THAT ’70s SHOW: Media suddenly focused on inflation after massive spending spree in DC.

Oddly, no one’s talking about the six trillion dollars or so that Congress and the White House has spent off the books as part of the pandemic response. That’s essentially the same as printing money, and that has its own inflationary effects. But the conditions and incentives created by those massive spending bills have inflationary impacts of their own. Lawmakers are using those conditions to force an artificial increase in labor costs, which go directly to producer and consumer prices and inflation. Direct stimulus, a key part of all three relief bills, produces a “sugar high” of consumption that puts strain on supply, which results in — ta da! — price increases.

From Amity Shlaes’ recent book, Great Society: “Another expert safely out of reach of [Lyndon] Johnson, at the National Bureau of Economic Research, was Arthur Burns. [Alan] Greenspan was just one economist; Burns, who headed the NBER, was the voice of the entire economics profession, independent and proud. Back in the 1950s, he had warned that ‘the problems of inflation will return to haunt us.’ It had been Burns who back in 1960 had warned the presidential candidate Richard Nixon—correctly, as it turned out—that tight monetary policy at the Fed was slowing growth and could cost Nixon the election. Lately, Burns had been charging that Lyndon Johnson’s brand of prosperity featured serious ‘perils of inflation.’ Burns, like Greenspan, pointed to the costs of the butter, not the guns. To attribute the recent large increases in the budget, and certainly future increases, to the costs of war, Burns said, frankly, was ‘a misconception.’ The anti-poverty programs were the problem—a good share of them, as Burns told the New York Times, were ‘pure waste.’ Precisely because they were outsiders, Greenspan and Burns could speak truth to power. Johnson was trading in the Great Dollar for the Great Society, and it was a lousy trade.”

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: Tonight We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 1979.

Insanity Wrap needs to know: What could possibly be worse than the 1970s?

Answer: The next four years, at least.

Before we get to the sordid details, a quick preview of today’s Wrap.

• How do you get a second coup when there was never a first one?
• Portland Commies Double Down on Commie Holiday
• Rosanna Arquette says if Jesus were alive today He’d be dead

And so much more.

Bonus Sanity: Britain’s Labour party got kicked in the teeth.

And so much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

NOBLE SAVAGES, LIVING IN HARMONY WITH NATURE: Humans were altering ecosystems with fire some 92,000 years ago.

It wasn’t capitalism that made the mammoths and the saber-tooth tigers extinct.

NOT THE BEE: These peeps are building a race-exclusive communist state in the Rockies and I wish them the very best of luck.

HEADLINES I DIDN’T SEE COMING: Eldridge Cleaver: The Mormon Years.

Cleaver still had harsh words for some of the cops he’d clashed with in the 1960s. But now he had been to the socialist world, and he had come away convinced that the cops there were even worse. “The thing that I used to resent the most about American police, in my own personal experience, was one time the police in San Francisco kicked my door down,” he said. “But I had an experience in Algeria…over there, the police came through the wall.”

The American left suffers from a lack of perspective.

HMMM: A potential herbal remedy for coronavirus? Massachusetts researcher studies plant’s impact on virus. Sweet wormwood blocks the replication of the virus, according to new research.

FACEPALM: AOC Calls Herself a ‘Planned Parenthood Baby.’

POLITICRITES, SELLING DOPE: Baltimore Vaccine Plant’s Troubles Ripple Across 3 Continents. But it’s Baltimore, so what do you expect?

OUT ON A LIMB: The Wuhan-Lab Theory Is Not Far-Fetched. Just Look at China’s Reckless Rocket Program.

The Chinese government does not give a rat’s patootie if it hurts or kills people in other countries. It wants what it wants, and it doesn’t care who pays the price in blood.

Oh, and one other point in that Times article: “Chinese space officials have not publicly addressed the uncontrolled re-entry since then, despite attention and worry around the world.”

When the Chinese government is confronted with a problem, the regime’s default setting is to deny the problem exists.

The Chinese government’s official statistics would have you believe that the COVID-19 pandemic effectively ended in that country in March 2020. The official statistics declare that the most populated country in the world, with more than 1.4 billion people, ranks 96th among all countries in cases, with just over 90,000, and 58th in deaths, with 4,636. To believe the Chinese official numbers, the entire country has seen four people die from COVID-19 since April 2020, and that they’ve never had more than 1,000 active cases on any given day over the past year. According to the Chinese government, no variant of COVID-19 has touched them in any significant way.

Meanwhile, just across the border, India reported 414,188 cases of infection and 3,915 deaths.

And that’s just today.

Want to see something really odd? The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, an independent global-health-research center at the University of Washington, published a new estimate of the total death toll from COVID-19, attempting to account for cases missed earlier and left out of data from unreliable regimes. The report concludes, “Our analysis estimates that by May 3, 2021, the total number of COVID-19 deaths was 6.93 million, a figure that is more than two times higher than the reported number of deaths of 3.24 million.”

But the only reference to China comes in a footnote.

And speaking of footnotes: Fauci’s NIH funded controversial gain-of-function viral research at Wuhan lab to get around US ban on dangerous research.

IF YOU OFFER PEOPLE MONEY NOT TO WORK, MANY OF THEM WILL TAKE IT: South Carolina and Montana to end all pandemic unemployment benefits for jobless residents.

WARTHOG PRE-FLIGHT: The business end of the A-10.

ON THE NAVY’S RECENT “ROBOT AND DRONE” FLEET BATTLE PROBLEM: U.S. Navy Must Win Wars, With Robots and Perhaps Without Them.

…Navy Fleet battle problems have a remarkable history for testing technology, training sailors, developing organizations and informing long-term decisions that have greatly benefited the United States. I’m referring to the 1920s and 1930s battle problems, which always had a trans-oceanic campaign against Japan as their strategic backdrop.

Prescient? Yes. And the battle problems were rigorous in execution and detailed in evaluation.

2021’s fleet problem, under wartime-like operational conditions, tested gee-whiz military and communications technology, specifically unmanned warships and unmanned aircraft, some remotely controlled, some autonomously or semi-autonomously controlled.

Check it out.

BIDEN BUST: Unemployment Rate Up, Numbers ‘Way Worse Than Expected,’ Inflation May Be Coming.

I can’t say I thought much of That ’70s Show the first time around, and suspect it will be even worse in reruns.

WHAT CHINA’S WUHAN LAB AND LONG MARCH 5B ROCKET HAVE IN COMMON: “Negligent” and “irresponsible” come immediately to mind, according to National Review’s Jim Geraghty.

JAMES LILEKS:

There is a huge piece of Chinese space junk — sorry, sorry, JUNKO-21 — landing somewhere soon, and I’m surprised it hasn’t spawned any novelty songs. When Skylab came down — before we figured out how not to dump 22 tons of uncontrolled metal on the planet — we had a novelty song about it.

Disco dreck with a guitar solo that wouldn’t be out of place in another genre. That was 1979, in the Fun Culture. But listen to the music used for NASA’s 1975 documentary.

If you go beyond the credits, it’s a fascinating look at an era generally ignored these days. We go from “Moon” to “Shuttle.” In-between were these guys, having to ride up to a crippled station and do hours of work outside to fix it.

It still seemed typical of the era. Not “adversity was overcome,” which was the previous message, but “we sent up a lemon,” which was how the country felt about itself in the 70s.

If you lived through that, you never wanted to go back. Not to sideburns and polyester pants and disco and urban decline and gas lines and inflation and the rest of it. But everything’s a cycle, and they never look the same. History repeats, but changes enough details so it doesn’t get a copyright strike.

With riots, rising gas prices, the strong whiff of inflation in the air, and frequent headlines about choo-choos (the massive Penn Central bankruptcy and the government’s creation of Amtrak marked the early 1970s), Biden and his handlers seem determined to see America reliving that decennium horribilis once again. In the meantime, click over to Lileks’ latest Bleat for the cultural clash of the dueling Skylab videos.

Related: On the flip-side, Jim Geraghty explores: Reasons to Doubt that America Is Reaching a Scheduled Nervous Breakdown.

TOM SLATER: Why Trump’s Facebook ban still matters.

When Facebook punted Trump’s case over to this new ‘independent’ board – set up in 2018 as a kind of Supreme Court for the social network – it was trying to outsource to the ‘experts’ the question of what to do about his ban in the long-term. That the board has refused to do so will at least force Zuckerberg et al to take some responsibility. But the ruling, from this group of human-rights types, journalists and former politicians, has nevertheless lent legitimacy to the decision to ban Trump in the first place.

That’s a problem, because that decision represented one of the most terrifying corporate interventions into democratic politics in recent memory. In removing Trump from its platform, used by around 70 per cent of adult Americans, Facebook was effectively standing between a president and his people, depriving him of access to what now constitutes the public square. This is an assault on democracy that makes the surreal storming of the Capitol pale into insignificance.

The Left has to keep calling the January 6 riot an “insurrection” in order to keep Trump quiet and the Right down.

THE ENEMY WITHIN: West Point probed for allegations it’s pushing critical race theory on cadets. I’m not surprised that the enemies of our civilization would try to infiltrate our most important institutions. What surprises me is that they’ve met so little resistance.

FURNITURE IS NOW RACIST:

So close, and yet so far — if “Hyperallergic.com” really wanted to discuss a racist connection to modern furniture — they should have gone back a few decades and explored the dark history of modernism’s founding fathers, not the next generation of artists whom they inspired.

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: This Is Why The U.S. Is Crazy to Sign on to Any Global Climate Agreement.

LIZARDS AND FLATWORMS CAN DO IT, SO WHY CAN’T WE? Persuading the Body to Regenerate Its Limbs. And no CRISPR needed: “The most astonishing part was that Levin hadn’t touched the planarian’s genome. Instead, he’d changed the electrical signals among the worm’s cells. Levin explained that, by altering this electric patterning, he’d revised the organism’s ‘memory’ of what it was supposed to look like. In essence, he’d reprogrammed the worm’s body—and, if he wanted to, he could switch it back.”

SCIENCE! Fauci to virtually address in-person commencement ceremonies. “Dr. Fauci will not be attending due to concerns regarding the COVID-19 pandemic, though the university has deemed the ceremony itself safe enough to be in person.”

FOLLOWING THE DATA:  Death and Lockdowns. There’s no proof that they save lives, but plenty of evidence they end them. The latest: Alcohol Deaths Rise in England and Wales.