A VERY GENEROUS ASSESSMENT, EVEN USING THE BIDEN CURVE: Zogby: Biden’s week a ‘C-’ over missteps overseas, poor polls, COVID-19.
Archive for 2022
July 25, 2022
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Turns out taxpayers are funding recruiting advertisements for the Minnesota National Guard in … an LGBT magazine.
CARJACKING IS NOW A TEEN SPORT: Hans Bader looks at the undeniable surge in carjackings and associated murders that now plague the nation. Among much else in the data, he finds this illuminating tidbit:
“Maryland and Virginia are alike in many ways. But Maryland has shorter sentences for criminals than Virginia. It also has a violent crime rate more than double Virginia’s. In 2018, Maryland had a violent crime rate of 468.7 per 100,000 people, according to USA Today, compared to a violent crime rate of only 200 per 100,000 in Virginia.
“Virginia’s Fairfax County is quite similar to Maryland’s Montgomery County, Md. The two counties border each other, have similar economies, cultures, and demographics, and had a similar crime rate back in the 1970s. Yet by 2018, Fairfax County ended up with a a violent crime rate less than half Montgomery County’s in the early 21st Century. Experts attributed that to Virginia’s tougher sentences and its abolishing parole for violent felons in the 1990s.”
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Did Our Health Experts Lie About COVID Vaccines?
ICYMI: SAD:
STANDING UP AGAINST BIGOTRY AND CENSORSHIP: Amy Wax Raises Over $125,000 To Defend Against ‘Major Sanction’ By Penn; Academic Freedom Alliance Calls For ‘Complete Exoneration.’
MICHAEL WALSH: “By Any Means Necessary.”
BIDENFLATION: There Are Signs Inflation May Have Peaked, but Can It Come Down Fast Enough?
Ed Hyman, chairman of Evercore ISI, pointed to many indicators that 9.1% might have been the top. Gasoline prices have fallen around 10% from their mid-June high point of $5.02 a gallon, according to AAA. Wheat futures prices have fallen by 37% since mid-May and corn futures prices are down 27% from mid-June. The cost of shipping goods from East Asia to the U.S. West Coast is 11.4% lower than a month ago, according to Xeneta, a Norway-based transportation-data and procurement firm.
Easing price pressures and improvements in backlogs and supplier delivery times in business surveys suggest that supply-chain snarls are unraveling. Mr. Hyman noted that money-supply growth has slowed sharply, evidence that monetary tightening is starting to bite.
We still have drought, fertilizer shortages, reduced domestic energy production, and a lot of unspent stimulus money filling state coffers — all inflationary.
But on the money supply side, Democrats seem to have (mostly) run out of steam conjuring up funny money by the trillions. And on the demand side, tapped out consumers and rising interest rates are both putting a damper on demand.
So inflation will abate at some point, but it will still be at least another two years before wages catch up to where they were two years ago.
FLASHBACK: Oikophobia on the rise after Trump win.
Related: Vicious Stereotypes in Polite Society.
A lot of it’s based on status anxiety. The reason that so many of our gentry class suffer from “impostor syndrome” is that they are, in fact, impostors, pretending to skills and wisdom and virtues that they do not, in fact, possess.
STEVEN HAYWARD: Piercing the Electric Car Fantasy. “With electricity rates rising fastest in those places that have overemphasized “renewable” energy such as California or Germany, it’s not clear that consumers will save much by driving a more expensive electric car and paying higher utility rates. And that’s if you can still fill it up with electrons whenever you want to. During recent power crunches, which are threatening to become endemic in the U.S. under the current policies of the Biden apparatchiks, grid operators have asked EV owners not to charge their vehicles in the evening, when power demand is highest and the time of day when most working people will want to charge their cars.”
Well, working people. The country isn’t being run for their benefit these days, you know.
TO BE FAIR, THEY BECOME APOPLECTIC WHENEVER THEY DON’T GET THEIR WAY: Democrat Senators OUTRAGED They Can’t Block Legal Firearm Exports.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Jill Biden heckled in Connecticut: ‘Your husband’s the worst president we’ve ever had.’ Sadly, it’s true.
“A man was clearly angered over gas prices and wanted Jill Biden to know. Jill Biden was in Connecticut as part of a three-state trip focused on summer learning. The heckling incident happened as Biden and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona exited an SUV and entered a building in New Haven. . . . ‘Your husband is the worst president we ever had. You owe us gas money,’ an unnamed man yelled at her during the exchange.'”
Plus: “The dirty little secret is that the Biden administration is happy with high gas prices. They want American drivers to feel the pain at the pump as they fill up their gas tanks, thinking it will speed up purchases of electric vehicles. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg admitted as much recently.”
Related: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
Anyone who doubts that those in charge of the operation of Providence have a sly sense of humor needs only to ponder the sweet declarations emitted by our more pampered celebrities and Democratic politicians on the subject of socialism. Consider, for example, the actor Jim Carrey, who back in 2018 told Bill Maher that “we have to say yes to socialism—to the word and everything. We have to stop apologizing.”
What a card! Were socialism to be instituted in the United States, one of the first things that would happen is that people like Jim Carrey—estimated net worth, $180 million—would be instantly pauperized. For what are the two fundamental pillars of socialism? 1) The abolition of private property and 2) the equalization of wealth. And the cherry on top of this fudge sundae is that Jim Carrey actually starred in a movie called “Dumb and Dumber,” which is about “two unintelligent but well-meaning friends from Providence, Rhode Island.” Talk about art imitating life.
Let’s leave the latest incarnation of really-existing-socialism—the country of Venezuela—to one side. That is a laboratory demonstration of what happens when you take a prosperous country and rigorously impose socialist policies on it. The former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn was partly right when he said that the Venezuela of Hugo Chavez showed that there was “another way” of doing politics and “it’s called socialism.”
Corbyn forgot to add: that way leads to universal immiseration and societal collapse, which is exactly what is happening in the once-rich country of Venezuela now.
The immiseration isn’t quite universal. The folks at the top do very well indeed. Under capitalism, rich people become powerful. But under socialism, powerful people become rich.
ON SUNDAYS I RUN A BOOK PROMO MOSTLY FOR INDIE AUTHORS: Book Promo And Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
And new writers have much fun writing vignettes. Paying it forward, and all that.
SHOCKED, SHOCKED, SHOCKED: Jeffrey Epstein aides reportedly accused of pocketing $13M from estate.
THEY NEED JUST A LITTLE MORE TO DRIVE THAT PARTY COMPLETELY OFF THE CLIFF: Fundraising by AOC’s progressive NY pals sputters ahead of primaries.
GEEZE – THEY’RE GETTING INTEL AND STILL PERFORMING SO BADLY? Top Ukrainian officials accused of spying for Russia.
NO YOU CAN’T HAVE YOUR UNICORN FART ENERGY: 41 Inconvenient Truths on the “New Energy Economy”.
Or why taking advice on policy from an autistic high school drop out might be a bad idea. She never learned the math. What’s your excuse?
REMEMBER AND DO NOT GIVE THEM EVEN A SHRED OF CREDIBILITY: Bret Stephens and Paul Krugman of The NY Times give a double master class in how to admit to being wrong while remaining deeply, deeply wrong.
YOU’RE NOT ALONE. IT’S GLOBAL. PEOPLE HAVE HAD ENOUGH: Tour de France fans take justice into their own hands and tackle militant eco-protesters before dragging them off the road to stop them blocking the race.