DISNEY TURNS FAIRY TALE ON ITS HEAD: Libby Emmons, writing for The Federalist, takes apart the latest illustration of why the company bearing Walt Disney’s name would make him retch were he around to see it.
UPDATE: For all you aspiring copy-desk tyrants (old-school newsroomese), please note that “retch” is now in place. You guys are a tough room! :-)
HARSH BUT FAIR: Fauci’s Cost-Benefit Calculation: You Absorb The Cost, He Benefits. “The problem isn’t that Fauci weighed costs and benefits. It’s that he was willing to impose life-and-death costs on unwitting Americans in order to benefit himself.”
WEALTH TAX TALK RETURNS WITH EXPOSURE OF BILLIONAIRE TAX RATES. Warren Buffett allegedly pays around a 0.1% income tax rate, but the odds that someone with billions of dollars isn’t going to find a way to avoid a wealth tax are even lower than that. Plus, do we actually care about taxes as a revenue stream any more? At this point we’re just funding everything through printing money, and the tax is inflation. No surprise there; the only way we can possibly pay the national debt is through inflating it away eventually.
Update: To be clear, Buffett’s “0.1%” tax rate was calculated by ProPublica by taking into account unrealized gains in his wealth, not just “income” like the average person gets, though ProPublica points out that they can just borrow against their wealth and avoid ever realizing the gains for tax purposes. Ultimately, it’s hard to imagine any “fix” that won’t end up missing the super rich and hitting the average person somehow instead.
NO POINT VACCINATING THOSE WHO’VE HAD COVID-19: Findings of Cleveland Clinic study.
Earlier: Rand Paul: The science proves people with natural immunity should skip COVID vaccines. “To dictate that a person recovered from COVID-19 with natural immunity also submit to a vaccine — without scientific evidence — is nothing more than hubris. If you have no proof that people who acquired natural immunity are getting or transmitting the disease in real numbers, then perhaps you should just be quiet. People are not getting re-infected in large numbers. And that’s not me saying so, that’s the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, quietly admitting that on its website. One thing they also admitted, while at first trying to hide it, was that there are no studies showing that getting the vaccine if you already have natural immunity is of any benefit at all. They can’t show that, because it has not yet been studied. It took my friend Congressman Thomas Massie to make them admit this, by the way. They originally denied their own studies on this.”
BALTIMORE TEA PARTY? Businesses Refuse to Pay Taxes as Public Safety Crashes.
The “Baltimore sage” H. L. Mencken said “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.” And so it was with defunding the police and its ideological companion, critical race theory. Defunding police was a simple-minded attempt to grapple with complex problems, not all of which are real and not all of which have government solutions. Critical race theory is just as simple-minded, and as toxic as Baltimore’s Inner Harbor occasionally becomes.
The last thing Baltimore needed was to have its police defunded. But the mayor and city council followed the far-left activist agitators off that cliff in 2020, and homicide in Harm City shot up.
Businesses in historic and trendy Fell’s Point are feeling the effects directly, and after the city has failed to listen and do its job, they’re fighting back with a tax revolt according to WBAL.
Call it the Baltimore Tea Party.
Flashback: The Coming Middle-Class Anarchy.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Let’s Play a Game of ‘If Hunter’s Last Name Were Trump.’ “The current occupier of the Oval Office has a straight-up sleazebag of a son running around out there who the press keeps ignoring. The Democratic propagandists masquerading as journalists must all be suffering a host of orthopedic ills from turning so forcefully away from each new Hunter Biden exhibit of scumbaggery.”
QUESTION ASKED AND EXPLORED*: Who Loses When the China Bat Cave Implodes?
* Can’t really say “Answered” here, as we still don’t know for sure how this will ultimately play out.
Flashback from November of 2019: How to Conduct Business with Chinese Companies That See a Dark Future.
DUMBING DOWN THE LAW FOR WOKE STUDENTS: Law Professor Skipped Teaching Plessy v. Ferguson, Edited Dred Scott to Two Paragraphs. “I understand that some criminal law professors no longer teach the law of rape. And now, some constitutional law professors will no longer teach about slavery and segregation.”
This isn’t respecting students, it’s disrespecting them. Students who need this kind of treatment don’t belong in law school, and should never be lawyers.
THEY’RE NOT JUST DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES — THEY’RE PROUD AND EAGER DEMOCRATIC PARTY OPERATIVES: GOP-Dems agree: Press ‘protecting’ Biden. “Pollster Jonathan Zogby said that 55% of Democrats agreed with that assessment, as did 80% of Republicans.”
‘THEY WILL BEHEAD US:’ There are an estimated 18,000 Afghans who helped the U.S. military, mostly as translators, but also in providing intelligence about Taliban movements and plans, who know they will be killed if they remain there after American forces are gone, according to Just The News’ Susan Katz Keating. The clock is ticking, much faster than the State Department bureaucrats are working to get these people and their dependents out.
NIFTY: DARPA’s newest system kills drones with stringy streamers. “The Mobile Force Protection program is designed to defeat drone intrusions over military installations and convoys using small unmanned aircraft. Using an X band radar, MFP automatically detects and identifies potential threats, then selects the appropriate interceptor to respond with. The system has a few different small drones it can send out, including rotary and fixed-wing interceptors. The primary interceptor tool is the one that shoots the streamers to gum up the works of other drones.”
A relatively inexpensive solution like this is exactly the way to deal with the asymmetric price advantage of cheap drones.
OUR RULING CLASS HAS A STRONG DESIRE TO DISCRIMINATE ON THE BASIS OF RACE: Almost Overnight, Standards of Color-Blind Merit Tumble Across American Society.
WHY DOES THE NEW YORK TIMES HATE AMERICA? I think this is an honest revelation: American flags really do disturb Mara Gay.
And why has America produced — and why does it tolerate — a ruling class that finds its own flag, and by extension its own nation and its own people, offensive?
AMERICANS: NOT AS DUMB AS POLITICIANS HOPE. Only 40% of Voters Think Dr. Fauci Told the Truth About Virus Research. “As investigators pursue evidence that the COVID-19 virus may have originated in a Chinese research laboratory, many voters doubt that Dr. Anthony Fauci has told the truth about American funding of such research.”
Zuckerberg finally stands exposed as a leading member of the new techno-aristocracy manipulating the world and shaping our society to fit their own world view, while getting ever richer in the process.
This ascendency offers little for most Americans, even as Americans have provided so much to Zuckerberg and his ilk as tech has become ever more concentrated and monopolistic, putting a lie to the heroic myth of “a guy and a garage.” Since 2019, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have added more than two and a half trillion dollars to their valuation, including record-breaking profits in 2020 as the pandemic shut down much of the in-person economy, while workers and consumers have faced stagnant incomes and purchasing power.
This is, as the left of center American Prospect put it, “predatory capitalism.” . . .
This accrual of power relies on having influence in Washington. Quasi-monopolies like Facebook could never have grown into such behemoths if not for the willingness of regulators, in both parties, to let them buy potential competitors like Instagram, Oculus, and WhatsApp. Taking a proactive approach, Zuckerberg put several fingers on the scales to assure the defeat of the less controllable Trump by financing Election Day operations in many critical states through an obscure Chicago based front group, the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which used its Facebook windfall to fund election offices, and staffers, around the country.
Facebook itself, along with Twitter, also de-platformed the New York Post, America’s oldest newspaper, to keep information about Hunter Biden’s laptop from circulating.
The “robber barons” gave us railroads and public libraries. Zuck gave us Farmville and censorship.
BOTTOM LINE: The California Senate doesn’t give a crap about Down Syndrome workers. It wants them priced out of the job market by phasing out the federal program that allows them to be employed at something less than the soon-to-be $15 minimum wage.
What those nice senators don’t tell you: Parents of Down Syndrome workers overwhelmingly oppose this kind of thing. They understand that their son or daughter will soon be out of a job if it passes.
DOES DAD LIKE GOLF? A fun gift would be James Y. Bartlett’s golf mystery series. (Bumped)
NOT EVERYONE CAN RECAPITULATE THE APPROVED NARRATIVE: Matt Taibbi and the Liberal Apostates of the Left.
PRIVACY: McDonald’s Is Being Sued By a Customer Over Its Latest Technology. “ McDonald’s latest tech upgrade which uses artificial intelligence could vastly improve the efficiency of the chain’s drive-thru in the future. But some customers aren’t thrilled by the prospect of placing their orders through an automated system that ends up collecting voice data without their consent.”
WELL, YES: Ukraine’s President Says Biden Handed Putin a ‘Weapon’ By Caving On Pipeline.
Flashback:
Ted Cruz notes, “[B]asically what Joe Biden has decided is pipelines in America, bad. Jobs in America, bad. Pipelines in Russia, good. Jobs in Russia, good. And this is exactly backward. It is asinine. And four months into it, Joe Biden is crawling in bed with Putin and Russia and the enemies of America. It doesn’t make any sense.”
Flashback: So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
You know who didn’t do those things? Trump. You know who is doing those things? Biden.
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