also helped me as a boss, realizing ways in which I was carrying mental loads for people/projects and allowed me to make changes in how I manage and what my expectations are for my employees.
22. Which brings me to something I talked about in "Ego Is The Enemy." Almost invariably, making improvements in your personal life or your self-development will make you better professionally. The converse is less often true - getting better and better at what you do is not necessarily going to make you a better spouse, parent, citizen.
23. At Per Se, Thomas Keller put up signs that say “A Sense of Urgency.” While I may need to work on slowing down a bit, I’d say most people could use a little speeding up. One of the things I say at work is “Start the clock” or sometimes, out of frustration, “Why the f*ck have we not started the clock on this?” The point is: Stuff takes time. When you add time in front (by taking too long to start) or in the middle (by taking too long to reply) or at the end (by taking too long to process and start the next thing) you are making it take longer. How long other people take to do their parts is not up to you, how long you take to do your stuff is.
24. All success (indeed all failure, too) is a lagging indicator. What are the choices you’re making now to give you what you want later?
25. Sometimes I’ll take a caffeine mint right before I go for a run or a bike ride. I have a lot of reasons to be glad I’m alive, but that right there is one of them. Epicurus would be jealous.
26. How does this stop you? This was the question the Stoics asked. How does this situation stop you from acting with courage, discipline, justice and wisdom? How could it?
27. I am getting better at recognizing when my brain is not functioning optimally. So like, I can say, when someone tries to explain something to me, “Sorry, I am not in a position to understand this right now.” Or, I can recognize, hey, this is not a good time to have this discussion with my wife. I used to brute force everything, even when I was tired or burned out, but what you find is that this itself just requires more work later, when you have to undo the mistakes you made because you were too fried to think clearly.
28. You are almost certainly not saying enough positive stuff. You’re not saying ‘good job’ enough. ‘Thank you’ enough. ‘I love you enough.’ You are not complimenting, congratulating, or appreciating enough.
29. The fewer opinions you have, the happier you’ll be. Or at least, if you do have to have opinions about things that don’t really matter, hold them lightly and in good humor.
30. Everybody thinks Jimmy Carter was a bad president because he was too nice or too idealistic or whatever, that he should have waited until reelection to do some of the things he did. Turns out the real reason he struggled (and why he wasn’t re-elected) was that he tried to get away with not having a Chief of Staff (read Chris Whipple’s book The Gatekeepers). This is an important lesson, I think: At the end of the day, it comes down to how well-organized you are and how tight a ship you run. Most everything else is secondary.
31. If you want to understand the present moment, go read about the past. Read something about a similar moment from a long time ago. "The Great Influenza" is an amazing book to understand the pandemic. "It Can’t Happen Here" and "All The Kings’ Men" are two great novels to understand the political moment. "Invisible Man" is a great way to understand the conversation about race. Jan Morris’ memoir from 1974 helped me understand what it means to be transgender.
32. I posted a picture of my positive COVID test and a bunch of people got extremely upset. This struck me as really weird because one of the things I have learned as a parent is anything you can do to avoid getting your family sick, you should probably do.
33. But this is just a life lesson too: Not just, why should my kids have to miss out on things they were looking forward to this week because I picked up something on my book tour? Not just why should my wife be rewarded with a fever for holding down the fort while I was gone, but why should my employees have to take something home to their kids, why should an old person I stood next to at CVS end up in the hospital when I could have worked from home and gotten things delivered? And this has nothing to do with this very specific (and strangely controversial) virus but has to do with all colds, bugs, and illnesses, it has to do with how you choose to drive on the road, it has to do with all sorts of little choices we make. The virtue of justice is considering how your actions impact other people. The only positive we should take from the pandemic is how interconnected and interdependent we all are.
34. And by the way, if you look back at COVID - something that killed more than 1.2 million Americans and at least 7 million people worldwide and you think we overreacted, I just don’t know what to say to you.
34b. Should we have done a bunch of things differently? Did the government make a bunch of indefensible mistakes? Did a lot of the assumptions turn out to be incorrect? Yes. But the indefensible reality is that we could have and should have done more, and when we look at this period as a historical moment, that’s what our children and grandchildren will say to us.
35. At the beginning of 2023, I made the decision to push the book I was working on an extra year. It was the first time I’ve ever done that. I think maybe I thought that it would be a nice chill and easy year but if anything, it was much harder. This is a good reminder: We often work and stay busy as an excuse to not deal with harder problems at home and with ourselves.
36. One of my favorite chapters in "Right Thing, Right Now" is the one on ‘coaching trees.’ A successful coach or leader should not just be judged on what they achieve, but also on what the people they discover, scout, hire, and develop are able to achieve. At the end of your life, you’re going to be most proud of the impact you’ve had on people.
36b. I can’t pay Robert Greene back for things he did and the doors he opened for me, but I can pay it forward.
37. Remember, you don’t die once at the end of your life. You are dying every second that passes. We are going in one direction. Don’t rush through it. Don’t miss it. Have something to show for it."
I'm 72 years old, and number 37 really resonated...
"37. Remember, you don’t die once at the end of your life. You are dying every second that passes. We are going in one direction. Don’t rush through it. Don’t miss it. Have something to show for it." And it made me think of this song...
"Why does this galaxy have such a long tail? In this stunning vista, based on image data from the Hubble Legacy Archive, distant galaxies form a dramatic backdrop for disrupted spiral galaxy Arp 188, the Tadpole Galaxy. The cosmic tadpole is a mere 420 million light-years distant toward the northern constellation of the Dragon (Draco). Its eye-catching tail is about 280 thousand light-years long and features massive, bright blue star clusters.
One story goes that a more compact intruder galaxy crossed in front of Arp 188 - from right to left in this view - and was slung around behind the Tadpole by their gravitational attraction. During the close encounter, tidal forces drew out the spiral galaxy's stars, gas, and dust forming the spectacular tail. The intruder galaxy itself, estimated to lie about 300 thousand light-years behind the Tadpole, can be seen through foreground spiral arms at the upper right. Following its terrestrial namesake, the Tadpole Galaxy will likely lose its tail as it grows older, the tail's star clusters forming smaller satellites of the large spiral galaxy."
"We cover several huge stories today: The large-scale construction of re-education camps across America, the Kansas AG suing Pfizer over claims of fraud, the DOJ criminally charging a Texas doctor who blew the whistle on illegal child mutilations in a Texas hospital, and much more. Plus, we have a featured interview with Sarah Westall about mind control and 5th generation warfare. You won't want to miss this."
"Annually, about 2800 lives are saved by airbags. Hurray! Annually, 13.6 million new cars are sold. That probably doesn’t rate a hurray, I mean, not every fact is exciting.
I’m guessing (numbers are sketchy) that it costs approximately $2000 per car to add airbags. This number may be a bit high, but replacing a single airbag can cost $2000, and many new cars have so many airbags that some cars can legally be sold as bubble wrap. By federal law, all passenger autos sold must include airbags. That pencils out to an annual cost of $27.2 billion dollars in additional consumer spending. For airbags.
So, we have all of the math ready for us: how much does it cost to save a human life. (drumroll) About $10 million dollars per life saved.
That’s insane. I mean, I know the goal is a good one, but why is the federal government mandating that Americans spend an average of $10 million dollars per person to save them? Heck, I don’t like most people even $50,000 worth. But $10 million?
This number, and, indeed the federal mandate that airbags be installed on everything on the highway is a product of the “safety at all costs” culture. Their motto is, “If only one human life is saved . . .” which is meant as a rallying cry for whatever uneconomic idea that they want to put forward. An actual economist, Thomas Sowell, made the argument that if you wanted people to drive safely you’d replace the airbag with a big Bowie knife. I tried to verify that quote, but the link that I came up with was . . . my site. So, I couldn’t verify it, except by myself. I’m not sure I’m a reliable source, but, hey.
Hit the brakes too hard? Sorry about that – there are consequences to the driver. Imagine how polite drivers would be then? If not, think of the lowered hospital visits!
The news is simple: no one makes it out of here alive. No one. We cannot escape the one inevitable consequence of living, which is death. The GloboLeftSafetyPatrol thinks that if we spend billions of dollars, we can make Death go away. No, at least in 2024, the only thing that we can do is shoo Death away from our doorstep for a little while by using better diet and exercise and maybe renting an 18-year-old to use as a blood donor to live off of them like a vampire. I heard them called “blood boys” once.
If I brought the concept that actions have consequences up with a GloboLeftist, it would break their mind. They live in a world where money is what other people provide to satisfy all the wants of the world. In my experience, most people want a lot more than the world can afford, so we have to make choices. Not everyone can afford a blood boy. That’s the basis of economics, making the least-bad choice given the information you know at the time.
The second thing that drives the GloboLeftistSafetyPatrol nuts is the idea that people might have a choice. It drives them nuts. What if I wanted to buy a car that didn’t have airbags? I’m the bad guy. Why? Well, for that to be the case, the GloboLeftSafetyPatrol has decided that they own me.
To be clear, I do believe that there are obligations that an individual has with society, and that a society has for an individual. Pure libertarianism in the absence of an infinite expanding frontier is simply not workable, though it has been tried and certainly worked better than communism and with a much smaller body count.
A similar bad choice is involved with the decision to import the swarming masses of parasite carrying (link below) illegals to replace actual citizens. All of the job growth post-COVID has been by immigrants, either of the legal (or, since there are millions and millions of them) more likely illegal aliens.
In one way this is a multiple hit to the economy. First, these aliens, on average consume a lot more resources than are offset by the tax revenue they produce and work that they do. For every illegal crossing the border, the economy has that much more sand poured in the gears in terms of unpaid for medical cost, schooling costs, infrastructure costs, and benefits cost. The average illegal costs far more than the average veteran, and much more than the average veterinarian. Heck, they even cost more than the average vegan, though they’re not so smug.
Second, for every illegal that consumes additional housing, often in conditions of squalor with much higher occupancy than an American family, the housing stock is consumed, raising prices. I read one story about a Canadian apartment where the inhabitants were living in every room in the house, including having a bed in the kitchen where two people lived.
Lastly, the illegals keep wages low. Literally if we import the third world, we become the third world because our wages will eventually drop to third world levels – the same goes for free trade.
Importing illegals (and, let’s face it, many legal) aliens actually makes the economy get worse, and it’s faster the more we import. With lowered demand for housing, prices would go down. With lowered amounts of workers, wages would tend to go up. Take these to the extreme, and California becomes Mumbai, but with fewer cobras.
The GloboLeft loves illegals, because of their compassion – but studies have consistently shown that their compassion is just that, a feeling, and that people on the TradRight are generally those that actually fund and charities that help people. To the GloboLeftists, that’s simply not their problem – government (meaning you and I) should take care of it.
We can’t afford airbags anymore because we’ve used that wealth on...airbags. And illegals. And any one of a thousand things that you or I could think of where the government either mandates waste or pursues policies that are directly detrimental to the voters. I mean, even Sweden is waking up to the concept that importing rapefugees might not be the best policy since there are no-go zones (Malmo) where actual Swedish people aren’t allowed. But what bothers me the most is, if the government keeps wasting the wealth of the country in this fashion and at this rate, I’ll never be able to afford a blood boy."
