Archive for 2022
June 13, 2022
STILL CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE (TWO) YEARS: The State Department Still “Hearts” BLM.
OPEN THREAD: Because I’m me.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Joe Biden Gets Smashed by Resurrected Clip, Karine-Jean Pierre Flails in Response.
Like with gas prices, Biden doesn’t get to talk about how great he is when the stock market is up and then disown his responsibility when things crash, and to be sure, what we are witnessing is a crash the likes of which we haven’t seen since the Great Recession. Retirements are being destroyed while those who invested in the market more short-term have lost their shirts.
(related Tucker Carlson Is All of Us in Latest Takedown of Biden’s America)
But unlike in past times of economic turbulence, there is nowhere to hide. The combination of rising interest rates, sky-high inflation, and cratering investments means whether you put your money in stocks, real estate, or the bank, you are losing money right now. At least during the Great Recession, inflation stopped short of four percent, meaning those who saved, invested low, and played it smart were rewarded down the line. Currently, everything is on fire, and there’s no escape from Biden’s economy. Worse, there’s no hope in sight of a turnaround.
When asked about the chaos on Monday, Biden’s press secretary, Karine-Jean Pierre, flailed wildly, essentially suggesting that the economy is so amazing that people can handle a little hardship.
More flailing by Pierre here: ‘Um… I don’t have them in front of me’: Karine Jean-Pierre is flummoxed by reporter asking what is the update with Biden’s response to the baby formula shortage and ‘doesn’t have anything new’ to share.
Why would she feel glum when Biden, a retread of her dad’s administration, is simply carrying out dad’s plans for energy prices?
Earlier: Why Aren’t Democrats Dancing for Joy About Sky-High Gas Prices?
In the service of reducing carbon emissions, Democrats have long openly worked to raise the price of fossil fuel energy. They have done so by proposing carbon taxes, cap-and-trade schemes, higher leasing fees, and other measures to jack up costs so people burn less of it. This is why Barack Obama said, in answer to a related question about electricity, that his energy plan would make prices “necessarily skyrocket.” This is why Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna praised BP’s CEO less than six months ago for pledging to reduce oil and gas production by 40% by 2030. Reductions in oil production and rising gasoline prices are part of the Democrats’ agenda and the Paris climate agenda.
There’s even more to it than that. Over the past decade, the Democrats’ overt hostility toward fossil fuels has even driven companies in the industry to sideline production, purely for public relations purposes, while prioritizing meaningless, politically correct carbon emissions goals. How can Democrats suddenly feign outrage at their incredible success in influencing the industry?
Is it a mystery why Democrats aren’t doing a sack dance and celebrating the salvation of planet earth?
There’s the small matter of their political survival, of course. It would be unseemly — like doing a jig at an Irish funeral — to celebrate other people’s pain. And it would cost many Democrats who are secretly jubilant about high gas prices their political careers.
Instead, Democrats are pretending to look for a way to “ease consumers’ pain.”
In September of 2019, after CNN’s seven hour “climate change town hall,” Bryan Preston wrote, “Seriously, if you see all of the above — which is just a sample — and vote for any of these people for any office at any level, it’s on you. If you like Venezuela, voting for any of them will bring you a whole lot of Venezuela.”
And as Kate of Small Dead Animals wrote after the CNN horror show, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking they don’t mean it.”
● Aren’t California’s High Gas Prices What The Left Have Wanted?
● NBC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times in lockstep call for higher gas taxes.
● 2008 L.A. Times headline: “The joy of $8 gas.”
Exit quote: “Under my plan, energy costs will necessarily skyrocket…”
In other words, Obama administration retreads are following the same playbook as the original Obama administration: “We’re going to keep at it to ensure the American people are paying their fair share for gas,” is the perfect Kinsley Gaffe for an Obama administration retread like Biden: As Steven Chu, Obama’s then-incoming energy secretary, told the Wall Street Journal in the fall of 2008: “Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
So is it fair to ask if Biden is on the payroll of Putin? As Walter Russell Mead wrote in 2017:
If Trump were the Manchurian candidate that people keep wanting to believe that he is, here are some of the things he’d be doing:
Limiting fracking as much as he possibly could
Blocking oil and gas pipelines
Opening negotiations for major nuclear arms reductions
Cutting U.S. military spending
Trying to tamp down tensions with Russia’s ally Iran.
“Yep,” Glenn added in late 2019. “You know who did do these things? Obama. You know who supports these things now? Democrats.”
● Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
Related: Biden tormented by Republican guerrilla campaign and ‘I did it’ stickers.
Also: 100Pcs I Did That Biden Funny Car Stickers. #Resist #CommissionEarned
PERHAPS IT CAN BE MERGED WITH ANOTHER SPACE PROBE TO SAVE THEM BOTH: With Voyager 1 data mystery, NASA relies on slow, long-distance conversation. “Zurbuchen is confident that the Voyager team will solve the mystery, but noted that the spacecraft cannot continue forever. In addition to the current communications issue, Voyager 1 is also running at much colder temperatures than it was designed to because of the decay of the spacecraft’s nuclear power source.”
WE’VE DESCENDED INTO SOME SORT OF BIZARRE HELL-WORLD IN WHICH PIERS MORGAN IS A VOICE OF SANITY: Piers Morgan Tells Amber Heard ‘It’s Time To Stop Playing The Victim’ After Actress Calls Internet Reaction To Verdict ‘Unfair.’
ROGER KIMBALL: Show Trials—Then and Now.
H. L. Mencken once observed that no one “ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”
That’s a nicely phrased comment.—
But I suspect we are on the verge of seeing it disproved.
Those “great masses” understand what the House Committee is up to.
Moreover, the public well remembers the multiple scenes of carnage from across the country from about the same time in response (ostensibly) to the black man who died while resisting arrest in Minneapolis.
The mob breached the White House security perimeter.
They torched police cars and police stations while pathetic reporters stood in front of the conflagrations and informed the public that what they were watching were “mostly peaceful” protests.
They maimed police officers and caused some $2 billion in damage.
The January 6 protest lasted a few hours.
The only shot was fired, without warning, by Capitol Hill Police officer Michael Byrd.
The bullet was fired at point-blank range at Ashli Babbitt, an unarmed veteran who was trying to calm protesters adjacent to her.
It struck her in the neck and killed her. Byrd was exonerated.
Then there was Roseanne Boyland, also unarmed, who was gassed and beaten while unconscious by the police.
She died, too.
Most of the people who entered the Capitol that day, many of whom were ushered in by smiling Capitol police officers, just wandered around gawking.
So outside the beltway, the public is pretty uninterested in this story, especially when inflation is the worst it’s been in 40 years, consumer confidence is at an 83-year low, energy prices are skyrocketing, as are interest rates, food, and housing, and the stock market, which means most people’s retirement accounts, is imploding.
And leftist violence continues: Have you heard about the 41 pro-life organizations and churches that have been vandalized in the last 40 days?
What is a woman?” This simple question—to which the dictionary definition, still clinging on for dear life, is “adult female human”—has recently been stumping Western politicians. During her recent confirmation hearing for the US Supreme Court, Ketanji Brown Jackson struggled to give a definition, demurring that she isn’t, in fact, a biologist. Britain’s Conservative chancellor, Rishi Sunak, likewise struggled painfully to answer it in a recent interview. Everybody in the world knows, however, that you don’t need to be a biologist to define what a woman—or, indeed, a man—is. Everybody, that is, apart from the gender ideologues who today occupy the commanding heights of media, business, academe, and philanthropy. Many of them are interviewed in Matt Walsh’s compelling new documentary, What Is A Woman?
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Western societies have taken a wrong turn on transgenderism, and all of us should resolve to reverse course. We all want to do our best by each other, by our children. When people are unhappy, we shouldn’t rush to medicate and operate on them to “affirm” what they say they want. Sometimes institutions, such as medicine and education, and the people who comprise them, go wrong. Those who work in these places need to speak up when they know something isn’t right. Parents’ eagerness to change their children’s sex should be a red flag; doctors keen to be at the “cutting edge” of new technologies of the body are to be questioned, not worshipped. We may disagree on all kinds of issues, but here reality is howling out: You can’t change sex, and the damage being done in pretending otherwise is utterly, damningly horrific.
Read the whole thing.
I’VE HAD GOOD LUCK WITH CREATINE: Feeding ‘Supplements’ to Corals Could One Day Help to Regrow The Great Barrier Reef.
VIA A FRIEND:
DOW TUMBLES 876 POINTS AND STOCKS ENTER BEAR MARKET ON WORRIES OF DRASTIC RATE HIKES:
US stocks have plunged into a bear market as Wall Street investors grew increasingly nervous about the prospect of even harsher medicine from the Fed to take the sting out of inflation.
The Dow (INDU) sank 876 points or 2.8%. The Nasdaq was down by 4.7% and has tumbled more than 10% in the past two trading sessions.
The broader S&P 500 fell 3.9%. That index is now more than 20% below its all-time high set in January, putting stocks in a bear-market.
Recession fears mounted after Friday’s miserable Consumer Price Index report showed US inflation was significantly higher than economists had expected last month. That could make the Federal Reserve’s inflation-control efforts more difficult.
After raising rates by a half point in May — an action the Fed hadn’t taken since 2000 — Chair Jerome Powell pledged more of the same until the central bank was satisfied that inflation was under control. At that point, the Fed would resume standard quarter-point hikes, he said.
But after May’s hotter-than-expected inflation report, Wall Street is increasingly calling for tougher action from the Fed to keep prices under control. Jefferies joined Barclays on Monday in predicting that the Federal Reserve would hike rates by three-quarters of a percentage point, an action the Fed hasn’t taken since 1994.
And the hits just keep on coming! Are housing and jobs markets bubbles about to pop?
If so, we can thank the cheap money that usually create asset bubbles — and point again to a Federal Reserve dissenter as a prophet. Fortune warned this morning that housing prices in as many as 40 markets could sharply drop over the next year as stagflation necessarily turns into recession. It won’t create as much damage as the housing-bubble pop did in the 2008 financial crisis, but it will leave the most recent home purchasers without a seat when the music stops:
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This might not matter in terms of bubble-popping if flipping and speculative purchases haven’t comprised a good portion of this bubble. If these prices have gone up on the power of actual homesteading, then a drift downward in valuation shouldn’t have too much of an impact on financial institutions. Homeowners can still pay their mortgages, at least as long as they maintain their current income levels in a recession. An “overvalued” market isn’t a catastrophe in itself, except for those who want to sell their home and have lost their positive equity in it.
However, the continuing rapid inflation pace will force the Federal Reserve to step up its monetary tightening by raising its interest rate. They’re already planning a series of 0.5-point increases this year, and last Friday’s 8.6%/1.0% consumer price index (CPI) result will likely spur even more intervention. If tomorrow’s producer price index (PPI) remains in double digits, you can probably bank on an even more aggressive approach to the Fed’s interest rate and money tightening. That will tighten the leash on business investment, and that will have an enormous impact on a jobs market that’s already looking a little shaky, according to Goldman Sachs:
Flashback: Milton Friedman’s Revenge:
Milton Friedman, whose empiricism led him to embrace free market public policy, was the most influential economist of the second half of the 20th century. But Biden has a weird habit of treating Friedman as a devilish spirit who must be exorcised from the nation’s capital. For Biden, Friedman represents deregulation, low taxes, and the idea that a corporation’s primary responsibility is not to a group of politicized “stakeholders” but to its shareholders. “Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” Biden told Politico last year. “When did Milton Friedman die and become king?” Biden asked in 2019. The truth is that Friedman, who died in 2006, has held little sway over either Democrats or Republicans for almost two decades. But Biden wants to mark the definitive end of Friedman and the “neoliberal” economics he espoused by unleashing a tsunami of dollars into the global economy and inundating Americans with new entitlements.
The irony is that Biden’s rejection of Friedman’s teachings on money, taxes, and spending may bring about the same circumstances that established Friedman’s preeminence. In a year or two, the American economy and Biden’s political fortunes may look considerably different than when Janet Yellen blurted out the obvious about inflation. Voters won’t like the combination of rising prices and declining assets. Biden’s experts might rediscover that it is difficult to control or stop inflation once it begins. And Milton Friedman will have his revenge.
Exit question: Is Team Biden purposefully grinding down the middle class?
WELL, YOU KNOW, SATANISM IS A RELIGION TOO: For some adults who love Disney, it’s like a religion.
RIP: Philip Baker Hall, Magnolia Star, Dies at 90.
Prolific character actor Philip Baker Hall, star of films like Say Anything… and Magnolia, has died at age 90. Truly a defining performer of his generation, Hall starred in a number of well-known projects over the years, with his roles, no matter the amount of screen time, always leaving an impact on audiences. Hall’s on-screen credits span decades, earning appearances in other notable projects like Secret Honor, Hard Eight, The Truman Show, Argo, and Zodiac. Los Angeles Times journalist Sam Farmer confirmed the news on Twitter, sharing a brief tribute to Hall, noting that the actor passed away peacefully.
“My neighbor, friend, and one of the wisest, most talented and kindest people I’ve ever met, Philip Baker Hall, died peacefully last night,” Farmer shared on Twitter. “He was surrounded by loved ones. The world has an empty space in it.”
Hall also did a brilliant Jack Webb impersonation as the library cop on Seinfeld:
Earlier: Trapped in a Corner: Robert Altman, Richard Nixon and Secret Honor.
Finally unburdening himself of the truth, Hall’s Nixon is confronted with a vision of his Quaker mother again, like Hamlet and his father’s ghost. This time she beckons him with instructions; he makes his way to his desk, points to the revolver and then picks it up, the muzzle touching his temple. At the last minute, though, he tosses the gun down, saying that they won’t make him do it, even though that was the plan.
“F–K ‘EM!!” he shouts, pumping his fist in the air, the moment captured on all four CCTV screens, turning into a loop while in the background a chant of “Four more years!” is brought up in the mix until the screen glitches and goes black. For a few moments, you really need to process just what kind of craziness the film has just laid out for us.
It’s a hell of an ending, and I remember being breathless as I watched it as a college student, at a screening at the Toronto film festival. There have been a lot of Nixons on film – Anthony Hopkins’ underplayed take in Oliver Stone’s Nixon, Dan Hedaya’s twitchy cartoon in Dick, Frank Langella’s sinister Nixon in Frost/Nixon – but Hall’s Nixon, desperate, contrite, spouting a nearly Tourettes-like stream of obscenities, remains my favorite.
It should have been a career-making performance for Philip Baker Hall, and ultimately it was – but only after word of mouth slowly built in the years following the film’s subdued release into film festivals and art houses. Paul Thomas Anderson, a young director and Altman acolyte who says Secret Honor is one of his favorite movies of all time, cast Hall in many of his films, beginning with Hard Eight, Boogie Nights and Magnolia.
Robert Altman would ultimately make his triumphant return to Hollywood, beginning with Vincent & Theo in 1990. But it would be The Player in 1992 that made him, well, a player; there’s nothing Hollywood loves more than a movie that portrays it as a moral charnel house, especially when it’s a hit. He was a hot property for the critics again, making a big-budget film featuring major stars – Short Cuts, Pret-a-Porter, Kansas City, Dr. T & the Women, Gosford Park – nearly every year until his death in 2006.
Pour yourself a Nixonian-sized glass of Chivas Regal and read the whole thing.
FLASHBACK: The Once-Common Practice of Communal Sleeping.
For most of human history, s-e-x was not spelled b-e-d, and “sleeping together” wasn’t a synonym for banging.