Catastrophes around the corner

     "For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope."

             Jeremiah 29:11

I am an optimist. We will muddle through.

I offer a "To Do" list of credible things to worry about.

To make the list manageable, I don't include anything about Trump's second term, domestic politics, possible bad legislation, social disorder, or the health of myself and people I care about.

1. China's economy is a mess. It's failing and it will trigger a worldwide economic crisis. China's real estate market is collapsing under spectacular mis-allocation of money into un-economic projects, creating ghost cities of empty buildings.

Coming on top of the overly-aggressive Covid shutdown, China will go into deep recession, damaging the world economy. Youth unemployment there is over 20%.

2. China is an unstoppable powerhouse. China is the manufacturing center of the world and they can produce everything less expensively than can U.S. manufacturers. Their scientists and R&D labs now file more cutting edge patents than Americans. They are eating our lunch and it is getting worse.

3. Growing China military strength. Their navy already has more ships than does the U.S. They are building islands in the South China Sea, and they have turned belt-and-road investments in Asia and Africa into Chinese owned or controlled ports, which they are garrisoning with military personnel. They are gathering up allies and markets, and locking them into place. We are behind the 8-ball.

4. The U.S. real estate market is un-sustainable. The 15-year period of zero-interest quantitative easing caused a crazy asset bubble in housing, far outpacing earned incomes by young people seeking homes. Housing prices are maintained by people who sold a prior house at an inflated price or who got gifts from parents, rather than a sustainable process of house prices reflecting earnings. 

5. The U.S. stock market is poised to collapse and bring another great recession/depression. Quantitative easing created a stock market bubble as investors grasped for assets that would throw off income.

Hussman Funds market comment

Valuations are farther above the sustainable trend-line than they were at the 2000 market bubble that preceded an 80% drop in the NASDAQ and the 2007 50% drop in the SP500.

6. Cascadia earthquake is due. North America moves west into the Pacific about an inch a year. The Pacific and Juan de Fuca plates slide underneath the continent in 20-foot lurches every 300 years. The last time was in the year 1700. One is inevitable and due.

7. Carbon dioxide levels are high and will get worse for decades. Therefore:

     A. The Arctic and Antarctic are warming. As North American and Asian permafrost melts the methane sequestered in it is released. Methane is a greater greenhouse gas than CO2. We have triggered a bad feedback loop. It is too late to stop this.

    B. Ice sheets are melting in the Arctic and Antarctic. That will raise sea levels by 20 to 30 feet by the end of the century. This will inundate parts of low-lying cities including Miami and New Orleans on the Gulf Coast and older East Coast cities including New York, Boston, Baltimore, and the largest U.S. Naval base at Norfolk, Virginia. It will cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.

   C. Trigger an Ice Age. Melting ice from Greenland will pour fresh water into the North Atlantic, thus turning off the cycle that causes denser salty water to sink to the sea bottom, which makes the North Atlantic circulation possible. That circulation creates the Gulf Stream. Without it, Europe returns to the Ice Age. The sun reflection (albedo) from European ice brings North America into its own era of mile-thick ice in Canada and the U.S. down to Boston, Pittsburg, Chicago, and Portland.

Melting ice off Greenland turns off the circulation.

    D. Wildfires in the west. In this century higher temperatures will mean drought in parts of the west, weakening and killing the standing forests, making them kindling. They are burning up and it will get worse.

8. Sooner or later, a Mississippi flood overwhelms the levees.  We are experiencing freak weather events of 30 and 40 inches of rain in a day in mid-continent. If a flood overwhelms the 60-year-old Old River Control Structure in northern Louisiana, the Mississippi River will do what gravity is pushing it to do, change course to a shorter, steeper slope to the Gulf. New Orleans and the Lower Mississippi have trillions of dollars worth of urban, port, and petrochemical infrastructure presuming the Mississippi continues where it now is. Those would be stranded by the inevitable Atchafalaya shortcut.

9. Sperm counts are dropping. Medical researchers don't know why. They only know it is happening and that it is worldwide. Sperm count dropped from 104 million per millimeter in 1973 to 49 million in 2019.  In the U.S. one in eight couples struggle with infertility and the male is increasingly the source of the problem. 

10. World population is growing too fast. Or it is dropping too fast. 

     Too many people. The world population is 8 billion humans, more than double from 1975. Humans are stressing the carrying capacity of the earth, driving other animals extinct. Humans are turning natural areas like the Amazon Rain Forest into soybean farms, to our peril. 

     Not enough people. Once women have access to education, meaningful work, and contraception, a great many choose to have fewer or no children. U.S. women now have fewer than 1.7 child per woman, below replacement rate of 2.1. Europe is even lower. China, South Korea, and Japan are lower yet, approaching an average of one child per woman. Only the poorest countries in Africa are still growing in population and as they develop that will presumably join the pattern. 

America's economic system presumes growth. Places in the U.S. that are losing population experience blight as dropping demand means properties sit empty or under-used. If the U.S. is successful in stopping immigration -- a policy desire of many Americans -- we will experience noticeable population decline. Japan is already experiencing it. Our national pension system calculated there would be at least three workers paying into Social Security for every retiree. This is no longer the case, which is why there is a pending crisis. Either we will cut benefits, raise taxes, or grow the deficit.

                                                          --  --

Lots could go wrong. These are just a few of the perils we know about and that come to me in my various new feeds. There are others. I don't consider these warnings a "downer" nor needless alarmism. I like the Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. 

It makes me optimistic we will muddle through.

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Poor, sad Mike Pence.

"Either go away or go all the way in
Look at what you hold
Come back down on a spear of silence
When it flies
You go on through
You come on through"

Grace Slick, "Hey Fredrick," Jefferson Airplane, 1969

Grace slick was saying many things at once. Who knew what? Either she was talking about sex with an inexperienced lover. Or meth addiction. Or Nietzsche. Or losing a childlike faith. In a song, ambiguity works, if the music is good and the band catches the mood of an era.

Michael Pence is less fortunate. He is a shining example of the problem with failure either to go away or go all the way in. His semi-in/semi-out political messaging isn't working. He is mired at near zero percent and he gets boos. He is speaking out now, saying that "in 2016 Trump promised to govern as a conservative, and together we did." But now Trump has changed. He was with Trump, but now isn't, not exactly, not anymore.

Pence has what he must have thought was a good, solid understandable message. He was all-in with Trump through 2016's campaign and even the Access Hollywood moment, and then all-in for four years of his presidency right up to the last two weeks. January 6 was the breaking point, though. Pence's case has a logic: If you like tax cuts, the anti-abortion judges, the Bible held up in the park, and the pushback on trans people and taking a knee at the national anthem, then you get a cleaner, purer form of Trump-ism -- but without the insurrection and the crazy tweets. Perfect, right?

No.

Pence misses an essential ingredient in Trump's appeal. Trump is all-in on being Trump, without reservation or apology. It makes Trump read as authentic, which many Americans read as honest. Trump isn't hedging. 

Pence is half-in/half-out.

Pence, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, Vivek Ramaswami, and Doug Burgum want support from Trump's supporters, so they send complicated messages of praise and disapproval. They like Trump and the MAGA vibe, but not outright criminality --  but it wasn't really criminal. Trump and his crowds were misunderstood. Or patriots. Maybe both. Their positions look calculating because they are indeed calculated. Not Trump's. Trump is conspicuous in his careless bluntness. Democratic and mainstream media pundits count 30,000-plus Trump lies, and they bemoan and marvel that Trump supporters believe the flagrant, ongoing con. How can he be so persuasive, they wonder? 

Trump is persuasive because he sees and believes what he wants to see and believe. It gives him the salesman's gift of apparent sincerity. This may serve him well in his upcoming court cases. He knew what he wanted to hear, so he integrated the election information and legal advice he wanted, and only that. Democratic pundits can call it narcissistic and crazy; a great many Republicans see it differently, as being resolute. Trump's imperviousness to unwelcome counsel is real. It was maddening for his former close advisors and cabinet officers, who are near-unanimous in their condemnation of Trump. They now say publicly that he is dangerously unfit. But to the wider audience of the GOP electorate, Trump's willfulness comes across as inner strength, integrity, fortitude. 

Rambo-Trump flags are sold and displayed un-ironically.

That is what Pence cannot duplicate. Pence is an other-directed man, a slave to to conscience, to faith, to a wife, to the GOP, to laws, to being consistent to his own prior statements. To outside reality. We see him calculating the political landscape and attempting to thread a political needle on tiptoes. 

Meanwhile, square-jawed Rambo Trump carries a big gun. He does what the hell he wants. He makes liberals cry.

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Pause a moment

Notice when and where we are.

We are at a tipping point in the seasons.

College classmate Jane Collins lives in Medford, Massachusetts, which like my farm outside Medford, Oregon is at latitude 42.4 degrees north of the equator. The climate zones are different, but the angle of the sun is the same. She wrote a reverie about this moment in the annual seasons and in the lives of people born in the postwar baby boom of 1949 and 1950.

She publishes her essays and poems at https://alicet4.com. 

Jane Collins: summer garden

Guest Post by Jane Collins.

The days are getting short. The sun doesn’t feel so warm, when it shines. Weeds have grown up in the garden. Nobody cares. They won’t stop the last tomatoes from ripening.

Parts of the plants have turned brown and limp. But if you pull one up, thinking it’s dead, you might be surprised by a good-sized fruit at the end of the dry stalk. So you leave the garden looking raggedy, overgrown, with brown among the living green. There are still treasures in it.

Here and there is a small yellow flower or two. The bees know where. The sunflower bushes are swarming with bees, and some butterflies, wasps, and moths. Creatures are still finding nourishment here.

I have lost some old friends recently. One died after a long illness. One is moving to be near family, now that she needs people to check in on her. One has been hospitalized several times; she has to have another operation and she’s terrified. The oldest of all of them is doing well but worries about becoming a burden to her daughter. I’ve always been in good health, but lately, something is going on with my heart.

Are we all dry stalks, then? Or is there still some juice in these old growths?

We live through more rains, more wind and clouds, more sunshine. We hope for a late harvest.

                                                                  ---          ---          ---          ---

Scenes from my farm, yesterday.

The spent sunflowers

Watermelons, culled in the field

The mature grape plants in full harvest

Young grapes, still putting on leafy growth

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Easy Sunday: Political Tourism in New Hampshire

Republican candidates are packing into New Hampshire.

It is easy to see them, live, in person, and up close.

Part of what makes political tourism fun is that so few people are interested in doing it. It is easy to see the candidates up close. 

In early primary states candidates are trying to see voters, not raise money, so most events are free. Many supply food and drink, too. My starting point is to look at news articles about upcoming appearances by candidates. Then I contact the candidates' NH campaign websites where I get more details and sign up for free tickets. 

Here is an example of news articles for events this week:

Another news article gave me a head's up on a big cluster of candidates coming to the First in the Nation New Hampshire Leadership Summit, on Friday and Saturday October 13 and 14. I expect all of the candidates to attend, except Trump.

I expect to attend.

It is an unusual event, since there is a charge for it. The crowds at the Summit will be highly engaged partisans, not curious political shoppers, looking over the candidates.

It is also fall foliage season in New Hampshire, a time of bright sun in the daytimes, crisp temperatures after dark. New Hampshire makes it easy to know where to go for the best sightseeing day-trips.

The Leadership Summit coincides with high season for fall foliage in the areas around Manchester, NH, the largest city and the site of the convention, and Concord to its north, the state capital. 

Political tourism in October in New Hampshire is easy and beautiful. December is harder. It will be cold and the roads may be slick then.

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The Grand Old Party is gone.

It's a new party, and it isn't grand.

Heads up to Republicans who voted for Mitt Romney, John McCain, or either Bush. Your party left you. It's been replaced.

My earliest memory of what it meant to be a Republican was my hearing about Richard Nixon's "Checkers speech." While a Vice Presidential candidate in 1952, Nixon had been accused of getting campaign gifts he used for personal expenditures. I  heard about the speech in 1960, at age 10, when Nixon was running against JFK. He said he took pains not to profit from his office in any way, such as by employing his wife in his Senate office. He could have done so; it was legal and customary, he said, but he thought it would be self-serving, so he didn't. The hook of the speech was that Nixon admitted that he kept one single gift, a small dog named Checkers because his young daughters loved it. The words that I best remembered from the speech were these:

"I should say this, that Pat doesn't have a mink coat. But she does have a respectable Republican cloth coat, and I always tell her she'd look good in anything."

Respectable cloth coat.  Those were the words that stuck.

The sentence imbedded multiple themes of Republican virtues; Modesty; sacrifice; prudence; a husband's conspicuous affirmation of devotion to his wife. Republicans, as I understood it, were good, normal people with normal jobs living in normal families with two parents and a sensible number of well-loved children. Republicans might be smarmy about it and less than perfect, but they hid it because they knew they were supposed to be good and virtuous. They were respectable. They expected respectability of themselves and of other Republicans.

In that context, the impeachment and forced resignation of Nixon in 1974 made all the sense in the world to me. Nixon broke the rules of respectability. He cursed in the Oval Office! He covered up a crime by his campaign by committing one of his own when he obstructed justice by telling the FBI not to investigate a burglary, saying it was a CIA operation. He broke the rules. Good Republicans wouldn't stand for it. Nixon knew he did wrong and was ashamed.

That was then.

The Atlantic published excerpts from McKay Coppins' new biography of Mitt Romney. Romney told his biographer that the GOP has become a dangerous, undemocratic cult. Coppins wrote 

In less than a decade, he’d gone from Republican standard-bearer and presidential nominee to party pariah. 

Romney is an example of the respectable Republican of old. The policy decisions that supposedly define a political party -- tax rates, spending, foreign affairs, gun rights, immigration, abortion, public benefits, trade -- aren't what differentiate the new GOP.  Romney says the new GOP is defined less by policy than its cynicism, nihilism, lawlessness, and shamelessness. Trump breaks the law and Republicans tolerate it. Key U.S. Senators who could tell the truth choose to endorse lies because it serves their careers rather than our country and oaths of offices. Romney identifies Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz in particular as shameless cynics. They know better, he said, but spread lies. U.S. Senators should be shaping opinion, but aren't. Romney says he quotes Mitch McConnell saying:

"You're lucky. You can say the things that we all think. You're in a position to say things about him that we all agree with but can't say."

Romney said that many GOP senators say the same thing as did McConnell, in private. Most of his colleagues realize full well that Trump has none of the virtues that make a good president and all of the ones that make him dangerous, Romney said. But their public silence affirms Trump's message.

Following the January 6 riot Romney spoke on the floor of the Senate.

What happened here today was an insurrection, incited by the president of the United States. Those who choose to continue to support his dangerous gambit by objecting to the results of a legitimate, democratic election will forever be seen as being complicit in an unprecedented attack against our democracy. The best way we can show respect for the voters who are upset is by telling them the truth!

The name "Republican" still exists, but it is an entirely new political party. The brand has inertia but the substance is all new. GOP senators let Trump and conservative media feed Republican voter a diet of Trump, and have become what they have eaten. Party leaders don't lead those voters. They are afraid of them.

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A cornucopia of ironies

Hunter Biden is in trouble for guns and taxes.

Republicans are celebrating.

Reality is stranger than farce. 

Hunter Biden is a deeply troubled man. He has traded on his proximity to power throughout his adult life. He may well have a great deal of raw talent -- he got into and through Yale Law School, but that fact is lost in the larger fact that he worked the angle of the family name. This included putting his father on speakerphone so business colleagues and clients could hear for themselves that Senator Joe Biden, and later Vice President Biden, was a loving father in communication with Hunter.

Irony One. Now that proximity jumps up to bite Hunter Biden. Republicans want a scalp with that name. Hunter Biden is a celebrity in conservative media. Having worked hard for years to show others how tight he is with his father, now the entire GOP political and media establishment is doing that work for him. 

Fox News Alert: Hunter emailed his father!

Irony Two. Of all the things that Hunter Biden did that was provably criminal, Republicans got him on a gun charge. I personally am thrilled there are laws making it a crime for a user of illegal drugs to buy a firearm, and illegal, too, for a person to sign a government document falsely swearing one is not an addict. (As with the fake elector certifications, I take seriously false swearing on government documents.) From my point of view, the more ways that government can take guns away from dangerous people, the better. But GOP gun rights orthodoxy and a near-unanimous GOP take a different view. They assert that people have a constitutional right to acquire and bear arms, and that broad restrictions on that right are wrong and illegal. We are in the odd situation where Republican politicians and media are celebrating Hunter Biden getting charged with a crime that Republican politicians and media, and many GOP-appointed judges, don't think should be a crime at all. 

Irony Three. Hunter was late paying his taxes for two years. He has repaid them, but he was, indeed, in arrears for two years. I personally am thrilled that Democrats are working to step up enforcement of tax laws, but an article of GOP orthodoxy is to reduce funding of IRS enforcement. Orthodox GOP messaging is that the IRS is inflexible and unforgiving and too harsh in treatment of taxpayers: Give taxpayers a break. Until now, with Hunter.

Irony Four. Much of what Trump has done is freely and proudly admitted by Trump. It may not be provably criminal beyond a reasonable doubt to a unanimous jury that contains people with MAGA bumper strips on their pick-up trucks. Still, there is ample "probable cause" sufficient to bring an indictment and a trial. GOP messaging has focused less on defending Trump than attacking the "politically motivated" prosecution; political considerations are wrong in prosecutions! Hunter Biden and the Special Prosecutor at the Department of Justice had worked out a plea agreement that was generally consistent with how these gun and IRS cases were resolved with other defendants. Plea agreements are near-universal in cases like these. The GOP-majority House learned about the deal and threw a fit, calling it a sweet deal, too sweet. With that politically-motivated involvement, the plea deal fell through, and now Hunter Biden has been charged with multiple counts of felonies. 

Irony Five. I think the nepotism that surrounds political figures is immoral and corrupting. It looks swampy because it is swampy. Gifts, benefits, contracts, and jobs to children are a way for private interests and foreign governments to curry favor with American politicians. Hunter is an example of this, and the GOP has leaped on it. GOP politicians and media call it the "Biden crime family." The irony is that we have examples of the same thing taking place for seven years without objection from Republicans, in the form of Don Junior, Eric, Ivanka, and Jared Kushner getting trademarks, investments, golf tournament deals, and hotel business, which benefit Donald Trump's family and businesses. Now the GOP cares about nepotism.

I am not inclined to minimize or excuse Hunter Biden's behavior. Yes, I know he was touched by misfortune. Troubled people -- people with tragedy in their pasts and addictions to deal with -- sometimes commit crimes. That is who we imprison, troubled people who commit crimes. Hunter is another iteration. I am perfectly happy to have him treated like everyone else. If that means the "the book" is thrown at him, and he serves years in prison with other troubled people, so be it. Possibly both Democrats and Republicans will better examine our prisons and justice system -- especially if people of privilege start ending up there. If Republicans get on board prosecuting gun and tax crimes, it is all the better for America. And if Hunter's prosecution means that Republicans acknowledge that criminal behavior should be investigated and prosecuted, all the better. And if Hunter's influence-peddling is examined for criminality, and that puts light onto Trump's children, onto gifts to Supreme Court justices, and of nepotism generally among House and Senate members, again, all the better.

Irony can serve a good purpose. It helps us see hypocrisy. Maybe Hunter Biden will end up in the same prison as Trump.

                                      -----       -----   

Here is a short video I just posted on YouTube.  

https://youtu.be/96Ot41QNzSQ

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Advice to Biden: Challenge Trump to a duel.

Call Trump's bluff.

Donald Trump challenged Biden to a public test of physical and mental fitness. Trump walked into a trap. 

Joe Biden should accept the challenge, promptly and very publicly. Offer to meet right now, this week, shirtless and in shorts, for a fitness duel. A showdown. Test ability to do chin-ups and sit-ups. Add a test of flexibility by a test of touching one's toes. Add a cardiovascular-style treadmill test.

Humiliate Trump. 

Joe Biden has a problem. People think he looks old, weak, and mentally diminished. Voters across the board see it and worry about it. Biden has been trying to address the issue by minimizing it, deflecting to calling it "experience." That approach isn't working.

The solution to a bad body-language message -- Biden is old and frail -- is another better body-language message. Biden doesn't need to look young. He just needs to look more fit than Donald Trump.  

I don't know the facts on Biden's physical and mental condition. I know what I see. I see a slender man of 80 who walks carefully, in the manner of people worried about falling, which comes across as feeble. But I read that he works out for an hour every day. He certainly appears to care of himself. I am guessing he can do a few chin-ups and more than a few sit-ups. I am pretty sure he can touch his toes; he does not have a stomach in the way.  I know he can ride a bicycle.

My photo, November 2019. Erect. Fit. 

I don't know the real facts on Trump's physical health, either. I know what I see. Trump generally looks solid and comfortable standing at a lectern. A dark blue suit covers up flaws. His trademark extra-long red tie covers his midsection. He pretends to weigh 215. I know he plays a lot of golf, and that he uses a golf cart. He is confident enough about his health to make the challenge, but I am sure he does not want to appear in public shirtless, and I am confident he would struggle mightily to do chin-ups, sit-ups, touch his toes, or walk any distance uphill.

There are lots of altered photographs of both Biden and Trump circulating on the web, which is why I used one of my own of Biden. The one below of Trump with Brett Favre is from a Reuters report on altered photos. They used this one to illustrate an example of an un-altered one.

I think Biden would easily win the contest of physical fitness measured by tests to lift one's body weight or flexibility. People who work out for an hour every day do cardio work, and my money would be on Biden for the inclined treadmill test, too. 

Presidents need to know about present and past foreign alliances, the names and interests of foreign heads of state and their governments, the names and priorities of key Members of Congress, about legislative process, about U.S. laws and the Constitution. Challenge Trump to a mental test written by presidential scholars on subjects that concern the president's job. This is Biden's home turf. He has spent a lifetime in preparation for that test.

Challenge Trump. People think Biden is weak, so he has nothing to lose, but Biden would not lose. But don't worry: Trump won't accept the challenge

Trump will not want to risk losing and he won't want to appear shirtless in public. Biden could badger Trump to put up or shut up. Turn the subject from Biden's weakness into Trump's refusal to prove up. Trump's substantial political base enjoys seeing Trump-the-bully dominate his opponents. He comes across as fearless and indomitable, whether he is grabbing women, humiliating political opponents, or claiming Mexico will pay to build a wall. They like his swagger. But there is something else a great many people enjoy seeing. People like seeing bullies put back in their place by the scrappy little guy who accepts a challenge. We enjoy seeing the bully shown to be a fraud.

This is Biden's chance to change the story on "fitness for office." Trump will go from offense to defense. Biden should keep pressing. Trump understands reality TV. He knows people would watch, and they will be disappointed not to get to see the showdown. He knows he would look ridiculous struggling to do a chin-up, losing to Biden.

Accept the challenge, Joe.

                                                   ---   ---   ---

Once again I am experimenting with a short video version of this post, which I upload to social media sites, where they appear to get about a thousand views.  I welcome suggestions from readers.

https://youtu.be/O00FfzrvYYQ

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