Archive for 2022
January 14, 2022
January 13, 2022
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Yikes: Wholesale inflation spikes up to new record 9.7% for 2021.
It’s just what everyone with at least half a brain — which rules out Democrats and media leaders — predicted after the orgy of spending that accompanied Biden’s investiture.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Team Biden’s plan to ‘ensure scientific integrity’ should start with itself.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Worst US inflation since ’82 is huge underestimate: Government’s CPI says the cost of shelter rose 4% in the past year but home prices and rents are up nearly 20%.
Shelter accounts for about a third of American household expenditure, and the cost of buying or renting shelter is up nearly 20% over the past year. Yet the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for shelter reported Jan. 12 by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics showed an increase of just 4.2 over the past year.
Private surveys conducted by the big rental sites, Zillow and Apartmentlist.com, show increases of 13% to 18% during 2021, and the Case-Shiller Index of US home prices jumped 18% in the year through October.
Who are you going to believe, to paraphrase Groucho Marx – the US government or your own eyes? . . .
Shelter makes up 32.3% of the CPI, so 14 percentage points in the cost of shelter would add another 4.5 percentage points to the headline inflation number.
That’s an additional 4.5 percentage points on top of the 7% annual rate of CPI inflation. In other words, accurate accounting for real-world shelter costs would put consumer inflation in the US around 10% a year. And double-digit inflation would cause a market meltdown.
There’s no sign of relief in cost pressures on business. Transport costs have been rising at an annual rate of 30% to 50% for most of the past year.
None of this is by accident, except for the people catching on before the elections.
PREDICTABLY: WHO: Omicron COVID-19 surge in Africa slowing down.
OPEN THREAD: Fetch the Bolt Cutters.
GOODER AND HARDER, CALIFORNIA: Thieves Raiding Cargo Containers, Stealing Packages On Downtown L.A. Union Pacific Train Tracks.
A section of the Union Pacific train tracks in downtown Los Angeles has been littered with thousands of shredded boxes, packages stolen from cargo containers that stop in the area to unload.
Thieves have been raiding the cargo containers, taking packages that belong to people from all over the country from retailers like Amazon, REI and others.
The refuse left behind, like home COVID test kits, are items that the robbers did not want or did not think were valuable enough to take.
Sources told CBSLA that the locks Union Pacific uses* are easy to cut, and officials with the Los Angeles Police Department said they don’t respond to reports of a train robbery unless Union Pacific asks them for help, which they said is rare.
While CBSLA was on the scene with cameras, one person was seen running off with a container used to hold smaller packages, and a Union Pacific officer was spotted chasing after two other people who appeared to be rifling through packages.
CBSLA also obtained video of University of Southern California Campus Police arresting a suspected thief last month. According to officers, the suspect’s bag was filled with stolen goods taken from the train tracks.
* I assume this refers to the locks used on the intermodal container cars that Union Pacific locomotives pull through the area where, as CBS-LA cameraman John Schreiber tweets, “trains frequently slow or stop…as they get worked into the [Union Pacific] Intermodal facility near Downtown LA. The thieves use this opportunity to break open containers and take what’s inside. I’d say every 4th or 5th rail car had opened containers.” More video in this Twitter thread by Schreiber:
Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pens. Cargo containers left busted open on trains. @CBSLA pic.twitter.com/JvNF4UVy2K
— John Schreiber (@johnschreiber) January 13, 2022
MATHEMATICS IS THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE: There’s a Hidden Mathematical ‘Law’ in The Sand Megaripples Found All Over Earth.
TO BE FAIR, THEY HAVE A LOT OF THE WORST IN THEM TO BRING OUT: Glenn Beck is battling COVID-19 again, and it’s bringing out the worst in his critics.
Related:
MAKING ABORTION POLICY MORE EUROPEAN, I GUESS: Florida lawmakers move to ban abortions after 15 weeks.
Related: Tulsi Gabbard Says She Supports Regulating Abortion in the Third Trimester.
Also related: Making America More Like Europe.
RIP: TERRY TEACHOUT, 1956-2022.
Terry Teachout published more pieces in COMMENTARY than any other writer in the magazine’s 76-year history. He was a monthly contributor for a quarter century—first as classical music critic and then as critic-at-large. On just two occasions in the 13 years of my editorship did he miss a month, our new issue being one of the two—he was unable to meet a deadline for an article on Buster Keaton because of a loved one’s health problem.
Just an hour ago I heard the dreadful news that Terry died in his sleep today, a few weeks shy of his 66th birthday. The loss to his loved ones, the loss to the American theatre he both championed as a critic and mastered as a playwright, and the loss to the broader American culture he knew more fully than anyone else in our time cannot be overstated.
I’m genuinely shocked to hear of his passing; I interviewed him once or twice for PJM’s old Sirius-XM show, and loved his Commentary columns and books.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: GOP Lawmaker Moves to Abolish Virginia’s Government Monopoly on Hard Liquor Sales.
NEWS FROM 2022: ‘Skynet Is A Private Company, They Can Do What They Want,’ Says Man Getting Curb-Stomped By Terminator.
Private companies haven’t had that kind of freedom of action in America for roughly a century, but you still hear this stuff.
MATTEL HONORS GUN-TOTING REPUBLICAN WOMAN: Mattel Honors Black Conservative Activist, Suffragette, and Investigative Journalist Ida B. Wells With a Barbie Doll.
It took them long enough. Ida B. Wells has been ignored for years, mainly because she was a conservative activist before it was a thing, as well as a gun rights advocate, when the laws in the country were moving in the direction of creating more gun control laws solely to prevent Blacks from arming themselves.
* * * * * * * *
In Wells’ writings, and particularly in an 1885 letter mentioned by Politifact, Wells expressed how she felt about Democrats and their agenda.
“I am not a Democrat,” Wells wrote, “because the Democrats considered me a chattel and possibly might have always so considered me, because their record from the beginning has been inimical to my interests.
During that time period, Blacks were aligned with Republicans, because Republicans were the party that was formed to end slavery (they did), and usher in Reconstruction (they tried). The Democrats who were the party of slavery, and then Jim Crow would have nothing to do with an Ida B. Wells, and Wells would have had nothing to do with them.
I think she would feel the same today, since much of what the Democrats are doing now is reminiscent of their tactics then. Today’s meltdown over not being able to kill the Senate filibuster and do their federal takeover of voting rights is an excellent example. They were the same party then, as they are now.
Still waiting for Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill, but this will do in the meantime.
LIVE BY TWITTER, DIE BY TWITTER: D’oh! SCOTUS justice quoted a Ron Klain retweet to show how Biden was trying to skirt the Constitution for vax mandate.
Flashback: Journo Twitter runs the Biden administration.
DISPATCHES FROM THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Microsoft Word introduces new “woke” feature to monitor your language.
Clippy morphed into Big Brother so slowly, I hardly even noticed.
THIS CONTINUES TO BE A GOOD DAY: Baltimore City State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby federally indicted on perjury charges.
Of course, I’m cynical enough now that I look at charges like this — not about official malfeasance but about statements connected with buying a vacation home in (where else?) Florida — and wonder who was so eager to get her out of the way. This looks like the kind of thing you find when you’ve already decided to go after someone.
#RESIST: A reader sends this pic from near Warrenton, Virginia.
And it’s not just gas pumps. Another reader writes: “Found this on a propane-tank vending machine today outside Philly.”
It’s nationwide!
WAVE A WHITE FLAG: Ex-Rebel Rocker Elvis Costello Bows Down to Cancel Culture.