Inflation: Return of a Plague

 From City Journal:

You do not need to have read the works of John Maynard Keynes to know, if only approximately, the famous conclusion of his General Theory. He argues, essentially, that all government policies are derived, usually unknowingly, from long-dead economists, whose very names are often ignored. Economic policies are indeed determined today by many people who have not read Keynes, or Friedrich von Hayek, or Milton Friedman, which does not prevent them from applying the Keynesian theory, or its opposite, the Hayek-Friedman approach. Current world economic developments demonstrate this; inflation, which is breaking out everywhere, especially intensely in the U.S., is indeed the consequence of strategies inspired by theories unknown to those who have internalized them.

As Keynes argued, theories are decisive. If only governments could choose the right ones! But the Biden administration mistakenly decided to apply the statist Keynesian theory, whereas it should have followed Hayek and Friedman. In a recession, Keynes argued, one should stimulate the economy by boosting demand—that is, by spreading purchasing power, which requires direct subsidies or easy credit at low rates. Greater production, according to Keynes, would necessarily follow the boosted demand. With the Covid crisis, as after the recession of 2008, Western governments adopted this strategy in the form of direct aid to consumers and an interest rate of zero. The result: a rise in prices, with production unable to keep up with demand. The price hikes that result from these political errors in turn provoke demands for wage hikes, setting off an inflationary spiral from which it is difficult to escape.

Two explanations have been proposed for this phenomenon. The first, quasi-mechanical in nature, we owe to Friedman: the growth in the money supply, fed by the state and by the central bank (the U.S. Federal Reserve System and the Central European Bank), shows up in increased prices, not in gains in production. Along with this “monetarism” of Friedman, which history has validated repeatedly, there exists a factor that the Chicago economist Robert Lucas in the 1960s named “rational anticipation.” According to this theory, economic actors are not dupes of governmental incentives, such as free credit, because they are informed by past experiences. Without being economic experts, consumers and producers know that the creation of money will lead to inflation, and they adjust their behavior by not investing and by spending as rapidly as possible.

Experience has once again verified Friedman’s and Lucas’s theories, reducing to nothing the naïve propositions of Modern Monetary Theory, a recent delusion of the American Left. According to this unscientific, ahistorical theory, legislatures can control the production of money and distribute it in a way that satisfies all needs, with no destructive consequences from expanding the money supply. The question of reimbursing a gigantic public debt is not supposed to arise, because no one can force the government to pay what it owes. But this magical solution, adopted in part by Joe Biden, ignores the fact that public debt produces inflation and that a debt that is not repaid, as in the case of Argentina, eventually ruins the currency. All this was well known, at least by economists, so it is surprising that governments in America and Europe had not taken it into account of late. They have short memories. From the 1980s until recently, inflation had been constrained thanks to public policies inspired by Friedman—but policymakers had forgotten its threatening presence, as if it belonged only to the past. We can liken inflation with pathogens: smallpox has disappeared, but vaccination is what made it disappear; stop vaccinating, and the evil can return. In the 1980s, central banks helmed by Friedman’s disciples, such as Paul Volcker in the United States or Jean-Claude Trichet in Europe, raised interest rates and defeated inflation by reducing the money supply. Today, economic policymakers will need to apply the same remedy as in 1980. Central banks are working on this, but their conversion comes late; they have waited for inflation to establish itself before responding, a delay that will make the remedy more painful.

Why, though, must we eliminate inflation and bring it down to a tolerable rate of, say, 2 percent? Because it is an economic and social plague. It replaces long-term investment with short-term financial speculation, harming the economy. It aggravates social inequality because price hikes have a greater effect on the poor, who consume all their earnings, than on those who are well-off and can invest their earnings to shelter them from inflation—for example, in real estate or works of art. (Read more.)

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Mexico’s Pink Lagoon

 From El Pais:

Strange things began to happen a few years ago in La Escobilla lagoon, on the Mexican coast of Oaxaca. Stupefied snook and snappers swam around disoriented, and the locals could just stick their hands in the water to catch them. Then bloated mojarras and popoyotes (also known as the Chiapas killifish) began to wash up on shore smelling strongly of sulfur.

The biggest shock was yet to come. In early May, everyone who came to the lagoon did a double-take: the water had turned pink. Hericel Ramírez, a 28-year-old guide, went for his daily morning run and then headed to the lagoon, a 40-hectare (100 acres) stretch of water separated from the sea by a sand barrier. He got there and was stunned by what he saw. “Oh no! Why is it like this?” He couldn’t believe it. Ramírez, who works at a nearby sea turtle sanctuary, timidly stuck his hand in the water and noticed that it was warmer than normal. He decided not to taste it, thinking that maybe someone had spilled a toxic substance in the water. “The lagoon had never turned pink before. I took videos to send to some specialists,” he tells EL PAÍS by phone. (Read more.)

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Fabric by Daniel Mitsui

 

From Spoonflower:

Daniel Mitsui is an artist whose specialty is meticulously detailed ink drawing. He desires to make art that is both vigorously medieval and highly original. His textile designs draw inspiration from Gothic, Celtic, and Persian art. (Read more.)

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The Middle American Machiavelli

 From Contra:

For an example of a quintessential piece of political formalism, Burnham pointed to Dante Alighieri’s “De Monarchia.” Its meaning “serves to express, in an indirect and disguised manner, what may be called the real meaning of the essay.” By “real meaning,” Burnham explained, “I refer to the meaning not in terms of the mythical world of religion, metaphysics, miracles, and pseudohistory (which is the formal meaning of ‘De Monarchia’), but in terms of the actual world of space, time, and events.”

Taken at face value, Dante’s goal is “the development of the full potentialities of all men, universal peace, and a single unified world-state” overseen by a strong and sovereign Holy Roman Emperor who is independent of the Pope and the Church in his temporal, political authority. For all that is required to realize his ultimate aim: eternal salvation. Dante advances this argument in largely formal terms, which Burnham eviscerates. “They consist of pointless metaphysical and logical distinctions, distorted analogies, garbled historical references, appeals to miracles and arbitrarily selected authorities,” he concluded. Instead, the real meaning of “De Monarchia”—what it would mean for the actual world of space and time—is much simpler: revenge against his political enemies in Florence by enlisting the help of her enemy, the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry VII of Luxembourg.

It’s hard to do Burnham’s “The Machiavellians” justice in so few words, but it is enough to say that Machiavellians refuse to take at face value the words and ideals of men but rather subject these things to ruthless interrogation to discover their real meaning. It was this method that was on display in Francis’ March 1981 op-ed for the New York Times, “Soviet Support of Terrorism.”

In about 700 words, Francis dissected the Soviet strategy of terror and took to task what he viewed as an incompetent and unserious domestic commentariat. “One sometimes has the impression from their writings that the Russians support terrorism just because they are mean and nasty,” he wrote. “In fact, Soviet assistance for terrorism—what Marxists call ‘national liberation movements’—is an integral part of Moscow’s strategy of political warfare.” (Read more.)

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The Real History of Paganism

 From First Things:

For over thirty years, Prof. Ronald Hutton has been the leading scholar of the history of paganism, both ancient and modern. While Hutton’s iconoclastic masterpiece The Triumph of the Moon (1999) essentially denied contemporary neopaganism any convincing claims to historical continuity, Hutton has always balanced his scrupulously polite eviscerations of neopagan wishful thinking with an insistence that the history of paganism nevertheless matters, even if the real history is not the one many of us expected. In his latest book, Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation, Hutton returns to a key question posed in his work in the 1990s: Was there really any continuity or survival of paganism in the Christian Middle Ages? Inspired by the centrality of the figure of “The Goddess” to neopaganism, Hutton attempts to answer that question by examining four culturally significant “goddesses” who have been considered “pagan” at different times: Mother Earth, a personification of the entirety of nature; the Fairy Queen, ruler of a parallel supernatural world and, Hutton argues, a distinctly British phenomenon; the Mistress of the Night, a mighty supernatural woman who roved the night with an entourage that mortals could join; and the Old Woman, or Cailleach, of Gaelic tradition, a legendary woman of immense age who came to be associated with mountains and wild places.

Hutton shows that popular perceptions of paganism are sometimes still informed by an old historiography that advanced the idea of “surviving paganism,” most notably in Margaret Murray’s “witch-cult” theory. Murray’s outlandish belief that groups of “witches” secretly worshipping a Neolithic goddess and a horned god in a fertility cult survived into the seventeenth century prevailed as a respectable scholarly position into the 1970s. Yet in the ’80s and ’90s a new generation of scholars—including Hutton himself—rapidly rejected the notion that paganism could have lingered for more than a short time after Christianization.

Instead, Hutton made a distinction between “surviving paganism”—the persistence of an organized pagan religion as a competitor of Christianity—and “pagan survivals,” the lingering existence of pagan elements as part of folk Christianity. Once elites abandoned their pre-Christian beliefs, Hutton argues, there was no chance of a coherent paganism surviving, but this did not mean scattered elements of pagan rite and belief could not endure. Some scholars have taken the revisionism even further, arguing that “pagan” is a meaningless term, and all we can say is that certain practices belonging to medieval popular Christianity had little to do with Christian orthodoxy.

Hutton is at pains to hold back from this kind of extreme skepticism, maintaining the meaningfulness of “pagan” as a category. He offers an intriguing analysis of why such skepticism took root so quickly, however. While the “Murray thesis” of pagan survival appealed to a post-Christian academic world when the rejection of Christianity was still new and self-conscious, as scholars became accustomed to a secular, pluralistic society, the project of exposing the flaws of Christianity lost its urgency, thus permitting historians to adopt a more objective approach to the analysis of medieval popular Christianity. For the second and third generations of scholars for whom religion is often no longer a lived reality, nor even a component of their experience at all, there is no longer any incentive to favor or discredit one religion over another.

Hutton’s “goddesses” originate from very different sources; Mother Earth was originally a learned personification, while the Fairy Queen came from literature. The Mistress of the Night and the Gaelic Cailleach both grew from folklore. However, all four figures are of particular interest to Hutton because they took on a life of their own, becoming figures of power with their own kind of agency in the collective cultural imagination. For example, the Fairy Queen was a literary figure at the end of the Middle Ages who appeared under a number of different guises in romances, from Morgan le Fay to a reimagining of the Roman sibyl, but by the sixteenth century she had seemingly made the transition to the “real” world, and judicial records show that she was often invoked by fraudsters and confidence tricksters as a source of magical power and authority. In the same way, the allegorical Mother Earth of the medieval alchemists and natural philosophers became, in the twentieth century, a much more literal personification of the suffering planet Earth. (Read more.)

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"Dramatic and Fiery"

 

Here is a lovely, thorough review recommending My Queen, My Love to older teens. I think young adults would enjoy it as well. From Catholic Children's Stories:

Strengths in this book include excellent character development throughout and the pure enjoyment of reading about grand balls with glittering tiaras and silken gowns of every colour swishing about. Details of life such as the lacing up of gowns, how ladies pass the time of day, have their hair styled, what they eat and what rooms they move into at various times of the day are an absolute pleasure to read.

This story will appeal to those who love historical romance novels, especially anyone who is interested in this particular period of time.  Vidal includes a long list of references at the conclusion of the story for anyone who wants to research this historical period further. There is also an extensive list of characters at the front of the book.

So I recommend this book for older and more mature teens and young adults. It is a beautiful example of one young woman’s Catholic faith enduring through challenging times – and also a lesson in how patience and love can soften even the hardest (Royal) hearts to appreciate the truth and beauty of our Catholic faith. (Read more.)

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Quitting The Circus

 From The Z Man:

That is what liberal democracy becomes at it zenith. It is a form of escapism for the class wealthy enough to escape the consequences of bad government, but not so wealthy as to enter the ruling elite. These are the people who promote pointless nonsense like climate change and gun grabbing campaigns. At the same time, they refuse to even think about practical problems that haunt society. Fixing roads is for poor people, while fixing the climate is for special people.

Another side effect of liberal democracy is the race for novelty. In the 1990’s, the luxury opinion was homosexual marriage. That was the thing bourgeois simpletons waved around to signal their aloofness from practical politics. Since anyone can acquire these luxury opinions, we have quickly moved along the clown line to the point where major corporations are celebrating child molesters. When novelty is the highest moral principle, who has time to worry about the kids?

Some will argue that the circus of politics is an intentional creation by the usual suspects to conceal their grip on society. That is a form of escapism, like all conspiracy theories, to avoid the reality of liberal democracy. Elites do run society, but they do not run the circus of democracy. Their only role is to make sure the actors do not accidentally shoot one another with a prop gun. Otherwise, they let these frivolous freaks do their shows and keep the masses occupied.

This is the beauty of the system, when you think about it. If the only way to fix the system is to get a bigger crowd, that means all opposition must select for greater novelty and narcissism than what is currently on stage. The winners of every election end up with a bigger clown than what was on stage. The losers get the new clown as well, which means no matter the result, you get stuck with a clown. Elections are always heads they win, tails you lose. (Read more.)

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Lost Cities in the Amazon

 From Techthelead:

El Dorado or the Lost City of Z? The legends now seem to be based on fact, thanks to new research undergone using Lidar. A new report published in Nature reveals one lost city in the Amazon, rediscovered using Lidar imaging. Cities of pure gold or lost civilizations full of riches have long been rumored to exist in the jungle of Amazon but their discovery was almost impossible based on the scale of search that had to be undertaken by explorers. 

Even more, like the story of the Lost City of Z warns, the quest to find lost Amazonian civilizations has claimed many lives, from adventurers to archaeologists, as the jungle remains dangerous territory to cross. However, that same jungle was home to many cultures and civilizations. Some of them, like the one in this discovery, were incredibly advanced.

“It’s a myth that was created by Europeans who really spoke of a jungle, and vast regions untouched by humans. So a lot of people didn’t want to see that there were archaeological sites here that merit exploration,” co-author Heiko Prümers, of the German Archaeological Institute, told Smithsonian. But what if you could look through the jungle from the air? That’s exactly what the scientists did, uncovering a forgotten city in Bolivia. (Read more.)

From Live Science:

Millions of lasers shot from a helicopter flying over the Amazon basin have revealed evidence of unknown settlements built by a "lost" pre-Hispanic civilization, resolving a long-standing scientific debate about whether the region could sustain a large population, a new study finds. The findings indicate the mysterious Casarabe people — who lived in the Llanos de Mojos region of the Amazon basin between A.D. 500 and 1400 — were much more numerous than previously thought, and that they had developed an extensive civilization that was finely adapted to the unique environment they lived in, according to the study, published online Wednesday (May 25) in the journal Nature (opens in new tab).

The study researchers used airborne lidar — "light detection and ranging," in which thousands of infrared laser pulses are bounced every second off the terrain to reveal archaeological structures beneath dense vegetation — and discovered several unknown settlements within a network of roads, causeways, reservoirs and canals that was centered on two very large Casarabe settlements, now called Cotoca and Landívar. (Read more.)

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Who wrote ‘God Save The Queen’?

 

 From Country Life:

In the early autumn of 1745, the future of Hanoverian rule in Britain hung in the balance. Bonnie Prince Charlie, the Stewart claimant to the throne, had landed in Scotland and occupied Edinburgh. On September 21, he also routed a government force close to the city at the Battle of Prestonpans. Regular soldiers were being hastily returned from Flanders to counter the threat and, in London, in response to the crisis, there was an outpouring of patriotic fervour. It found particular expression in theatres, where audiences responded enthusiastically to displays of loyalty to George II.

On September 28, 1745, therefore, a notice in the General Advertiser announced that Mr Lacy, Master of his Majesty’s Company of Comedians at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, had ‘applied for leave to raise 200 men, in defence of his Majesty’s person and government’. In the auditorium that evening, after a performance of Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist, three celebrated singers of the day — Susannah Cibber, John Beard and Thomas Reinhold — stepped onto the stage and, with the support of a male choir, sang a traditional anthem with new words. It had been arranged by Thomas Arne, the composer who a few years previously had set a verse by James Thomson called Rule Britannia as the rousing finale of his 1740 masque Alfred.

The audience were delighted and, according to the Daily Advertiser of September 30, received the performance with ‘universal applause’, as well as ‘encores’ and ‘repeated huzzahs’, thereby illustrating in ‘how just an abhorrence they hold the arbitrary schemes of our invidious enemies and detest the despotic attempts of papal power’. Such was the success of the performance that, within two weeks, every play at both Drury Lane and Covent Garden was followed by the song. It began: ‘God Bless our noble king, God save great George our king…’ Now our national anthem, it has never passed out of the popular consciousness since. (Read more.)

 

Pictures from the life of Elizabeth II from Architectural Digest, HERE. 

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