I find myself more shaken and stricken after this week’s latest mass shooting, the elementary school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, that saw 19 children and two teachers slain in cold blood, than I did after other mass shootings in recent years. Part of that is biographical: As an ex-Texan, the son of an elementary school teacher, and the owner of a rifle made by the same manufacturer as was the apparent murder weapon, this just hit home a little closer. And part of that, of course, is the sheer nature of the evil incarnate the likes of which decides to go shoot up a schoolhouse.
The palpable nature of that profound evil in our midst is yet the latest reminder of the truism, contrary to modern convention though that truism may be, that man is by his nature inclined toward iniquity. As God Himself says in Genesis 8:21, “The imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Naturally inclined toward tradition, conservatives—if perhaps no one else—intuit this. As the great conservative statesman Edmund Burke once said, “Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites—in proportion as their love to justice is above their rapacity.”
In theory, in an America ravaged by plummeting church attendance and a concomitant crisis of mass despondency, this sentiment could militate in favor of greater “gun control” measures. But in America, there is, of course, our cherished Second Amendment—with its individual right to gun ownership secured in our jurisprudence by the landmark 2008 Supreme Court case, District of Columbia v. Heller. Just as important, there is also the unavoidable reality that, in the year 2022, there are now more firearms in circulation in America than there are human beings. Put simply, even if one wanted to better “control” guns, that ship has sailed at this point.
The “conservative theoretical case” for greater gun “control” thus fails on empirical grounds. But it also fails on alternative theoretical—and historically informed—grounds. As then-Judge Alex Kozinski of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in a powerful dissent from denial of en banc rehearing in the 2003 case of Silveira v. Lockyer:
All too many of the other great tragedies of history—Stalin’s atrocities, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, to name but a few—were perpetrated by armed troops against unarmed populations. . . . If a few hundred Jewish fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto could hold off the Wehrmacht for almost a month with only a handful of weapons, six million Jews armed with rifles could not so easily have been herded into cattle cars. . . .
The prospect of tyranny may not grab the headlines the way vivid stories of gun crime routinely do. But few saw the Third Reich coming until it was too late. The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed.
As unspeakably evil as atrocities like Uvalde are, those words are just as true today as they have ever been. (Indeed, if anything, in the aftermath of two years of COVID-induced hysteria, they ring even truer.) And as a poignant reminder of the ever-lurking threat of that “prospect of tyranny,” I keep on my work desk at all times a rock that a rabbi once gave me that he smuggled out of the Auschwitz crematorium—as well as a rock that I personally took from the killing field of Treblinka. One can trace a direct line from those rocks to my rifle.
Greater “gun control,” then, is simply not the answer. There must be a very strong rebuttable presumption against even incremental proposed reforms, such as so-called “red flag” laws. And based on all the available empirical evidence, that presumption has not been overcome in any gun-related reform now discussed.
What, then, to do?
Tragically, there are no easy answers. At a micro level, governments at all levels must increase funding for mental health awareness and early-intervention programs. At a macro level, it is well past time to start rolling back the liberalization of involuntary commitment that roiled American society in the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. Making it easier to remove mentally disturbed and patently insane loners from the streets would not merely have a salutary effect on alleviating America’s epidemic of mass shootings; it would also help ameliorate our homelessness epidemic, given the disproportionate number of homeless individuals who are mentally ill. Prosecutors must also more stringently pursue gun trafficking, straw purchasing, and other firearms-related charges.
Every single school in America must also be hardened. It is incumbent upon governors and state legislatures to ensure every single school in their jurisdiction has armed security and a single entrance point (multiple one-way, exit-only doors are fine). Crucially, this cannot be left up to superintendents on a district-by-district basis; this must be mandated by state governments. In the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, movie theater mass shooting, the shooter chose the only theater in the immediate radius that did not permit moviegoers to carry a concealed weapon; we cannot risk psychopathic would-be school shooters making a similar calculation about a comparatively “softer” school target.
Innocent children are society’s most precious assets. That a parent can drop a child off at school and ever harbor any doubts about whether that child will return at the end of the school day is beyond inexcusable. If Democrats agree, then they will work with Republicans on some of these clear and obvious measures—assuming, of course, they don’t take the cowardly way out and resort to grandstanding about misbegotten “gun control.”
The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) originally calculated the first quarter economy at a scale of -1.4% growth. The BEA revises that figure downward today with more data showing a contracted level of consumer spending [DATA HERE]. The economy contracted by -1.5% in the revised numbers.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the dollar value of all goods and services produced in the economy, minus the dollar value of goods and services we import. The percentages discussed are percentages of change over time.
(1) U.S. inflation was revised upward (prices increased); (2) the estimate of calculated inventories was lowered; (3) the estimate of consumer spending was raised (inflation issue); which leads to (4) a massive drop in the calculation of disposable incomes. [See the Change Table]
Look at the revision to disposable incomes:
The Joe Biden’s economic policy is literally: (a) draining our savings and bank accounts, and (b) increasing our personal debt as we struggle to survive.
(Via MSM) – […] The U.S. economic contraction to start the year was worse than expected as weak business and private investment failed to offset strong consumer spending, the Commerce Department reported Thursday.
First-quarter gross domestic product declined at a 1.5% annual pace, according to the second estimate from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. That was worse than the 1.3% Dow Jones estimate and a write-down from the initially reported 1.4%.
Downward revisions for both private inventory and residential investment offset an upward change in consumer spending. A swelling trade deficit also subtracted from the GDP total.
The pullback in GDP represented the worst quarter since the pandemic-scarred Q2 of 2020 in which the U.S. fell into a recession spurred by a government-imposed economic shutdown to battle Covid-19. (read more)
These economic conditions are mostly driven by energy policy. U.S. energy policy underlines almost all economic activity and touches every facet of our lives as a consumer. You cannot change U.S. energy policy so drastically without changing every single economic aspect which is connected to energy policy.
I concur with that prediction.
Prepare your affairs accordingly.
One of the side effects of war is economic dislocation. No matter what Vladimir Putin chooses to call his war in Ukraine, it is a war, and it is dislocating markets worldwide. Most of the attention has been on the potential disruption of Russian oil and gas supplies to Europe, but a more significant problem than cold Euros is looming. Ukraine is one of the world’s leading exporters of wheat and sunflower oil. Because of Putin’s War, Ukrainian products can’t pass through the Black Sea to get to market.
Fears of a global food crisis are swelling as Russian attacks on Ukraine’s ability to produce and export grain have choked off one of the world’s breadbaskets, fueling charges that President Vladimir V. Putin is using food as a powerful new weapon in his three-month-old war.
World leaders called on Tuesday for international action to deliver 20 million tons of grain now trapped in Ukraine, predicting that the alternative could be hunger in some countries and political unrest in others, in what could be the gravest global repercussion yet of Russia’s assault on its neighbor. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where worries about the war’s consequences have eclipsed almost every other issue, speakers reached for apocalyptic language to describe the threat.
To make matters worse, Russia has closed areas of the Black Sea to all traffic from all nations, no matter what the ships are carrying.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken echoed the grim assessment last week in remarks at the United Nations, calling Russia’s blockade “a deliberate effort” to destabilize the world’s food supply.
Since Russia issued a warning to mariners in February that significant areas of the Black Sea were closed to commercial traffic, “the Russian military has repeatedly blocked safe passage to and from Ukraine by closing the Kerch Strait, tightening its control over the Sea of Azov, stationing warships off Ukrainian ports. And Russia has struck Ukrainian ports multiple times,” Blinken said.
“The food supply for millions of Ukrainians — and millions more around the world — has quite literally been held hostage by the Russian military,” he said.
There are a couple of different parts to this story. Russia is looting grain from occupied areas of Ukraine and selling it on the world market. They also destroy infrastructure like silos and grain elevators and take Ukrainian farm machinery to Russia.
Never one to let a perfectly good crisis go to waste, Putin is pushing the west to end sanctions on Russia in return for it ending its blockade of Ukrainian ports.
The very premise of Putin’s proposal is ludicrous and dishonest. Because of those features, France, Germany, and Italy may go along. In removing the blockade, Russia doesn’t give any assurances about putting ships in Odessa or the grain elevators and rail systems that supply them off-limits. My view is that a) it is very unlikely that Putin gives a rat’s ass about hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of non-Russians starving to death; in fact, he probably sees this as a feature rather than a bug, and b) equally unlikely that Putin will allow Ukraine to earn money from exports. By removing the blockade and going after the infrastructure in Odessa, he removes sanctions, sustains a famine that he probably wants to create, and prevents Ukraine from earning cash off exported wheat and seed oils.
Will this gambit work? Can you cut a deal to rid yourself of sanctions imposed because you started a war of aggression if you promise not to starve a few million people to death? Even when there is no guarantee those people still won’t starve if sanctions are removed? Never lose sight of the fact that Putin is a strategic genius in the same way that “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” He’s dealing with self-serving idiots incapable of resolve, so don’t count out the EU shouting “Leeeeeroy Jenkins,” and coming to Putin’s rescue.
The few days immediately following the mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, by 18-year-old degenerate Salvador Ramos should offer a window into how depraved and cynical Democrats (including the media) are about exploiting deadly tragedies purely for raw political gain.
Recall the very recent past when a similar incident played out in Buffalo, New York. Leftists were all over that one because the perpetrator was apparently a white supremacist (which is difficult to find in America).
President Biden visited the city to slur his way through a speech in which he said “white supremacy is a poison.” He paid no such visit to Waukesha, Wis., when a black separatist plowed his car into a parade of elderly women in November.
A billion op-eds and editorials were written in the national papers linking the shooting to Donald Trump and the Republican Party at large. CNN and MSNBC anchors took a break from explaining why none of our multiple crises is Biden’s fault to instead repeatedly accuse Tucker Carlson of inspiring a new generation of white nationalists by pointing out that both Democrats and Republicans have had a multi-decade policy of allowing obscene numbers of destitute migrants into the country.
So, let’s see what level of sustained interest these people have for the Texas shooting on Tuesday, wherein the gunman was of Hispanic descent and apparently the product of a neglectful single mother who was also a drug addict.
Democrats have so far shown little interest in the subject outside of resorting back to their tried and true policy proposal to restrict firearm sales, which is so perfunctory at this point that 24 hours after the shooting, The New York Times did not have the normally predictable editorial calling for more gun restrictions. By contrast, the day of a mass shooting in Sutherland Springs, Texas, on Nov. 5, 2017, the Times had an editorial up that same day headlined, “It’s Not Too Soon to Debate Gun Control.” (Then again, that shooter was also a white man.)
To be fair, the White House did announce plans on Wednesday for Biden to visit Uvalde, although it was on after having been called out for his politically motivated, inconsistent choices on which tragedies deserve the full Biden’s-Got-Empathy treatment. It remains obvious anyway that for Democrats and the media, some violent episodes are more important than others and it all depends on which ones are more readily exploitable.
Unfortunately for Democrats and the media, this one isn’t.
President Joe Biden’s Chief Climate Officer and Deputy Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development was a fellow at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, founded by World Economic Forum Chairman Klaus Schwab.
The prominent position of the Biden Appointee, Gillian Caldwell, gives her considerable direction over the White House’s energy and climate change policy, which the World Economic Forum (WEF) has highlighted as an integral component of its “Great Reset” agenda. In addition to exploiting COVID-19, the WEF has been accused of using issues like the environment to advance its radical agenda of abolishing private property ownership.
Caldwell was a Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship Fellow in 2001, which earned her “all expenses paid participation at the World Economic Forum in Davos annually,” according to her resume. The Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship was founded by WEF Chairman Klaus Schwab in 1998 and is run by his wife, Hilde.
While attending several WEF events, Caldwell has been a featured blogger for the group, which she reveals on her resume:
"The Schwab Foundation brings several dozen of us here each year as the primary vehicle through which is aims to support our work.”
Several blog posts authored by Caldwell from 2006 focus on panels she attended and business leaders, media figures, and celebrities she spoke with while at the WEF.
“Day 1 at the World Economic Forum. I attended a session this morning on how we did as a global community in the last year in the areas identified as top priorities by Davos attendees last year: poverty, equitable globalization, climate change, education, global governance, and the Middle East,” she reported
Prior to joining the Biden White House, Caldwell worked as a consultant for clients including the shady far-left campaign slush fund Arabella Advisors, which has deep ties to George Soros. She was also a Strategy Consultant for the Robin Hood Foundation, which has received millions of dollars from Soros.
“Gillian serves as the Chief Climate Officer and is responsible for directing and overseeing all climate and environment work across the agency. She also serves as Deputy Assistant Administrator, overseeing DDI’s Center for Environment, Energy, and Infrastructure and the Office of Environmental and Social Risk Management,” explains her professional bio on USAID’s website.
The USAID has previously funded research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, believed by many to be the source of COVID-19.
https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/05/27/biden-climate-officer-is-wef-alum/
As pundits across America continued to trip over one another, rushing to write article after article about the horrific Texas elementary school shooting, I held back. So much to think about, so much to say. Yet, maybe not enough. Toss in the redundancy and “solutions” from pundits and politicians alike? Call it what you want, from political expediency to writing for clicks. I’ve never been interested in either.
So, I decided to wait. Until Wednesday night, that is, after I had a thought-provoking conversation over dinner with a good friend, who also happens to be a smart-as-hell guy, a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment, and a law-abiding gun owner who is extremely knowledgable about firearms of all kinds— many of which he owns and has a clear purpose for why he owns the guns he owns.
Anyway, my friend — let’s call him “Al” — shared with me his strong opinions on actions he believes should be taken and changes he thinks should be made after yet another unconscionable mass murder by an out-of-control madman. Not among those actions and changes, as you might assume, is further restricting the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding gun owners. “Evil finds a way,” said Al:
You can enact all the gun-grabbing laws and Second Amendment-threatening laws you want. Guess what? Evil does not follow laws. Remember the theater shooting some years back? The shooter drove 10 or 15 miles to get to a theater that had ‘gun-free zone’ signs posted, outside. Evil finds a way; laws are meaningless to these people.
Al, cool as a cucumber, looked me in the eye:
Michael, if I was as crazy as that son-of-a-bitch and that determined to commit an evil, unconsciounable crime, I could have killed all those kids with a hunting knife. Or, I could have thrown a bunch of fertilizer or gasoline into that classroom, tossed in a match, and did the deed, as well. And that’s just off the top of my head.
As awful as it sounds, Al was right.
Conservatives know that. Perhaps some liberals know it, as well — but even if they do, the gun grabbers seemingly cannot wait to capitalize on tragedy as they arrogantly and ignorantly call for stricter gun legislation.
So what do we do? What do Second Amendment advocates do; beyond repeating what we always repeat, much of which I’ve said in this op-ed regarding Second Amendment rights? Given the impossibility of having an intelligent, fact-based dialogue with the left about “solutions” to mass shootings, we must take the lead and offer our own solutions — beyond “just” the Second Amendment argument.
Certainly, improving the detection, monitoring, and adequate response(s) to people who appear to be troubled — particularly, young men, statistically — who clearly should not have the ability to purchase firearms. Clearly, people who make dark or menacing comments on social media should not only be flagged; they should be promptly contacted by authorities. Also clearly, there are those among us who should not be allowed to move freely in public without supervision. I know; easy to say, hard to implement. But we must do better.
My friend Al also talked at length — as I and others have, as well — about hardening access to our schools. All doors must be fortified and deadbolted. Armed guards must be posted at the main entrance, in supervision and control of entrance and egress. Operable security cameras must be placed around the building(s) and monitored at all times. The list goes on, as it should.
To me, this is no-brainer stuff and must be viewed, if nothing else, for now, as a last-resort stopping of evil in its tracks before evil does evil things, while we continue the same ol’, same ol’ arguments.
As Al asked me, rhetorically: “Is it more important to have armed guards at banks — when the money they protect isn’t even that of depositors — those funds are guaranteed by the federal government — than protecting our children when we cannot?
Finally, at one point, Al again looked me in the eye and said:
Michael, I don’t love guns; I love my family and I love our freedom. Don’t get me wrong. I like my collection, but I’ll be damned if I’ll make it easy for anyone to take my loved ones or my freedom away from me.
Amen.
Incidentally, you ever notice that many of the liberals who rush to TV cameras to exploit the death of children while calling for a ban on “assault rifles” or “weapons of war” also support the murder of unborn children — right until birth? Me, too.
We must do better.
The National Rifle Association is hosting its leadership summit in Houston on Friday. Following a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school Tuesday, many corporate media outlets are suggesting politicians should cancel their planned speeches there.
ABC News tweeted:
“Houston Mayor Says He Can’t Cancel NRA Convention After School Massacre,” wrote Bloomberg. “Trump will keep ‘longtime commitment’ to Texas NRA event despite school shooting,” wrote the New York Post.
Why would an organization of law-abiding defenders of the U.S. Constitution cancel an event on account of a horrific school shooting committed by an individual with no regard for constitutional principles, readers might ask. Nevertheless, the pressure from the media and others opposed to gun rights will be intense.
It is reminiscent of a previous attempt by the media and other partisans to blame law-abiding gun owners and their defenders for gun violence. On April 20, 1999, two high school seniors murdered 12 students and one teacher at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. The NRA was slated to hold its large convention in Denver just days later.
Everyone in the political and media classes warned the NRA to cancel their convention. Many immediately pushed for gun control as the only valid response to the murders.
President Bill Clinton and his wife Hillary Clinton immediately called for limits on gun rights, as did many other Democrat politicians. The Democrat mayor of Denver, Wellington Webb, repeatedly told the NRA attendees that they weren’t welcome anymore.
Weak-kneed politicians canceled their planned appearances. More than five dozen Colorado business leaders signed a full-page ad published in local newspapers asking the convention organizers to cancel. Thousands of anti-gun rights activists descended on the convention.
Nevertheless, a few brave gun rights proponents stood strong. Charlton Heston — the actor and civil rights activist who was by then president of the NRA — opened up the convention in Denver on May 1, saying it was “absurd” and “offensive” to act as if supporters of Second Amendment rights couldn’t gather.
But what happened next was breathtaking. The top-ranking Republican in the state at that time was Gov. Bill Owens. He declined an invitation to speak. Secretary of State Vikki Buckley, a black Republican in her second term, welcomed the attendees to Colorado with a breathtaking speech on gun rights. “I greet you as Secretary of State of Colorado and I welcome you to Colorado, a state where some of us believe strongly in the entire Constitution of these United States, including the Second Amendment.”
Buckley was the first black secretary of state in Colorado and the first black Republican woman elected statewide in the Centennial State. The mother of three sons, she had once been on welfare to support them, eventually becoming a clerk typist in the secretary of state’s office in the early 1980s.
Her campaign pitch was to tell people that if she didn’t win the race, she’d have to train whoever did win. She defeated four other candidates for the Republican nomination in 1994 on the strength of a floor speech, even though hardly anyone at the convention had heard of her previously.
Buckley mentored young women and spoke to international women’s organizations about building stronger communities. She helped homeless children and worked to end the scourge of gang violence.
One of the children killed at Columbine was Isaiah Shoels, an 18-year-old black senior. His murderers had used racial slurs before killing him. Buckley had spent time with his parents and quoted Isaiah’s father about the scourge underlying violence.
“Guns are not the issue. Hate is what pulls the trigger of violence,” she said. She talked about “new age hate crimes,” such as raising children “without a value system which places a premium on human life,” or sending children to school “without a value system which teaches the difference between right and wrong.” She listed the ways in which children were not prepared for socioeconomic success, saying, “raise as much heck about that as you did about the NRA, and you will have saved more lives in five years than are taken with guns in a century.”
Buckley then shared the painful story of how she was the victim of gun violence. “I know firsthand the pain and fear–but that experience has not made me an opponent of the NRA or the Second Amendment,” she said. She called for resources to be spent against violence and hate, then said, “But we must stand ever strong against those who would ignore sections of the U.S. Constitution which they do not like. We are a strong democracy because the guiding principles of our Constitution and all of its amendments including the Second must be adhered to in its entirety, not selectively. Thank you and God bless America.”
The thousands of attendees roared to their feet and gave her a standing ovation. You can watch the speech here.
Rabid anti-gun rights activist Jake Tapper — yes, that Jake Tapper — attacked Buckley and her ideas. The Wall Street Journal, on the other hand, suggested Buckley was set for greater political heights.
It was not to be. Buckley died unexpectedly of a heart attack just two months later. Her courage and leadership is remembered.
Greenhouses at the White House, late 19th Century. What happened to self-reliance?
Article by Vic Hughes in The American Thinker
What if the lights go out this summer? How much food gets lost?
In February 2021, I wrote on the near collapse of the Texas electric grid and asked this rhetorical question: "how would you and your family like to be trapped in your car at 16 degrees below zero?"
Given that it is summertime, and the living is theoretically easy, let me ask another one. If the lights go out, how much refrigerated food will you lose? Similarly, will you be able to replace lost food?
We have all seen huge food price increases and heard media reports of the potential for massive food shortages. Among the many reasons, the Russian-Ukraine war taking out the "breadbasket of Europe" and simultaneously dramatically reducing critical fertilizers products looms large. With no end in sight, this war will significantly impact global food supplies for some time.
Other global factors are also in play. Flooding in China has had a detrimental impact on Chinese crops, and China has limited fertilizer usage in some fields. Also, China is still recovering from a dramatic loss of its swine herds due to swine flu epidemics, creating a potential protein shortage. No idea what the lockdowns will do.
India, one of the larger grain exporters, has placed severe restrictions on its exports to ensure adequate domestic food supplies. Food riots in Sri Lanka are occurring.
Globally, the prices of grains are rising dramatically, creating the potential for almost unimaginable misery among the world's poorest.
Closer to home, U.S. fertilizer prices have risen dramatically, in some cases fourfold in the last few years. This not only creates huge upward price pressures, but impacts usage, potentially impacting yields.
Also Union Pacific has reduced major U.S. fertilizer companies, like CF Industries, one of America's largest, to shipping about 80% of their potential volumes. This can result in some of America's premier farmlands, the Corn Belt, not getting adequate fertilizer during the critical spring planting season.
Ironically, "Union Pacific has said it is limiting rail traffic and hiring aggressively as part of a plan to improve service after grain and ethanol shippers complained about shortcomings." So U.P. is limiting the food supply to further limit the food supply by converting more corn into ethanol — a devil's twofer. And the Biden administration plans to increase ethanol limits. A threefer.
With bird flu resulting in millions of chickens being killed and with numerous fires at food processing plants reducing processing capacity, supplies of eggs and chickens are also under assault. Add in record high diesel fuel prices and historically low inventories, and everywhere you look, the food system is stressed.
Not only is the food system under stress, but so is the electric system. The National Electric Reliability Council (NERC) recently came out with it 2022 Summer Risk Assessment (SRA). The NERC SRA highlighted that almost all of the areas west of Michigan, on a line south roughly along the Illinois-Indiana border to the Gulf, are either at high risk or elevated risk of energy emergencies this summer. The reasons vary by area, but the bottom line is that a lot of the country is at risk of power problems.
While the loss of critical electricity-based services can be literally life-threatening, I wondered what would happen to already stressed food supplies if the power goes out. Basically, I tried to figure out how much food would be lost if the lights went out long enough to kill refrigerated and frozen foods. I will freely admit that my calculations are highly subjective and almost certainly subject to challenge, but I made a shot at it that might be useful. I would love to learn of better numbers, but here is my approach.
Using Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers, as reported in Value Penguin, I was able to break down by product category an average 2013 family's monthly food expenditures (according to Value Penguin, the most recent values available). I then put a weighting factor that represented what I thought was a reasonable percentage of a product category that was refrigerated. For some products, like milk or eggs, 100% of the product would be impacted by sustained power outages. Other product categories, such as nuts and canned goods, would have zero percent spoilage in a blackout. On some products that weren't so clear, I tried to guess, hopefully conservatively.
I then summarized the potential losses across all categories and determined that at-home losses would be about 52% of monthly at-home expenditures. I arbitrarily assumed that outside-the-home food purchases were at a 75% refrigerated factor, my logic being that you go out for cooked fresh food, not canned items.
I then updated the actual dollar amounts for the BLS total food expenditures of approximately 1.69 billion dollars for 2020. Using the same factors of 52% of home expenditures and 75% of out-of-the-home food purchases, I assumed about a one-month inventory of these refrigerated foods.
I assumed about a one-month inventory throughout the whole refrigerated supply chain resulting in about $89 billion. Dividing that by 330 million people, I came up with an estimated monthly refrigerated inventory of about $270 per person that would be lost. While obviously the entire national grid will not collapse, I thought the average loss per person would give an indication of what would happen on average in any given blacked out area.
There are obviously huge regional differences, like in Nancy Pelosi's $20,000 refrigerator, but this number may be useful anyway. If a family of four loses about $1,000 of refrigerated food in a blackout, that could have a substantial budget impact. While some of the lost product will be in other parts of the already stressed supply chain, such as the grocery stores or restaurants, assuming they lost power, too, eventually those expenses will get passed on to the consumers.
I will freely admit that there are a lot of questionable assumptions in this calculation, but having lost power and dumped food in the past, it seems to have some basis in reality. It does give a shot at "how much food would be lost if the lights went out?"
As mentioned in the previous article, as many as 20,000,000 Texans almost lost power in 2021 due to unreliable wind power, probably for months. Twenty million times $270 each equals $5.4 billion, not exactly chickenfeed.
It doesn't come close to answering "will you be able to replace lost food?" That is a question way beyond my simple analysis. Given the supply constraints mentioned above, what's your answer?
I always come back to the historian Alfred Henry Lewis, who stated In 1906, "There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy." And that was before refrigeration and a power grid based on unreliable wind power and fairy tales.
https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/05/how_long_can_you_eat_if_your_power_goes_out.html
