MY FAVORITE BRAND: Tempur-Pedic TEMPUR-Cloud Pillow for Sleeping. #CommissionEarned
Archive for 2022
October 14, 2022
OH: Republican US Senate candidate’s name not on ballots distributed in Illinois county. “Some early voters have already cast their ballots in Schuyler County, Illinois, despite Republican U.S. Senate candidate Kathy Salvi’s name not being listed as a choice. Instead of Salvi’s name, the name of her defeated primary opponent Peggy Hubbard is listed on the ballot as an option. Salvi won the seven-way Republican primary on June 28 by a significant margin.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Thanksgiving Is Being Canceled by Many Due to Bidenflation.
QUESTIONS IN JOE BIDEN’S AMERICA: Are You Prepping For Food Insecurity?
LUCKILY, IT’S PRETTY TASTY SO IT’S NO BIG SACRIFICE: Mediterranean diet may not reduce risk of dementia, study suggests.
DISPATCHES FROM THE PARTY OF TOLERANCE FOR DIVERSITY: Watch: The folks over at MSNBC really have no idea how they’re going to live on this earth with Republicans.
JIM TREACHER: Biden: Don’t Let Republicans Ruin This Great Economy.
The Dems have got it down to a science: Lie about every single thing under the sun, make the lies as big as possible, and just keep repeating those lies until everybody gets tired of pointing out that they’re lies. It’s an endurance test. Exhaust reality. Make the truth a chore.
The people who write down the words this old fossil repeats into a microphone certainly haven’t forgotten:
Read the whole thing.
THE ENEMIES OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION ARE IGNORANT BRATS WITH DADDY ISSUES: Eco-Vandals Defaced a Van Gogh for the Stupidest Reason Ever and the Reactions Are Priceless.
WAIT, JOE SAID COVID IS OVER: Biden administration extends COVID public health emergency.
But I suppose Joe says a lot of things.
UPDATE: A friend comments: “I assume that’s to facilitate election fraud. Extending the public health emergency.”
COLORADO: Conservative American Birthright civics program rejected by Colorado State Board of Ed.
American Birthright is a project of the Civics Alliance, a coalition whose mission statement says it formed to oppose a “new civics” more centered on global citizenship and activism than on understanding American ideals and responsibilities.
“American Birthright teaches about the expansion of American liberty to include all Americans, the contributions that Americans from every walk of life have made to our shared history of liberty, and America’s championship of liberty throughout the world,” the website says. “Students will learn of heroes of liberty such as Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Ronald Reagan.”
Colorado’s social studies standards got a D rating from the Fordham Institute, a conservative think tank. Scheffel, who is dean of the school of education at Colorado Christian University, said American Birthright draws heavily from Massachusetts and Florida social studies standards that get much higher marks.
While Fordham has not rated American Birthright, Scheffel said she encounters many college students who lack basic information about American governance, and she believes the program offers more rigorous content and is more comprehensive than current state standards.
The left doesn’t even pretend at patriotism anymore, and hasn’t for years.
THE TRUNALIMUNUMAPRZURE BROTHERS: Biden to campaign for John Fetterman in Pennsylvania next week.
I AGREE WITH BRIAN LEITER THAT THIS IS A VICTORY FOR JUDGE HO: Yale Law Dean Trumpets Free Speech Stance Amid Federal Judges’ Clerk Boycott.
And there’s more going on. Harvard is actively poaching conservative applicants to Yale, promising them that administrators at Harvard, unlike Yale, won’t sabotage job opportunities or drum up mobs of woke students to chase them out of town. This appeals to many. The real game here is knocking Yale out of its #1 slot in the U.S. News rankings, which it’s held forever. Being the dean who let that happen would permanently tarnish Dean Heather Gerken’s career, regardless of what else she does, and she knows that. Harvard, of course, would like to be #1 almost as much as they’d like to see Yale knocked down a peg or two.
Harvard hurts Yale two ways — losing top students might hurt Yale’s entering-class stats enough to knock it down (the margins between places in the rankings are pretty thin, making Yale’s continued reign at the top all the more impressive). But the reputation ranking is huge too. And one of the groups that votes on this is academics, and another is federal judges. If Yale gets in a pissing match with federal judges, and they seem like they might be taking the bait, the risk of being downrated enough to matter is non-trivial.
Gerken has just been awful throughout this whole thing, and I’m disappointed because she started off looking quite sensible. Former deans like Guido Calabresi, Tony Kronman, or even Harold Koh wouldn’t have gotten into this mess. But YLS really hasn’t been the same since they brought in Bob Post, and Gerken is unfortunately more in his mold.
“DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS” IS A GOAL, NOT A WARNING: Today’s Democracy Dies in Darkness edition: All Trump, no inflation.
Related: Mythmaking about Khashoggi has been a disaster for Biden. “Why are we in this mess? Because Biden, whose administration and party are rife with Brotherhood sympathizers, has made Khashoggi’s murder the focal point of the U.S.–Saudi relationship. Khashoggi was undoubtedly executed with MBS’s approval, and probably at his direction, as U.S. spy agencies believe.”
UPDATE: How to Lose Friends and Influence Over People: A decade of Obama-Biden foreign policy has broken the Middle East and America’s security order.
READER FAVORITE: Weather Radio Raynic 5000 Solar Hand Crank Emergency radio. #CommissionEarned
ABOUT THAT PARKLAND SHOOTER SENTENCE: If a criminal like Nikolas Cruz, who killed 14 at Parkland High School in 2018, doesn’t get the death penalty, nobody will and that’s a disaster for civilization, according to today’s edition of The Briefing with Al Mohler.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Intersectionality Breakdown: Liberals shocked to learn Muslims in Dearborn, MI don’t want LGBTQ content pushed in schools. “You see, for the left, it’s fine to call a bunch of mostly white and suburban parents racists and terrorists, but when Muslim parents start showing up and protesting the same issues, things get… difficult.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: We’re Heading for a Stagflationary Crisis Unlike Anything We’ve Ever Seen.
First question: Will the rise in inflation in most advanced economies be temporary or more persistent? This debate has raged for the past year, but now it is largely settled: “Team Persistent” won, and “Team Transitory”—which included most central banks and fiscal authorities—has now admitted to having been mistaken.
The second question is whether the increase in inflation was driven more by bad policies (i.e., excessive aggregate demand because of excessively loose monetary, credit, and fiscal policies), or by bad luck (stagflationary negative aggregate supply shocks including the initial COVID-19 lockdowns, supply-chain bottlenecks, a reduced U.S. labor supply, the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on commodity prices, and China’s zero-COVID policy). While both demand and supply factors were in the mix, it is now widely recognized that supply factors have played an increasingly decisive role. This matters because supply-driven inflation is stagflationary and thus increases the risk of a hard landing (increased unemployment and potentially a recession) when monetary policy is tightened.
That leads directly to the third question: Will monetary-policy tightening by the U.S. Federal Reserve and other major central banks bring a hard landing (recession) or a soft landing (growth slowdown without a recession)? Until recently, most central banks and most of Wall Street were in “Team Soft Landing.” But the consensus has rapidly shifted, with even Fed Chair Jerome Powell recognizing that a recession is possible and that a soft landing will be “very challenging.”
We’ve spent nearly three years flooding the economy with funny money, while engaging in lockdowns and productivity- and innovation-crushing re-regulation — particularly in the vital energy and transportation sectors.
If that isn’t a recipe for stagflation, I don’t know what is.
DURHAM TRIAL: ‘Salacious and Unverified’ Trump-Russia Dossier Story Too Juicy for FBI to Check.
An FBI intelligence analyst testifying in the special counsel probe by John Durham says he never really checked the fake story about the so-called “Steele dossier” in the Trump Russia collusion hoax — including the infamous and non-existent “pee tape” — and assumed FBI sources were telling the truth. This, even though the FBI offered a $1 million payday to verify it (it went uncollected), proving the FBI knew it was “salacious and unverified” in the words of former FBI chief James Comey. But knowing that, the FBI used the dossier against Donald Trump anyway and lied to the nation’s top spy court to get a warrant to spy on his campaign.
Why would they investigate? The FBI is in the business of establishing partisan narratives, not looking into crimes.
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: University of Illinois paid Ibram Kendi $35,000 for 60-minute Q&A.
JAMES LILEKS ON PAYPAL’S SELF-IMMOLATION:
I’m going to unwind from PayPal, because – well, you know. This will not affect any ongoing subscriptions for many months, but Jeebus Crow, this terms-of-service nonsense is ridiculous. I have my ideas about how it happened, though.
They’re not sitting around thinking “how do we shut down the voices of everyone who stands in our way?”
I don’t think they’re not that self-aware.
It’s more like “we are the smart and correct people whose beliefs are good and true and settled, and there are no good-faith rebuttals. Disagreement can only come from a bad place. No reasonable or good person can defend hate.”
Hmm. Hate.
Okay, well, I think you may have gleaned over the years that I hate fatuous anti-human abstract architecture that destroys the historical fabric of settled, established communities.
Does that count? Why not? It’s hate. It’s grounded in a series of defensible aesthetic opinions, but it could be defined in the end as hate.
No, of course not, that’s not what we’re talking about!
Okay, well, I hate Putin. Does that count?
No, that’s good hate, and good hate isn’t hate hate. Besides, if we banned good hate we’d have to ban all sorts of people with strong opinions about things that don’t matter.
Why not? If hate is the defining term, do they not understand how this could be applied in the broadest possible fashion? I you fail to apply it in the broadest possible fashion, then you might seem, oh, what’s the word, selective?
Read the whole thing.