Month: February 2021

Via Off-Guardian.org,

The scary red numbers are all going down. Check any newspaper or covid tracking website you want. Cases. Deaths. Hospitalisations. They’re all going down, sharply, and have been for weeks, especially in the US and UK.

So, why would that be?

Pundits across the media world have made suggestions – from vaccines to lockdowns – but there’s only one that makes any real sense.

IT’S NOT VACCINES

The assumption most people would make, and would be encouraged to make by the talking heads and media experts, is that the various “vaccines” have taken effect and stopped the spread of the “virus”.

Is this the case? No, no it’s not.

The decline started in mid-January, far too early for any vaccination program to have any effect. Many experts said as much:

Dr. Wafaa El-Sadr, professor of epidemiology and medicine at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, said the falling case numbers can’t be attributed to the COVID-19 vaccine, because not even a tenth of the population has been vaccinated, according to the CDC.

Further, the drop is happening simultaneously in different countries all around the world, and not every country is vaccinating at the same rate or even using the same vaccine. So no, the “vaccines” are not causing the drop.

IT’S NOT LOCKDOWN EITHER

Another suspect is the lockdown, with blaring propaganda stating that all the various government-imposed house arrests and “distancing” measures have finally had an impact.

That’s not it either.

Sweden, famously, never locked down at all. Yet their “cases” and “Covid related deaths” have been dropping exactly in parallel with the UK:

Clearly, if countries that never locked down are also seeing declines in case numbers, the lockdown cannot be causing them.

So what is?

THE WHO PCR TEST GUIDELINES

Maybe for our answer, we should look at the date the decline started.

Observe this graph:

As you can see, the global decline in “Covid deaths” starts in mid-to-late January.

What else happened around that time?

Well, on January 13th the WHO published a memo regarding the problem of asymptomatic cases being discovered by PCR tests, and suggesting any asymptomatic positive tests be repeated.

This followed up their previous memo, instructing labs around the world to use lower cycle thresholds (CT values) for PCR tests, as values over 35 could produce false positives.

Essentially, in two memos the WHO ensured future testing would be less likely to produce false positives and made it much harder to be labelled an “asymptomatic case”.

In short, logic would suggest we’re not in fact seeing a “decline in Covid cases” or a “decrease in Covid deaths” at all.

What we’re seeing is a decline in perfectly healthy people being labelled “covid cases” based on a false positive from an unreliable testing process. And we’re seeing fewer people dying of pneumonia, cancer or other disease have “Covid19” added to their death certificate based on testing criteria designed to inflate the pandemic.

Just as we at OffG predicted would happen the moment the memo was published.

Authored by James Ketler via The Mises Institute,

These days, it sure looks like they have them right where they want them. Using the storming of the Capitol Building as a pretext, the media-government alliance has targeted Trump, his supporters, and their fellow travelers harder than ever before. Many on the right consider the January 6 storming to have been a dream come true for the leftist elite—giving them the ability to impeach Trump again, deplatform right-wingers, and weaponize the Justice Department against the establishment’s foes. Everything, though, may not be as it first seems. There’s no reason to be despondent or worry that the Left has sealed its ultimate victory—it has done no such thing. Rather, the storming, for what it’s worth, proved the power of ragtag populists and exposed the elite’s shaky foundations. There’s a reason they’re so terrified.

What Happened?

In political discourse, narratives are everything, so – quite predictably – there’s heated dispute over what actually happened on January 6. One pressing question is: How did the stormers manage to actually break into the Capitol—one of the most heavily guarded buildings in the world? Cell phones and social media allowed civilian attendants to document the day’s events, which has made some details clearer and others a bit murkier. From freelance journalist Marcus DiPaola, one particularly bizarre video emerged which appeared to show Capitol Police willingly removing barricades to allow rioters inside the building complex. 

In response to that footage, many leftists contend that the storming was an attempted “coup” and “inside job” planned by Republican politicians and Capitol Hill officials to reinstall Trump for a second term. Of course, that’s nothing more than baseless media drivel. Had it been an actual coup, the storming would have been far bloodier and better orchestrated, with rogue military units and politicians leading the charge—but nothing like that happened.

On the other hand, after seeing the questionable footage, many right-wingers have alleged that the event was a “false flag” arranged by Antifa provocateurs to defame Trump and his supporters. To the credit of this theory, at least one far-left activist was arrested in connection with the storming. However, it’s not clear that Antifa had any role in drumming up the crowd’s furor; certainly, the antielitist spirit was strong enough on its own.

Strange as the video was, there’s a third potential explanation, expounded by PolitiFact: “Many officers had to abandon their posts and barricades because they were far outnumbered and overwhelmed.” Marcus DiPaola, who shot the footage, floated the same explanation, as did former Capitol Police chief Terrance Gainer. The police’s limited manpower was no match for the immensity of the Trumpian mob, leaving the officers in fear for their own safety and their posts strategically indefensible. A panoply of additional on-the-ground footage reveals the brutish tactics many of the rioters used to gain access to the building. They openly ripped away barricades, scaled walls, broke windows and doors—and once inside, used their collective force to push back the officers who tried to “hold the line.” If nothing else, this shows, in physical terms, how frustrated the populist right has become with the federal establishment.

As is true of most mass spontaneous action, the stormers seem to have had different reasons for doing what they did. Some may have hoped to interrupt the Senate’s session and pressure lawmakers into blocking some of Biden’s electoral votes. Others likely stormed the building as an act of antiestablishment desecration, whipped up by the rage of other rioters. Apparently, there was also a small group of extremists who called for Mike Pence’s execution, according to reports. Indeed, the stormers were a far-from-perfect lot, but—aside from a couple crazies here and there—they were driven by an opposition to the federal establishment shared by millions of Americans.

The People Hold the Power

After five years of shameless anti-Trump witch hunts, culminating in an election fraught with vote irregularities, the events of January 6 should be little surprise. When legal, political methods of seeking redress from the state become unresponsive, there is no longer any choice but to seek extralegal, nonpolitical methods. Trump himself understands this. In one of his final tweets before being suspended, he wrote: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long.” These tensions, in fact, existed long before the Trump era. Disheartened by decades of increasing federal abuse, these people stood up in an anti-Swamp rebellion aiming to “take back the people’s house.”

This reflects an immutable principle of government outlined by the sixteenth-century French libertarian Étienne de La Boétie: “[T]he inhabitants themselves … permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude.” It may appear that the state holds power over the people, but in reality the converse is true; it is the people en bloc who—by choosing to obey or not obey—hold ultimate power over the state. The only way a state can enforce its laws at all is if the people overall acquiesce to it. If sufficiently widespread, political resistance would disrupt the status quo to such a degree as to render its function completely ineffectual. In the final analysis, it is the people who hold the power.

A Catalyst for More Resistance

After stirring up a great deal of chaos, the Capitol stormers were flushed out of the building over the course of a few hours and the riots outside were broken up. Early the next morning, Congress certified the electoral vote count for Joe Biden, and the following weeks were flooded by the prosecution of more than two hundred stormers. Does that mean that their resistance failed? In the short term, yes; in the long term, maybe not. As Murray Rothbard said about the French “May 68” protests: “Whether it fizzles … or triumphs, … it gives the lie, once and for all, to the widespread myth that revolutions, whether or not desirable, are simply impossible in the modern, complex, highly technological world.” By storming the Capitol, the rioters proved that successful resistance against the American Leviathan is indeed still possible.

Clearly, the right-populists have both the numbers and willpower necessary to significantly disrupt the federal order, and their zeal is unlikely to dissipate any time soon. Therefore, the question of another revolt is not one of if, but of where and when. This reality was clear right after the storming occurred. In anticipation of riots during President Biden’s inauguration, twenty-six thousand army and Air National Guard troops were deployed to Washington, DC, and razor-wire fencing was set up around the Capitol Building. The day passed by without any incident, yet thousands of national guardsmen are still set to remain in DC through mid-March (or longer) and the acting chief of the Capitol Police has called for the fencing to stay up permanently.

As Rothbard observed in volume I of Conceived in Liberty, political resistance is not effect neutral, but actually has an augmentative effect on the actions of other partisans: “If cherished in later tradition, a revolution will decrease the awe in which the constituted authority is held by the populace, and in that way will increase the chance of a later revolt against tyranny.” That is to say that even a foiled resistance plot can help attract more people to the fold of dissent if the rebels have some cultural sway. Plans to pack the Supreme Court, unleash restrictive gun control, and prosecute right-wingers—rather than signifying the elite’s final triumph—may serve to further rally the populist dissenters.

Hitting the State Where It Hurts

When the rioters began their push to breach the Capitol Building, lawmakers were forced to shelter in place, before then evacuating to a secure location. For some of them, the day’s events were evidently traumatic. That can be seen in the hyperbolic language that’s been used to describe the storming, like Chuck Schumer likening it to Pearl Harbor.

The stormers crossed the threshold of the establishment’s cushy elitism and exposed lawmakers to the real-world ire their actions create. As described in a passage from Cato’s Letters, “The only secret … in forming a free government is to make the interests of the governors and of the governed the same.” Angry populists, who’ve watched federal decrees wreak havoc on their lives, turned around and gave lawmakers a taste of their own medicine.

In the wake of this, the media-government alliance has clamped down against the populist right harder than ever before.

Yet, in this vicious pushback, one can sense a prescient hint of panic within establishment ranks that the threads of their dominance may finally be unraveling. Far from playing a domineering role, the establishment politicos find themselves on the defensive in a politically unstable position.

Someday—whether it be in one week or thirty years—the US could face a serious period of mass antiestablishment demonstrations; if that day comes, it’ll signal the Washington elite’s ultimate failure.

With no cards left to play, they may be forced to tread lightly on the right-wing populists and avoid violent confrontation as much as possible, for fear of repercussions like those of January 6. This may force their hand into granting the Right some concessions—perhaps some very big ones, like a return to more states’ rights or, better yet, the right of unilateral secession. This would short-circuit the federal order and help restore to America’s overtaxed and overburdened some of their long-withheld freedoms. With everything in view, it looks like the journey down this path may have already begun.

At the dawn of the 19th century, global life expectancy was only 28.5 years.

Outbreaks, war, and famine would still kill millions of people at regular intervals. These issues are still stubbornly present in 21st century society, but, as Visual Capitalist’s Nick Routley notes, broadly speaking, the situation around the world has vastly improved. Today, most of humanity lives in countries where the life expectancy is above the typical retirement age of 65.

At the same time, while inequality remains a hot button topic within countries, income disparity between countries is slowing beginning to narrow.

This animated visualization, created by James Eagle, tracks the evolution of health and wealth factors in countries around the world. For further exploration, Gapminder also has a fantastic interactive chart that showcases the same dataset.

The Journey to the Upper-Right Quadrant

In general terms, history has seen health practices improve and countries become increasingly wealthy–trends that are reflected in this visualization. In fact, most countries drift towards the upper-right quadrant over the 221 years covered in the dataset.

However, that path to the top-right, which indicates high levels of both life expectancy and GDP per capita, is rarely a linear journey. Here are some of the noteworthy events and milestones to watch out for while viewing the animation.

1880s: Breaking the 50-Year Barrier
In the late 19th century, Nordic countries such as Sweden and Norway already found themselves past the 50-year life expectancy mark. This was a significant milestone considering the global life expectancy was a full 20 years shorter at the time. It wasn’t until the year 1960 that the global life expectancy would catch up.

1918: The Spanish Flu and WWI
At times, a confluence of factors can impact health and wealth in countries and regions. In this case, World War I coincided with one of the deadliest pandemics in history, leading to global implications. In the animation, this is abundantly clear as the entire cluster of circles takes a nose dive for a short period of time.

1933, 1960: Communist Famines
At various points in history, human decisions can have catastrophic consequences. This was the case in the Soviet Union (1933) and the People’s Republic of China (1960), where life expectancy plummeted during famines that killed millions of people. These extreme events are easy to spot in the animation due to the large populations of the countries in question.

1960s: Oil Economies Kick into High Gear
During this time, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia all experience massive booms in wealth, and in the following decade, smaller countries such as the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait rocket to the right edge of the visualization.

In following decades, both Iran and Iraq can be seen experiencing wild fluctuations in both health and wealth as regime changes and conflict begin to destabilize the region.

1990s: AIDS in Africa
In the animation, a number of countries plummet in unison at the end of the 20th century. These are sub-Saharan African countries that were hit hard by the AIDS pandemic. At its peak in the early ’00s, the disease accounted for more than half of deaths in some countries.

1995: Breaking the 65-Year Barrier
Global life expectancy reaches retirement age. At this point in time, there is a clear divide in both health and wealth between African and South Asian countries and the rest of the world. Thankfully, that gap is would continue to narrow in coming years.

1990-2000s: China’s Economic Rise
With a population well over a billion people, it’s impossible to ignore China in any global overview. Starting from the early ’90s, China begins its march from the left to right side of the chart, highlighting the unprecedented economic growth it experienced during that time.

What the Future Holds

If current trends continue, global life expectancy is expected to surpass the 80-year mark by 2100. And, sub-Saharan Africa, which has the lowest life expectancy today, is expected to mostly close the gap, reaching 75 years of age.

Wealth is also expected to increase nearly across the board, with the biggest gains coming from places like Vietnam, Nigeria, and the Philippines. Some experts are projecting the world economy as a whole to double in size by 2050.

There are always bumps along the way, but it appears that the journey to the upper-right quadrant is still very much underway.

Authored by Pepe Escobar via The Asia Times,

Moscow is painfully aware that the US/NATO “strategy” of containment of Russia is already reaching fever pitch. Again.

This past Wednesday, at a very important meeting with the Federal Security Service board, President Putin laid it all out in stark terms:

We are up against the so-called policy of containing Russia. This is not about competition, which is a natural thing for international relations. This is about a consistent and quite aggressive policy aimed at disrupting our development, slowing it down, creating problems along the outer perimeter, triggering domestic instability, undermining the values that unite Russian society, and ultimately to weaken Russia and put it under external control, just the way we are witnessing it transpire in some countries in the post-Soviet space.

Russian President Vladimir Putin during a meeting of the Federal Security Service Board in Moscow on February 24. Photo: AFP / Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik

Not without a touch of wickedness, Putin added this was no exaggeration: “In fact, you don’t need to be convinced of this as you yourselves know it perfectly well, perhaps even better than anybody else.”

The Kremlin is very much aware “containment” of Russia focuses on its perimeter: Ukraine, Georgia and Central Asia. And the ultimate target remains regime change.

Putin’s remarks may also be interpreted as an indirect answer to a section of President Biden’s speech at the Munich Security Conference.

According to Biden’s scriptwriters, 

Putin seeks to weaken the European project and the NATO alliance because it is much easier for the Kremlin to intimidate individual countries than to negotiate with the united transatlantic community … The Russian authorities want others to think that our system is just as corrupt or even more corrupt.

US President Joe Biden speaks virtually from the East Room of the White House in Washington, DC, to the Munich Security Conference in Germany on February 19. Photo: AFP / Mandel Ngan

A clumsy, direct personal attack against the head of state of a major nuclear power does not exactly qualify as sophisticated diplomacy. At least it glaringly shows how trust between Washington and Moscow is now reduced to less than zero. As much as Biden’s Deep State handlers refuse to see Putin as a worthy negotiating partner, the Kremlin and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs have already dismissed Washington as “non-agreement capable.”

Once again, this is all about sovereignty. The “unfriendly attitude towards Russia,” as Putin defined it, extends to “other independent, sovereign centers of global development.” Read it as mainly China and Iran. All these three sovereign states happen to be categorized as top “threats” by the US National Security Strategy.

Yet Russia is the real nightmare for the Exceptionalists: Orthodox Christian, thus appealing to swaths of the West; consolidated as major Eurasian power; a military, hypersonic superpower; and boasting unrivaled diplomatic skills, appreciated all across the Global South.

In contrast, there’s not much left for the deep state except endlessly demonizing both Russia and China to justify a Western military build-up, the “logic” inbuilt in a new strategic concept named  NATO 2030: United for a New Era.

The experts behind the concept hailed it as an “implicit” response to French President Emmanuel Macron’s declaring NATO “brain dead.”

Well, at least the concept proves Macron was right.

Those barbarians from the East

Crucial questions about sovereignty and Russian identity have been a recurrent theme in Moscow these past few weeks. And that brings us to February 17, when Putin met with Duma political leaders, from the Communist Party’s Vladimir Zhirinovsky – enjoying a new popularity surge – to United Russia’s Sergei Mironov, as well as State Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin.

Putin stressed the “multi-ethnic and multi-religious” character of Russia, now in “a different environment that is free of ideology”:

It is important for all ethnic groups, even the smallest ones, to know that this is their Motherland with no other for them, that they are protected here and are prepared to lay down their lives in order to protect this country. This is in the interests of us all, regardless of ethnicity, including the Russian people.

Yet Putin’s most extraordinary remark had to do with ancient Russian history:

Barbarians came from the East and destroyed the Christian Orthodox empire. But before the barbarians from the East, as you well know, the crusaders came from the West and weakened this Orthodox Christian empire, and only then were the last blows dealt, and it was conquered. This is what happened … We must remember these historical events and never forget them.

Well, this could be enough material to generate a 1,000-page treatise. Instead, let’s try, at least, to – concisely – unpack it.

The Great Eurasian Steppe – one of the largest geographical formations on the planet – stretches from the lower Danube all the way to the Yellow River. The running joke across Eurasia is that “Keep Walking” can be performed back to back. For most of recorded history this has been Nomad Central: tribe upon tribe raiding at the margins, or sometimes at the hubs of the heartland: China, Iran, the  Mediterranean.

The Scythians (see, for instance, the magisterial The Scythians: Nomad Warriors of the Steppe, by Barry Cunliffe) arrived at the Pontic steppe from beyond the Volga. After the Scythians, it was the turn of the Sarmatians to show up in South Russia.

From the 4th century onward, nomad Eurasia was a vortex of marauding tribes, featuring, among others, the Huns in the 4th and 5th centuries, the Khazars in the 7th century, the Kumans in the 11th century, all the way to the Mongol avalanche in the 13th century.

The plot line always pitted nomads against peasants. Nomads ruled – and exacted tribute. G Vernadsky, in his invaluable Ancient Russia, shows how “the Scythian Empire may be described sociologically as a domination of the nomadic horde over neighboring tribes of agriculturists.”

As part of my multi-pronged research on nomad empires for a future volume, I call them Badass Barbarians on Horseback. The stars of the show include, in Europe, in chronological order, Cimmerians, Scythians, Sarmatians, Huns, Khazars, Hungarians, Peshenegs, Seljuks, Mongols and their Tatar descendants; and, in Asia, Hu, Xiongnu, Hephtalites, Turks, Uighurs, Tibetans, Kirghiz, Khitan, Mongols, Turks (again), Uzbeks and Manchu.   

Arguably, since the hegemonic Scythian era (the first protagonists of the Silk Road), most of the peasants in southern and central Russia were Slav. But there were major differences. The Slavs west of Kiev were under the influence of Germania and Rome. East of Kiev, they were influenced by Persian civilization.

It’s always important to remember that the Vikings were still nomads when they became rulers in Slav lands. Their civilization in fact prevailed over sedentary peasants – even as they absorbed many of their customs.  

Interestingly enough, the gap between steppe nomads and agriculture in proto-Russia was not as steep as between intensive agriculture in China and the interlocked steppe economy in Mongolia.

(For an engaging Marxist interpretation of nomadism, see A N Khazanov’s Nomads and the Outside World).

The sheltering sky

What about power? For Turk and Mongol nomads, who came centuries after the Scythians, power emanated from the sky. The Khan ruled by authority of the “Eternal Sky” – as we all see when we delve into the adventures of Genghis and Kublai. By implication, as there is only one sky, the Khan would have to exert universal power. Welcome to the idea of universal empire.

Kublai Khan as the first Yuan emperor, Shizu. Yuan dynasty (1271–1368). Album leaf, ink and color on silk. National Palace Museum, Taipei. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/National Palace Museum, Taipei

In Persia, things were slightly more complex. The Persian Empire   was all about Sun worship: that became the conceptual basis for the divine right of the King of Kings. The implications were immense, as the King now became sacred. This model influenced Byzantium – which, after all, was always interacting with Persia.

Christianity made the Kingdom of Heaven more important than ruling over the temporal domain. Still, the idea of Universal Empire persisted, incarnated in the concept of Pantocrator: it was the Christ who ultimately ruled, and his deputy on earth was the Emperor. But Byzantium remained a very special case: the Emperor could never be an equal to God. After all, he was human.

Putin is certainly very much aware that the Russian case is extremely complex. Russia essentially is on the margins of three civilizations. It’s part of Europe – reasons including everything from the ethnic origin of Slavs to achievements in history, music and literature.

Russia is also part of Byzantium from a religious and artistic angle (but not part of the subsequent Ottoman empire, with which it was in military competition). And Russia was influenced by Islam coming from Persia.

Then there’s the crucial influence of nomads. A serious case can be made that they have been neglected by scholars. The Mongol rule for a century and a half, of course, is part of the official historiography – but perhaps not given its due importance. And the nomads in southern and central Russia two millennia ago were never properly acknowledged.

So Putin may have hit a nerve. What he said points to the idealization of a later period of Russian history from the late 9th to early 13th century: Kievan Rus. In Russia, 19th century Romanticism and 20th century nationalism actively built an idealized national identity.

The interpretation of Kievan Rus poses tremendous problems – that’s something I eagerly discussed in St. Petersburg a few years ago. There are rare literary sources – and they concentrate mostly on the 12th century afterwards. The earlier sources are foreigners, mostly Persians and Arabs.

Russian conversion to Christianity and its concomitant superb architecture have been interpreted as evidence of a high cultural standard. In a nutshell, scholars ended up using Western Europe as the model for the reconstruction of Kievan Rus civilization.

It was never so simple. A good example is the discrepancy between Novgorod and Kiev. Novgorod was closer to the Baltic than the Black Sea, and had closer interaction with Scandinavia and the Hanseatic towns. Compare it with Kiev, which was closer to steppe nomads and  Byzantium – not to mention Islam.

Kievan Rus was a fascinating crossover. Nomadic tribal traditions – on administration, taxes, the justice system – were prevalent. But on religion, they imitated Byzantium. It’s also relevant that until the end of the 12th century, assorted steppe nomads were a constant “threat” to southeast Kievan Rus.

So as much as Byzantium – and, later on, even the Ottoman Empire – supplied models for Russian institutions, the fact is the nomads, starting with the Scythians, influenced the economy, the social system and most of all, the military approach.   

Watch the Khan

Sima Qian, the master Chinese historian, has shown how the Khan had two “kings,” who each had two generals, and thus in succession, all the way to commanders of a hundred, a thousand and ten thousand men. This is essentially the same system used for a millennia and a half by nomads, from the Scythians to the Mongols, all the way to Tamerlane’s army at the end of the 14th century.   

The Mongol invasions – 1221 and then 1239-1243 – were indeed the major game-changer. As master analyst Sergei Karaganov told me in his office in late 2018, they influenced Russian society for centuries afterwards.

For over 200 years Russian princes had to visit the Mongol headquarters in the Volga to pay tribute. One scholarly strand has qualified it as “barbarization”; that seems to be Putin’s view. According to that strand, the incorporation of Mongol values may have “reversed” Russian society to what it was before the first drive to adopt Christianity.   

The inescapable conclusion is that when Muscovy emerged in the late 15th century as the dominant power in Russia, it was essentially the successor of the Mongols.

And because of that the peasantry – the sedentary population – were not touched by “civilization” (time to re-read Tolstoy?). Nomad Power and values, as strong as they were, survived Mongol rule for centuries.

Well, if a moral can be derived from our short parable, it’s not exactly a good idea for “civilized” NATO to pick a fight with the – lateral – heirs of the Great Khan. 

The virus pandemic did not change the trajectory of where the restaurant industry was headed, but it did force years of change in a short period. Restaurants are embracing artificial intelligence and automation to revolutionize their business models. 

A new report via payments company Square titled “Future of Restaurants” discusses an overview of how technology is sweeping through the industry. Square partnered with Wakefield Research to survey 500 restaurant owners and managers across the country. 

They found an overwhelming number of owners and managers are pivoting towards automation in the kitchen and embracing the hub-and-spoke model. 

About 91% of respondents said they have made or planning to make investments in kitchen automation technology.

So what’s the rush to digitize the backend of a restaurant? 

Well, as explained by Bruce Bell, Head of Square for Restaurants, he said:

“We’re seeing more of a hub-and-spoke model with the kitchen at the center of it all. Restaurants embrace new channels for customers to interact with their business, effectively meeting them wherever they are. Each of these channels represents a revenue stream for the restaurant, and they connect to the same kitchen and are all managed by the same centralized POS system.” 

Bell is essentially saying restaurants, via investments in kitchen automation technology, will be able or have already been able to pivot to various revenue streams at a moment’s notice, such as making meal kits, dining room, groceries, delivery, among others. 

“One channel might be the dining room, one channel might be first-party delivery, one channel might be meal kits, and so on,” added Bell. “Having the kitchen run as efficiently as possible extends that efficiency into all of those channels.”

Square said one respondent, Mediterranean fast-casual chain The Kebab Shop, already invested in kitchen automation technology when the pandemic struck, and quickly allowed it to pivot to curbside pickup and delivery. 

“We’re really lucky that we keep everything in the same ecosystem,” owner Wally Sadat explained. “We were already digital-forward, so when it came to implementing something on the fly, like during COVID, we were in a good position.”

Other notable stats from the survey shows how restaurants are rapidly evolving in a post-COVID world: 

• 3 in 4 restaurants plan on offering contactless ordering and payment options across all channels.
• 59% of consumers are willing to buy items that are not part of the restaurant’s core offerings.
• 42% of restaurants plan to invest in customer loyalty programs
• Restaurants that are using online ordering for delivery and takeout expect 62% of revenue to come through those channels.
• 67% of consumers prefer to use a restaurant’s own website or app for food delivery.
• 92% of restaurant owners and managers are open to experimenting with their menu.
• 88% of restaurants would consider completely switching from physical to digital menus.

… and as readers may know when artificial intelligence and automation are embedded into company businesses models – they become job killers – suggesting technological unemployment will soar through this decade. 

How will the economy replace the millions of jobs lost if technology displaces them?  

Authored by Ethan Yang via The American Institute for Economic Research,

Lockdowns should have shown every American just how tyrannical and unreasonable our leaders can be. There are elected leaders like Governor Cuomo who have acted as outright tyrants, alienating everyone, even those in his own party. Then there are the unelected bureaucrats who wave away our liberties with the stroke of a pen from the secrecy of their massive offices with technocratic efficiency. This is all of course a sudden and dramatic curtailing of our freedoms. I would not be surprised that with this much public attention, some sort of effort will be made to roll back much of what has been done. Although lockdowns are certainly an existential threat to our long-term freedoms and system of liberal democracy, there has been another specter out there that many experts have been sounding the alarm on for decades. The growth of the administrative state. 

The chilling narrative about the growth of the administrative state, which is essentially the regulatory apparatus of the executive branch, is usually confined to specialist professions. The ever-present danger of a slowly expanding and unaccountable apparatus of bureaucrats that threatens to sap the life out of American society and drown it in a sea of paperwork is typically a concern that only keeps policy wonks and lawyers up at night. Although many lawyers probably celebrate this dystopian vision because they benefit from the compliance fees. The regulatory state not only threatens to make society that much slower and dreary with its excessive onslaught of regulation but it also makes us poorer. Robert Samuelson writes for the Washington Post that

“No one really knows by how much, but “there is ample evidence that regulation has expanded and that this expansion has limited economic growth,” as Ted Gayer and Philip Wallach of the Brookings Institution recently wrote. One study estimates that regulation has shaved 0.8 percent off the U.S. annual growth rate, which — if confirmed by other studies — would be huge.”

The regulatory state refers to organizations such as the Environmental Protection Agency, the Centers for Disease Control, the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Education, the Department of Justice, the Internal Revenue Service, and all the other three-letter agencies in Washington, DC. If you would like to see how long the list of agencies is, take a look at the Federal Register, to which there are 455. That number is absolutely mind-boggling and you don’t need a fancy degree in political science like I have to say that society can function without their oversight. A paper by Peter Strauss at Columbia Law School notes that there are currently over 2 million civilians employed in the federal government alone. He notes that for context,

“The first Congress to meet once the Constitution was ratified created a Post Office and Departments of War, Navy, Foreign Affairs, and Treasury, each in unique ways suited to its responsibilities; this new government employed few civil servants to manage all its affairs. The first serious count of federal civilian employees, in 1816, reported that they numbered 4,837.” 

The drastic expansion of the administrative state has come at a cost to not only our liberty, which is slowly being eroded by a sea of paperwork and regulations, but it also undermines our democracy. According to Article 1 of the Constitution, the legislative branch or Congress is supposed to be the primary law-making body of our government. That is because if there are bad laws or laws society doesn’t like, we can hold people accountable. However, more and more power has been shifted to the executive branch because of the growth of the administrative state. Even the judicial system is losing power to the administrative state after the establishment of a legal doctrine known as Chevron Deference, which binds the court system to defer to the administrative agency’s interpretation of a rule, not the Constitutional interpretation of a sitting judge. It shouldn’t be too hard to assume that the interpretation will probably favor the ambitions of the agency, not the integrity of the Constitution. These issues and more form the basis of legal scholar Richard Epstein’s assertion that the administrative state is not congruent with rule of law in this country.

The worst part about all of this is that society continues to tell itself that those in the administrative state are simply humble public servants. Although I’m sure many of them are, the hard reality is that at the end of the day it’s a source of income and advancement for bureaucrats just like jobs in the private sector are for everyone else. This is the basic insight of Public Choice Theory, which is the common-sense realization that government agents are not angels, they are humans and follow human nature. That means that although many government agents may think they are serving the country, they are also limited by their own capabilities as humans as well as their desires. This is demonstrated by a phenomenon known as the Washington Monument Syndrome, which refers to how when a government agency is threatened with a budget cut or hiring freeze, they shun fiscal restraint in order to protect their own self-interests. The Washington Monument Syndrome gets its name because when the National Park Service was faced with budget cuts, instead of streamlining its finances like a normal private company they protested by shutting down the Washington Monument rather than taking sensible steps to cut costs. In the private sector there is a natural check on how much workers can demand, such as the threat of going out of business. In the public sector there are no such restraints. This is part of the reason why the bureaucracy simply grows and grows and grows, taking our freedom as well as our treasure as it does. 

Finally, there is the dark fact that there are ambitious people in the administrative state who want to make a name for themselves at the expense of their fellow countryman. If there aren’t any problems to solve, hotshot regulators are trying to move up the food chain by creating problems to solve by either targeting innocent private actors or trying to pump up their resumes with unnecessary sanctions. This problem is well known when it comes to the criminal justice system, as prosecutors leverage plea bargains to increase their incarceration statistics regardless of the guilt of the defendant and without ever having to take a case to trial, which is a constitutional right. However, this system of perverse incentives to simply rack up wins at the expense of society is present in the regulatory state as well as agencies bringing the government’s boot down on businesses just trying to provide a good service. 

I had a personal experience with this dynamic when I interned at a law firm providing pro bono services to private entities that were being pursued by trigger-happy regulators. The case I worked on was FTC vs D-Link Systems, which was settled finding no liability for any violations. The FTC in this case levied a claim that D-Link Systems was engaging in deceptive practices. However, upon investigation there were no rules that they violated, nor were there any widespread complaints from consumers to be found. The FTC was essentially going out of its way and leveraging vague rules to pursue a responsible corporation likely in the name of career advancement. That is because there are no rewards for doing nothing, even though that’s what the government should be doing when its citizens are being responsible. Sadly, not every private business has the resources to fight back against overzealous government regulators. Even worse, there is little being done to check the powers of the administrative state. In fact, many elected politicians simply see it as a way to shift blame away from themselves.

Key Takeaway

If lockdowns were a sudden and brutal assault on our liberties, the rise of the administrative state would be the silent killer. It keeps itself away from the public spotlight, only raising alarms for the communities it directly affects and policy wonks who enjoy ranting about taxes and federal codes all day. To the average person, the administrative state is not a problem until it is. Every year it grows and grows with little incentive to care for the trouble it has caused for the rest of American society. It is the true embodiment of the leviathan illustrated by Hobbes. Although there is certainly a time and place for regulatory agencies, today they have so greatly outgrown their bounds to the point they are becoming an unelected judge, jury, and executioner. What was a handful of executive agencies at the beginning of the republic has now become an expansive list of alphabet soup abbreviations, some with their own SWAT teams and court systems. The administrative state not only saps our treasure and stifles our creativity but it drains our spirit. If left unchecked it will surely turn this country of ambitious innovators and entrepreneurs into one of paper pushers and clerks.

The virus pandemic’s economic hit has been particularly severe for millennials, considering many of them decided to get useless English degrees and rack up insurmountable student debt while choosing after college to become bartenders. As the story goes, in a post-pandemic world, the downturn has crushed the restaurant industry. Many youngsters are either collecting government checks or finding other jobs or attempting to retrain for a new career. As home prices soar (no thanks to Fed. Chair Powell), housing affordability has become out of reach for many. That’s why Ikea, yes, the affordable furniture store that sells Swedish meatballs, is now marketing tiny homes for broke millennials. 

The tiny home crazy has been gaining momentum in the last decade as wealth inequality, driven mainly by the Federal Reserve, leaving most of the wealth concentrated in just a few hands, has resulted in the middle class’s decimation. People are downsizing left and right and opting for tiny homes. 

Ikea launched the Tiny Home Project to capitalize on this trend. The 187-square-foot structure, or what could be viewed as a trailer, but commonly known as a “tiny home” to hipsters, is equipped with renewable, reusable, and recycled materials for inside furnishings, solar panels on the roof, running water, kitchen, and a ductless heat pump and air conditioner unit. 

Under the guise of eco-conscious minimalists, millennials who gravitate towards tiny homes don’t realize that their living standard has collapsed. Say goodbye to the McMansion of the late 90s and early 2000s, and hello, to the double-wide trailer. 

Unlike assemble-it-yourself furniture that the Swedish company is known for, these tiny homes are preassembled in a factory in partnership with media firm Vox Creative and Wisconsin-based tiny home ESCAPE. 

During the pandemic, internet searches for “tiny homes” hit a five-year high. 

With Amazon already selling tiny homes, how long until Walmart joins the party?

Authored by Daniel Lacalle,

In this era of monetary fiction, one tends to read all types of undocumented and misguided views on monetary policy. However, if there is one that really is infuriating is the MMT science fiction.

One of its main principles is based on a fallacy.

“A country with monetary sovereignty can issue all the debt it needs without default risk”

First, it is untrue. A report by David Beers at the Bank Of Canada has identified 27 sovereigns involved in local currency defaults between 1960 and 2016 (database here).

(source: Bank of Canada, David Beers)

David Beers explains: “A long-held view by some investors is that governments rarely default on local or domestic currency sovereign debt. After all, they say, governments can service these obligations by printing money, which in turn can reduce the real burden of debt through inflation and dramatically so in cases like Germany in the 1923 and Yugoslavia in 1993-94. Of course, it’s true that high inflation can be a form of de facto default on local currency debt. Still, contractual defaults and restructurings occur and are more common than is often supposed”.

(source: Bank of Canada, David Beers)

No, a country with monetary sovereignty cannot issue all the debt it needs without default risk. It needs to issue in foreign currency precisely because few trust their monetary policies. Most local citizens are the first ones to avoid domestic currency exposure and buy US dollars, gold or cryptocurrencies (now), fearing the inevitable:

Most governments will try to cover their fiscal and trade imbalances by devaluing and making all savers poorer.

“A country with monetary sovereignty can issue all the currency it needs” is also a fallacy.

Monetary sovereignty is not something the government decides. Confidence and use of fiat currency are not dictated by the government nor does it give said government the power to do what it wants with monetary policies. Citizens all over the world have stopped accepting the government-issued and denominated currency when confidence in its purchasing power has been destroyed after increasing the money supply well above its real demand.

That is why the Sucre in Ecuador or the Colon in El Salvador collapsed or why the Argentine peso and the Venezuela bolivar or the Iran Rial are widely rejected by local and international citizens. There are numerous fiat currencies that have failed or disappeared.  As Michael Sanibel writes, “a nation’s currency is not exempt from the laws of supply and demand, so the more that is printed, the less it is worth“. Currency collapses and failures are frequent, but, more importantly, even if some survive, its domestic and international demand is irreparably damaged.

Given that the world of currencies is a relative one, the average citizen of the world will prefer gold, cryptocurrencies, US dollars or Euros and Yen despite their own imbalances rather than their own currencies.

Why is this? When governments and central banks worldwide try to implement the same mistaken monetary policy of the US and Europe or Japan but without their investment security, institutions and capital freedom, then they fall into their own trap. They weaken their own citizens’ trust in the purchasing power of the currency.

The MMT answer would be that all that is needed then is stable and trustworthy institutions. Well, it does not work either. The first crack in that trust is precisely currency manipulation to finance bloated government spending. The average citizen may not understand monetary debasement but certainly understands that their currency is not a valid reserve of value or payment system. Because the value of the currency is not dictated by the government, but by the latest purchase agreements made with such means of payment.

Governments always see economic cycles as a problem of lack of demand that they need to “stimulate”. They see debt and asset bubbles as small “collateral damages” worth assuming in the quest for inflation. And crises become more frequent while debt soars & recoveries weaker.

(source World Bank, Deutsche Bank)

The imbalances of the US, Eurozone or Japan are also evident in the weak productivity growth, high debt and diminishing effectiveness of policies (read “Monetary Stimulus Does Not Work, The Evidence Is In“).

(source IIF, BIS)

Countries don’t borrow in foreign currency because they are dumb or ignore MMT science fiction, but because savers don’t want government currency debasement risk, no matter what yield. The first ones that avoid domestic currency debt tend to be domestic savers and investors, precisely because they understand the history of purchasing power destruction of their governments’ monetary policies.

Some 48% of the world’s $30T in cross-border loans are priced in US dollars, up from 40% a decade ago, according to the Bank of International Settlement. Again, not because countries are stupid and don’t want to issue in local currency. Because there is little real demand.

(source IIF)

As such, governments cannot unilaterally decide to issue “all the debt they need in local currency” precisely because of the widespread lack of confidence in the central bank or the governments’ perverse incentive to devalue at will.

As reserves dry up, and citizens see that their government is destroying purchasing power of the currency, the local savers read minsters talk about “economic war” and “foreign interference”, but they know what really happens. Monetary imbalances are soaring. And they run away.

(source: Capital Economics)

Inflation is not solved with (more) taxation.

Many MMT proponents solve this equation of inflation caused by monetary excess denying that inflation is always a monetary phenomenon, and saying that inflation would be solved by taxation. Is it not fantastic?

The government benefits the first from new money creation, massively increases its imbalances and blames inflation on the last recipients of the new money created, savers and the private sector, so it “solves” the inflation created by the government by taxing citizens again. Inflation is taxation without legislation, as Milton Friedman said.

First, the government policy makes a transfer of wealth from savers to the political sector, and then it increases taxes to the “solve” inflation it created. Double taxation.

How did that work in Argentina? That is exactly what governments implemented, only to destroy the currency, create more inflation and send the economy to stagflation (read).

These two factors, inflation, and high taxation, negatively impact competitiveness and ease to attract capital, invest and create jobs, relegating a nation of enormous potential, such as Argentina, to the final positions of the World Economic Forum index, when it should be at the top.

Excessive inflation and high taxes are two almost identical factors that hide an excessive public expenditure that has acted as a brake on economic activity since it is not considered as a service to facilitate economic activity, but as an end in itself. The consolidated public expenditure reached 47.9% of GDP in 2016, a figure that is clearly disproportionate. Even if we consider primary public expenditure, that is, excluding the cost of debt, it doubled between 2002 and 2017.

The idea that a country’s debt is not a liability but simply an asset that will be absorbed by savers no matter what is incorrect as it does not consider three factors.

1. No debt is an asset because the government says so, but because there is a real demand for it. The government does not decide the demand for that bond or credit instrument, the savers do. And savings are not unlimited, hence deficit spending is not endless either.

2. No debt instrument is an attractive asset if it is imposed onto savers through repression. Even if the government imposes the confiscation of savings to cover its imbalances, the capital flight intensifies. it is literally like making a human body stop breathing in order to conserve oxygen.

3. That debt is simply impossible to assume when the investor and saver know that the government will destroy purchasing power at any cost to benefit from “inflating its way out of debt”. The reaction is immediate.

The Socialist idea that governments artificially creating money will not cause inflation, because the supply of money will rise in tandem with supply and demand for goods and services, is simply science fiction.

The government does not have a better or more accurate understanding of the needs and demand for goods and services or the productive capacity of the economy. In fact, it has all the incentives to overspend and transfer its inefficiencies to everyone else.

As such, like any perverse incentive under the so-called “stimulate internal demand” fallacy, the government simply creates larger monetary imbalances to disguise the fiscal deficit created by spending and lending without real economic return.  Creating massive inflation, economic stagnation as productivity collapses and impoverishing everyone.

The reality is that currency strength and real long-term demand for bonds are the ultimate signs of the health of a monetary system. When everyone tries to play the Fed without the US economic freedom and institutions, they only play the fool. Monetary illusion may delay the inevitable, a crisis, but it happens faster and harder if imbalances are ignored.

However, when it fails, the MMT crowd will tell you that it was not done properly. And that it is YOU, not them, who do not understand what money is.