LET THEM, AS PART OF THE “STAY IN CALIFORNIA” PROGRAM: Beverly Hills Residents Clamor to Purchase Guns, Ammo and Personal Security Guards.
Heaven knows we don’t want them in flyover.
Archive for 2021
December 30, 2021
ABOUT TIME: Senate Republicans Moving to Ban Federal Funds for Cities and States That Let Non-Citizens Vote.
Though arresting their traitorous rulers should happen soonest.
Look at it this way. It might save them from #teamheadsonpikes.
NOT guaranteed, but could happen.
I’D JUST LIKE TO POINT OUT MAXWELL DIDN’T KILL HERSELF: Ghislaine Maxwell Found Guilty on Five of the Six Charges in Sex Trafficking Case.
IF YOU DON’T ACQUIESCE THAT EVERY RACE IS SUPERIOR TO “WHITE” YOU’RE A RACIST. QED: AZ State U. Students Disciplined For Harassing White Student Post Bizarre Video Accusing School of Racism.
Teach your children well, no matter their color.
December 29, 2021
OPEN THREAD: Party like it’s 1973.
WHEN DANIEL GREENFIELD JOINED ISIS:
They say that everyone has a twin somewhere in the world. Scientists, when they’re not calculating the amount of chocolate someone can safely eat a day, claim that everyone has six doppelgangers somewhere around the world. And some even have their own evil twins.
Mine was living in Australia all along.
I had spent the time since the attacks of September 11 writing about the dangers of Islamic terrorism. But somewhere in a suburb of Sydney, Australia, another Daniel Greenfield had decided to convert to Islam. One thing led to another and before anyone knew it, he had become a fan of ISIS and was arrested with police alleging he’d been planning an attack.
While one Daniel Greenfield had been investigating an Islamic terror plot, another Daniel Greenfield, some 7,500 miles away, was having his Islamic terror plot broken up.
Read the whole thing.
THIS IS CNN: Second CNN Producer Under Criminal Investigation For Allegations ‘Involving Potential Juvenile Victims:’ Report.
Meanwhile, at America’s Newspaper of Record: After Conviction For Sex Crimes, Ghislaine Maxwell Announces New Job At CNN.
WHAT, DID BEZOS PAY SOMEONE OFF? FAA delays completion of Starship environmental review.
It’s sad, but that was literally my first thought on seeing this headline. But that’s where things have gotten.
HAHA, JUST SAW THIS IN THE COMMENTS TO THE CB RADIO POST BELOW:
This was recorded today on international frequency that pilots use. repeated all day by pilots! pic.twitter.com/WMeTtMh1hQ
— ❌Skibum (@heliski777) October 17, 2021
LOL: LIBERAL WOMEN SHOCKED, SADDENED TO FIND THAT SEX AND THE CITY HAS GONE FULL WOKE, DOESN’T RESEMBLE THE OLD SHOW. “I know most of you don’t watch this show but it’s just so amusing to me that Sex and the City people are going through the same thing — what the hell is up with all of this woke bullshit? — that Star Wars and comic book fans went through six years ago.”
WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? We have a powerful weapon to fight inflation: price controls. It’s time we use it, says the Grauniad.
Control-F “Nixon” brings up zero results. Which seems odd:
[In 1971, Economist Herb] Stein was saying aloud what they all knew. Prettifying a political grab by dressing it as an economic rescue was precisely the kind of action against which eminences like Burns warned foreign governments when they made grand speeches abroad. Nixon was indeed now preparing to do what Harold Wilson had done in 1967: disingenuously pretend that devaluing a currency would not affect the consumer. Stimulating the economy in this way might win Nixon the election, but inflation would eventually explode, as Friedman sometimes said, like a closed pot over high heat. Wage and price controls and taxes on imports could make the kind of growth America was accustomed to, the old bonanza, disappear for years, even a decade. True scarcity of key goods might suddenly become the rule. And that was true no matter how many times that cowboy Connally went around bragging about tariffs and telling others that America was “the strongest economy on earth.”
* * * * * * * *
The 1971 run on American gold also, however, reflected foreigners’ insight. Outsiders knew a tipping point when they saw one. America had moved closer to Michael Harrington’s socialism than even Harrington understood. The United States had locked itself into social spending promises that might never be outgrown. Today, interest in Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies serves as a measure of markets’ and individuals’ distrust of the U.S. dollar. In those days there was no Bitcoin, but gold played a similar role. The dollar was the common stock of America, and foreigners used gold to short it.
The disastrous performance of the U.S. economy in the following years proved the foreigners’ 1971 wager correct. To pay for its Great Society commitments, the U.S. government in the next decade found itself forced to set taxes so high that it further suppressed the commercialization of innovation. Products that could have been developed from patents awarded in the 1960s remained on the researchers’ shelves. Today we assume all markets will rebound given a decade. But there was to be no 1970s rebound for the Dow Jones Average. The Dow flirted with the 1,000 level throughout the decade, but did not cross the line definitively until 1982, an astonishingly long period to stagnate, nearly a generation. While markets languished, unemployment for all Americans rose. High prices, high interest rates, and federal budget deficits plagued the nation. “Guns and butter” had proved too expensive, but so indeed had butter alone. The 1960s commitments required spending that, then and down the decades, would be far greater than for Vietnam or most other wars. Those on the far left who had originally pushed for aggressive public-sector expansion had achieved what they sought, to subordinate the private sector. In 1977, Harrington actually titled a new book The Twilight of Capitalism. Those who had counted on the private sector to sustain prosperity saw they had expected too much. The nation’s confidence evaporated. Indeed, by the late 1970s, President Jimmy Carter felt the need to undertake a national campaign to restore confidence, the kind of campaign Franklin Roosevelt had launched in response to the Great Depression. From being a nation that could afford everything, America morphed into a country that could afford nothing, a place where the president warned citizens to set their living room thermostats to sixty-five in January, or face catastrophe.
In a supreme irony, many of the people who caused the economic damage found themselves mired in the dirty work of reversing what they had wrought. The task of reducing inflation through punishing interest rates fell to Paul Volcker, who as a junior official aided leaders in the 1971 decisions that triggered the 1970s inflation in the first place. Mortgage rates rose to today incredible-sounding levels, over 15 percent. In the 1980s, the same John Connally who as treasury secretary in 1971 pounded on Nixon’s desk for populist measures that ensured an economic quagmire, went bankrupt, a casualty of the mess he had helped to create.
—Amity Shlaes 2019 book, Great Society. There’s a reason why its epigraph is, “Nothing is new, it is just forgotten.”
YOU SAY TRUINTERNATIALDEPRESSURE; I SAY TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE. LET’S CALL THE JOE THING OFF. Lauren Boebert Tricks the Left Into Exposing Biden With a Savage Troll:
“But folks on the left weren’t aware of it, even though it had gotten a fair amount of coverage. So they attacked Boebert for saying it — mocking her intelligence, saying she shouldn’t be drunk tweeting, that the word was evidence that she wasn’t literate, asking if she had mental issues, and saying it showed she shouldn’t be in office. They had no idea what they were saying was effectively being applied to Biden because they didn’t keep themselves informed enough about their leader to know that this was a Biden comment.”
Biden won the presidency on a promise of the federal solution that he now says doesn’t exist. It didn’t exist in 2020, either. Yet that didn’t stop him from saying that he wouldn’t open the economy until he’d marshaled the powers of the federal government to “shut down” Covid, as if a pandemic can be defeated by taking it out back of the gym and pummeling it like it was Donald Trump or Corn Pop.
If you have nothing better to do — if, perhaps, you’re in bed with a mild but slightly synthetic-feeling cold that won’t put you in the hospital unless you’re an obese octogenarian with comorbidities where other people have organs — you can read all about The Biden Plan, as he called it, on his campaign website. This Plan of Plans has three elements:
- “[T]o massively surge a nationwide campaign and guarantee regular, reliable, and free access to testing”
- “Double the number of drive-through testing sites and increase the numbers until there are no more lines”
- “Build a national contact tracing workforce, starting by hiring at least 100,000 Americans and equipping sorely under-resourced public health departments with the resources they need to spot and stop outbreaks”
Biden has failed to deliver any of this. Omicron has caught him pants-down yet again on testing. There are spectacular lines at drive-in testing sites. And while there is no sign of Biden’s contact-tracing militia, there is plentiful evidence that public health departments remain flatfooted.
Which is why: 2022 is likely to be a brutal year for Joe Biden and Democrats.
But don’t get cocky. As Glenn has written, “If you want to win, donate and volunteer. Winning takes work, and commenting on Internet blogs, even this one, doesn’t count.”
I’VE SEEN THIS MOVIE: Viruses Found In 15,000-Year-Old Tibetan Glacier Ice Are Like Nothing Seen Before.
FLASHBACK: The CB Revolution as successful “Irish Democracy.” “Before Citizens’ Band was created, you needed a license to be on the air, with almost no exceptions. Radio was seen as Serious Technology For Serious People, nothing for normal folks to fool around with, at least not without government approval. Citizens’ Band put an end to that, not by regulatory design but by popular fiat. Originally, a license was required for Citizens’ Band, too, but masses of people simply broke the law and operated without a license until the FCC was forced to bow to reality. It was a form of mass civil disobedience that accomplished in its sphere what drug-legalization activists have never been able to accomplish in theirs. No small thing. . . . And it worked: the 55 mile per hour speed limit was repealed.”
There’s a lot of power in noncompliance.
BONGINO IS RIGHT:
This eco-hysteria, this dogmatic belief that modernity is setting the planet ablaze and unleashing disease, was further codified at COP26 in Glasgow. The great and the good arrived in their private jets and limousines to gnash their teeth over the horribleness of industrialised society and to draw up a plan for phasing out coal and other ‘dirty’ energies.
Not surprisingly, nations like India and China, whose populations haven’t yet reached such a luxurious level of development that they can sit around for days on end bemoaning the eco-impact of human extravagance, were not so keen on this neo-colonial attempt by Western elites to virtually criminalise certain forms of energy.
Boris Johnson spelt out the revolt against modernity that lies at the heart of climate-change alarmism when he used his speech at COP to complain about the invention of the steam engine. That contraption, which gave rise to the Industrial Revolution itself, was a ‘doomsday device’ that started the clock ticking on the eco-calamity we currently face, he madly said. And this is a PM who claims to stand up for British history and British greatness.
That’s a stunning turn by Johnson, a Tory who spent his salad days writing sports car reviews, “imitation Jeremy Clarkson at best,” for Britain’s version of GQ magazine.
AS CLAYTON CHRISTIANSEN NOTED, DISRUPTION COMES FROM THE BOTTOM UP: Waymo To Use Chinese Geely Robotaxi Body. This Should Send Shivers Into Western OEMs. “This is why the shift to robotaxi is frightening to car OEMs. Customers don’t care a lot about the brand of the car that picks them up. . . . The long-term goal for robotaxi players is to make a service that can function as a car replacement. That urban dwellers will decide to use that service and reduce the number of cars they own; first from 3 to 2 or 2 to 1, but in some cases to zero. Instead they will buy everything as a service from the robotaxi company: Vehicle, energy, maintenance, parking, insurance, financing, repairs and more. They won’t even know they have switched to a Chinese maker from a western one.”
GHISLAINE MAXWELL CONVICTED OF SEX TRAFFICKING VICTIMS FOR JEFFREY EPSTEIN.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A friend sends these thoughts:
A) wanna lay any money on how long Ghislaine Maxwell lasts in prison, and
B) wouldn’t the normal thing have been for a prosecutor to cut a deal with her in exchange for assorted former presidents, CEOs, royals etc?
I mean, I don’t want to be cynical, but it’s almost like…
Srsly tho, it’s all academic. What’s the point of being in the witness protection program when it’s the feds who want you dead?
I wish I could call this overly cynical, but in 2021, is it really?
BEST ECONOMY IN DECADES! December Auto Sales Still Looking Weak.
CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND: The Royal Bank of Canada rejected our mortgage because we’re conservative. “We’ve published recordings of RBC banksters admitting to financial de-platforming. Toronto headquarters stopped our mortgage to purchase a home for freedom-oriented Canadian media, activist, and think tanks.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: MagneTrainer-ER Mini Exercise Bike Arm and Leg Exerciser. #CommissionEarned
IT WAS ABOUT ELIMINATING A STRONG PRESIDENT AND TRYING TO MAKE A WEAK ONE LOOK STRONG: CDC’s Rochelle Walensky just ‘said the quiet part out loud’ and admitted that for Dems, the COVID pandemic has always been about politics.
THEY WON’T BE HELD OFFICIALLY ACCOUNTABLE, BUT PARENTS ARE CERTAINLY TAKING NOTICE: School Closures Only Accomplished Harm; Teachers’ Unions Must Be Held Accountable.