Archive for 2022
July 5, 2022
AND DESANTIS RESPONDS: The Florida Governor wins this round.
READER FAVORITE: Nisaku Hori-Hori Weeding & Digging Knife.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: The Establishment Is Running Out of Cannon Fodder for Its Woke Military. “In fact – and this rips me up to say because I would not trade my about 27 years in the Army for anything – the reluctance to enlist of the traditional, normal Americans who are most likely to serve and who are the most desirable for service, is entirely rational. You do have an obligation to serve your country in some way, the military being the highest and best way for those who are able. But you do not have an obligation to do so if your life is going to be squandered by a leadership whose strategies are a disaster, whose priorities are not the defense of this country but some sort of bizarre pan-global progressive ideology, and who will use you as a guinea pig in freakish and morally bankrupt social experiments, all while failing to fulfill even the most basic obligations of the leaders to the led. Our military today is failing to meet its recruiting goals because it has failed to earn the trust of normal Americans who would otherwise be inclined to raise their hands.”
And Afghanistan. It’s not discussed in polite society,* but the Afghanistan debacle has done — and is still doing — catastrophic damage in all sorts of places.
*Because it would make Democrats look bad.
P.S.: This is from Kurt Schlichter, who has a book coming out.
FIRST-TERM LAME DUCK: Pincer Movement to Dump Biden Taking Shape.
The left’s pincer move to force Biden to step aside will have three clear parts.
First, we can expect a steady drumbeat of media stories such as the latest from mainstream political reporter Ronald Brownstein. His latest headline: “Is Biden a Man Out of Time?” What Brownsteain’s article makes clear is that the media and the Democratic base wish Biden would be even more aggressively leftist and polarizing.
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The second part of the pincer move will be party insiders who start publicly dumping on Biden. This week it is David Axelrod, the impresario of Barack Obama’s rise to power. Appearing on CNN, Axelrod said that “There is this sense that things are kind of out of control and he’s not in command.”“Not in command” is a euphemism for you-know-what.
Then there is the polling data, which will be the third part of the pincer move to oust Biden. The worst polling news for Biden right now comes from a new Harvard-CAPS/Harris Poll that finds 71 percent of respondents don’t want Biden to run for a second term in 2024.
They underestimated Joe’s ability to f*** things up but I have to wonder if Biden might still be just wily enough to hang on (and too stupid and stubborn to let go) — and further doom his party in 2024.
AND THEY’RE RIGHT TO BE MAD: How rules fuel populist anger in rural America.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: America-Hating Leftists Should Be Forced to Try the Alternatives. “A lefty comedy club owner I know once thought he could get government health care by having an anchor baby in Canada and was promptly asked to take his newborn child and leave by our neighbors to the north.”
UKRAINE WAR: Ukraine’s military withdraws from Lysychansk as Russia claims control — as it happened.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has confirmed that his forces have withdrawn from Lysychansk, the last holdout city in the eastern Luhansk region.
In his nightly video address, he vowed to restore control over the area thanks to the prospect of new, improved weaponry.
“If the commanders of our army withdraw people from certain points at the front, where the enemy has the greatest advantage in fire power, and this also applies to Lysychansk, it means only one thing,” Zelenskyy said.
“That we will return thanks to our tactics, thanks to the increase in the supply of modern weapons.”
Moscow said earlier Sunday that Luhansk was now under Russian control after the seizure of Lysychansk.
Russian forces can now concentrate on the neighboring Donetsk region, where Kyiv still controls swathes of territory.
Losing Lysychansk is a much bigger deal than forcing the Russians off Snake Island last week.
JUST IN CASE YOU THOUGHT IT WAS OVER: A campaign to end abortion rights under state constitutions. “Kentucky, whose constitution is not currently recognized to protect abortion, will hold a similar referendum in November to ensure that it will not be protected. “To protect human life, nothing in this Constitution shall be construed to secure or protect a right to abortion or require the funding of abortion,” reads the text of the referendum. Voters in four states — Tennessee, Alabama, West Virginia, and Louisiana — have passed similar referenda over the last decade explicitly barring courts from interpreting their state constitutions to protect abortion.”
Nothing in Dobbs, of course, affects this at all, except atmospherically. But atmospherics can be powerful.
Related: Lessons from the Left’s Implosion: “It seems to be only now occurring to progressives how heavily they had leaned on the Supreme Court to act as their cat’s-paw — and how little work they have done to try not only to secure the maximum possible number of Democratic appointments to the Court but, more important, to defend and fortify the intellectual position that made those activist judges such reliable progressive policy-makers for all those decades. And it only now seems to really be becoming clear to them what they have lost by failing to defend that intellectual ground: not only the Roe regime but also much of the progressive activist thinking that made it and similar decisions possible, far-reaching regulatory power and a practically unlimited administrative state. If progressives are shocked by this — and they are shocked — it is because they made the mistake of thinking that convincing the editors of the New York Times was sufficient.”
JAMES BOVARD: Remember Biden’s ‘summer of freedom’ and victory over COVID? No wonder his credibility’s shot. “As the president’s credibility faded, Team Biden became more aggressive in suppressing criticism. On March 3, Biden’s surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, demanded that social-media companies report to the feds anyone who posted “misinformation” regarding COVID. The odious Disinformation Governance Board was tasked with targeting COVID misinformation, among other suppression targets. Biden’s own false statements on COVID are exempt from the hit list. The CDC recently estimated that that almost 200 million Americans (60% of adults and 75% of children) have already been infected by COVID. The CDC continues to report more than 100,000 new daily cases, and the White House forecasts up to 100 million new COVID cases in the coming fall and winter. What was the point of the last 18 months of Pandemic Security Theater?”
Control. The point was control.
The Afghanistan debacle was if anything even more damaging to his credibility, and remains so even though it’s no longer mentioned much.
MORE DOWNSIDES OF OUR FECKLESS RULING CLASS: Get Ready: A Baleful Consequence of Inflation You’ve Heard Too Little About.
First, I expect to see a substantial surge in labor disputes as real wages (i.e., the relative price of labor) fall when some more flexible prices rise and nominal wages don’t. We are already seeing some indications of that (keep an eye on potential strikes at US ports and railroads).
Second, arguing along Coasean lines, I expect that since inflation makes it costlier to rely on the price system, there will be a substitution towards non-price methods of resource allocation, including vertical integration (in lieu of long term contracts where misalignment of prices leads to costly disputes between the parties), and the rationing mechanisms that Dennis Carlton (another former thesis committee member of yours truly) wrote about in the JLE in 1991. (There might be some shifts in the other direction too. Goods that are somewhat commoditized but are currently exchanged under formal or informal contracts with relatively inflexible prices might be amenable to being traded on auction- or auction-like platforms with more flexible prices.) . . .
Third, contracts will become shorter in duration, and incorporate various indexing clauses (which mitigate, but do not eliminate, relative price distortions).
Fourth, inflation and the associated relative price volatility can be a boon for futures/derivatives markets. It is not a coincidence, comrades, that a major burst of growth in derivatives markets (both in size and scope) occurred at the time of the last major inflationary period.
This list is not exhaustive by any means. It’s just some things that immediately come to mind.
Plus: “As Sherwin forcefully expressed, inflation is anything but economically benign, something that microeconomists (like Sherwin) are sensitive too, but which macroeconomists too often ignore. (Back in the day, macro types thought that the only real cost of inflation was “shoe leather cost” due to people having to walk to the bank more often.)” Morons.
THE WORLD WAS READY FOR A LITTLE FUN THAT YEAR: On this day in 1946, Micheline Bernardini, modeled a skimpy two-piece swimsuit at a press conference held at a public swimming pool in Paris. The swimsuit’s designer, Louis Réard, called it a “bikini” after the Pacific atoll where the United States had recently conducted a nuclear weapons test.
Bernardini was an 18-year-old nude dancer from the Casino de Paris, not a professional runway model. Réard had been unable to find a runway model willing to pose in his little creation.
The bikini was a scandal … or so the newspapers wrote. But it was also a hit—especially with men. Bernardini received over 50,000 fan letters.
Réard didn’t do badly either. The former automotive engineer had inherited his mother’s lingerie business sometime during the war. His bikini sold well (and … well … the cost of materials was low enough to allow for a decent profit margin).
THAT’S MORE WARNING THAN HE GAVE HIS CINEMATOGRAPHER: Alec Baldwin Threatens Twitter User: ‘I’ll Find You.’
TOP SELLER: Alpha Grillers Instant Read Meat Thermometer for Grill and Cooking.#CommissionEarned
FALLOUT: Russia’s oil is in long-term decline – and the war has only added to the problem.
In the longer term, however, assuming the western boycott is maintained and even tightened, the loss will become more notable. Even before the war, the Russian government’s own forecasts expected its oil and gas production to be undermined both by depleting reserves and the effects of the technological and economic sanctions imposed by the west after the 2014 Crimea invasion. Even its most optimistic scenario predicted a short-term modest increase in oil production and then plateauing from 2024 to 2035. In the more conservative scenario, oil production was expected to decline.
Since the war began, many western oil companies, which typically bring capital and technology, have exited Russia. In a country with complex reservoirs, ageing fields and a hostile climate, the lack of investment and access to technology will accelerate the long-term decline.
The global market will ultimately accommodate such an outcome, as other supplies become available and demand responds to prices, but Russia will have to live with a shrinking market share and diminished influence on global oil markets.
At a time when Russia needs more foreign investment and friendly trade partners than ever, Putin decided to wage war instead.
ME IN NEWSWEEK: How to assassin-proof the Supreme Court.
I CAN’T KEEP UP WITH ALL OF BIDEN’S LGBT EXECUTIVE ORDERS: But this blog post might help me.
RANDY BARNETT: The meaning of the Declaration of Independence.