Archive for 2021

EIGHT CHARTS ILLUSTRATE THE BIDEN FAILURE: Context is everything, as Issues & Insights points out regarding the 6.5 percent quarterly growth rate just announced. Sounds really good, until you realize it’s dramatically lower than the consensus projection of 8.5-9.0 percent for the second quarter of 2021 and the first that reflects the initial impacts of His Fraudulency’s policies.

Similar insights are marshaled by the I&I platoon for a total of eight charts that track where America is headed under His Fraudulency. What is really scary, however, is the realization that as things get worse in the days ahead, our betters, rather than recognizing their errors, will double-down on them. Can you guess who will get the blame when that, too, fails?

 

BILL DE BLASIO AND THE DECLINE OF NEW YORK CITY:

The New York renaissance that began with the election of Rudy Giuliani in 1993 and continued through the end of Michael Bloomberg’s three-term mayoralty two decades later was literally that. When babies were born in New York City, parents stayed if they could afford to instead of fleeing because they had to. An aging city suddenly turned younger. Areas that had lain fallow were reborn. Despite, or perhaps because of, the 9/11 attacks and the surge of citizen pride that accompanied them, the 2000s saw still more people flowing into the five boroughs. Half a million souls, to be exact; the population rose to 8.5 million.

New York might have been the most expensive city in the country to live in, a bastion of income inequality and every other sin of wealth that the young people who flooded to hipster Brooklyn to eat food twice as expensive as they would have paid for it anywhere else found time to worry over on their blogs — but as their presence indicated, it was the place to be.

And what of the decade dominated by Bill de Blasio’s eight years as mayor? When he leaves office in January 2022, the population of New York City will likely be around 8.25 million. He will not only leave office with the city in far worse shape than it was when he became its chief executive in 2014; he is the key cause of its renewed depopulation.

By almost every conceivable benchmark, even his own, de Blasio has failed. Take crime. Critics predicted that under his leader­ship, crime would skyrocket, and for a while it looked like we would have to eat our words as the crime rate continued to fall. In July 2019, de Blasio announced with great fanfare that the city had booked 40,000 fewer miscreants into jails that year than in the year he took office.

“The safest big city in America is ending the era of mass incarceration,” he said proudly. “For decades, we’ve been told we can only arrest and imprison our way to a safer city. Under my administration, New York City has proven that’s not true. Instead, we can keep fathers at home and kids in school and get even safer.”

By the end of 2019, the murder rate had risen by 7 percent, with other violent crimes also increasing at a comparably modest rate. Then, in 2020, everything went south. Shootings increased by 97 percent (that is not a typo), the homicide rate by 44 percent, the burglary rate by 42 percent, and the number of car thefts by 67 percent.

A year into his mayoralty, the city found itself awash in street dwellers, many of the newer indigents apparent opioid addicts who had moved into the city because it was an easy place to panhandle and because word had gone out that vagrancy would be tolerated. De Blasio accused the everyday New Yorkers who complained about the piles of garbage on Broadway and elsewhere of “fearmongering,” even as he increased spending on homelessness.

As usual, when you subsidize something, you get more of it — and in 2020, nearly 21,000 individuals were sleeping nightly in public shelters, an all-time high. When the vagrants are not in the shelters, they’re on the streets, sleeping or raging or rampaging, degrading the daily life of the city’s working residents and their children.

Compare John Podhoretz’s article on the end of the de Blasio era with Kyle Smith’s “NYC, July 1993,” written a few months before it began, to understand how New York City has come full circle with its Death Wish-era past. Likely future mayor Eric Adams has his work cut out for him, but Giuliani and Bloomberg have shown that it’s possible to actually govern the city.

I LINKED THIS ARTICLE ON SOUTH AFRICA’S DECLINE YESTERDAY, but it’s worth breaking out this sentence:

The state, rather than the market, became the main site for opportunity and enrichment.

That’s a formula for disaster, but it’s also what the political class in every country tends to push for.

Related:

The agents of government should be men and women of integrity. Unfortunately, Read observed, political office tends to rob a person of modesty, humility, and integrity, which make it advisable never to accept a political office. “Office robs men of integrity because they get to thinking that their being in office is more important than integrity. There isn’t anything in life superior to integrity. It is the rock of character on which all else is erected.”

If political office tends to rob men of integrity, contact with the affairs of government must logically be one of the most corrupting of influences to which men are exposed.

Yes.

THE JUNTA FEELS LIKE IT’S PUSHING ON A STRING:  Danger Phase Begins – Biden Angrily Attempts to Reconcile His Own Contradictions on Mask Mandates, Announced Mandated Vaccines and/or Testing for Federal Workers and Federal Contractors.

The peasants aren’t acting as they’ve been told they would. They’re not falling in line. So the idiots who stole our institutions are going to try escalating.

Sauve-qui-peut. This is not a drill. Sauve-qui-peut and secure your position. The map is about to go angry and arrowy.

NO: Mask Guidance Based On Misleading Data.

Misleading data is just what they use to justify masks and lockdowns, which they need to do, because they’re terrified of us.  As I told you last year, lockdowns and curfews in my experience (and I’ve experienced a few) are not because of the announced reason. They’re because the government is scared of the people.

OPEN THREAD: I ain’t askin’ for much.

SPACE: Rocket Lab launches US military satellite on return-to-flight mission. “Electron is currently an expendable launcher, but Rocket Lab wants to change that. The company plans to eventually pluck falling Electron first stages out of the sky with a helicopter, then haul them back to land for reuse in relatively short order. Rocket Lab has been making progress toward this end goal. For example, on both the May 15 mission and a November 2020 flight, the company brought an Electron first stage down for a soft ocean splashdown under parachutes. Engineers and technicians have been analyzing these returned boosters, which company representatives said survived their space missions in good shape.”