WHAT DISHONEST POLITICAL CYNICISM LOOKS LIKE: Biden Denounces MAGA Threat While Democrats Spend Millions Helping Them Win.
Archive for 2022
September 6, 2022
LAW & LIBERTY: Montesquieu’s Warning About Our Childlessness.
Related: The Parent Trap.
DON SURBER: A raid to get 1,693 newspapers? “Why on Earth did U.S. Magistrate Bruce Reinhart issue a warrant to raid Mar-a-Lago? The stuff the FBI collected was not nuclear codes. It was a bunch of old magazines and newspapers. He and the FBI had no business confiscating them. A detailed list of what the FBI claims it took shows Reinhart’s was a general warrant, which the 4th Amendment bans. I suppose this is FBI standard operating procedure because although they are sworn to defend the Constitution, the agents never seem to bother following it. The full list of items taken is here. Overwhelmingly, what the FBI took were newspapers and magazines, either in full or just articles clipped from them. President Trump obviously needed the 1,693 articles, newspapers and magazines to help his ghostwriter write his presidential memoirs.”
September 5, 2022
Related: Majority see FBI as Biden’s ‘personal Gestapo’ after Trump raid.
Remember, Biden’s own press secretary says that if you disagree with the majority, you’re an extremist!
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: A US Freight Rail Crisis Threatens More Supply Chain Chaos: Federal regulators and the White House have been scrambling to prevent poor service and a possible strike from jamming up a vital but often overlooked network.
Well, if “federal regulators and the White House” have been working on it, what can go wrong?
UPDATE: From the comments: “This proves they can’t be fascists! The trains aren’t running on time! They’re not even running!”
OPEN THREAD: Ring out the long weekend.
OLD AND BUSTED: “Defund the Police.”
The New Hotness?
It was a pretty quick transition to “Defund the Fire Department” https://t.co/13e1bwn42W
— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) September 6, 2022
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China begins launch campaign for final space station module.
CIVIL RIGHTS VIOLATION: Hochul to NY police: Presume gun carriers guilty until proven innocent.
Now I could see doing that with politicians, especially in the Empire State. . . .
SO, SECOND LOOK AT PUTIN? Russia bans Sean Penn, Ben Stiller, more US senators from entering country.
CHINA’S ECONOMY IS HEADED FOR ONE OF THE LARGEST MELTDOWNS EVER:
In the past, when the economy look fatigued, China’s business community could count on the central government to create growth with massive stimulus programs. That is, after all, how former Premier Wen Jiabao avoided contraction in China as the rest of the world suffered during the 2008 downturn.
Wen went big. In the half decade beginning in 2009, Beijing added an amount of credit equal to that in the entire U.S. banking system. The premier flooded an economy that at the end of 2008 was not even a third the size of America’s.
Wen went too big. Anne Stevenson-Yang of J Capital Research tells me that the Chinese have long compared their country to a train whose last car is on fire. The train has to go fast to make sure the flames blow backwards. As soon as the train slows, flames engulf the passenger cars.
“That is China and debt,” Stevenson-Yang, also author of China Alone: The Emergence from and Potential Return to Isolation, says. “If you add enough money to the system, you can keep refinancing the old debt, but you have to add money exponentially.”
The country has been exponentially incurring indebtedness, perhaps creating debt about seven times faster than it has been producing nominal gross domestic product.
Nobody knows how much debt China has accumulated, but total country indebtedness could be an amount equal to 350% of GDP. Because of the infamous “hidden debt” and Beijing’s misreporting—exaggeration—of economic output, the percentage could even be higher.
However much debt there is, senior Chinese leaders are facing problems they cannot solve, something evident from, among other things, defaults by large property developers, the so-called “mortgage boycotts” of homeowners refusing to pay loans, and bank runs.
The Communist Party knows—and has known for a long time—the game could not go on forever. Wen Jiabao himself in 2007 talked about what has become known as the economy’s “Four Uns.” Growth then, he said, was “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and unsustainable.”
What happens now?
Flashbacks:
● November 13, 2019: How to Conduct Business with Chinese Companies That See a Dark Future.
● July 6th, 2022: Business Exit from China Accelerating. “The exit from China makes sense for many businesses and will probably have positive geopolitical consequences as the U.S. becomes less dependent on production in a communist regime. But the fundamental transportation problems the U.S. faces will remain the same, and some might even get worse.”
IT’S STILL THE ECONOMY, STUPID: Why Republicans Shouldn’t Take the Bait and Make the Midterms a Referendum on Trump.
HOW THE MOVIE STARTS: ‘Vampire’ in Poland Found Buried With a Sickle to Prevent The Rise of The Dead.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: After Using FBI To Suppress Son’s Crimes And Raid Political Rival’s Home, Biden Warns Democracy In Danger.
FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOMS: In 2021, a deadly volcano erupted with no warning. Here’s why. “Nyiragongo’s last two eruptions, in 1977 and 2002, were both presaged by days of distinct seismic rumblings strong enough to be felt by people living nearby. But before the eruption on May 22, 2021, even the sensitive monitoring stations near the volcano seemed to detect no clear warning signs of magma on the move underground.”
AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: Amazon Prime Video blocks new Rings of Power reviews for 72 hours to prevent “trolls” from commenting as fans cry foul about the series.
(Updated and bumped.)
EUGENE VOLOKH: My Skepticism About Fears of a Constitutional Convention. “If a constitutional convention is called and proposes amendments, they still have to be ratified by legislatures or conventions (the convention gets to decide which) in 3/4 of all states. . . . Maybe I’m wrong, but I expect that this will be a pretty serious bar to any particularly radical proposals. If you disagree, tell me this: What amendments do you think a convention could propose that would get the support of legislatures or conventions in at least 38 of the 50 states, and how conservative (or liberal) do you think those amendments would be?”
Well, Russ Feingold seems pretty worried that they’d be conservative.
Plus: “By the way, the New York Times article does mention the 38-state ratification requirement—in the 24th out of 28 paragraphs.” Well, the New York Times.
DON SURBER: A raid to get 1,693 newspapers?
Why on Earth did U.S. Magistrate Bruce Reinhart issue a warrant to raid Mar-a-Lago?
The stuff the FBI collected was not nuclear codes. It was a bunch of old magazines and newspapers. He and the FBI had no business confiscating them.
A detailed list of what the FBI claims it took shows Reinhart’s was a general warrant, which the 4th Amendment bans. I suppose this is FBI standard operating procedure because although they are sworn to defend the Constitution, the agents never seem to bother following it.
The full list of items taken is here.
Overwhelmingly, what the FBI took were newspapers and magazines, either in full or just articles clipped from them.
President Trump obviously needed the 1,693 articles, newspapers and magazines to help his ghostwriter write his presidential memoirs.
Why did the FBI take them? What evidence does an old newspaper provide? That the media lied (or as we should call it now, FBI-ed)?
Related: Federal judge hands Trump win, orders special master to review evidence seized from Mar-a-Lago.
I’M GLAD HE FAILED: “Gorbachev Failed. That’s Why He Was Showered with Honors.”
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned
WHO CARES? How Sustainable are Fake Meats?