WHAT A LONG, STRANGE TRIP IT’S BEEN: Today is the 20th anniversary of InstaPundit.
Archive for 2021
August 8, 2021
I DON’T THINK THE MARKET CONDITIONS JUSTIFY THIS: Surge In Law School Applicants Is Biggest Since Dot-Com Bubble.
Then again, they didn’t justify the dot-com bubble either.
August 7, 2021
FROM A RALLY IN CALIFORNIA:
A QUESTION LOTS OF PEOPLE ARE ASKING: COVID: Yes, There Are Tests for the Delta Variant.
It’s like the misinformation Olympics.
Anyway, this is a VIP piece. Promo code CHARLIE for the discount.
OPEN THREAD: Can’t stop the rock.
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE, PEOPLE!
HMM: Did The CDC Director Just Accidentally Admit That Vaccination Passports Are Futile? The vaccines are, in fact, pretty effective. Vaccines generally don’t produce “sterilizing immunity” such that no germs grow in your body. Rather they prime your immune system to wipe the germs out before they produce illness. Given how the immune system works, that’s pretty inevitable.
The real question here is risk thresholds. People who have been vaccinated, or who have had Covid, pose a very low risk of infection to vulnerable people, and essentially zero risk to people who have themselves been vaccinated or who have had Covid.
I DUNNO, J.K. ROWLING DOES OKAY: Why Men Don’t Read Books by Women. “A writer for The Guardian, M. A. Sieghart, has asked the perennial question, ‘Why do so few men read books by women?’ Curiously, the people who always ask this question never follow up by asking how women authors might better appeal to men or how the publishing industry might get a better share of the underserved male-readership market. No, the assumption is always that men have something wrong with them and need to change. It’s not the books that are the problem, it’s you. The customer is in the wrong.”
Well, all media discussions of men start with the presumption that men are the problem, and are wrong. That’s because most consumers of media are women, who need to be pandered to.
Plus: “Danielle Steel writes trashy romances. Jojo Moyes writes trashy romances. Jane Austen wrote non-trashy romances. Atwood writes a variety of things but is best known for a pearl-clutching feminist screed that confuses Baptists with the Taliban, though she also churns out an occasional apocalyptic science-fiction novel disturbingly obsessed with child pornography. To put it briefly and bluntly, men don’t want to read that shit.”
Though interestingly Jane Austen was quite popular with men in her time, and didn’t get labeled as a women’s writer until much later.
Also: “By the way, the Japanese manga Demon Slayer outsold the entire American comic-book industry last year. This is not a coincidence.”
Related: From Jon Gabriel in the Arizona Republic: Obama scaled back his 60th birthday because of COVID-19. He should have made it bigger. “If you want to increase the number of people getting the jab, we need more healthy, happy, vaccinated people out there enjoying life. Grim threats from lab-coat bureaucrats have motivated everyone they can. Time for a full-on charm offensive. Instead of threatening vaccine passports, Mayor Bowser should hold a block party and invite every vaccinated D.C. resident. Speaker Pelosi should throw a bipartisan cookout on the steps of the Capitol — we know all the lawmakers are protected. And let Obama hold an epic birthday rager; heck, invite 1,000 more guests. Despite my vigorous defense of his right to party, I doubt I’ll be on the list. But I hope he has a very happy birthday anyway.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Right Needs A More Confrontational Politics.
SO FAR, THE TREND FOR THE 21ST CENTURY SEEMS TO SUPPORT THEIR APPROACH: ‘Preppers’ Quietly Stock Up for the ‘Perfect Storm.’
People, he said, are waking up to the worsening reality of supply chain disruptions and food shortages, and rapid political and social changes that all point toward “a perfect storm” just ahead.
The COVID-19 lockdowns and empty store shelves only served to heighten popular sentiment that the “old normal” is gone, he said.
“When the pandemic struck, we started seeing all this panic buying,” Maddox said. “What’s really increased is the number of people that contact me. These are really personal emails. They’re not crazy extremists. These are single moms, elderly people, disabled people, regular working people. They’re realizing that things are changing. They can just feel things are changing rapidly,” he said.
“The riots [of 2020] were bad. The election was bad. Now what’s happening is the whole world is starting to change.”
And not for the better.
FIGHT INEQUALITY: ABOLISH HIGHER EDUCATION. College Was Supposed to Close the Wealth Gap for Black Americans. The Opposite Happened.
Black millennials thought college would help them get ahead. Instead, it is setting them back.
The median net worth of households with Black college graduates in their 30s has plunged over the past three decades to less than one-tenth the net worth of their white counterparts, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Federal Reserve data. The drop is driven by skyrocketing student debt and sluggish income growth, which combine to make it difficult to build savings or buy a home. Now, the generation that hoped to close the racial wealth gap is finding it is only growing wider.
More than 84% of college-educated Black households in their 30s have student debt, up from 35% three decades ago, when many baby boomers were at the same age. The younger generation owes a median of $44,000, up from less than $6,000. By comparison, 53% of white college-educated households in their 30s have debt, up from 27% three decades earlier. The median amount rose to $35,000 from $8,000. All figures are adjusted for inflation.
Meanwhile, Black graduates’ household incomes have grown more slowly than those of college graduates in general, according to a Journal analysis of census data. Median income for Black college-educated households in their 30s increased 7% from the early 1990s to late 2010s to about $76,000. Income for their white counterparts rose 13% to about $114,000.
“Not only are Black families pretty far behind, they’ve fallen further and further behind for millennials,” said Ana Hernández Kent, a senior researcher at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s Institute for Economic Equity. “It will be very difficult for these older Black millennials to build wealth.” . . .
The median net worth for Black households with college graduates in their 30s has fallen to $8,200 from about $50,400 three decades ago, the analysis found. Over the same period, their white peers saw their median net worth grow 17% to $138,000. Net worth is calculated by subtracting a person’s liabilities, such as mortgage and college debt, from assets like homes and stockholdings.
The Journal’s analysis is based on the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, which examines household wealth, and census data. The analysis sorted the data by age, race and educational attainment. The Journal pooled results from 1989, 1992 and 1995 and compared that with results from surveys conducted in 2016 and 2019 to capture a larger number of college-educated families in their 30s than participate in a single survey.
Why didn’t President Obama do anything about this? Why isn’t President Biden addressing it?
BACK IN STOCK: Don’t Tread On Me Adjustable Snake Ring.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
● Shot: Will Hollywood’s MeToo Movement Finally Hold Andrew Cuomo Accountable?
—Christian Toto, NewsBusters, today.
● Chaser: Hollywood Feminists Silent On Revelations That Time’s Up Helped Cuomo Undermine Accuser.
—The Daily Wire, yesterday.
Related: Birds of a Feather: Ralph Northam Won’t Call on Cuomo to Resign.
MY KIND OF UNDERWATER SPORT: Hunting Lionfish with a Glock. Video at the link.
Related item here.
GOOD LUCK, I WANT YOU TO KNOW WE’RE ALL COUNTING ON YOU: Hillary’s coven wants you to like Kamala Harris.
The coven discussed using Harris’s record as a prosecutor to defend her against negative press coverage. What a truly brilliant strategy to remind voters of the very thing that sunk Harris’s presidential run. That’s why these ladies get paid the big bucks!
If you criticize them or Harris, though, you will be accused of ‘sexist overtones.’ Harris’s allies want to ‘make sure the press knows this’. It’s much easier to blame Harris’s low approval ratings on bigotry rather than her own poor performance.
Translation: Democratic Party brass has given its operatives with bylines their marching orders, and is promising to shame them if they refuse to comply. “You don’t have to fall in love, you just have to fall in line,” to coin a phrase. It will fun to see who does.
As Jon Gabriel adds, “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Kamala’s critics into what I call the basket of deplorables. But what difference, at this point, does it make? I think her new PR team will easily wipe away all the bad coverage, like with a cloth or something.”
OLD AND BUSTED: Apple still refuses to unlock iPhones, so Bill Barr is mad.
—Young-adult site* Vox.com, May 18th, 2020.
The new Hotness? Apple is opening a Pandora’s box with its upcoming software update:
Apple has announced it will install a program on iPhones in the United States that will persistently scan users’ photos and flag those its algorithm believes to be related to child abuse.
Flagged photos will then be reviewed by humans to determine if they violate any laws. Once implemented, the measure will affect roughly one-third of people in the U.S.
Although the goals of this initiative are noble, its implications are dire. We learned last month that the federal government is actively advising social media platforms on what constitutes disinformation, sometimes even going as far as to single out individual posts and users for removal. Bear in mind, many things branded disinformation throughout the pandemic have turned out to be true.
What could possibly go wrong?
Orwell didn’t write 1984 as a how-to guide. As Jim Geraghty wrote in October of 2019, when the CCP-NBA connection was exposed for millions of Americans to see: We’re Not Exporting Our Values to China — We’re Importing Theirs.
YOU WILL BE MADE TO CARE: Erick Erickson just got suspended from Twitter for this tweet.
More here: Twitter Has Kicked Erick Erickson off… for Being ‘Pro-Science.’
JOURNO TWITTER RUNS THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION:
Within 24 hours, Joe Biden, having declared several times that he did not have the authority for such an order, complied with Alcindor’s request, to the delight of her fellow blue-check reporters. Alcindor is also pushing the administration to levy penalties on states that do not comply with a national and federal mask mandate, such as Florida. Who knows how that will turn out for them…
While the President himself may not know how to use a computer, 137 years of age that he is, his comms team follow the example of the acting president in the Chief of Staff’s office. They appear to be Way More Online than even the administration of ‘the Former Guy’.
Left-leaning journalists know they can nudge this administration in the direction they want it to go with their tweets. The trouble is, not many more people besides self-promoting journalists have dominant voices on Twitter. There’s an insular bubble in Washington DC containing the blue-checks and the administration. Who knows how their shared policy vision will sit with the people outside it?
Well, here are a few clues:
● New York Magazine Writer Baffled by Support for the Rule of Law.
● Biden Administration Extends Pause on Federal Student-Loan Repayment Until January 2022.
Regarding that last item, as Stephen Miller tweets, “Cool so pandemic panic porn will be going until at least the end of next January.“