Author: VD

What is good for the fake economy

Is good for the Fake Americans, but no one else in the USA.

According to official US government economic data, the US economy has been growing for 10.5 years since June of 2009. The reason that the US government can produce this false conclusion is that costs that are subtractions from GDP are not included in the measure. Instead, many costs are counted not as subtractions from growth but as additions to growth. For example, the penalty interest on a person’s credit card balance that results when a person falls behind his payments is counted as an increase in “financial services” and as an increase in Gross Domestic Product. The economic world is stood on its head.

It is aggregate demand that drives the economy. Payments made on a rise in interest rates on credit card balances from 19{1603ff2a6a588d58223e197ffd7f0c0e99c41a7d65ea3396012a60862884ee77} to a 29{1603ff2a6a588d58223e197ffd7f0c0e99c41a7d65ea3396012a60862884ee77} penalty rate reduce consumers’ ability to contribute to aggregate demand by purchasing goods and the services of doctors, lawyers, plumbers, electricians, and carpenters. Contrary to logic, the fee is magically counted in the “financial services” category as a contributor to GDP growth. The extortion of a fee that reduces aggregate demand lowers GDP, but builds paper wealth in the financial services sector.

GDP growth is also artificially inflated by counting as GDP abstract concepts that do not produce income streams. For example, for homeowners the US Department of Commerce estimates the rental values of owner-occupied housing, that is, the amount owners would be paying if they rented instead of owned their homes, and counts this imputed rent as GDP.

These and other absurdities have caused economist Michael Hudson to conclude correctly that the “financial reality of how the U.S. economy works is no longer captured in GDP statistics.”

You may recall that I pointed out this sort of thing repeatedly back in 2008 and 2009. We have been living in the Great Depression 2.0 ever since, even though the massive financialization of the economy has managed to disguise that being exposed in the statistics.

This is why I no longer pay any attention to the statistics or comment upon them. CPI is fictitious, GDP is fictitious, and Z.1. has been rendered useless. It would be about as meaningful as commenting on the fictional economics of the post-imperial Star Wars universe.

The reason that the fake growth has to continue indefinitely is because once the paper gains are correctly written off and accounted for as losses, the whole structure begins to collapse.

A pity conservatives don’t follow suit

PewDiePie is done with Twitter now too:

On Sunday he announced he will be quitting YouTube in 2020.

And a day later, PewDiePie wiped his Twitter account of all its tweets, keeping the profile there only to ‘prevent fake accounts’.

The online sensation, 30, had been using Twitter regularly but unfollowed all of the accounts he once followed.

Good for him. Twitter is a cesspool. And on a not-entirely-unrelated note, the first SG2 invites to Unauthorized Annual members have gone out. The SG1 subscribers will be invited next. Once all the Unauthorized members have been invited, we’ll look at opening it up to everyone who is interested. This is a process that will take several weeks at a minimum, and we want to go step-by-step in order to manage the initial influx, so please be patient.

And yes, Castalia Deluxe members will also be receiving Bronze SG2 subscriptions in due course. Complete with a special book icon for the readers….

Another Democrat defects

That makes two in one day:

State Senator John Yudichak of Luzerne County, Pennsylvania said that he will be switching his registration to become an Independent. He will caucus with the Republican majority. Yudichak has criticized an increasingly liberal Democratic caucus that has led to this decision…. Yudichak’s announcement comes less than 24 hours since we learned that New Jersey Democratic Congressman Jeff Van Drew has also made a decision that speaks volumes.

No wonder the god-emperor welcomes the impeachment process. His enemies are literally shrinking before his eyes.

Panic in the Deep State

Reading the media tea leaves:

Former CIA officer and counter-intelligence expert Kevin Shipp says that former Obama Administration Attorney General (AG) Eric Holder gave a big Deep State panic signal when he wrote in an Op-Ed last week in the Washington Post trashing current AG William Barr and his top prosecutor John Durham.

Shipp explains, “This is very significant. We all remember that Holder was Obama’s right hand man. Eric Holder was Barack Obama’s enforcer. The fact that Holder comes out this quickly after the Inspector General (IG) Horowitz Report comes out . . . and makes this veiled threat against Durham’s reputation. The fact that Eric Holder came out and made this statement is a clear indication to me they are running scared. We have to understand it was Eric Holder that Barack Obama used to target the heads of corporations that spoke out publicly about Barack Obama. We know Holder was held in ‘Contempt of Congress.’ He spied on AP reporters, ran guns to drug cartels and blacked out the information. He spied on over a hundred journalists, and on and on we go. . . . They (Deep State) are convinced there are going to be indictments. Secondly, there is AG Barr’s outrage over (IG) Horowitz’s report and what it did not do. He made statements that there was spying and actions by government officials that need to be criminally looked into. Barr’s outrage over this shows me that there are going to be indictments, and that he is taking this seriously. Again, when Holder comes out and puts out this bombshell in the Washington Post, which is another indication that indictments are coming. John Brennan, former Obama Administration CIA Director, is going to be at the top of the list.”

I find this credible because it is entirely obvious that the DNC-media-federal bureaucracy complex is observably in a complete tizzy about something. What that something is, we do not know, but it may have something to do with what the Q Army calls The Storm. Or it could be something else, but regardless, they are clearly terrified about something that is currently in the works.

Relax, McRapey

John Scalzi looks back over the last ten years of his literary career and devotes nearly one-third of the article – 31.6 percent – to his critics:

Any discussion of my career over the last decade needs to include the antipathy of me by a certain cadre of right-wing SF writers and fans, a group which overlaps (considerably) with the “Sad/Rabid Puppies” who publicly shat themselves so dramatically during the middle bit of the decade with regard to the Hugo Awards and other aspects of the business and community of SF/F literature. I noticed the first real push of the antipathy after Redshirts won the Hugo, and certain dudes suggested that Redshirts won because I had sucked up to the Social Justice Warriors sufficiently, rather than because, say, it was a popular book riffing off a beloved science fiction franchise in a clever and affectionate way, written by a writer who’d been nominated for Best Novel a few times before.

In the full bloom of the Puppy beclownery there was more of the same, a fair amount of snide discussion of my sexuality and gender, and general allegations that my sales numbers were inflated and/or propped up by bulk purchases by my publisher, which, by the way, was doing terribly and would soon be out of business. My personal favorite bit of this was when there was a long discussion about how my 2014 novel Lock In had been a massive sales failure and that Tor was about to drop me as an author; this discussion was happening simultaneously with me negotiating with Tor for my multi-book, multi-year, multimillion-dollar contract (which included not one but two sequels to Lock In). When the contract was announced, the narrative shifted to how much more I would have made self-publishing, and then later how I’d never really make as much money as the public figure of the contract. Which, well, okay, dudes. In time most of them have left off this nonsense, but there are a few of them still out there on this bullshit — why, I was chucklingly misgendered just this week!

What is it about me that bugged and in some cases still bugs these dudes? If you ask them they will give you all sorts of reasons, but having dealt with this nonsense for a better part of a decade I’ll tell you it’s mostly envy, and frustration about the state of their own careers, which they feel should be better because they write the sort of science fiction they’ve always loved and assume others still love as well. And which I also do, so why the hell do I get the big contracts and they’re (mostly) left to scrape by? There has to be something else involved — thus the secret cabal of SJWs, bulk purchases, also I’m gay and/or trans and thus not a man at all, hur hur hur. Add to this the fact that at least a couple of these dudes legit dislike me for other reasons (most of which boil down to the fact they can’t argue their way out of a paper bag and at one point or another I pointed that out to them in public), and some of them just happen to be bigoted as fuck, and you’ve got a fairly toxic mix of resentment and complete bullshit.

This hasn’t affected my career in any meaningful way — see the summary earlier in the piece — but on a personal level it could be tiresome. I’m guilty of taunting some of these dickheads on occasion, because they deserve the taunting and because I know my successes irritate the shit out of them. But mostly I’m glad it’s largely done and over with, save a few stragglers. I think after a certain point it just became difficult to argue that I was a failure, and that their doing so just accentuated their own relative positions, which they preferred not to do. And also, after a certain point you do just have to get on with your life and write your things. To the extent that some of them are doing that, good for them. Those that aren’t, well. Bless your hearts, dudes.

As always, Ol’ Johnny is lying and attempting to retroactively spin the narrative when he thinks no one is going to call him on it. No one was ever saying that he was a failure – quite to the contrary, he is almost certainly science fiction’s most financially successful grifter of the last fifty years.

What we said, and still say to this day, and what we can prove, is that he is a serial liar, a fraud, and a literary mediocrity. That’s all there ever was to it. And the reason no one even bothers to criticize him any more is because it is obvious to everyone that he is over and done. He can relax now. The hounds, like everyone else, have lost interest in him.

Let Scotland go

Boris Johnson and the Tories are making a massive blunder if they fail to support the Scottish National Party and embrace Scottish independence:

Already this morning the Twittersphere buzzes with talk of a renewed Scottish independence campaign, while the SNP yesterday announced its support for another referendum if a “material change in circumstances” arose between Scotland and the greater union. Surely a landslide victory by the Tories — who are widely disliked by the Scots — and a flashing green light for a deeply unpopular Brexit represent exactly such a change.

Scotland and England are not magically joined at the hip. If the Scots don’t want Brexit, don’t want Boris Johnson, and don’t want the Tories, who says the current political makeup of the UK is forever and unchanging? Political arrangements are not something to impose on reluctant, disbelieving people. If we favor independence and political self-determination only when we like the results, the only liberty on offer is the liberty to agree. But political universalism is an abstraction, and an arrogant one at that.

If Scots choose Holyrood over Westminster, or even Brussels over Holyrood, who are we to object?

Given the way in which the Scots have been the primary engine of left-wing power in the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson can secure not only the restoration of British sovereignty, but a multi-generational defeat of the Labour Left by excising the Scottish nation from the British crown.

This will, of course, mark the penultimate stage in the end of the British empire, but the empire has been shrinking steadily since the beginning of WWII. And there is absolutely no point fighting the nationalist trend in favor of a dying and discredited imperialism.

The Scots deserve to rule themselves. Let Scotland go!

Mailvox: Kurgan-Dyer debate

I will wait to read the transcript before even attempting to develop an opinion of the recent debate between Jay Dyer and The Kurgan, but this was a summary sent to me by one witness to it:

It was an interesting watch for me as an Ilk that has consumed a sizable amount of Dyer’s content and appreciates his niche.  Similar to you, my church background has been American Protestant Evangelical. Lately I’ve been studying the Orthodox faith, due in no small part to Jay’s content.

Kurgan has accused Jay of being a lying gamma sperg. What I witnessed today went a ways toward confirming two out of three. I simply don’t know enough about Catholicism to follow verbally what was flying around (especially from Jay), much less sedevacantism. So I have no idea if Jay is lying or not about Catholic law. He could simply be accurate or inaccurate.

But Jay’s performance was demonstrably gamma sperg. He was clearly triggered. For long stretches it felt like he was channeling Shapiru. I don’t watch a lot of debates, so I’m not sure shouting ‘You just lost the debate!’ is a validated method. Kurgan’s demeanor was consummate adult. And by the end seemed like an adult managing a child’s temper tantrum.

The chat was funny from a certain standpoint. It was like an audience of homeless people and junior highers having to sit through a theology debate. They just started giving each other wedgies and complaining about boredom. Can’t say I’m happy about it. But it probably needed to happen.

If you happened to watch the debate and would like to express your opinion about it, please feel free to do so. But be judicious and specific, as the sort of fanboy posturing one sees on Twitter will not be permitted. And neither of the two participants will be permitted to comment here on their own performances.