Lex Anteinternet: Three economists walk into a bar and. . .

Lex Anteinternet: Three economists walk into a bar and. . .: 

Three economists walk into a bar and. . .

spend the rest of the evening arguing on whether to adjust the thermostat from 68F to 65, or maybe 72.

By Flickr user midnightcomm - https://www.flickr.com/photos/midnightcomm/447335691/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5596839

Not funny?

Neither are missing the point arguments economist out in the Twitterverse have about inflation, or elsewhere on the Internet.

Maybe we should have titled this thread "what causes inflation"?  If you are listening to economists or pundits on the topic, you probably don't actually know.

If you listen to right wing politicians, and economics is pretty political, you'll hear stuff like that put out by Dr. John Barrasso.  It's simple,  Inflation started on inauguration day when Joe Biden put his had on the Big Meter O' Gas Prices and personally shut down American oil production. All that needs to happen to fix it is to have Biden go down to the White House basement, find the Gas Thermostat, and adjust it.

Gas meters behind the White House where the President personally sets the price of natural gas.

That's nonsense.

So is "unleash American oil", or what have you. That's not what's going on.

If you listen to Robert Reich, the left wing economist, inflation is all caused by corporate greed. That's it.  Tax corporation and their heads, and it'll all drop back into price.

The cause of inflation, according to Robert Reich.

Sorry Robert, that's not correct, and I'm guessing in the middle of the night and ponder this, you know it isn't.

If you listen to NPR, and I do, it's all so complicated no mortal is capable of figuring it out.

Well, it ain't that complicated, either.

Apologist Jimmy Akin, who ponders a lot of non-apologetic topics, states that it's all caused by the government.  It isn't, but we'll start there.

Setting the inflation meter.

In normal times, and in a normal land, with a normal economy, there's a lot of truth to that.  In those circumstances, there are a lot of things that operate naturally, as long as the government doesn't mess with them.  You'll have a natural sized population, which may be stable, may be declining, or may be increasing somewhat, but it'll be in a sort of rough status in that fashion. And you have their "consumer demands". The cost of those demand is determined by supply.

The cost of government, in this scenario, is determined by its demands, which is paid for by taxes.

Pretty simple.

So how can that get off kilter?

In modern history, it got off kilter during the Great Depression.

With the Great Depression, the US turned to John Maynard Keynes.  Keynes believed that business cycles could be regulated through government spending.  If things were in the dumps, increased government spending could address it, but that spending had to be paid off in good times.

Yeah, right.

In reality, during the Great Depression, government learned how to deficit spend and liked it.  World War Two made it worse.  Ever since then, we've never really been able to reign that in, as Government likes to spend borrowed money it can't pay back.

The reason for that is simple.  People like getting money, but they don't like having to work or pay for it.  If you go from wherever you are today, in the US, and go anywhere, you're going to collide with things the Federal government bought with borrowed money.  You won't be able to avoid it.

Generally, the Federal government likes to keep the inflation rate caused by spending money it doesn't have right down around 3%.  I frankly feel this is immoral as inflation steals from people's wallets, but that's what they try to do.  It's decreasing the amount they have to pay back on their loans and gives them the extra cash to spread around without anyone really noticing inflation too much.

People should, and should, be up in arms about it, but they basically don't notice.

So, in the Jimmy Akin sense, yes, government causes inflation.

But, it's not that simple.

In the US, the government has also messed with the natural value of labor by inflating the size of hte working population through immigration. There's certainly outsized legal immigration, but there's also illegal immigration, which nobody did much about until fairly recently.  Immigrants are actually deflationary, as they work for less than native born Americans would in the same industries.  By the same token, however, if immigration is slowed, it causes wages to rise, as the labor pool shrinks.  If illegal immigration is slowed, it causes the artificially depressed wages to rise.  That's inflation, but it's also an example of wages seeking their natural level, effectively reaching the level they should have been.

This is important to keep in mind, as part of the way that the government keeps inflation down, in normal times, in spite of high borrowing, is by keeping wages down, through immigration.  Never raising the minimum wage plays into this, but the immigrant population, quite a bit of which is "off the books", plays into this.

That also serves to keep everyone in a household at work, which is a different topic we will address some other time.

So there you have normal times.

But what about abnormal times?

And we are in those.

It turns out that the Four Horsement of the Apocolpyse have a lot to do with causing inflation.

And when wars ride in, at least famine rides in with him.

In, other words, spite of what Jimmy Akin may think, a lot of current inflation has more to do with Vladimir Putin's government than our own.

Vladimir Putin, as we all know, has launched a war against Ukraine to bring it back under Moscow's heel.  Russia is failing badly at it.

A casualty of the war has been oil prices.  Oil is a globally traded commodity, and one whose value widely even in normal times.  Now the price has gone up because of the effort to take Russian hydrocarbons off the market to punish Russia.

Now, if only the price of things mattered in the world we could do what Trump probably would have done, which would have been to turn a blind eye to Ukraine's fate.  But that would have been a very dangerous thing to do.  It's still the thing that some Republicans want to do right now, but they seem to be a minority.

At any rate, this is why calls by people like Dr. John Barrasso to "unleash" American oil are wrong and won't work, which he probably knows.  The American oil industry isn't producing on all the leases it has now, in spite of the high prices.  Market instability is part of that reason.  If people like Marjorie Taylor Greene have their way, Russian oil will be back on the market, the price will drop, and having invested in American oil, which only makes sense if prices are high, would have been the wrong thing to do.

The price of oil is also high due to OPEC+, which operates to falsely set the price.  If the organization were a domestic organization, it'd get sued by the Federal government.  As it's international, it can't be, but it sets production to set the price and when it wants to raise it, it does. It recently did.

Russia is part of OPEC+

If the US really wanted to address this part of this issue, as we're always going to be subject to OPEC, we'd switch as much of the nation over to non petroleum energy as possible.  This gets into naysayers who say it can't be done, but it can be, and it's happening now naturally.  Of course, Wyomingites get up in arms about that too, as they fear that electric generation is going to omit coal, which is another topic. And on that topic, you don't just get to do what you want to do as it's good for you locally.  Most people know that, but they don't like to really believe that something that may be causing harm is doing that.  People elsewhere, however, will be deciding those things, not us.

And Putin's war has disrupted global food supplies as well.  Ukraine is often referred to as a "breadbasket", and it is. . . for much of the Third World.

Food prices, we'd note, are up in much of Africa by epic levels.

This impacts us too, as food has been a global commodity since ancient times.  If it's transportable, it will be traded long distance.

Of course, it's also the case that the US went to a "cheap food" model following the Second World War, which emphasized size and production. That was a mistake.  It would have been better to emphasize the producers and to have sought to keep as many people in agriculture as possible.  A more agrarian type of farm economy would cause prices to climb initially, but it would also help stabilize the market long timer, making some of it more local and all of it more direct.

For that matter, the whole scale up scaling of economic scale on the retail and production end of things achieved that as well. Robert Reich decries "corporate profits" without seeming to ever realize that for much of the economy, even now, corporations aren't necessary.  We don't need Walmarts at all, and for that matter, there's no reason that something like Twitter can't be corporate owned.  If changes like that were made, it would also damper inflation.

Be that as it may, should the Republicans take the House and Senate tomorrow, they're not going to introduce an anti-corporate ownership bill and bring back a more Distributist economy.  No way. And in spite of Harriet Hageman's agricultural roots, she's not going to introduce any bills directed at returning large scale agarianistic agriculture to the economy either.  

And as long as fuel and food prices are subject to the reestablishment of the Russian Empire, we're going to be in an inflationary cycle.

That argues for defeating Putin decisively and right now.  

Finally, there's the COVID effect.

A pandemic that kills 1,070,000 people is going to remove a lot of workers from the economy forever.  That's inflationary.

The necessary halting of imports from China, something Trump did right during the pandemic, was inflationary, however.  Giving credit for where credit is due, that needed to be done, but in the globalized economy, the econmy has never righted itself, just as it didn't after World War One when a highly globaized economy was also disrupted by the war, and then of couse the Spanish Flu followed.

Lots of workers stayed home during the pandemic, many during mandatory quarantines. Government efforts started under Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, to address this by addressing wage cessation amounted to sending people money, a lot of whom never needed it. That was inflationary.

The perceived and mistaken idea that something needed to be done to get people back to work, they would have done that on their own for economic reasons gave rise to infrastructure bills under Trump that expanded under Biden.  That was inflationary.

But here's the added things. Putin's war jump started inflation all over the globe, and as we're in a globalized market, that means one country's fever at least gets another one sick.

For example:

 CPI Austria Austria cpi september 2022 1.599 % 10.531 %

 CPI Belgium Belgium cpi october 2022 2.372 % 12.268 %

 CPI Brazil Brazil cpi september 2022 -0.290 % 7.169 %

 CPI Canada Canada cpi september 2022 0.066 % 6.858 %

 CPI Chile Chile cpi september 2022 0.859 % 13.728 %

 CPI China China cpi september 2022 0.291 % 2.783 %

 CPI Czech Republic Czech Republic cpi september 2022 0.801 % 17.973 %

 CPI Denmark Denmark cpi september 2022 1.305 % 10.019 %

 CPI Estonia Estonia cpi september 2022 0.321 % 23.648 %

 CPI Finland Finland cpi september 2022 0.780 % 8.119 %

 CPI France France cpi september 2022 -0.564 % 5.552 %

 CPI Germany Germany cpi september 2022 1.936 % 9.991 %

 CPI Great Britain Great Britain cpi september 2022 0.411 % 8.808 %

 CPI Greece Greece cpi september 2022 2.937 % 12.024 %

 CPI Hungary Hungary cpi september 2022 4.077 % 20.124 %

 CPI Iceland Iceland cpi october 2022 0.668 % 9.405 %

 CPI India India cpi september 2022 0.845 % 6.488 %

 CPI Indonesia Indonesia cpi october 2022 -0.106 % 5.710 %

 CPI Ireland Ireland cpi september 2022 0.000 % 8.175 %

 CPI Israel Israel cpi september 2022 0.187 % 4.594 %

 CPI Italy Italy cpi september 2022 0.263 % 8.866 %

 CPI Japan Japan cpi april 2022 0.396 % 2.422 %

 CPI Luxembourg Luxembourg cpi september 2022 0.257 % 6.879 %

 CPI Mexico Mexico cpi september 2022 0.620 % 8.700 %

 CPI Norway Norway cpi september 2022 1.372 % 6.894 %

 CPI Poland Poland cpi september 2022 1.586 % 17.254 %

 CPI Portugal Portugal cpi september 2022 1.226 % 9.281 %

 CPI Russia Russia cpi march 2022 7.613 % 16.698 %

 CPI Slovakia Slovakia cpi september 2022 0.908 % 14.170 %

 CPI Slovenia Slovenia cpi september 2022 -0.921 % 10.002 %

 CPI South Africa South Africa cpi september 2022 0.094 % 7.801 %

 CPI South Korea South Korea cpi september 2022 0.285 % 5.583 %

 CPI Spain Spain cpi september 2022 -0.696 % 8.872 %

 CPI Sweden Sweden cpi september 2022 1.429 % 10.838 %

 CPI Switzerland Switzerland cpi september 2022 -0.176 % 3.252 %

 CPI the Netherlands The Netherlands cpi september 2022 2.340 % 14.496 %

 CPI Turkey Turkey cpi october 2022 3.545 % 85.515 %

 CPI United States United States cpi september 2022 0.215 % 8.202 %

 HICP Austria Austria hicp september 2022 2.436 % 10.915 %

 HICP Belgium Belgium hicp september 2022 1.336 % 12.061 %

 HICP Czech Republic Czech Republic hicp september 2022 0.885 % 17.829 %

 HICP Denmark Denmark hicp september 2022 1.473 % 11.101 %

 HICP Estonia Estonia hicp september 2022 0.338 % 24.094 %

 HICP Eurozone Europe hicp september 2022 1.196 % 9.927 %

 HICP Finland Finland hicp september 2022 0.726 % 8.413 %

 HICP France France hicp september 2022 -0.511 % 6.232 %

 HICP Germany Germany hicp september 2022 2.176 % 10.899 %

 HICP Great Britain Great Britain hicp september 2022 0.569 % 10.142 %

 HICP Greece Greece hicp september 2022 2.956 % 12.117 %

 HICP Hungary Hungary hicp september 2022 1.850 % 20.673 %

 HICP Iceland Iceland hicp september 2022 -0.235 % 5.933 %

 HICP Ireland Ireland hicp september 2022 0.000 % 8.604 %

 HICP Italy Italy hicp september 2022 1.582 % 9.366 %

 HICP Luxembourg Luxembourg hicp september 2022 0.510 % 8.832 %

 HICP Poland Poland hicp september 2022 1.522 % 15.698 %

 HICP Portugal Portugal hicp september 2022 1.270 % 9.811 %

 HICP Slovakia Slovakia hicp september 2022 0.937 % 13.579 %

 HICP Slovenia Slovenia hicp september 2022 -0.284 % 10.629 %

 HICP Spain Spain hicp september 2022 -0.246 % 8.974 %

 HICP Sweden Sweden hicp september 2022 1.221 % 10.252 %

 HICP the Netherlands The Netherlands hicp september 2022 2.842 % 17.061 %

 HICP Turkey Turkey hicp september 2022 3.097 % 83.394 %

But also note that global inflation rates are expected to peak this year, and then steeply decline.

At any rate, in a globalized economy in which we depend on stuff with overseas sources to come here, when prices go up there, they go up here.  Put another way, when is the last time you bought a shirt made in the United States?

So, what should the government do, and by that I mean right now, to address inflation?

The most important thing it could do would be to make systemic changes that take the country out, as much as possible, of a system that is subject to foreign commodity and product inflation without falling into the falsity of autarky, which we'd note is, of course, inflationary.

That would entail moving the volatile energy sector over to stable, and frankly North American based, energy production.  Nuclear energy would be the best option for the US for domestic and transportation energy.  If we wanted an infrastructure bill, this should have been it.  It's not too late to do this through various means, however, including tax breaks where appropriate, and by removing subsidization, which occurs in places we're so used to use to we don't recognize them.  The national highway system, for example, is subsidized, which in turn amounts to a trucking industry subsidization.

We could also do this in the food and retail sectors through anti monopoly and frankly highly distributist policies that revested much of the economy at a lower level.  That would be inflationary in the short term, but stabilizing in the long term.

In the immediate short term, we could quit deficit spending on things that we don't need to, which is only almost all, but probably not all, things.  The Federal Government doles out cash like crazy under both Republican and Democratic Administrations.  There are a lot of things that the Federal Government takes care of that it could just say to localities, "you take care of it, it's yours anyway".  Quite frankly in quite a few instances local entities couldn't take care of it, at least not without tax hikes, but then those things would be paid for along the way in most instances, and where they couldn't be, there's likely an existential problem at work such that they shouldn't be.

And contrary to the Republican whining about "thousands of IRS agents" and the Democratic silence on taxes, the upper marginal tax rates ought to be increased.  Billionaires now control a frightening amount of the US economy and ought to be taxed aggressively. That won't reduce them to poverty, but would recapture money that should be recaptured.  And in inflationary cycles, a windfall profits tax should be put in place.

Finally, as grim as it is, the Fed ought to jack up interest rates to double their current amount and put a massive damper on the overheated economy.

How much of this is going to happen? 

Probably none of it.

"We keep you alive to serve this ship", Part 1 of societal institutions and work.

"We keep you alive to serve this ship"

Ben Hur

Just observing things, It's really struck me over time how certain social programs, of the left and the right, basically amount to nothing other than serving the needs of businesses, particularly large business entities, no matter how they are styled. This is so much the case that certain huge proponents of some programs who would regard themselves as real fire breathing leftists are actually heavy-duty capitalists, and don't know it.

This shows in their justification for the programs.

Let's, once again, make reference to our evolved place in a state of nature, and where we are actually at.

In a state of nature we'd not do what most of us do daily, which is to leave our abode and clock in time somewhere else, to come back to our home.  In our natural state, while we would leave our families, the family would be the focus all the time.  In our industrial societies, our work is.  Most people spend most of their lives with people they are brought in contact with solely because they serve an economic interest, and nothing else.

Men got there first, long before women. But starting in the early part of the 20th Century, if not slightly before, that changed for women and now women are basically expected to work away from their homes and families.

Everyone is.

When looked at this way, we see why left wing emphasis on child care, and paradoxically abortion, are part and parcel of serving industry.  If women can be prevented from having children, they can, ie., they'll have to, go to work. That's what they should be doing, working.  If they must have children for some weird biological and psychological reason, well then government sponsored child warehousing, i.e., daycare, will force them back into work in another fashion.

Either way, they'll be freed, i.e., forced, to serve work.

Almost all the post 1945 liberalization of domestic law and structure works this way.  Easy no-fault divorce makes it easy to dump families, sending everyone unhindered and untethered into work. Where that results in women falling below the poverty line due to their children, as they foolishly chose to have children, government funded daycare will address it.  Abortion must be kept legal, we are told, as it means women can go to work.

What if things didn't work this way?

Well, men would still be men, and women be women, but they'd have to fund their families themselves, and at least attempt to choose more wisely.  That would have a lot of collateral impacts, but chief among them would be, frankly, less of a focus on work and more of a focus on the domestic.

But that would also mean that a society based on consumption, and which reduced its members to consumers, would be focused on families instead.

And then who is going to make and buy all that crap?

So the next time you here Bernie Sanders spouting off about something like universal child care, remember, what he's really saying, whether he means it or not, is:

"We keep you alive to serve this ship"

Lex Anteinternet: This is why we can't have nice things.

Lex Anteinternet: This is why we can't have nice things.: 

This is why we can't have nice things.

And this is absolutely appalling.

The State of Wyoming and Natrona County will actually make more money by way of this purchase than it does keeping the property in private hands.  So what is this really about?

Well, that requires reading the wind, but if you do, it's plain that the Republican Party of the state abhors the concept of public land to at least some degree. All of Wyoming's current Congressional delegation supported the concept of turning the Federal lands over to the state during the 2016 race, and likely still think that way, even though average Wyomingites are overwhelmingly opposed to it.  Governor Gordon's knee-jerk reaction to the Marton transfer seems to express that view as well.

Underlying it all is the concept, generally, that only immediate generations seem to count, and everything is better privatized.  Listen to Republican politicians in the state generally, and you'll commonly hear that view.  While few will openly state it, the general concept is that it's best to transfer all the land to the State, and for the state to sell all of it to private parties. That will generate "wealth".

It'll also convert the state basically into Ohio, but as it seems that monied interests are the only ones that count, much of the current GOP is deaf on this issue.

Now, we can't say that this is 100% true. The GOP itself is split between the Trumpite populist wings and the old party.  Many in the old party are not of this mind, and others remember the era when Governor Geringer and legislators who supported him, like Jim Hageman, Harriet Hageman's father, attempted to privatize the state's wildlife.  But many more do not recall anything of this sort.

Indeed, the state has become amazingly blind, at least politically, to think long term, a disturbing symptom of a society that's in deep existential distress.  Like late stage Weimar Germany, people are reaching out for simple solutions to long term systemic problems, and only the most extreme views seem to be really having an influence.  

Wyoming at one time had an actual two party system.  Today is an anniversary of various events which demonstrate that, as noted here regarding past Democrats elected to state office.

1896  Democratic Governor John E. Osborne elected to Congress from Wyoming.  He would serve a single term.

1933 John B. Kendrick, U.S. Senator from Wyoming, and sponsor of the Kendrick Irrigation Project in Natrona County, died.  Prior to being elected Senator, he had served as Governor.

1936  Henry H. Schwartz, Democrat from Casper, elected to the U.S. Senate.  Schwartz served one term and was defeated in his reelection bid.  The Ohio born lawyer practiced law in Casper.

Henry H. Schwartz

1942.  Lester Hunt, DDS, the sitting Wyoming Secretary of State and a Democrat, narrowly defeated Governor Nels H. Smith.

Lester C. Hunt.

Hunt would serve as Governor for two terms before going on to becoming Wyoming's Senator.  He killed himself in 1954 after Washington, D. C. policy picked up his son in 1953 for soliciting a male prostitute.  The scandal was kept quiet for a while, but political opponents threatened to use it against him as a threat to keep him from engaging in a 1954 bid for office.

I

1958  Gale McGee was elected to the U.S. Senate.  He was the first, and so far the only, University of Wyoming instructor to be elected to the U.S. Senate.   He was a Democrat.

McGee fit into another era in Wyoming's politics in that he was able to be elected as a Democrat and, perhaps even more surprisingly, the Class 2 Senator position was occupied by a Democrat at the time that McGee was elected, making both of Wyoming's Senators Democrats.  He served from 1959 until 1977.  That he was elected in the late 1950s is surprising to recall, because his somewhat flashy sartorial style really fit in with the early 1970s.  Nonetheless, his service stretched all the way back to 1959 and he was sworn in as  Senator by Vice President Richard Nixon.  After being defeated for a reelection bid in 1976, a campaign which he was largely absent in, he was appointed by President Carter as the Ambassador to the Organization of American States.

Politically, McGee was slightly liberal, but remained a popular Wyoming politician.  His defeat in 1976 was attributed by the national media to his opposition to the Vietnam War which was almost certainly incorrect.  McGee did oppose the war, but his seat remained safe throughout it.  There has been some speculation that by 1976 he no longer wanted to remain in the Senate, but for one reason or another ran anyhow.  That would be more consistent with his campaign that year against Malcolm Wallop in which Wallop was allowed to run a nearly unopposed campaign.  McGee was the last Senator from Wyoming to be a member of the Democratic Party.

The Post Office in Laramie is named after Senator McGee.

1964  Teno Roncolio, a Democratic lawyer originally from Rock Springs, but living in Cheyenne at the time, elected to Congress.

Roncolio would only serve one term from his 1964 election, and then attempt a run for the Senate.  His Senatorial run was unsuccessful, and he would regain his position in the House in 1970.

Roncolio's 1964 election meant that two out of the three members of Congress (House and Senate) from Wyoming were Democrats, an event which would be almost inconceivable today.

Roncolio received the Silver Star while serving in the U.S. Army during World War Two for heroism in the invasion of Normandy, and he was one of the sources interviewed by Cornelius Ryan for his Book "The Longest Day."  Roncolio was the last member of the Democratic Party to be elected to Congress from Wyoming.

And this is just from this day in history.  It omits such figures as Governors Ed Herschlar and Mike Sullivan.

It's frankly almost impossible to imagine Wyomingites voting for any of these figures now.  Osborne was elected because of something, while over a century ago, that directly relates to what we see now with Gordon, an effort by large landed interest to drive out small ones.  They were engaged, quite frankly, in an attempted Republican Party supported public lands, land grab.  The effort has never really stopped.

Roncolio was a war hero and McGee a University of Wyoming professor.  McGee would be reviled for merely occupying that profession today.  Roncolio would be harder to lambaste, as you really couldn't do that with somebody who had landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944.  That's instructive, however, in that much of the death of the Democratic Party in the state is due to the Democratic Party itself.

Roncalio was a lawyer who was a Catholic Italian American.  Sullivan was a Catholic Irish American.  Herschlar had been a World War Two Marine Corps raider.  Kendrick was a Texas born rancher.  Al these men essentially had "the bark on" in some fashion, and you knew that they held views that were close to those of common Wyomingites, including rank and file Republicans.  That day has really passed.  While some very solid Democrats remain, its nearly impossible to find one that holds middle of the road views on major social issues.  Statewide races are sometimes the exception, but often the state's Democrats can be predicted to be impossibly left wing to elect.

Up until now, this has been stemmed a bit by the fact that the majority of the Republican Party has been grounded in the traditional middle, but during this election that has already massively slipped.  It could be seen to be slipping when Barack Obama was elected, an event to which many Wyomingites had a strange knee-jerk reaction to that's hard to explain.  Following that, it became increasingly clear that major existential changes are occurring to industries that the state has long depended upon. While massive amounts of coal are still being mined, it's clear to anyone with eyes to see that this is a temporary situation, and one which the state hasn't begun to adjust to.  The same is now true of oil and gas.  Instead of addressing the economic crisis head on, the popular reaction has to been to blame the Democratic Party.  And the Democratic Party, in turn, by nationally embracing increasingly left wing causes, has made itself easy to blame.

This election really demonstrates this.  Absent a real surprise, Wyoming will be sending Harriet Hageman to Congress.  Neither Cheney nor Hageman can be regarded as "greens" (and while it's hardly been noted, Sen. Barasso has been quietly backing electric charging stations for oncoming electric automobiles in the state), but hardly a day has gone by this week where some Hageman campaign flyer hasn't arrived here, some of which just have silly theses.  To read Hageman's propaganda, the Federal government is at war with the state and keeping it from doing whatever it wants due to over regulation and by refusing to allow the production of oil and coal.  In reality, Federal oil and gas leases are going unused.

There's always an extreme danger in listening to people who tell you that nothing is your fault, and that everything is somebody else's, that person being somebody that you probably don't actually know.  One day in the early 30s somebody is telling you that the Deutsches Heer didn't really lose the war, and was somehow "stabbed in the back" by the Jews, and the next day you are freezing in a muddy trench in Stalingrad.  Well, that's your fault for listening to such complete nonsense.

Around here, right now, there seems to be very little push back on the concept that the voice of the public can be ignored, everything ought to be privatized, and everyone will benefit from never being able to go on the land again as we'll all have jobs for Big Out Of  State Entity.  That's nonsense.  But until there's a way to cause politicians to suffer at the polls for such positions, this will keep on keeping on.

Lex Anteinternet: Gang Warfare Erupts Between Thomas Gobbles Gang an...

Lex Anteinternet: Gang Warfare Erupts Between Thomas Gobbles Gang an...: 

Gang Warfare Erupts Between Thomas Gobbles Gang and Other Turkeys

Well of course somebody is out feeding them.

Turkeys in town are a nuisance. They're mean, dirty and a large road hazard.  I wish the Game & Fish would relocate them.

Lex Anteinternet: Wednesday, October 18, 1972. Congress overrides Nixon to enact The Clean Water Act, The Soviet Union agrees to pay on Lend Lease, ZZ Top in Kentucky.

Lex Anteinternet: Wednesday, October 18, 1972. Congress overrides N...: 

Wednesday, October 18, 1972. Congress overrides Nixon to enact The Clean Water Act, The Soviet Union agrees to pay on Lend Lease, ZZ Top in Kentucky.

Congress overwhelmingly overrode Richard Nixon's veto to pass the Clean Water Act. The Senate voted 52–12 for an override, and the House 247–23.

It was clearly a different era.  It's almost impossible to imagine the GOP supporting the act today, and the television "news" would be full of vindictive comments.

The public had been mobilized by Rachel Carson's 1962 book Silent Spring, back in the day when it still could sit and read a book, and the 70s saw a host of environmental legislation pass.  As the ABA has noted:

The 1970s was a seminal decade for environmental protection. Its first year saw three major accomplishments: the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the Clean Air Act, and the creation of the EPA. NEPA alone was groundbreaking

All of which is an understatement.   And that text omitted the Endangered Species Act.

The counter reaction set in soon, and already by the mid 1970s there were those who urged the repeal of nearly everything that had been passed, although it never occurred. What has occurred, however, is that an increasingly polarized public, fed slop by such things as "news" outlets that cater only to a person's preformed views, and loud voices on Twitter and Facebook, have made listening to unpleasant scientific news a political act that can be disregarded if it conflicts with a person's preformed views.  This reflects a wider crisis in the culture on political issues, that are similarly fed, which is rapidly making the United States nearly ungovernable

On the same day, the USSR agreed to pay the United States $722,000,000 over 30 years for repayment for Lend Lease.  The Soviets reneged the following year, but started again, with a reduced amount, under Gorbachev.  They paid until 2006, with payments of the renewed obligation having been scheduled to run through 2030.  In 06, however, the Russians paid in full and retired the debt.  About that same time, the United Kingdom did as well.

ZZ Top preformed at Brannen's Tobacco Warehouse in Bowling Green, Kentucky.

Painted Bricks: Prairie Woman, Casper Wyoming.

Painted Bricks: Prairie Woman, Casper Wyoming.:  

Prairie Woman, Casper Wyoming.

 A mural on one of the newer downtown building in Casper, entitled Prairie Woman.

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: Lessons From the Badass Muscular Neu...

Lex Anteinternet: Blog Mirror: Lessons From the Badass Muscular Neu...: 

Blog Mirror: Lessons From the Badass Muscular Neurobiologist

Probably more than a little to this:

Lessons From the Badass Muscular Neurobiologist

Probably the real takeaway is this.  Modern life is deeply unnatural.