An annoying feature to punditry and reactions across the public discourse is the shock and confusion as to why there are so many job losses and unemployed. How could this be they exclaim. They never mention that when you close all restaurants and bars, shut down all non-essential business and bar public gatherings of over 10 people, people will be laid off. Much of this would come back with the lifting of lockdowns. The reaction is as if this is not a shock, as an unexpected global pandemic is, and is part of a normal business cycle. This is a shock. The real revelation, besides their ignorance of the current system, is that so much of the last decade has been a con in job growth.
Zero Hedge is a bit strange for a financial website, as it has superior foreign affairs reporting than economics. Despite their incorrect calls of the last 100 recessions, Zero Hedge spent the Obama recovery noticing how so much of the job growth in America was in leisure and hospitality. This is not to demean those sectors, but the tame growth of the Obama era was often found in part time employment gains and employment growth in waiters and bartenders. These were not career style jobs with high potential, providing robust earnings for a family or fostering wealth accumulation.
During the Obama era, our economy added roughly 3 million leisure and hospitality jobs. Per the BLS time series charts, in January of 2010, America had 12.9 mil leisure and hospitality workers. In January of 2020, America had 16.8 mil in those same sectors. This is not to say these are the only people being laid off, but that we must understand the numbers that were going to show up when a sector employing 17 million Americans gets shut down. Tourism is dead. Dining and entertainment is pinched. They are all legally prohibited from operating.
This points to a weird change in our economy as the service economy model aggressively became more ridiculous. Reported in 2019, Americans finally were spending more money on dining at restaurants than grocery stores. We went from making things for one another to serving each other salads. This is the driving force behind the runs at grocery stores. We have many people cooking for themselves for the first time in years. Technically, we built a culture that used a separate preparation method and distribution system for eating. We have a dislocation now that could return many people to work if our supermarkets hired proper staff for operating stores and even delivering food.
That was a job growth engine of the economy that the Obama administration shepherded after the big crash. Health care grew initially, and then post-Obamacare, the massive health care system consolidations stopped that cold. Oil and gas due to the shale boom on private land helped where it could. This is why the small gains in manufacturing when Trump took office were different. Those gains for Americans on the lower end of the wage spectrum made for such weird reporting these four years. It was a positive flyover surprise the media could avoid just as they avoided the flyover pain of the opioid crisis. Blue city plebeians, not the well to do, did not see gains to speak of but the rabble in flyover did. Add in the rent explosion and SALT tax reform, and the blue city residents were crying despite good times for the provicinals.
This also speaks to why the pundit class is surprised. They are finding out just how elective and non-essential the new economy that their masters have built is. That AirBnB, Uber, DoorDash world is a temporary, unstable subsidization for their existence in expensive blue cities. They do not realize this is an army of people scraping buy in jobs with high churn and little opportunity to enter the glorious mindwork sectors that can bring their laptops home and tap away while streaming Amazon Prime in the background. The manufacturing was shipped off, the natural resource firms legislated out of existence, and there is nothing left but service, with all the weight that word holds.
Will the jobs return quickly? Hard to say as we do not know how many bankruptcies there will be of businesses nor when firms can return to work. There is a chance everyone goes back to work in May except the worst of states and we have a mask culture that takes what Asians do but jazzes it up with flair and style. There is also a chance the nation and world is crippled for multiple years as no vaccine arrives and herd immunity is hard to hold if immunity does not last long. What we may see is a repeat of the economy of the ‘70s that adjusted to multiple oil shocks. Those shocks caused massive disruptions and forced adjustments that took nearly a decade to work out but did not destroy the world.
What is undeniable is that anyone telling you they know what will happen in 2021 might as well predict 2025. They are lying, but not lying as much as the analysts and pundits shocked to see the current job losses roll in. We need to reorient the entire economy on a balanced system of firmer footing with job sectors that provide the basics for building families and wealth, not just performing services for the rich and elect of the great metropolises.
Another element of the big “unemployment” spike I haven’t seen spoken on much is how much of that will be university students dumped into the “looking for a job” bracket. Unemployment rate doesn’t usually include these people so it’s no wonder that with unis shuttered it spikes
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When considering the warrior, a stupid fighter is a dead fighter.
When considering soldier, a stupid soldier is a dead soldier and endangers all of those around him.
Certain weapons require higher intelligence, such as the sword over the club, and hence its embracing by the Aryan warrior above all other weapons.
Also, since the sword in its long form is an ideal weapon for fighting from horseback, horse soldiers have been especially loathe to dispose of this weapon even after it had become largely obsolete, though never as obsolete as the lance, which is a more universal and lower IQ tolerant and higher strength requirement weapon.
I do not believe that McNamara committed folly. He was practicing specifically what industrial warfare is designed to do, to cull unwanted men.
-The retarded are not wanted by the system.
-The brave are not wanted by the system at all—are actually feared by it—and hence, as Wainwright’s Grandfather observed in WWI the bravest men died first, mostly before they had sired children.
The latter is an important aspect of Modern War, that it culls the potentially troublesome and heroic at extreme rates, at much higher rates than the retarded.
The people most likely to survive modern war are
-Cowards, easily controlled by state systems
-manipulators, necessary to control the cowards and propagate systems of control
The idiot, in general, is useful to no system or struggle.
The brave one is absolutely crucial to decisive warfare and anathema to Systems of Control. This is well demonstrated in mythic characters and plights of Achilles and Beowulf.
Seen in this light, the industrial wars of annihilation that were pursued roughly from 1914 to 1953, with such efforts as Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq standing as desultory addendums, may be seen as the State Systems inoculating themselves from the very class of man who was necessary to place these systems into dominance over the world. Ironically, much dissident thought, from Ernst Junger, and down through Hackworth, to Henry Mencken and Masonius Rufus at Identity Dixie and Samuel Finlay in his Breakfast with the Dirt Cult, has been generated by Aryan warfighters who learned through experience that their better natures were virulently feared and rejected by the managerial class who managed said wars. A great example was in House to House, when the Lieutenant and his men, having battled for a week and were covered in sores, were made to dry shave before they were allowed to have a photo op meal with the criminal politician who was their general.
In the late Aryan tradition, it is the rule to discard the hero on the field and to discredit and or discard his companions upon their return to the noose of a civilized society, the imperial tree of which they just saved from the fires of barbarism through a kind of sacrifice which is utterly anachronistic in regard to the System of Control it is implemented on behalf of, in the name of a people which is, viewed by that system as nothing but tax cattle in the form of a mewing mob of complaisance.
I would like my Coauthor, Wainwright to expand upon this:
Creativity: think of something new
Courage: try something never done before
Honor: pursue regardless of the chance of failure
Persistence: try something else despite failure
JL
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