MONEY MAGAZINE ROLLS LEFT TO DIE: Money magazine has an interesting way to rate the best places in the US to live.
Archive for 2022
October 14, 2022
WE SHALL FIGHT THEM ON THE SCHOOLS, WE SHALL FIGHT THEM ONLINE, WE SHALL FIGHT THEM IN THE CORPORATIONS, WE WILL NEVER, EVER GIVE UP: Pushback: Chants of “Vote them out!” overwhelm school board meeting.
THIS WILL END IN TEARS: Doctor’s groups want to imprison those who disagree with them.
DON’T GET COCKY: Things Are Much Worse Than They Seem for Democrats.
THIS IS WHY ALL THE LOCKDOWNS: Ultra-rare anti-Xi demonstration breaks out in Beijing days before Party Congress set to install him as dictator-for-life.
HE SHOULD PAY THEM RENT FOR LIVING IN THEIR HEADS: The January 6 Committee just can’t quit Donald Trump.
OF COURSE IT WAS ELECTION INTERFERENCE: Election Interference? Biden Admin Asked Saudi Arabia to Delay OPEC+ Oil Vote ‘for a Month’.
October 13, 2022
NEW YORK POST EDITORIAL: The FBI framed Trump and saved Hunter Biden: it’s time to clean house, for good.
OPEN THREAD: It’s all you.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Revenge of the Material Economy: Elites suddenly realize they need blue-collar workers they derided.
Well, some of them realize it.
HEY, WHAT’S THE WORST THAT COULD HAPPEN? Germany’s Apokalypse Now.
Time may still favor Putin, many German officials believe. He is far from running out of options for escalating Russia’s military mobilization. He can shift focus from direct confrontation with Ukrainian forces to the country’s water and energy facilities, to civilian housing and schools—in a word, to rape and terror—perhaps in hopes of inflaming a refugee crisis. He can simultaneously attack civilian infrastructure in Europe. (Last weekend, it’s worth noting, half of Germany’s rail network shut down because communication cables were mysteriously cut in two main nodes, an operation considered to be impossible without the complicity of insiders; two days later, the Interior Ministry announced that it plans to sack the country’s cybersecurity chief over links to Russian security services.) Russian reservists may be overweight, underpaid, untrained, and craven, Germans note, but Putin doesn’t need them to match the mettle of the heroic Ukrainians; he only needs them to stretch the war beyond the point that Ukraine and the West can afford to continue financing it, while indiscriminately murdering civilians from afar.
Confidence that the Western sanctions regime will outlast Russia’s financial resources likewise overlooks the fact that the Russian central bank can print money if it needs to, which it currently doesn’t. EU countries have paid more than 100 billion euros to Russia for fossil fuel imports since the invasion began. Russia will record a current account surplus this year of some $200 billion; the West’s hit to its foreign exchange reserves, while unprecedented, was still relatively modest. Many of Russia’s Western imports are being rapidly substituted by China and even U.S. allies like India, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan, while markets for Russian energy are being expanded all over Asia and the Middle East. Perhaps the Russian system under Putin really is so rigidly corrupt that it won’t be able to adjust to the shock of Western expulsion; but overconfident Western predictions of Russian economic weakness and irrelevance were part of what got us into this mess in the first place.
Furthermore, even if Russia’s economic picture is as dire as many hope, and even if the Russian elite is as humiliated by the war as it deserves to be, that does not automatically mean that Putin will suffer a crisis of legitimacy. Even on the day of the Russian invasion, Putin spoke of his war aims in genocidal terms; at best, the vast majority of his subjects and courtiers demonstrated a remarkable degree of apathy. The war has since gone very badly, and has inflicted pain on elite and ordinary Russians alike. But Russians have never known any other kind of war.
There are plenty of Germans who are panicked that Putin would sooner ignite a thermonuclear exchange with the United States than be removed from office or killed: Their analysis does not go anywhere the president of the United States didn’t go in his remarks at a Democratic fundraiser last Thursday, when he warned of “the prospect of Armageddon.” But there are also German officials and policymakers who, all too reasonably, read Putin’s snowballing nuclear threats as a strategy aimed specifically at Berlin.
Washington has signaled that a Russian nuclear strike on Ukraine could trigger NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause on the grounds that radioactive fallout would spread to NATO territory. It is unimaginable that Poland, for example, would accept anything less. At the end of September, U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan claimed that, “We have communicated directly, privately, and at very high levels to the Kremlin that any use of nuclear weapons will be met with catastrophic consequences for Russia, that the U.S. and our allies will respond decisively.”
Lesen sie das ganze.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Last-Minute Entrant ‘Head Of Cabbage’ Surges To Lead In Pennsylvania Senate Race.
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Aren’t you endangering national security by draining the SPR for the midterms?
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Upset Trevor Noah is Leaving The Daily Show? Blame Sarah Palin.
Palin’s Couric interview became fodder for memorable sketches on Saturday Night Live but the fallout also led to the political divide that defines media consumption today. Palin wrote off the press as condescending, mean-spirited, untrustworthy and out to get people like her (non-elites who would rather hunt than read.) People who saw themselves in her began to write the press off and the rise of social media finally made it easier for them to do so. (2008 was the first presidential campaign in which Twitter existed.)
When Palin first started avoiding traditional media, the thinking was that no high-profile politician could flourish without media gatekeepers. There was precedent. While George W. Bush was famously wounded by an embarrassing sit-down interview illuminating his lack of foreign policy chops during the 2000 campaign, he couldn’t simply steer clear of media he didn’t like, or trust, afterward. That simply wasn’t an option in the pre-social media days. But while she did sign a contract with Fox News, Palin became the first prominent political personality to use social media to strategically avoid media she didn’t want to engage with while still maintaining a significant public profile (and without the perch of the presidency that guaranteed visibility for Bush). A 2009 Politico article highlighted Palin’s outsized influence on the United States’ health care debate using social media (she popularized the term “death panels” in a Facebook post) despite “making almost no public appearances and successfully avoiding the media outlets that are clamoring to talk to her.” So while the Obama campaign’s win proved that social media can help mobilize voters, Palin’s loss and subsequent legacy proved something equally significant: that those who didn’t trust media gatekeepers no longer had to rely on them to reach fans or respond to enemies.
Sound familiar?
As the saying goes, Sarah Palin walked so Donald Trump could run. In the current cycle, Pennsylvania Democratic senate candidate John Fetterman has befuddled traditionalists with a campaign largely driven by social media*. This transition from defined media gatekeepers to a media free-for-all has been hard on all legacy media institutions but perhaps hardest on late night television. After all, a paper can report on the Trump White House without Trump’s participation. Cable news can broadcast a lively debate regarding Biden’s policies with a panel of pundits. But you can’t really have a successful late night celebrity interview show without celebrities.
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Noah, Seth Meyers and Stephen Colbert are among those who decided to lean into their more progressive political views. Their shows became required stops for liberals promoting books, conservatives who didn’t mind verbal combat and activist actors. Their ratings, however, seemed to indicate that they were also alienating a large swath of America. Perhaps that’s why Greg Gutfeld’s late night talk show on Fox News, which leans to the right, has been a surprise hit, recently dethroning Colbert as the late night king. Still, Gutfeld’s viewership is just above 2 million. Johnny Carson’s final episode was watched by 55 million Americans.
Gutfeld’s success may not be that big a surprise, as Rob Long writes in the new issue of Commentary: Conservative Night Live.
Jimmy Fallon had taken over Tonight from Jay Leno and returned the show to its New York roots. Stephen Colbert took over The Late Show from its founder, David Letterman. Los Angeles–based Jimmy Kimmel was in the mix with ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!
At this point, television viewers interested in talk shows could only choose among Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, and Trevor Noah. The audience got sliced into very thin wedges. Suddenly, being intensely political became a big advantage. After all, if “winning” means garnering a larger slice of a diminishing pie, it makes sense to appeal to a dedicated and passionate audience. And Republican-haters, as nightly talk-show hosts found out, are a very loyal audience.
The winner in the Who Can Hate Republicans the Most Contest could rely on about 1.5 million Democrats to remain loyal daily viewers, and that’s all they needed to remain competitive—and even on top—in the ratings battle.
The only problem is you drive away everyone else. Four or five hosts were competing for the liberal Democrat audience, and the rest of us—half of the country, at least—have nothing to watch. What we could not choose was a show hosted by a center-right personality. If you were watching a nightly talk show, you were watching a liberal.
The networks chose to relentlessly politicize late night shows, turning them into “group therapy for liberals.” They shouldn’t be too shocked if the one host offering a different political view emerged the winner.
* Fetterman may have other reasons for his “campaign largely driven by social media” as well.
MRS. FRISBY, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Scientists Spliced Human Brain Tissue Into The Brains of Baby Rats.
OUR PUBLIC HEALTH COMMUNITY, PERFORMING TO ITS USUAL STANDARDS: Cholera protection gaps in U.S.: No new vaccine supply, no national stockpile.
KURT SCHLICHTER: Instead of a National Divorce, How About a National Backlash? “There is not going to be a national divorce. There is going to be a national backlash, a backlash against the stupid, corrupt, and evil ideology of the left. We normal people are not going anywhere. We’re not chopping up our country any more than we are going to tolerate these monsters chopping up our little kids. We will not divorce them. We will defeat them. And it will be glorious.”
Reminder: His new Kelly Turnbull book is officially out today.
DO NOT BE ALARMED. EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL. China’s Bursting Housing Bubble Will Rock the Economy for Years.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Salary Premium for Graduate Degrees Erodes in Tight Job Market: Difference between starting salaries for bachelor’s and master’s degrees fell to 22% in 2021, the smallest on record.
I wonder if that will change in the coming recession?
PAYPAL’S DYSTOPIAN FINANCIAL CENSORSHIP SCHEME BACKFIRES:
However, concerned customers shouldn’t assume that everything is fine now.
As it turns out, PayPal has in place another dystopian financial censorship policy that enacts similar fines for those it deems bigots or hatemongers. Law professor Eugene Volokh exposed the PayPal policy, which again authorizes $2,500 fines (taken directly out of your bank account) for “activities that … relate to … the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory” in the “sole discretion” of, yup, PayPal.
This is, of course, entirely subjective. Anyone with mildly right-of-center viewpoints on topics ranging from affirmative action to climate change to religious liberty to abortion has, at one point or another, faced shrieks of “bigot!” from some progressive opponents. A company setting itself up to rob users of thousands of dollars for subjectively perceived speech crimes is not just dystopian, but also in grotesque violation of its users’ financial privacy and the trust that has been placed in the company by millions of hard-working people.
That said, we don’t need to run to the government for a solution here.
We already saw how widespread consumer backlash led PayPal to reverse its first policy. So we simply need to keep the pressure on and demand the company end its other Orwellian infringements. And if it won’t, then we should all cancel our PayPal accounts and migrate to other platforms.
This kind of newfangled corporate financial censorship represents a grave threat to a free and open society. We must stop it here before this kind of overreach spreads further throughout our digital lives.