The Great Quit

I've kept thinking about the current headline that record numbers are quitting their jobs, while lower-level openings are harder to fill. The biggest thing I noticed last year was that once the lockdowns closed the barber shops, fewer of them reopened. I asked my barber about this when I went in for a haircut yesterday.

He noted that his shop has an empty chair, and they were trying to get someone in to take it over, but so far had been unable. I asked if this was due to the lockdowns. He said yes, he thought that once barbers were prevented from earning a living, they simply had to look for other options, and they wound up liking those options better. He cited a barber who'd worked in that shop but had a sideline of selling vintage clothes. He could keep running the sideline during the lockdown, and once he focused on it exclusively, he earned enough to quit working as a barber.

A local restaurant has had a NOW HIRING COOKS sign out for months. I read that restaurant workers, another group hit by the lockdowns, are in short supply. But I've got to think the reason people are quitting, changing careers, or retiring goes beyond that. According to CNN,

Workers are quitting in search for better pay or better jobs, representing a fundamental shift in America's labor market.

"Labor now has the initiative, and the era of paying individuals less than a livable wage has ended," said Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM US. "This strongly suggests that rising wages are going to be part and parcel of the economic landscape going forward."

An additional factor that the stories don't mention is that the lockdowns prompted people to retire if they could manage it, especially if they found they didn't mind staying home and didn't relish the idea of going back to jobs they didn't like. Yet another is vaccine mandates, which appear to be forcing retirement decisions, especially among public safety and health care workers with the generous benefits that let them make that choice.

And I would imagine that not just lockdowns but work-from-home have broken the associations from habit that kept other people tied to their jobs and their networks of friends at work and changed the balance of factors that kept them from leaving.

Scott Adams has always made the point that it's never realistic to expect you'll get a major raise in your current job. If you want a realistic raise, especially one that pays the market rate for your current skills, you have to get a new job. This is another unintended consequence of the misguided social engineering behind the lockdowns and vaccine mandates. It's raised the level of dissatisfaction with the current social contract across the board. Unfortunately, it's inflationary, especially in that it's effectively raised social, not just financial, expectations.

How Did Hunter Get That Way?

When the story about Ashley Biden's diary broke last weekend, I had a feeling it wasn't going away, notwithstanding its contents, the incoherent, vaguely allusive jottings of a deeply troubled drug addict, are of no probative value for much of anything. But that the FBI would be involved in harassing Project Veritas over something or other in connection with it is effective acknowledgement of its authenticity.

In fact, I think if nothing else, it's also confirmation that the big guy is dumb as a rock -- nobody would touch the story during last fall's campaign, and if the FBI hadn't been sicced on James O'Keefe last week, the whole thing would have stayed forgotten. Now, with the matter in court, it's an ongoing narrative. Dumb as a rock.

The most-referenced passages have the author ruminating over being sexually active and hypersexualized at an early age, with one clear factor being "possibly inappropriate" showers with her father. This suggests to me that the Biden family environment was just an everyday extension of the vignettes we've seen in the news from time to time. For instance, there's the skinny-dipping:

It's the Joe Biden you didn't know — and might not want to see.

Secret Service agents dread being assigned to protect the vice president, in part because Biden's a big fan of skinny dipping, according to a new tell-all book.

. . . "Agents say that, whether at the vice president's residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude," Kessler writes.

"Female Secret Service agents find that offensive."

This in turn echoes reports of Hunter's behavior. This story cites a lengthy e-mail found on Hunter's famous laptop where he claims a woman, apparently his ex-wife,

has told them others [sic] I am a bad influence that I endanger their health that I've been sexually inapopropriate with [redacted] . . . and that she knows that if [redacted] were allowed to come visit me I would be "walking around naked watching porn masturbating and doing drugs in front of her." [redacted] IS NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO VISIT me if [redacted] my 25 yer [sic] old brings her she is only allowed alone with me if my father is there.

From the added perspective of Ashley's diary, it sounds as though the Biden family environment was something from which both Ashley and Hunter were exposed to and learned highly dysfunctional behavior from an early age. The report of skinny dipping both in Delaware and then in the vice president's residence suggests this was a habit of long standing in the Biden home. Indeed, it makes me wonder if the Bidens' regular weekends in Delaware now reflect a potential discomfort with having White House domestic staff and secret service observe other facets of family life.

One could speculate the apples didn't fall too far from the tree. Nor is it surprising that someone in a position to do so would order the FBI to suppress this information, however counterproductive the effort would be. As Aquinas says, sin dulls the intellect, and Biden is dumb as a rock.

"How Do You Solve A Problem Like Kamala?"

I've just had new confirmation for my view that journalists across the spectrum have the mental capability of promising eighth graders. This piece by Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, which I take to be part of the never-Trump right, New Dem mission: Dump Harris?, makes this assertion:

Actually, party leadership has no real way to “engineer the removal of a vice-president,” not unless the VP wants to leave. Vice presidents are elected to their positions, so they cannot be fired. The 25th Amendment only applies to presidents, not vice-presidents, so there is no mechanism to remove a VP for incompetence or any other reason.

Except Spiro Agnew didn't want to leave, but he left. I did a find on "Agnew" in that piece, and Morrissey doesn't mention him at all, which suggests to me that he's furrowed his brow with great effort and completely forgotten about, or maybe never even knew about, the one historical case where party leadership engineered the removal of a vice-president -- in circumstances similar to those that appear to be developing half a century later. According to Wikipedia,

In 1973, Agnew was investigated by the United States Attorney for the District of Maryland on suspicion of criminal conspiracy, bribery, extortion and tax fraud. Agnew took kickbacks from contractors during his time as Baltimore County Executive and Governor of Maryland. The payments had continued into his time as vice president. . . . After months of maintaining his innocence, Agnew pleaded no contest to a single felony charge of tax evasion and resigned from office.

This was characterized at the time as "the first shoe of a two-shoe drop", a somewhat transparent effort to replace Agnew under Section 2 of the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution with a more acceptable mainstream figure who could in turn credibly replace Nixon, whose impeachment and removal or resignation seemed increasingly likely. Morrissey begins his piece, "How do you solve a problem like Kamala?", but if he were brighter than a promising eighth grader, he'd have his answer.

So the Kamala problem is actually the Biden problem, which is a tougher nut to crack. My position continues to be that Biden's public clownishness isn't the result of dementia. The big guy is dumb as a rock, has incredibly poor judgment and weak character, but he won't be removed for senility. If the lizard people want to remove him, they'll find another, easier way; I've got to figure he's got plenty of Agnew style skeletons in his closet besides Hunter. And Kamala has got to be just as easy a case -- she got her rise in the California Democrat machine by shacking up with Willie Brown, after all, and the FBI is still the political tool it's always been.

That stuff is already in somebody's desk drawer.

The development that interests me is this: 11 Dems Smack Biden With Reality Check on Rising Gas Prices

On Monday, 11 Democratic senators wrote to Biden and told him that whatever his green dreams, we needed to “ensure that Americans are able to afford to fill up their cars at the pump in the meantime.” Now that should be self-evident, but not apparently to Joe Biden.

The senators were Jack Reed (D-RI), Bob Casey (D-PA), Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Maggie Hassan (D-NH), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Ed Markey (D-MA), Tina Smith (D-MN), Chris Van Hollen (D-MA), Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Sherrod Brown (D-OH).

The 11 Democrats highlighted how high the gas prices are already now, noting the “national price for a gallon of gasoline is the highest it has been since 2014, with an increase of more than $1 per gallon since this time last year.” They stated further that “in our home states, high gasoline prices have placed an undue burden on families and small businesses trying to make ends meet, and have proven especially burdensome as our constituents continue to recover from the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

A few of these senators may be lizard people themselves, but I'm sure they've all got lizard people on speed dial -- more important, the lizard people's private secretaries have those senators on speed dial, too. What the lizard people are seeing right now is polls showing Trump beating Biden in a 2024 rematch. Farting in front of royalty won't get rid of Biden, nor will pooping his pants in front of the pope, but $6 a gallon for gas will most assuredly do it in 2024, and it could do it sooner for some of those senators in 2022 as well.

As of yesterday, Biden -- or his handlers -- still wasn't listening.

Earlier on Wednesday an inflation report showed the largest annual increase in prices in three decades.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said that prices in October rose 0.9 per cent from September — and more than 6 per cent over the past year, the largest annual rise in 30 years.

. . . He said he believed the problem was temporary, and that the economy would stabilize.

'People are not going out to dinner and lunch and going to local bars because of COVID. So what are they doing? They're staying home and ordering online and they're buying product.' Biden said.

'Well with more people with money buying product and less product to buy, what happens?

'The supply chain's the reason, the answer is you guys, I'll get to that in a minute. But what happens? Prices go up.'

Glib patter and the phony false-teeth grin aren't gonna cut it. The one thing the lizard people fear is the return of Donald Trump. I suspect Kamala will be just the first shoe of the two-shoe drop.

The Last Believer In Götterdämmerung

It appears that on the local, state, and congressional levels, the results of last week's elections effectively ended the fantasy that there could be a rapid enactment of a Great Reset that would make the 2022 midterms irrelevant -- or if indeed the voters did exact revenge at the ballot box, it would be something past the end of the world and also irrelevant. I've been calling this the Götterdämmerung strategy, and naturally, it isn't adult thinking, And the November 2 elections did focus the minds of many adults. According to the Washington Post,

Progressives gave up a lot of ground when they agreed to vote for the $1.2 trillion bill to improve the nation's infrastructure in exchange for a later vote on their top priorities.

Now, some of them are pretty pessimistic about the chances of getting their top priorities included in the larger, roughly $2 trillion social spending bill the leadership and moderates promised would follow. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was only able to push through the infrastructure package after Democrats took a drubbing in last week's off-year elections and President Biden personally stepped in to lobby members.

Privately, aides to some Congressional Progressive Caucus member [sic] described their members as being downcast about passing the reconciliation bill in its current form.

"We're incredibly pessimistic and it's hard to project strength and fortitude as each caucus we are all a part of individually ran us all over on Friday night," a staffer for a progressive caucus member told The Early.

What we're seeing from such reports is that people like the progressive caucus have been forced to recognize that the policy objectives of the Götterdämmerung strategy can't be achieved prior to the 2022 midterms as they had hoped.

But so far, the ones who've gotten this message have been those directly affected by short-term politics in local, state, and congressional elections. President Biden isn't up for election in 2022. I don't believe he's cognitively deficient -- at least from the specific effects of aging -- but he does appear so far to be stubbornly unaware of the potential effect of last week's elections on his own effectively Götterdämmerung agenda, now or after 2022.

For instance, he's still looking at closing another oil pipeline:

At a time when gas prices are soaring and people are demanding answers from the Administration about what they are going to do to help out the problem, the idea that they would be looking into the question of shutting down another pipeline is pure madness. As we noted, this isn’t shutting down a prospective pipeline — this would be shutting down a pipeline that provides more than half the propane used for heating in northern Michigan. Line 5 has been operating since the 1950s and is a major energy supplier to Michigan and the region. It delivers oil from western Canada across Wisconsin, the Great Lakes, and Michigan, and into Ontario.

Biden has already implemented policies that increase fuel costs, which are inflationary, as well as enacting vaccine mandates that will affect the supply chain by firing truckers, as the industry points out. He's able to enact these via executive orders and doesn't need legislative approval, which would be increasingly difficult to obtain in the current environment, especially with Sen Manchin's influence.

The problem for Biden is that the Götterdämmerung agenda is deliberately meant to reduce fossil fuel consumption without, however, replacing the fossil energy with equivalent renewable sources. Thus it simply increases energy prices overall, which increases the price of everything and lowers living standards across the board.

The electorate isn't stupid and fully recognizes this. For observers, the question is simply whether Biden is doing this because he doesn't know what he's doing, or he's doing it because he likes hurting people. Frankly, based on what we're learning about the big guy, I lean toward the latter. A factor that exacerbates this is that Biden, weak of character and even dissipated himself, is at the mercy of his unelected and ideologically driven handlers. But apparently even these are beginning to show some concern:

There must have been some sort of emergency meeting last night at the White House, because Biden administration officials have simultaneously shifted into spin overdrive as news about inflation, energy prices and supply chain issues continue to worsen.

. . . Don’t worry, according to this administration, it’s all been invented by the media (that largely helped carry Biden into office on their shoulders).

On one hand, the economic news can't help but get worse. On the other, too much evidence is continuing to build up, in my view, that Biden isn't suffering from dementia, but other determining character issues must inevitably come out, for instance in the simmering Ashley diary story.

Let's go, Brandon!

What's Happening In This Picture?

On Sunday, I linked to a story in the UK Daily Mail that reported on the Duchess of Cornwall's apparent bewilderment at President Biden's flatulence at a soiree following the Cop26 conference in Glasgow. Something kept bothering me about that story that hasn't gone away.

Consider this. The Duchess of Cornwall, who had been Prince Charles's mistress of long standing prior to their 2005 marriage, has kept a low public profile despite her formal status as Princess of Wales. However, given the state of the queen's health and her age, it's become inevitable that sooner rather than later, the duchess will be the royal consort, with a standing equivalent to Prince Philip. In other words, she'll be a national figure of high dignity and prestige, and I assume she's preparing to ease into that role as we speak.

I've got to think that under those circumstances, even remarks attributed to her by unnamed sources but carried in the UK press must have some level of sanction by the royal family's press office. And as far as I know, the palace hasn't done anything to dissociate the duchess from those remarks.

What's going on? My wife thinks the UK, as well as other US allies on the Afghanistan mission, still resents Biden leaving them high and dry in his precipitous withdrawal. I would guess that's a good part of it, and quite possibly HM Government is tacitly OK with those remarks as well.

But the photo above, from the same Daily Mail story and showing the big guy clapping Prince William on the shoulder with a facial expression suggesting he's just delivered the punch line to an off-color joke, raises just as much concern. I don't normally follow the rules of etiquette for meeting the royal family, but at the back of my mind I had an idea you're not supposed to touch them. Indeed:

[I]t does seem that touching the royals is pretty much off-bounds. Whether by directive or convention, most people restrict themselves to a handshake as opposed to a hearty back slap or bear hug.

Former Australian premier Paul Keating felt the wrath of public opinion and was dubbed the "Lizard of Oz" for touching the Queen's back during a royal tour to Australia in 1992, in what was seen as a purposeful snub and a representation of his country's republican desires.

But apparently there is in fact some flexibility here; the link mentions that Michelle Obama hugged the queen on a state visit. But the other problem I see is the big guy's facial expression. Let's allow that plastic surgery and Botox stiffen the face and limit normal animation, but it's hard to avoid thinking he's projecting an oddly incongruous sense of high cameraderie, again as if they're both roaring at a dirty joke. The prince's face is away from the camera, but I suspect he's smiling politely while smoothly disregarding the hand on the shoulder.

I would go so far as to wonder if, the possible effect of Botox aside, the big guy is blotto, or more descriptively, s***faced. Just sayin'. That might explain as well the extended fart in front of the duchess, and it might even lend some credence to the so far completely baseless rumor that the big guy had an episode of incontinence during his private audience with the pope. But speaking of the Vatican, on October 30 I linked to Raymond Arroyo's remarks on why they limited coverage of the big guy's visit:

“I think the Vatican was concerned that a live meeting, video of a live meeting, might expose Biden to a gaffe. No telling what he might say, and you heard some of the blarney about drinking and whiskey and being an Irishman. They wanted to tamp some of that down,” he continued.

As I say, the Vatican has the best intelligence network in the world.

Completely unrelated, Vice President Harris is in Paris apparently trying to patch things up.

Looking At The Vax Mandate Lawsuits

The coverage of the Fifth Circuit's ruling to stay temporarily the Biden OSHA rule mandating vaccinations for employees of firms with over 100 workers has been remarkably shallow. The basic outline is this:

An appeals court ruled on Saturday to temporarily halt President Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate for businesses with 100 employees or more.

The ruling came from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit after Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) filed a challenge to the mandate requiring employers with over 100 or more employees to get vaccinated or undergo frequent testing directly with the court.

The challenge included the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Utah and South Carolina.

. . . OSHA’s rule includes sending agents to inspect businesses to determine if they are abiding by the mandate. If a business is found to not be in compliance, a company could be fined $136,532.

Paxton argued in the announcement of Texas’s challenge that the mandate goes outside of OSHA’s “limited power and specific responsibilities” and is “flatly unconstitutional.”

The court agreed, finding "grave statutory and constitutional issues” with the mandate and ordering The Biden administration to respond to the group's request for a permanent injunction by 5 PM today. However, I really had to dig to find the legal reasoning behind the suit and the court's action. This is just further basis for my long-held view that reporters on any spot on the political spectrum have the mental capability of promising eighth graders.

It turns out that the Texas argument is very similar to the US Supreme Court's ruling last August 26 blocking the CDC's extension of an eviction moratorium.

The ban on evictions, a two-month order, was issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The pause covers parts of the United States that are experiencing what the CDC calls "substantial" and "high" spread of the coronavirus.

. . . The court's majority said the CDC exceeded its authority with the temporary ban.

The majority opinion says that the CDC for its order relied on "a decades-old statute that authorizes it to implement measures like fumigation and pest extermination."

"It strains credulity to believe that this statute grants the CDC the sweeping authority that it asserts," the majority writes, adding: "If a federally imposed eviction moratorium is to continue, Congress must specifically authorize it."

This decision appears to be based in turn on long-established doctrine that regulatory agencies can't issue regulations beyond their scope. The CDC regulates public health measures. It can't suddenly be put to enforcing an eviction moratorium. The Texas argument, which the circuit court agreed with, is that OSHA generally regulates physical workplace safety, not public health. If Congress wants to expand OSHA's mandate, it must change the existing law.

An additional factor, not mentioned in the Texas case, is that the Secretary of Labor has announced that truckers are sorta kinda exempt, since they work alone in their cabs and don't interact with others. But this is pretty clearly an arbitrary political move intended to prevent mass firings of truckers, which would further disrupt the supply chain. Truckers must interact with other people at shippers' and destination locations, as well as on the road at truck stops.

So far, it appears that almost all of the numerous lawsuits filed against the OSHA vaccine mandate rely on the above doctrine. This is likely reasonable, since it's based on arguments toward which the current US Supreme Court has already been friendly.

However, it leaves aside the question of the HIPAA Privacy Rule, which requires that employee medical records not be accessible by corporate management. This exists on one hand to prevent employees' medical records of, say, HIV or abortion being used against them, but now a medical record of vaccination must be provided to the same employer in one arbitrary circumstance. In addition, more general rules requiring, for instance, fast food workers or bouncers to see confidential medical records for entry to a business are also a problem that isn't addressed in these lawsuits.

We'll have to see how this develops.

No, It Isn't Cognitive Decline

I ran into three vignettes over the weekend that I think provide some insight into the big guy's mental state. The first, via Drudge, is from the UK Daily Mail: Camilla 'hasn't stopped talking about' hearing the President 'break wind' during chat at Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow

An informed source has told The Mail on Sunday that Camilla was taken aback to hear Biden break wind as they made polite small talk at the global climate change gathering in Glasgow last week.

'It was long and loud and impossible to ignore,' the source said. 'Camilla hasn't stopped talking about it.'

The photo above from the story is at least confirmation that this could have taken place. Indeed, the expression on the duchess's face, not to mention the big guy's, suggests it might even have occurred as the shutter snapped.

Curious, I did a web search on flatulence and discovered it isn't normally indicative of an underlying medical condition but can be controlled through diet or via over-the-counter remedies like Beano. What's the story with President Biden?

Naturally, I'm neither a doctor nor a dietician, but in the context of what we already know about him, I would say it's something like the Louis XIV syndrome.

Louis XIV suffered from serious digestive problems from swallowing food without chewing. This caused Louis XIV to break wind very frequently which filled whatever room he was in with horrendous odor. To deal with his digestive problems, Louis XIV was prescribed with laxatives for years. He would frequently visit the toilet up to 15 times a day due to the laxatives.

Notwithstanding, King Louis was definitely a babe magnet. Charming and attractive women sought his company, presumably seeing deeper qualities beyond the stench. My sense of President Biden is that he understands that whatever he does, the press and the political establishment will cover for him, and this is yet another example of the circumstance.

The second vignette is the very strange story of the FBI raids on the residences of James O’Keefe and others connected with Project Veritas as part of an investigation into a possibly stolen diary said to have been kept by President Biden's daughter, Ashley.

O’Keefe says he was approached by a tipster he didn’t know who offered him the diary (or a copy) but who also said they were negotiating a sale of the diary to another site. O’Keefe said Project Veritas tried to verify the diary was real and that the things discussed in it had really happened but ultimately could not do either. “At the end of the day, we made the ethical decision that because in part we could not determine if the diary was real, if the diary in fact belonged to Ashley Biden, or if the contents of the diary occurred, we could not publish the diary in any part thereof,” O’Keefe said.

Project Veritas attempted to give the diary to an attorney for Ashley Biden who refused it and then they wound up giving it to law enforcement so it could be returned to its owner.

The provenance of the manuscript, according to the stories on line, is very similar to that of Hunter Biden's laptop: apparently it was left behind when she moved out of an apartment and made its way to alternate media sources who shopped it around. If true, like the Hunter Biden laptop, this is abandoned property and not stolen. Indeed, once it came to O'Keefe's attention, he attempted to return it to Ashley Biden's attorney and finally gave it to law enforcement himself.

The issue is whether any crime occurred at all, but even if it did, why the FBI would be involved. As various commentators have said, that the FBI would be chasing it down is strong reason to conclude it is authentic. The original site that published it presents it as scans of original handwritten pages. It doesn't appear to have been transcribed at all. Entries suggest someone represented as Ms Biden is trying to recover from indefinite forms of childhood sexual abuse that do apparently include inappropriate showers with her father.

What we do know of the big guy's conduct includes bizarre public invasions of young girls' personal space, hair sniffing, inappropriate touching of adult women, and naked swimming in front of female secret service agents. None of the implied allegations from his daughter's diary comes, if authentic, as a complete surprise. Again, the impression this gives is that Biden has been more or less in the background through most of his public career, but nevertheless has developed a habit of impunity, with a sense that the establishment and press will cover for him.

The problem is that if this investigation results in an indictment, the whole story will definitely come out. There is some deeply flawed judgment involved here, but not cognitive decline. There's a clear sense of actions, potential consequences, and things that apperently need to be kept from public view that we would not see in a case of dementia or disorganized thinking.

The third vignette is the episode of shouting at a reporter who questioned why the big guy called reports of negotiations to pay illegal immigrant families compensation for enforcement actions "garbage":

I would characterize this as "shame rage", anger at being caught in an untruth, but he's also fully aware that if he blows up at the reporter directly, it will look bad. So he just shouts and gestures. This is organized behavior. It isn't intelligent, and it displays poor judgment, but it isn't cognitive decline.

However, I don't think this will go without its own consequences. By the way, this guy has gone to weekly Roman Catholic mass all his life, it would seem. Something's really wrong here, but it isn't medical.