ECI – The Diaspora Wars Warming – Weekend at WW III – Selectric Adventures

This will be a somewhat complicated morning – so let’s “chunk it”.

ECI First

Let’s begin with the “employment cost index” which has just been released.

The Pitch:  ECI is a solid, low-noise gauge of employer labor costs (wages + benefits, composition-adjusted) useful for tracking wage inflation pressure.

The Reality: It is not a quality-of-life measure: rising costs feed prices, benefits rarely equal cash value, and it ignores real purchasing power and broader living conditions. Legitimate cost tool, not a truth-teller on how people are actually doing.

The Data:

Compensation costs for civilian workers increased 0.9 percent, seasonally adjusted, for the 3-month period ending in June 2026, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Wages and salaries increased 0.9 percent and benefit costs increased 1.0 percent from March 2026.

Compensation costs for private industry workers increased 0.9 percent, seasonally adjusted,

Compensation costs for state and local government workers increased 1.0 percent, seasonally adjusted, for the 3-month period ending in June 2026. Wages and salaries increased 0.9 percent and benefit costs increased 1.1 percent from March 2026.

And so, we wonder, who rules whom?

This is watched by the market, but other issues (expanding Middle East war, oil prices, making up money scams) take higher priority. Days like this I wonder “Am I the only guy who read “The Zero-Sum Society?”

The Diaspora Wars Warming

My latest book (free to Peoplenomics subscribers, $8 on Amazon) – The Judgment Engine –  begins to tackle the notion of “decision domain selection.”

Sounds a bit high falutin, but solutions always depend on which domain you’re standing in when you look at the problem.

In our view, the biggest cock-up in modern history has been major countries embracing (misguided) liberal agendas by throwing their borders open.

See, when that happens, you get population-mixing.  And it usually takes two or three generations before things tend to settle down.  Examples?

Notice the difference: integration has historically worked best when societies were given time to digest the inflow. Europe has kept adding ingredients while the pot was still boiling.

What occasions this discussion is the story Spain will send troops to Ceuta to help with border security. Moroccan pressure is breaking against Spain’s border.  It’s worth putting on the Peoplenomics hat for a minute, though. Because Spain is just the front edge of the airfoil on what’s ahead. So let’s add context before we turn on the blender.

Earlier this month, Spanish authorities declared a humanitarian emergency in the North African enclave of Ceuta after thousands of migrants, predominantly young Moroccan men, surged across the border by land and sea. Military units were deployed, reception centers overflowed, and local officials warned that the territory’s capacity had collapsed.

Here’s where “domain selection” matters.  You and I are “first worlders” – liking our tech and high consumption life.  Spain – viewed this way – has a “Barbarians at the gates” issue. And real people are dying: authorities reporting at least 9–18 deaths during crossings.

The episode echoed earlier crises in 2021 and underscored a recurring pattern: pressure from the southern Mediterranean repeatedly tests Europe’s external borders while amplifying internal debates already running at high temperature.

Here’s where we go from event to template: The Ceuta events did not occur in isolation. They form one visible front in Europe’s evolving “Diaspora Wars” — a multi-decade contest over numbers, norms, and political power driven by the collision of large-scale immigration with sub-replacement native fertility.

Strategically? Losing the sex war (insufficient baby making) invites (sometimes unwanted) immigration.

Where domain selection matters is in time and location:

• Russia treats fertility as strategic state policy while much of Western Europe treated family formation chiefly as a private lifestyle matter.
• Europe went overboard in a pseudo-sexual revolution which is fueling downstream events due to the lack of baby making. The co-drivers are delayed marriage, fewer births, aging workforces, and subsequent reliance on immigration.
• The U.S., comparatively, has been running this clock for roughly a century along the Mexican border. Take out the drugs and people-to-people we’re all somewhat chill.

How to Lose a Sex War

Across most of Western and Southern Europe, total fertility rates among native-born populations have remained well below the 2.1 replacement level for decades. The resulting demographic vacuum has been filled, unevenly, by inflows from North Africa, the Middle East, and other higher-fertility regions. The arithmetic is straightforward and no longer seriously disputed: without sustained immigration, many European societies face long-term population decline and aging; with it, they experience rapid shifts in the composition of younger cohorts.

Those shifts have produced measurable cultural friction. In several countries, significant segments of Muslim-majority immigrant communities and their descendants hold social attitudes on sexuality, gender roles, and free expression that diverge sharply from the progressive legal and cultural settlements of the host societies.

Surveys and incident reports over the past fifteen years have documented lower acceptance of homosexuality, higher rates of social conservatism, and periodic harassment or violence directed at LGBTQ individuals and events in certain urban districts. Pride marches have required heavy police protection in parts of France, Sweden, Germany, and the United Kingdom; some local authorities have quietly altered routes or visibility. And we trust you remember the incident in Germany last weekend? A Pride event attack killed one and injured more than a dozen. Police identified the suspect as a known member of Berlin’s Islamist milieu.

The conflict is not abstract. It pits the post-1960s European settlement on individual sexual autonomy against the more traditional moral frameworks carried by portions of the diaspora.

Spain’s Moroccan connection illustrates both the demographic and the political dimensions. Morocco has long been a primary source of immigration into Spain. Chain migration, family reunification, and repeated border pressures have created sizable communities whose integration outcomes remain mixed.

While many individuals succeed economically and socially, concentrated areas exhibit higher unemployment, lower intermarriage, and value patterns that resist full convergence with Spanish secular norms. The latest Ceuta surge arrives against this backdrop, reinforcing perceptions among restrictionist voters that external control has failed and that domestic social cohesion is under continuous stress.  Remember the B-school process? Forming, storming, norming—and, politicians hope, conforming. Welcome to the storming part now rolling hard.

Similar dynamics appear elsewhere. France continues to manage the legacy of post-colonial North African migration through recurring banlieue unrest and debates over laïcité. Germany’s Turkish-origin population, originally recruited as temporary labor, has produced both successful second- and third-generation citizens and persistent “parallel society” controversies six decades on.

In each case the timeline of tension has stretched far beyond early optimistic forecasts of rapid assimilation. Historical comparisons with earlier European migrations to the United States suggest that substantial normalization often required three to four generations under conditions of lower cultural distance and eventual restriction of further inflows. Europe’s current combination of higher distance and ongoing arrivals has lengthened that horizon.

Political systems have begun to register the strain. Parties emphasizing border control, cultural continuity, and skepticism of rapid demographic change have gained ground in multiple elections. Governments of the center-left face simultaneous pressure from progressive constituencies that prioritize humanitarian obligations and LGBTQ protections, and from working-class and peripheral voters who experience the costs of rapid change most directly. The result is a polarized discourse in which demographic data, crime statistics, and cultural surveys are weaponized by all sides.

What distinguishes the present moment is the simultaneity of external border pressure and internal value conflict.

The Diaspora Wars are not a single insurgency or a coordinated campaign. They are the cumulative effect of differential fertility, sustained migration, incomplete assimilation in key metrics, and the collision of incompatible social norms inside the same legal and urban space. Whether European states can enforce borders, accelerate selective integration, or renegotiate the terms of coexistence will determine how long the current phase of tension lasts. History suggests the answer is measured in decades, not election cycles.

Oh, and somewhere in here? The nation-state levels ramp up and it’s WW III.  Because the other big front is? What I’ve called for twenty years now: The Manufacturer’s Resource Wars.

Let me emphasize something:  Because you won’t see this on TV.  The domain-understanding is that Diaspora Wars and Manufacturer’s Resource Wars are not separate stories. One stresses identity, legitimacy, borders, and domestic cohesion; the other stresses oil, minerals, food, water, energy, and industrial capacity. When they overlap, governments lose room to compromise because every external concession looks like an internal betrayal.  (And may be…)

That defines The Convulsion Period: not necessarily one clean World War III opening bell, but a rolling global renormalization in which borders, alliances, populations, currencies, trade routes, and acceptable social rules are all fought over at once.

Might a rolling global socioeconomic convulsion sidestep nuclear WW III?

Wait!  There’s a Timer I Should Mention!

von Clausewitz supplied the hidden timer. War remains an instrument of policy only while the leaderships involved believe there will still be a state—and a leadership—left to conduct policy afterward. The Convulsion Period can therefore remain conventional only until one nuclear player sees a no-win outcome for its regime.

At that point deterrence may stop restraining action and begin encouraging first use. Then the regional nuclear-shadow systems—Russia and the NATO-Ukraine theater, Israel and Iran, China and the Western Pacific alliance structure—come off the shelf. The “mini-MADs” activate, escalation outruns diplomacy, and the mop hits the floor.  Masks and Geigers ready?

Then our weekend question becomes harder:

Can a rolling global socioeconomic convulsion avoid producing one (nuclear or biologically armed) leadership that concludes it has nothing left to lose? Because that—not the first border riot, tanker strike, or battlefield loss—is where the nuclear clock really starts.

And maybe ends.  (Whew!!)

News Compressor: ON

Now let’s look through the windshield for evidence that the fronts are already converging.

What changed overnight is continued kinetic activity in the US-Iran conflict after a brief pause, with the US completing another “heavy wave” of strikes on Iranian targets and Iran claiming drone attacks on US facilities in Kuwait plus strikes on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian media reported additional casualties on Qeshm Island. The US Senate again rejected an effort to limit presidential war powers.

Extreme heat warnings remain in effect across large portions of the western and southwestern United States as a heat dome intensifies into the weekend.

Weekend News Outlook

Further US or Iranian strikes possible within 24–48 hours if claims of Hormuz tanker attacks or Kuwait targeting hold; outcome depends on whether commercial traffic is visibly disrupted and on any CENTCOM confirmation or denial (confidence 65%).

Spanish government coordination with Morocco and potential additional mainland transfers from Ceuta over the next 48–72 hours; risk of secondary surges if weather or Moroccan border control shifts (CI 70%).

Peak heat stress Friday–Sunday across the Southwest and Intermountain West; elevated wildfire ignition risk and heat-related medical load (confidence 85%).
Energy markets sensitive to any confirmed Hormuz transit interruption; price spikes possible if multiple tankers are verifiably halted (60%).

Senate or executive messaging on war powers and Iran policy likely within 48 hours given the failed limitation vote (55%).

Ukraine long-range strikes on Russian energy infrastructure may continue but no fresh overnight confirmation beyond the prior refinery hits (50%). We still think the Ukraine nuke plant under Russian control will become a target (26%) but timing is open.

Domestic US disaster picture currently heat-dominant; flash-flood risk remains on burn scars in the West if thunderstorms develop (70%).

Eyeing Next Week

Take Monday off. Mainly boring shit (market could rally early). But Tuesday mid-morning the JOLTS report from labor. Then the usual Wednesday-through-Friday track: ADP, Challenger, and Federal job numbers.

We are almost to the top of the heat roller-coaster lift tower – and we’re looking forward to cooling in September like you wouldn’t believe.

Around the Ranch: No Selectric

The adventure of Elaine’s Selectric II is about wrapped.  If you remember, I bought it July 6 from a shop up in Denver. It never showed – and I was refunded.  When there’s no money on the table, I tend to lose interest.  But when the “Second Notice of Attempted Delivery” showed up Wednesday I just couldn’t resist the trip to the post office. C-URE-iosity.

No, despite a “notice of attempted delivery” they didn’t have it.  So here’s what I told the seller:

“As promised, I went to the USPS here in Palestine, TX today to present my “Second notice” of attempted delivery.

The clerk explained that the item (your typewriter) is still in Denver and the notice to me only arrived here because my name and address are the intended in the system.

However, the clerk said that the USPS is now trying to get it (to the seller) because (clerk says) most likely there is a label issue.

She also showed me the USPS internal tracking which showed “container” scan, not “item scan” and that could be part of the issue as well.

I am OK since I was refunded (giving up on Selectrics, lol) and my wife will have to use one of our half dozen computers for writing. If there is someone there (wherever your shop is in, Denver?) when USPS tries again, who knows.

I don’t have it – never did, and it never got south of Dallas even “container joyriding.” As I said Zip+4 may improve the delivery batting average Mine is 75803-0349.”

This is the end of the Postal Mystery series, for now.

But follow along in the Comments section, because reader Hank (out on the Big Island of howwahyah) is waiting for a fishing shirt (long-sleeve – good choice except working with power tools) and we’re developing this into a whole contest.

I can hear it now:  “Enter today and you could win a roll of stamps.”

My home insurance check still hasn’t made it to Dallas, either – that was mailed on June 22.

But you know what did get through?  Me.

Write when you get rich,

George@Ure.net