(This image is of Chairman Socotra attempting to beat back malaise during the Carter Administration in Rangoon, or Yangon, or whatever they are calling Burma at the moment. It worked! Well, we think it worked. The bat has to hit the bell at left. We think it did.)

I don’t know if you saw it, but the Gross Domestic Product- “GDP” for short- was released by the government this morning. There was an anticipated number showing recovery from the pandemic decline, instituted by the Government with shut-downs and mandates for masks and vaccines. The number announced was 2%. That is what is characterized as “disappointing.” It was normal during the Obama Administration. Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen announced yesterday that our current “transitory” inflation will be around until late next year. Those two official declarations mean we have returned to another fun time in America’s fairly recent economic times. In Mr. Carter’s Administration we called it a stagnant economy struggling with relentless inflation. In short, it was characterized as “Stagflation,” and we all agreed it sucked.

With the number of crises in progress, we are dropping all of them to send virtually the entire Executive Branch, President, nine cabinet Secretaries and some high-ranking hangers-on to Glasgow for the COP26. This is a big one. It will formulate imposition of the rules we will have to follow to comply with the Paris Accords of 2015. That wasn’t a treaty, as we recall, which normally would require confirmation by the Senate. I tried to sum up what the UN people claim they are going to accomplish, which starts out with the phrase “we must save the planet.”

Many of us around the Fire Ring at Refuge Farm are generally in favor of it, if that is what it is. But since laying out with the COP26 organizers say, there is some fairly dramatic activity on the Hill this morning. We mentioned that the UN expects the U.S. and other Western states to contribute (individually!) a hundred billion dollars annually to permit the globe to continue spinning. There is something like that included in the Build Back Better legislation, which some progressive members of Congress inform us is “90% written.” They give it two-to-seven days to accomplish, and if this feels a little like the Affordable Care Act (“You must pass it to find out what’s in it!”) you can understand a little unease in this manifestation of the legislative process.

Splash motioned for the intern to walk by with the Footnote Placard, which says we agree we should act decisively to protect the globe. Now exactly how we do this is a little open to question, but suggests showering taxpayer dollars on despots around the globe is the right way to do it. The problem is the number of placards we are required to keep handy. Like, “We support immigration!” We are a little unsure about how 1.7 million “short term visitors” flown at night all over the country actually works. In our time, those sorts of issues were subject to discussion, not taxpayer-funded airline transportation for unvaccinated people while laying off firefighters, medical personnel and police.

The recent Chinese hypersonic missile test suggests our entire nuclear arsenal and defense system have been rendered obsolete against it. Remember Reagan and the Strategic Defense Initiative? That was a matter of discussion for several years. Now, it is just another placard, the one that says “We are opposed to nuclear annihilation!”

The President is certainly on board with it though, and in fact one of the larger chunks of cash in the Infrastructure Bill is a number that appears, at the moment, to be $500 Billion to contribute to saving the planet. We can’t tell whether that is what the American delegation will take to COP26 to hand out, but the old grizzled bureaucrats at the Fire Ring are bemused at what has happened to the process of collecting taxes and then giving them away. With no discussion of the matter any of us understand. Or those on the Hill voting on it.

This sort of stuff actually used to be against the law. And remember when the word “trillion” had a sort of science fiction aspect to it?

New world, isn’t it?

Copyright 2021 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com