Tag: inflation

Of Ricotta Cheese and the Seventh Circle of Hell

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What to write about tonight?  Today was a day for chores.  One was my semi-annual trip to the dental hygienist.  Such a strange thing we have to do.  Twice a year someone has to torture you with dental tools while trying to make small talk with someone who can’t speak.  You know it’s an interesting thing.  Someone who’s good at that must be a gifted person.  My hygienist only sees me twice a year but somehow manages to continue the conversation from where it left off six months earlier.  Quite the trick.  Either she has an incredible memory or she takes notes.  Either way it’s kind of remarkable.  And it’s funny.  This time she told me that my teeth and gums looked better than usual.  For some reason this slight praise filled me with a sense of accomplishment.  I was now some kind of flossing ninja!

Anyway, when I got back home with my slightly whiter teeth and my “free” new toothbrush I read through the news articles and I even commented on the OPEC move to screw Joe Biden to the wall.  And that was fun.  But nothing struck me as the nucleus of a post.

So, I watched an old movie that I recently bought.  I got it used at a library sale.  I’d never consider buying it new because it’s not that good.  It’s “Constantine” with Keanu Reeves as a freelance exorcist who battles demons while smoking a lot of cigarettes.  It’s really a goofy concept.  Constantine has a gift that allows him to see demons.  But he is damned to Hell for a suicide attempt he sort of succeeded at when he was a boy.  He was “dead for two minutes.”  During those two minutes he experienced a lifetime of torment in Hell before the doctors revived him.  In this movie he is battling semi-demons, a renegade angel and lung cancer.  As I said it’s a goofy movie but every three years or so I seem to watch it again.  Another problem with the movie is it costars Shia LaBeouf.  Well, what can you do?  But it was a good way to stop thinking about Joe Biden for an hour or two.

Camera Girl put together a nice manicotti and meat ball dinner for us.  Now that’s comfort food.  So, I complemented her on this delicious meal and then she told me that the cost for the meal had doubled in a little over a month.  She said, for instance, that ricotta cheese went from $3.50 for a container to $7.00.  Being the frugal and practical shopper, this kind of thing strikes her as madness.  I started to explain to her how energy costs associated with the green new deal cascaded through the economy and caused multiple increases in the costs of food because of transportation, refrigeration, fertilizer and of course the ever-popular supply chain problems.  She gave me a look as if I had blamed it on the demons from the Constantine movie.  So, I stopped beating that drum and told her we’d find a way to save money by eliminating something “scholastic.”  That’s the word she uses for anything that she deems pseudo-intellectual.  Which covers anything that I am interested in that she is not.

But there was Joe Biden again.  Annoying my wife by sabotaging the economy.  This monster had doubled the price of ricotta cheese in a single month.  Looking back at the logic of the Constantine movie I decided that for this monstrous act Creepy Uncle Joe should be consigned to one of the worst circles of Hell, possibly the one where an arch-demon gets to clean the teeth of the damned with a pickaxe for all eternity and where they’ve completely run out of free toothbrushes.  I started to wonder if Joe’s fake teeth would be more or less sensitive to pain.  But then I remembered that arch-demons really know their stuff so he would be in for it either way.  So, I felt a little better.

You know all the little problems that come out of the sabotage of the economy seem trivial compared with crime waves, nuclear war and the sexual mutilation of children.  But those little things add up to something important.  The United States was called the land of opportunity because a good chunk of its citizens, the middle class, was prosperous.  They weren’t rich but they weren’t poor.  They couldn’t buy a new car every three years but they always could go out when they felt like it to a burger joint or a Chinese restaurant and enjoy a good meal to give everybody in the family a boost.  Not since the days of Jimmy Carter have we been worried about having enough money to pay for the groceries and the mortgage.  Now we do.

And so, if I was going to consign Joe Biden to Hell for his crimes, I wouldn’t leave out this charge.  Because along with everything else he’s done he’s killed the natural cheerfulness of the American people.  That’s a pretty monstrous thing.

Well, that’s what I’ve come up with.  It seems a bit random but life is a stew.

Hunkering Down for the Second Half of Bidencrash

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In November we’ll have a diversion as the careers of all those RINOs and Dems get flushed down the toilet by the mid-term paroxysm of voter rage.  That will give us through Christmas to savor the schadenfreude and contemplate all the judges Biden will not get approved.

But in January as we look at the cost of the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, we hosted there won’t be that much to feel thankful for.  As the saying goes, we’ll all be getting a little hungrier next year.  I’ve already heard that the property taxes here in Dunwich will be up a good bit and the cost of food and just about everything else will be surging very soon.  And energy and transportation costs will become horrific.

But that’s when the tough get going.  Camera Girl and I have already started to consolidate different shopping trips to save on gas.  And the last barbecue was burgers and dogs instead of ribeye steaks.  Looking to next winter I’ve decided to make the ultimate sacrifice.  I’m going to lower the thermostat from 72 (and sometimes 74) to 70 degrees Fahrenheit.  I know what you’re thinking.  Lots of people set it at 68 or even lower.  Sure, but those people have ancestors who lived in Cimmeria and Ultima Thule.  My people come from the sultry regions of the Mediterranean.  In order to survive even 70 degrees in the winter Camera Girl and I will have to wear our snow apparel indoors.  Who knows, we may even cut the cable this year.  Of course, that won’t be such a savings as it seems.  The packages that include phone, internet and cable don’t really go down all that much if you drop cable.  But we’ll see.  After all there’s nothing on and every little bit helps.

I was trying to think if there was any other savings, I could implement to weather this storm.  I am contemplating taking a position in the Dunwich town government.  There’s a part time position that would net me a few thousand dollars a year for what has been described as a few hours a week’s worth of work.  That could be a worthwhile idea.  But I hear there is an extremely annoying Democrat that would come along with the job and that would be bound to make my life more “interesting.”

And I have been on a diet for the last year or so.  Unfortunately, it’s been working pretty well so by next year I won’t have anymore weight to lose and eating less won’t be the benefit it currently is.  But knowing what a frugal shopper Camera Girl is I don’t doubt she has already started making buying decisions based on rising costs.  In fact, I know she has.  We recently planted a number of pepper plants in our garden because she informed me that peppers were now off the shopping list based on their current outrageous price.  It would be a shame if our menu featured less and less fresh produce.

But that’s reality.  I think back to when I was a kid and my parents were feeding a very large brood so vegetables were frozen peas and corn.  And when things were really going badly there was some frozen spinach which for me was impossible to swallow.  I even tried mixing it with mashed potatoes.  But nothing made it palatable.  So, I’ve got a long way to go before I’m anywhere near that level of wretchedness.

Of course, I’m so much better off than most folks out there that I feel silly even writing about making ends meet.  I think of the young families I know who are really tightening their belts.  The cost of feeding, clothing and housing a family is a crime.  When that old idiot unleashed his war against petroleum, he doomed this country to runaway inflation and recession.  We’ve got until 2025 before we can expect any relief.  That’s a really long time to hang off a ledge by your fingernails.  But when you have no choice, you do it.  And hopefully four years of misery will be enough to convince even the stupidest Millennial that rainbows and unicorns are just things you tell toddlers stories about and not the basis for an economy.

16NOV2021 – OCF Update – Thoughts for This Morning

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A fine Tuesday morning in mid-November; cold, windy and bright sun.  A perfect day to be viewing the world from the warm side a of a window.  Camera Girl is her usual busy, efficient self.  I can hear her banging around some pots and pans in the kitchen.  She says the noise is incidental but I don’t know, I think she must enjoy the violence.  Maybe she’s thinking of me while she’s beating on them.

I took care of some paperwork and also approved some preventive maintenance on the heating system that needs to be completed before the heavy snows begin.  That one I should’ve done last week.  I can feel the snow in the air.  It won’t take much for a few inches to find its way onto the ground and that would make the work much harder.  But for someone as lazy as I am the fact that I’m not waiting for spring and hoping for the best is a major victory.  So, on the home front things aren’t too far off course.

Looking at the news articles I see more bad news for Dementia Joe.  The country rightly blames him for moronically shutting down oil production and thereby unleashing high energy cost inflation on the already suffering country.  The left-wing media is whistling past the graveyard trying to convince themselves that the infrastructure bill or the reconciliation bill will make everything go back to rainbows and unicorns and 2022 won’t be the bloody rout that everybody knows it will be.  But with $5 a gallon gas already here in parts of the country and with no place for the price to go but up Good Old Joe looks to be headed for single digit approval ratings sometime soon.

The consensus is Biden won’t run for re-election.  Well, duh!  And since Kamala is about as dumb as a hammer and half as popular as cancer there’s going to be one hell of a fight for the nomination.  And one of the best parts of it is that any white male Democrat who runs will be accused of racist misogyny just for running. Who knows?  Maybe Hillary will run again and we’ll get a 2016 rematch.  Oh, the fun that would be!

The Rittenhouse case has gone to the jury.  Whichever way it goes it will stand as another marker of when defending yourself from the mob became a crime.  Even if he’s vindicated, it’s just one more nail in the coffin of a free America.  A government sanctioned riot was burning down an American city and the only allowable choices for the blameless white populace is flee or stay and be assaulted, burned out or even murdered.  And if you resist, the full weight of the government is brought to bear to send you to prison.  And the media will help the process along by distorting the facts and egging on violent partisans to threaten the judge and jury into finding you guilty.

But seeing what a mess the idiotic Left is making of the government they stole is an invigorating experience.  If discontent became widespread enough there is always the chance that someone will take the opportunity to win over the people to real reform.  And not just the Left-sanctioned Bush version where nothing happens except tax cuts for the rich and foreign wars for us.

Well, that’s enough for now.  When some real news breaks out, I’ll have more specific things to say and I’ll have more reviews soon too.  Have a great day.

16OCT2021 – Word On the Street

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A good friend of mine who spent a lot of his younger days as an engineer for the likes of Exxon or whatever they were called back then in the oil fields of Saudi Arabia says he’s heard from old friends that Joe Biden’s fervent requests for the oil companies to pump more oil (somehow) have been met with polite evasions like, “We’ll look into that.”  Meanwhile they’re laughing up their sleeves and watching as a barrel of crude approaches the $100/bbl mark with nothing but upside into the foreseeable future.  His advice to me is buy oil stocks.

Hey Joe, why not build some more wind turbines or how about a billion solar car charging ports?  Not quite there on those renewables are we?  Oh Joe, you’re gonna be an awfully popular guy this winter when fuel bills double in New England.  Awfully popular.  Sucks being a Democrat coming up for re-election.

But the bad news for us is that inflation is going to be pretty awful for the foreseeable future for all of us.  Maybe buying oil stocks isn’t such a bad idea.  Now I just have to find some money to buy them with.  Can I sell the dogs?

The Six Dollar Box of Oatmeal

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Yesterday, Camera Girl returned from the grocery store and she was highly agitated.  I know that lately she has been finding her grocery shopping frustrating because of the price inflation.  But I could tell that she was much more annoyed than lately.  She explained to me that she went to buy oatmeal and there was none to be had.  So, she went to another store, I think it was Walmart, and they had oatmeal.  But instead of being $3 a box it was $6 a box.  Now that caught my attention.  I’ve been seeing inflation numbers quoted as six percent, ten percent or maybe fifteen percent.  But this data point is a 100% increase!  How the hell is that possible?  Well, when there is no oatmeal on the shelf you can charge whatever you want.

My next question was, “What happens when oatmeal goes from $3 a box to $6 a box in a week?  Well, I know what happened when inflation reached 18% in 1980.  Jimmy Carter got a new job in 1981, unemployed.  So does this mean that the Democrats are going to get drubbed in 2022 and Biden will get bounced in 2024?  Well, the first result looks pretty certain.  The second is much less clear.  Three years is an eternity when discussing the future.  For all we know Joe Biden will go with some kind of price-fixing scheme to insulate Americans from the damage he’s done to the economy.  Nixon tried that back in the 1970’s when OPEC hit us with the oil embargo.  But Nixon got a pass because he could blame the Arabs.  So, is there a change in the world that allows runaway inflation to happen without political consequences?  Maybe.

Everybody has been talking about the new reality where elections don’t require the electorate to vote.  Maybe that’s the theory for what’s happening.  The government tells companies to fire their employees because they don’t have proof of vaccination.  The government destroys the ability of industry to provide enough of the essentials for life and the poorest, or rather the poor that aren’t advantaged by protected status will have to do without when supply and demand puts essentials beyond their means to purchase.  The government does whatever it likes to hurt its enemies and help its friends.  It doesn’t sound like anything that could happen in America but it does sound like the Soviet Union.  Starving their own people was a specialty of the communists in Russia. The manufactured famine in the Ukraine is the classic example.  Maybe the communists running our government think they are ready to start using soviet tactics to destroy their enemies.

I don’t know.  It’s a strange time we find ourselves in.  All of this is happening because of COVID and because of the war against petroleum.  The desire to turn us into serfs is visible all around us.  Are we really so helpless that we’ll just let it happen?  I tend to think not.  Even idiotic white women in the suburbs must notice that their lives are becoming steadily worse.  At some point I assume they will decide that being against Donald Trump doesn’t justify allowing Joe Biden to impoverish their family and deprive them of the means of living a first world existence.

Anyway, that’s what I hope will happen.  In the meantime, I better go enjoy my bowl of doubly expensive oatmeal.  I won’t even bother to ask for sliced bananas in it.  My heart isn’t strong enough to hear what they must cost.

Peter Thiel is Buying Gold Bar

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Here’s an interesting tidbit of information, Peter Thiel’s software corporation Palantir Technologies Inc. is hedging it’s other equity positions with gold bullion.  It’s one thing when Alex Jones tells you to buy gold.  It’s another when a really smart guy starts buying precious metals.  I shudder to think what these guys believe the inflation situation might be a few years down the road.

Isn’t it a great thing to be basking in the glow of Joe Biden’s post America?