SO “SLASH THE TIRES” JULIETTE KAYYEM IS married to U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit Judge David Barron.
Archive for 2022
February 11, 2022
#RESIST: To be honest, though doing nothing would have been a huge improvement.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Psycho Libs Keep Reminding Us Why Public Education Should Be Defunded. “If one adult asked another adult to do something like this it would be looked at as kind of pervy. When it’s middle school homework it’s really disturbing.”
I’D GIVE STUDENTS A CHANCE TO GROW AND CHANGE OVER TIME. DEANS, NOT SO MUCH: Hamburger & Volokh Debate: Are Law School Deans, Faculty, And Students Who Stifle Opposing Views Unfit Ever To Be Judges?
DEAL OF THE DAY: Bluetooth Headset [Upgraded] Active Noise Cancelling Bluetooth Headphones. CommissionEarned
JOANNE JACOBS: Stop scaring kids. “She cites asking 11-year-olds if they’ve drafted a suicide plan, telling children they are oppressors or privileged and teachers announcing their own sexuality to elementary children (‘Mommy, what does ‘pansexual’ mean?’).”
“JUSTICE” DEPARTMENT: Biden DOJ Recommended Reduced Sentence for BLM Arson Killer for Incredible Reason.
According to the prosecutors, Lee broke into a pawn shop during the BLM riots in Minneapolis on May 28, 2020, and set fire to the building, destroying the business. They had a video of him pouring the accelerant and saying, “F**k this place, we’re going to burn this b**ch down!” He was also captured on video raising a fist there, as well as discussing what other places they could “hit” next. The police later found the body of Oscar Stewart in the building; He was killed by the fire. Stewart had five children. Lee pled guilty to one count of arson.
As the prosecutors themselves admit in their sentencing memo, the guidelines would suggest a sentence of 235-240 months (19.5 to 20 years). Lee had prior convictions for burglary, assault, violation of no-contact order, and theft of property, including assaulting a woman and rupturing her eardrum.
But, the Biden DOJ recommended instead that he get a sentence of only 144 months, or 12 years.
Why? The reason is infuriating: “Mr. Lee was terribly misguided, and his actions had tragic, unthinkable consequences. But he appears to have believed that he was, in Dr. King’s eloquent words, engaging in ‘the language of the unheard.’”
Now do January 6.
HMM: The Capitol Police Issue Suspicious Statement Over Spying Scandal. “If U.S. Capitol Police were merely securing the room after finding the door open, why take photographs of constitutionally protected information?”
MILTON FRIEDMAN’S REVENGE: Inflation Haunts the Biden Economy.
So how’s the U.S. government’s grand experiment in modern monetary theory turning out? Not well. Consumer prices over the past 12 months rose 7.5%—the most in 40 years—while real wages declined 1.7%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Thursday.
The report jolted financial markets, as stocks fell and bond yields rose. But nothing in the January report should be shocking. This is what happens when the government massively expands the money supply and over-stimulates demand. Yet the Federal Reserve and Biden Administration last year dismissed inflation as “transitory.” They have belatedly dropped that line, but they still won’t concede that inflation is becoming more entrenched as price increases have exceeded 5% for eight months in a row.
Food prices increased 0.9% in January and 7% over the year. Gas prices ticked down 0.8% last month but are still up a whopping 40% from a year ago. It’s striking that the core index that excludes food and energy rose 0.6% in January—about twice as much as last summer—and is up 6% year-over-year.
The economy needed support early in the pandemic. But Congress’s $900 billion Covid relief bill in December 2020 and the $1.9 trillion in spending that Democrats passed last March were overkill. The enormous income transfers reduced incentives to work while at the same time giving people more money to spend.
Inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. But if you include regulations that stifle growth or discourage people from working, it can become stagflation too. So there’s that.
The NYT article on MMT, written by Jeanna Smialek, is mostly a puff piece about Stephanie Kelton, MMT’s most well-known proponent. In glowing tones, it describes Kelton’s clothes, her office, her house, her neighborhood, her blog, her manner of speaking, her personal story, and so on, calling her “the star architect of a movement that is on something of a victory lap”. Very little is written about the background of the macroeconomic policy debate, and what does appear is highly questionable.
Typical fodder for the group of aging liberal women who don’t know anything about economics, or much else, that appears to be the NYT’s target demographic these days. Plus:
This is important because any attempt to engage with the actual substance of MMT quickly finds that such substance is curiously lacking. MMT proponents almost always refuse to specify exactly how they think the economy works. They offer a package of policy prescriptions, but these prescriptions can only be learned by consulting the MMT proponents themselves. There is no model here — no set of equations or definite formal statements that a layperson could use to generate their own MMT policy prescriptions without appealing directly to the gurus.
Every economist who has attempted to engage seriously with MMT literature has concluded the same.
So it’s a cousin to Critical Race Theory, then?
Plus:
As a coda, though, I should point out that the really scary threat to U.S. macroeconomic policy comes not from MMT — nor, at the moment, from the return of austerity. It’s from the people advocating price controls. Some decided non-fringe economists — James K. Galbraith of UT Austin, Todd Tucker of the Roosevelt Institute, and J.W. Mason & Lauren Melodia of the Roosevelt Institute, to name just four — have advocated adding price controls to our inflation-fighting toolkit, despite the fact that both theory and history offer us little reason to think the tool would be effective. In fact, a shift from a regime of demand management based on monetary and fiscal policy to one based on price controls and direct intervention in industry could spark runaway inflation as it did under Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela. The Biden administration hasn’t gone for price controls yet, but it has attempted to blame inflation on powerful companies, suggesting that Biden’s people might be thinking along these lines.
Wage and price controls also help turn inflation into stagflation or worse, and high prices into shortages.
Also: Yes, the Biden Stimulus Made Inflation Worse.
UPDATE: From the comments: “The function of most left journalism is to tell readers how they are supposed to feel about someone or something. The journalist uses connotative language cues as a code to indicate to the reader what they should feel. Writing about Kelton’s clothes, home, or way of talking is simply a way of cuing the reader on what the approved left attitude is toward her.”
TRUST THE SCIENCE! Doctor Who Helped Discover Omicron Says She Was Pressured Not to Reveal It’s Mild.
The doctor who helped discover the Omicron COVID-19 variant claimed that she was pressured by several government officials not to reveal that it was a milder strain.
Speaking to Germany’s Welt newspaper, Dr. Angelique Coetzee, who is currently the head of the South African Medical Association, said that during discussions with European officials, she was told not to say that Omicron patients presented milder symptoms than prior COVID-19 variants.
“I was told not to publicly state that it was a mild illness. I have been asked to refrain from making such statements and to say that it is a serious illness. I declined,” she told Welt in response to a question about her initial discussions about Omicron with European officials.
Coetzee did not elaborate on which officials allegedly told her to keep quiet. In the interview, Coetzee said that South African officials did not try to pressure her, claiming that later, she was criticized by authorities in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.
She continued: “I am a clinician and based on the clinical picture there are no indications that we are dealing with a very serious disease. The course is mostly mild. I’m not saying you won’t get sick if you’re mild,” according to a German-to-English translation.
“The definition of mild COVID-19 disease is clear, and it is a [World Health Organization] definition: patients can be treated at home and oxygen or hospitalization is not required,” Coetzee said, adding: “A serious illness is one in which we see acute pulmonary respiratory infections: people need oxygen, maybe even artificial respiration. We saw that with Delta—but not with Omicron. So I said to people, ‘I can’t say it like that because it’s not what we’re seeing.’” . . .
Since Omicron was controversially named as a “variant of concern” by WHO in November 2021, a number of studies have suggested the variant presents milder symptoms than the Delta variant. Currently, according to data from U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Omicron makes up the vast majority of current COVID-19 infections nationwide.
A study from a group of Japanese and American researchers, published in late December, found that Omicron causes less damaging effects to the lungs, throat, and nose.
The narrative über alles.
D*MN IT BEE, YOU’RE NOT SUPPOSED TO REPORT THE NEWS STRAIGHT UP: Biden Administration Begins Grueling, Months-Long Process Of Abandoning Americans In Ukraine.
AND THEY’RE ALL PAPER TIGERS: CNN Poll Shows, Team Obama Have Pushed Disposable Joe Biden into the Political Furnace.
WAITAMINIT, I THOUGHT THE HEADQUARTER WAS IN MY DINING ROOM: Dispatches From Small Radical Fringe HQ.
Occasionally my kitchen. Almost always my office.
THE LEFT NEEDS A REFRESHER: Rights and Government.
THE WHITE HOUSE CAN GAZE ON A FOREST OF UPRAISED MIDDLE FINGERS: White House Defies Most Governors, Demands Americans Keep Wearing Masks.
LOOK, IT’S NOT JUST THAT THE FBI IS CORRUPT, IT’S THAT IT’S MIND-BOGGLINGLY STUPID ALSO: High Pressure Tactics in FBI Coverup Surrounding Whitmer Case.
THEY DON’T GET US, THEY REALLY REALLY DON’T GET US: America Far Away.
PERHAPS THE JUNTA SHOULDN’T HAVE STOMPED ON DOMESTIC OIL PRODUCTION? Biden’s oil nightmare.
I SHOULD HOPE SO: Truckers Are Coming! Truckers Are Coming! Says DHS.
It’s very hard on a country to be outdone by its hat.
WAY TO INSULT YOUR PUBLIC: Cheney Says Wyoming Voters Are “Crazies”.
Honestly, the only thing that surprises me is that she’s not writing feminist science fiction or something like that.
DUMB OR HATEFUL? OR BOTH? Rep. Cori Bush Doubling Down on ‘Defund the Police’ Despite Requests From Fellow Progressives.
HOW TO TELL ME THE DEMOCRATS ARE ROBBING ME: Inflation Increased 7.5% Over Past 12 Months, Hitting a 40-Year High.
Without telling me the democrats are robbing me.
I WANT NPR TO BE CONCERNED ABOUT PEOPLE WITH THORAZINE LYING IN WAIT FOR THEIR EMPLOYEES: NPR Wants You to be Concerned About Which Skin Color Emoji You Should Use.
Look, mental health in this country is a mess. And sometimes emergency thorazine shots are obviously needed. NPR just seems to be screaming “Thorazine, for the love of heaven, thorazine. We can’t find reality with two hands and a seeing eye dog!”
THE WEIRD THING IS THAT EVERYONE KNOWS MASKS DID NOTHING: Even Politico Knows the Democrats Change of Heart on Masks is a Farce.
So, why die on this very weird hill.
Oh, yeah. okay. Brain the size of a walnut.