Year: 2023

Puzzled by the Productivity Slump

Clown World’s economists are perplexed by the “strange and awful” 50-year decline in US construction productivity.

Measurement error alone cannot explain the decline in US construction productivity over the last 50 years, with evidence pointing to the sector’s deteriorating ability to transform intermediates into finished products, and to the allocative inefficiency of construction inputs.

Despite aggregate productivity for the US economy having doubled over the past 50 years, the country’s construction sector has diverged considerably, trending downward throughout that period. And this is no slight decrease. Raw BEA data suggest that the value added per worker in the construction sector was about 40 percent lower in 2020 than in 1970 (see Figure 1).

How can a sector like construction, with average value-added of 4.3 percent of GDP between 1950 and 2020, experience such a precipitous decline in productivity relative to the rest of the economy? To answer this question, researchers have focused on issues relating to data measurement, hypothesizing that measurement errors largely explain this phenomenon. This new research updates some of those efforts and, importantly, extends them to investigate other hypotheses to find the following:

Using measures of physical productivity in housing construction (i.e., number of houses or total square footage built per employee), the authors confirm that productivity is indeed falling or, at best, stagnant over multiple decades. Importantly, these facts are not explained by the incidence of price measurement problems. Instead of data error, the authors investigate two other possible explanations. First, they find that the construction sector’s ability to transform intermediate goods into finished products has deteriorated.

And second, the authors describe the curious fact that producers located in more-productive areas do not grow at expected rates. Indeed, rather than construction inputs flowing to areas where they are more productive, the activity share of these areas either stagnates or even falls. The authors suggest that this problem with allocative efficiency may accentuate the aggregate productivity problem for the industry.

Interestingly enough, US hourly wages have also been stagnant since 1972. Now, whatever could possibly have happened to the labor force that would make it less productive?

It couldn’t possibly be immigration effecting a qualitative change in the workforce, could it? It’s not possible that a predominantly white male work force might be more productive than a sexually diverse, nationally diverse work force, right? No, surely not, because we are reliably informed that immigration is always good for the economy. Just maybe not for wages and productivity and per capita wealth.

But the resultant growth in debt and spending makes up for it, so it’s all good, right?

Even while Clown World is collapsing and burning before their eyes, these wicked morons will be convinced that everything is fine because their spreadsheets produce the expected numbers.

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Michael Myers was the Good Guy

It turns out that “Jamie Lee Curtis” (real name: Jamie Lee Schwartz) was actually the evil monster in Halloween.

Hollywood star Jamie Lee Curtis has deleted an Instagram post after followers noticed a photo in the background depicting a naked child stuffed in a box. In her original Instagram post, the actress revealed she tested positive for COVID. She also explained why she posted a picture of her office, though she didn’t address the bizarre photo in the background.

“Ok. This is a weird post. But I have Covid, so f*ck it. During one of the SAG nomination panels for @everythingeverywheremovie I told the story of how I ended up with my office furnished with my beautiful Pollack chairs from that movie,” she wrote.

“I mentioned if people followed me, that was not a cheap trick to try to get people to boost my numbers, but I couldn’t figure out how else to get the picture out into the world, that I would post a picture of them on my IG in my offices for @comet.pictures and I am a truth teller so here you go.”

Jamie Lee Curtis recently revealed that her son Thomas transitioned into a woman and now goes by the name Ruby.

These Hellmouth denizens are not only fake and gay, they are wicked and degenerate. Those who hate the Good, the Beautiful, and the True can’t help but expose themselves sooner or later due to their instinctive preference for the Evil, the Ugly, and the Lie.

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Why They Take the Ticket

And all you have to give them is your soul.

Daily Wire CEO Jeremy Boreing published a video Thursday disclosing and discussing a binding contract the company offered to podcast host Steven Crowder. The contract reveals that Daily Wire offered Crowder $50 million over four years. The deal included a two-year company option that, if exercised, would continue to pay Crowder $12.5 million a year.

Boreing expressed this was DW’s opening bid. The company was likely to bid — much — higher during negotiations, he states. Boreing posted the video in response to comments Crowder made on Tuesday about an unnamed conservative media company offering him a contract that contained, what he described as, penalties if Big Tech were to demonetize his content.

Crowder accused the company of enabling censorship with the following terms:

“If any of the major platforms (e.g. YouTube, Facebook, Apple Podcasts, Spotify) issues a content strike (other than a “companywide” content strike) such that Crowder content cannot be monetized on such platform, and the company is not able to resolve the issue within 90 days, then the fee will be reduced by 25% from that point forward.”

Precisely, the contract would allow the company to reduce Crowder’s salary if a content strike were to decrease the revenues the brand could generate from his program. For background, Crowder boasts nearly 6 million subscribers on YouTube. He has notoriously feuded with the video service over demonetization, censorship, and suspensions.

This makes it clear why YouTube banishes people like Owen Benjamin. He was over 300k subscribers when he was banned, and he probably would have been well over 1 million subscribers by now, which would have been worth about $2 million annually from a ticket-distributor like Daily Wire.

Of course, the money isn’t actually real, as evidenced by the fact that it has to be returned to sender upon the relocation of the ticket taker to Hell. Make no mistake. This isn’t genuine success. This is the satanic illusion of success that is on offer as bait.

That is why I always find it mystifying when people claim that I am jealous of the likes of John Scalzi, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, or Steven Crowder. Because you literally could not pay me to take their place.

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A Portrait in Projection

The Kiev regime puppet is told to suggest Vladimir Putin is appearing in front of a green screen:

Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky claimed that he was not certain if Vladimir Putin actually holds the office of president of Russia, or is even alive. The Kremlin dismissed the remark as an expression of Zelensky’s wishful thinking.

Russia and Putin are “a big problem” for Zelensky, so it’s natural that he “would prefer that neither Russia nor Putin existed,” Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman told journalists on Thursday.

He was reacting to a claim that Zelensky had made earlier in the day during his virtual appearance at the Ukrainian Breakfast, an event hosted on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos by the Victor Pinchuk Foundation.

“I am not certain that the president of Russia, who makes occasional appearances on TV in front of a chroma key is actually [Putin],” the Ukrainian leader said, using the term for a background replacement technique colloquially known as ‘green screen.’

This amounts to a confession by Zelensky concerning his own virtual appearances. They always project their own actions onto others.

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The Subversion of the Hero

And the intrinsic immorality of the Marvel hero. One thing you’ll notice about Arkhaven heroes compared to Marvel and DC heroes: they are absolutely willing to kill the wicked without hesitation or remorse. This is an excellent piece on the insidious modern subversion of the Western hero:

Classical heroes kill their enemies. This is really their most essential job. The role of the hero archetype is to slay dragons and evil kings. Their purpose is to root out evil. They may show mercy on occasion, but this is not their primary role. Mercy-giver is the role of the king. The Folk Hero’s job is a violent one for the sake of good.

However, your typical modern era hero story almost always includes a moment where the villain must be offered a chance for “rehabilitation”, or must stand trial, or where the hero does everything in his power to avoid using deadly force out of some moral reluctance. The modern hero is suspiciously full of reluctance to stamp out evil.

This “Marvel morality” is everywhere.

Try paying attention to this next time you watch a modern action movie. There is almost universally a moment in every film where the main character will show some reluctance to kill a truly evil villain (never mind the countless nameless villains the hero kills- this sentiment is reserved only for the main antagonist). This is a truly inexplicable trope. What is reveals is a reluctance on the part of modern Western culture to define actual evil. Everything must be nuanced. When we knew what evil was, heroes did not have to waste time on these silly moral dilemmas. There was no question on whether the heroes dead wife and children “would have wanted” him to take revenge on their killer, no question on whether the tyrant should be violently thrown down from the slain king’s throne. Questions like these would not have even been asked a couple generations ago, but in modern media a hero that kills evil without hesitation is unheard of. It would offend our modern sensibilities.

Think of Superman, or Batman. One of their defining traits is an unwillingness to kill. Even to kill evil, heinous villains. Its fine for Superman to destroy an entire city and likely countless civilians, but not to actually kill the main antagonist. Why? It is because they are products of a Neo-liberal marvel morality.

You could look to The Chronicles of Narnia as an example. In Prince Caspian, Peter duels the tyrannical king Miraz in a single combat. During the duel Miraz is traitorously slain by his own nobles, but there is never any question that King Peter is absolutely trying to kill Miraz. There is never any discussion between Peter and Caspian about sparing Miraz’s life- why would they?

However, the movie version of the story completely changes the this into a scene that could only have been written in the 21st century. No, Peter is not too “cowardly to take life”. This is a ridiculous question.

Peter saying Mira’s life is “not mine to take”. This is ridiculous. They are in a single combat to the death for the rule of Peter’s kingdom. Of course it is his to take. It is in fact his duty to do so.

Ok, he hands the sword to Caspian. This is fine I guess. Peter is not abandoning his duty, but letting the exiled prince avenge his father. Maybe the scene will turn out ok?

Nope.

Miraz then implies that Caspian killing him means “he has the makings of a Telmarine King”. This is ridiculous. Only a Telmarine King would slay a traitorous, fratricidal tryant? What?

Caspian says “not one like you”. As if avenging his father is comparable to his uncle’s crime of regicide and fratricide? This is ridiculous.

Then, Caspian inexplicably, ridiculously, spares his traitorous uncle in what appears to be some demonstration of high moral character.

Why even write this scene at all? Why show both Peter and Caspian spare Miraz when neither of them do in the book? Why not just have Mira’s nobles murder him during the duel?

Because in the eyes of the writers of this science, this makes them noble. For some reason, the hero must be shown being merciful to the main antagonist. Because in our modern eyes, for them to single-mindedly seek his destruction would be apprehensible. Note that both Peter and Caspian kill numerous other Telmarines in this movie with no moral qualms, Telmarine soldiers that have all wronged them less than their Lord Miraz did. This scene is in the movie for no reason other than to shove 21st century Neo-Liberal values down the audience’s throats.

This scene is awful.

Mercy is not a bad thing. But it is almost always used inappropriately in modern media like this. It is used not as true mercy, but as nauseating moralizing.

As a result of this inability to define true evil and treat it as such, our heroes must also become less heroic. Our popular media is filled to the brim with antiheroes.

A real folk hero suffers none of these delusions. If Superman were a real hero, he would kill evil men, not let them live to murder another day.

Indeed. Even as a child, I found it infuriating how Hollywood never permitted a hero to take decisive action, but only allowed him to use lethal force after first defeating, then mercifully sparing, the villain, who would then inexplicably attempt, and fail, to kill the hero, leaving the latter no choice but to finally finish off the villain. The first Lethal Weapon is a particularly egregious example of this cinematic trope.

In fact, at this point Batman should really be regarded as an accomplice and an enabler of the Joker, given how many times he has spared him and thereby permitted him to murder again and again and again. One might not unreasonably suspect of Batman of harboring secret sympathies for the Joker’s attitude toward the human race.

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Troisième Guerre Mondiale

A French analyst is one of the few quasi-mainstream thinkers who appears to understand the true scope of the current conflict.

Emmanuel Todd was not at Davos. But it was the French anthropologist, historian, demographer and geopolitical analyst who ended up ruffling all the appropriate feathers across the collective West these past few days with a fascinating anthropological object: a reality-based interview. So here’s Todd’s concise Greatest Hits.

  • A new World War is on: By “switching from a limited territorial war to a global economic clash, between the collective West on one side and Russia linked to China on the other side, this became a World War”.
  • The Kremlin, says Todd, made a mistake, calculating that a decomposed Ukraine society would collapse right away. Of course he does not get into detail on how Ukraine had been weaponized to the hilt by the NATO military alliance.
  • Todd is spot on when he stresses how Germany and France had become minor partners at NATO and were not aware of what was being plotted in Ukraine militarily: “They did not know that the Americans, British and Poles could allow Ukraine to fight an extended war. NATO’s fundamental axis now is Washington-London-Warsaw-Kiev.”
  • Todd’s major give away is a killer: “The resistance of Russia’s economy is leading the imperial American system to the precipice. Nobody had foreseen that the Russian economy would hold facing NATO’s ‘economic power’”.
  • Consequently, “monetary and financial American controls over the world may collapse, and with them the possibility for the US of financing for nothing their enormous trade deficit”.
  • “The fundamental dilemma of the American economy: it cannot face Chinese competition without importing a qualified Chinese work force.”
  • And that bring us, once again, to globalization, in a manner that Davos roundtables were incapable of understanding: “We have delocalized so much of our industrial activity that we don’t know whether our war production may be sustained”.

Of course he wasn’t at Davos. Davos isn’t listening to anyone who is capable of seeing the situation with clear eyes. Todd is not even remotely wrong. But if he’s selling 100,000 books in Japan based on those entirely obvious conclusions, I should really consider finding myself a Japanese publisher.

Anyhow, if you’re wondering why some of the more historically perspicacious intellectuals appear to be so wildly off-base with regards to their observations of the current situation, a recent conversation I had with one individual proved very illuminating. My impression is that it mostly comes down to the elder generation not being able yet to comprehend any sort of conflict between a) a regional war of the US and its allies against a single regional power, and, b) mutually assured nuclear destruction.

As a general rule, they believe that the USA of 2022 is still, more or less, the USA of 1950, only with momentarily ascendant leftists and better ethnic food. They see the qualitative problems very well, but don’t recognize the scale of the quantitative and issues, which is why their analyses, and their solutions, tend to rely upon some sort of 1980s Reagan-style renaissance that isn’t even a possibility anymore.

From centenarian clowns like Kissinger to twenty-something Republicans who read Victor Davis Hanson, all of the proposed “solutions” to the global war between Clown World and the other 80 percent of the planet led by the Sino-Russian alliance are comically irrelevant. Failing to understand either the nature or the scope of the conflict, it is their reliance upon their familiar axioms and the continuation of the current global infrastructure that is leading them astray.

But very important structural things, have fundamentally changed, as I pointed out on Monday’s Darkstream following a highly unusual statement by the Saudi Finance Minister.

Andy told me back in September 2022: “The dollar hegemony is right about ready to break when you realize that Saudi Arabia is about to join the BRIC nations. Do you think Biden is going to fly there to ask for more oil? He went there to beg them not to join BRIC.”

“The dollar was made reserve currency only because of our protection of the Saudi kingdom,” Andy continued. He then noted astutely that Saudi Arabia had signed new protection agreements with Russia. “All of the Eastern European countries that have repatriated their gold. They’re all part of the EU but they all trade their own currency. They’re all going to break away from the Western system,” he added.

And now it looks like Andy was right: it appears Saudi Arabia has just issued a death knell to the exclusivity of the petrodollar as we once knew it – the first of several dominoes that needs to fall before the U.S. is exposed financially as an emperor with no clothes.

Saudi Arabia Just Killed The Petrodollar, 18 January 2023

It may be worth noting here that my original prediction of 2033 for the end of the political entity known as the USA was predicated on the expected lifespan of the post-Bretton Woods dollar. I don’t recall anyone taking that timeframe very seriously at the time, but if it was an option, it would probably be considered in the money now.

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He Did Not Buck the Trend

Jeremy Clarkson publicly pleads guilty, hoping for absolution. Guess what happens next!

One of the strange things I’ve noticed in recent times is that whenever an MP or a well-known person is asked to apologise for something, no matter how heartfelt or profound that apology may be, it’s never enough for the people who called for it in the first place. So I’m going to try and buck the trend this morning with an apology for the things I said in a Sun column recently about Meghan Markle. I really am sorry. All the way from the balls of my feet to the follicles on my head. This is me putting my hands up. It’s a mea culpa with bells on.

Deep movie voiceover: he did not buck the trend.

Headlines:

  • The Sussexes’ pointed put down to Jeremy Clarkson as they reject his emailed apology for column saying he hated Meghan – as it emerges Amazon Prime ‘is set to drop the presenter’
  • Has ITV now axed Jeremy Clarkson? Channel says it has ‘no further commitments’ to Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and star after next series and postpones celebrity specials – as Amazon cancels press call for Clarkson’s Farm amid Meghan column backlash
  • Is this the real reason Amazon ‘axed’ Jeremy Clarkson?

It’s not as if someone hasn’t written a book about this very situation, after all.

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History, As Written by the Winners

Those who lied about NATO’s previous war are now lying about the current one.

At the time of the NATO war against the Serbian nation I was working for the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, a kind of a UN think tank for the Conference of Disarmament. While this institute was not part of UNPROFOR, we had access to internal UNPROFOR documents. Furthermore, at that time I also had access to classified documents from the Swiss Strategic Intelligence Service. Finally, and unbeknownst to my various bosses, I also had personal friends who were Serbs and Russians with access to all sorts of interesting info. In other words, at the time I knew for a fact that the media was lying about this war and I can now personally confirm the following (though I cannot offer any proof):

  • The bombings of the Markale market in Sarajevo were false flag operations and the UNPROFOR specialists in the field saw through the propaganda and reported that up the chain of command which, of course, classified and ignored these reports.
  • The “Srebrenica genocide” never happened, but scores of Muslims did get killed, most while retreating through the woody hills towards Gorazde and in some cases there were executions of POW, the latter were ordered by CIA plants in the Milosevic administration. It was a carefully prepared PSYOP to give the West a reason to attack for “humanitarian reasons”, the same role MH17 fulfilled years later.
  • The (in)famous Racak massacre never happened. The EU monitors quickly realized that and they did report this up their own chain of command which, of course, classified and ignored these reports. Except that some of these folks were friends of mine and told me the truth 🙂 What actually happened was a gun battle between KLA terrorists and Serbian units.
  • Just like in the Ukraine today, the West pumped a lot of money, weapons and “volunteers” into Bosnia, in direct violation of plenty of UNSC Resolutions. The entire UN was hijacked, which was made especially easy with clowns like Eltsin or Kozyrev sitting in the Kremlin.
  • When NATO and the Croats attacked the UNPAs in Croation the UNPROFOR forces were ordered by their respective national commands to step aside and not interfere. The Serbs had agreed to give over their heavy weapons and be placed under the “protection” of the UN. We all know what happened after that.
  • NATO provided aircraft to bring in hundreds of flights al-Qaeda terrorists into Bosnia, working hand in hand with Turkey and, alas, Iran (Iran’s stance on Bosnia is, in my opinion, the worst mistake ever made by the Islamic Republic who did not have the courage to resist the hysterics in the Muslim world triggered by US PSYOPs).
  • EU “observers” were mostly officers of western intelligence agencies. The same goes for a lot of personnel in the so-called “humanitarian” organizations, especially MSF. And, of course, this is also true for many “journalists”. Still, while some of them did very honestly report what they saw, many were simply collecting intelligence and even participating in covert support for the Wahabis in Bosnia (and Chechnia, by the way).

Why is this important today? Because we have many of the same actors operating in the Ukraine and elsewhere.

Keep these things in mind when the inevitable false flag is produced in order to inflame American patriots against Clown World’s enemies in Russia, China, Venezuela, and now Saudi Arabia. Remember the real history of the Maine. Remember the fake horror stories about the Kuwaiti incubators. Remember the real history of Pearl Harbor and the Gulf of Tonkin. Understand that pointing your justifiable anger elsewhere, at anyone except those who have actually invaded, enervated, and financially pillaged your country, is one of Clown World’s top priorities.

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