THE SQUEAKY WHEELS: See How Much ‘The Squad’ Has Fleeced From America With Earmarks — Just Since 2023. “Since the start of 2023, this small clique of eight far-Left socialists have managed to tack $224 million worth of pet projects onto the spending bills meant to fund core government operations.”
Archive for 2024
April 3, 2024
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: New York City Isn’t Going to Survive the Democrats’ Reign of Error. “When I first started hanging out there a lot it was just after Rudy Giuliani made them clean up the hookers, the chlamydia, and the fear of getting mugged. Native New Yorkers would publicly complain about the city losing its flavor; privately they would say that the place was much nicer.”
IF YOU SUPPORT HAMAS, I’M NOT BUYING YOUR “HUMANITARIAN” CONCERNS: Where Were These Ceasefire Bleeding Hearts for the Past 20 Years of Hamas’s Carnage?
If you care about humanitarian issues, you should be calling on Hamas to surrender. It’s telling that no one is doing that.
HUH, WHAT HAPPENED FOUR YEARS AGO? Here’s how much Americans say they need to retire — and it’s 53% higher than four years ago.
Americans have lofty goals for their retirement, with the typical worker believing they need $1.46 million to retire comfortably — a jump of 53% from their savings target in 2020, according to a new survey from Northwestern Mutual.
But most people are far from reaching that objective, with the study finding that the average amount held in a retirement account today is just $88,400. That means that the typical worker has a $1.37 million gap between their actual savings and their retirement aspirations.
Due to the impact of inflation and other financial pressures, Americans today believe they need to sock away more for their golden years compared with 2020, when the typical worker pegged a comfy retirement as requiring $951,000 in savings, Aditi Javeri Gokhale, chief strategy officer at Northwestern Mutual, told CBS MoneyWatch.
There are other contributing factors, but four years ago was when Washington set the money printing presses to Ludicrous Speed and they haven’t slowed down since.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Democrats face ‘horrifying’ reality amid young minorities’ exodus: ‘Leaving in droves.’
VOX POPULI, VOX DEI: Tennessee Votes NO on Weather Engineering.
NATE SILVER DEBUNKS THE LATEST MEDIA TREND: Americans love Florida, even if you don’t: The rate of “mover’s remorse” is statistically low. Understanding why might help in understanding America. “In principle, a state could still have a net positive migration flow is a lot of people leave it, provided that even more people arrive But Florida isn’t like that: it has a high rate of in-migration and a low rate of out-migration. . . . Sure, in a state with 22 million residents, you’re going to find plenty of leavers, like the half-dozen people the NBC story interviewed. But this is not a typical pattern.”
Plus: “One of the underlying themes in my work is that people make far too many inferences about public opinion from the preferences expressed by their friends or professional peers. That may be especially true for progressives who work in media given the blob-like nature of the mainstream media, where progressive, liberal, centrist and center-right news outlets are all smooshed together, but there aren’t a lot of outright Trump supporters and there isn’t much cultural conservatism. And part of it is that Florida, like no other state, challenges the Emerging Democratic Majority hypothesis. If looked at in a highly abstract way, you might expect Florida — a diverse coastal state — to be solidly blue, but instead it has gotten redder: ground zero for Democrats’ increasing erosion with nonwhite voters. Some 42 percent of the Miami metro’s population was born abroad, the highest rate in the country. Miami proper is majority foreign-born, though many of the immigrants there are patriotic (as immigrants often are) and have become US citizens.”
DON’T TRUST CHINA. CHINA IS ASSHOE.
https://twitter.com/Byron_Wan/status/1775118506138419412
15 MINUTES INTO THE FUTURE: James Woods Presents the ‘Horror Movie’ That Is the ’15-Minute City.’
This is the horror movie they are bringing to life in your city soon. #15MinuteCity pic.twitter.com/rQXNju2Dzl
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) April 1, 2024
It’s all fun and games until you turn 30, your lifeclock starts blinking, and it’s time to don the doomsday hockey masks of Carousel:
I don’t know how old the video that Woods linked to is, but it seems like an awfully bad idea on many, many levels post-2020:
Flashback: Coronavirus lessons on density, mass transit, bureaucracy and censorship: They kill.
LIGHTNING DEAL: Eureka Powerful Carpet and Floor, Household Cleaner. #CommissionEarned
TO BE FAIR, MOST HUMANS AREN’T VERY PERSUASIVE: GPT-4 is 82% more persuasive than humans, and AIs can now read emotions.
AI Language models, it seems, are already extraordinarily effective at changing people’s minds. In a recent pre-print study from researchers at EPFL Lausanne in Switzerland, 820 people were surveyed on their views on various topics, from relatively low-emotion topics like “should the penny stay in circulation,” all the way up to hot-button, heavily politicized issues like abortion, trans bathroom access, and “should colleges consider race as a factor in admissions to ensure diversity?”
With their initial stances recorded, participants then went into a series of 5-minute text-based debates against other humans and against GPT-4 – and afterwards, they were interviewed again to see if their opinions had changed as a result of the conversation.
In human vs human situations, these debates tended to backfire, calcifying and strengthening people’s positions, and making them less likely to change their mind. GPT had more success, doing a slight but statistically insignificant 21% better.
This is why the progressive left is hellbent on controlling AI outputs, even when that leads to laughably wrong results.
HOW WORKING-CLASS AMERICANS became second-class citizens. “They want higher wages. They want better healthcare—or really, just affordable healthcare. They want fewer migrants competing for their jobs, and they want trade policy that favors America. They want stable jobs that reward their immense efforts with the hallmarks of a middle-class life that so many in the top income brackets take for granted: a home. A vacation with their kids every now and then. Enough in the bank so they don’t have to call the electric company every month to beg forbearance to keep the lights on. Some money to put away for retirement for when their aching bones can no longer perform physical labor.”
THIS IS TERRIFYING: It is for pollster Scott Rasmussen, that is. He asked a representative sample of the nation’s electorate if they would prefer their candidate to win by cheating or lose by being honest. “Only” seven percent chose the former.
But wait! There’s more, as Issues & Insights (I&I) explains today:
“Among all Americans, just 7 percent said they would want their candidate to win by cheating. As Rasmussen put it, he’d rather see that number lower, but that’s not bad.
“But more than a third of the elite 1 percent he surveyed would condone cheating. And among those who are ‘politically obsessed’ – meaning that they talk about politics every day – that number shot up to 69 percent.”
A government led by cheaters is a government with zero credibility. And if they condone cheating to win elections, they will condone lying by the media, too.
SUZANNA SHERRY: DEI and Antisemitism: Bred in the Bone.
Last October, progressive Jews were shocked by the raw antisemitism displayed by their erstwhile allies on the political left. After Hamas terrorists tortured, raped, or murdered more than 1200 Israeli civilians and took some 200 civilians hostage, some progressives – especially on college campuses – celebrated. They chanted the Palestinian mantra “from the river to the sea,” seeking to erase Israel (and Jews) from the face of the earth. The number of antisemitic incidents on campus soared, coming from both students and faculty. A Stanford lecturer forced Jewish students to the back of the classroom and labeled them “colonizers.” Jewish students had to barricade themselves inside a library at Cooper Union, and Jewish students at MIT were told by faculty to avoid the university’s main lobby for their own safety. Many university presidents who had previously sent out campus-wide emails condemning the murder of George Floyd, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the overruling of Roe v. Wade, and countless other world events suddenly discovered the Kalven Principles and claimed it would be inappropriate for them to take sides, or issued weak statements about how the situation in the Middle East was complicated. This double standard continued as some universities responded to student calls for genocide of Jews by invoking principles of free speech, principles that had been notably ignored when the speech in question was directed at other groups. Most campus DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) offices, especially at the most elite universities, had nothing to say about the surging antisemitism.
This essay explains why no one should have been shocked, or even mildly surprised, by the progressive response to the massacre. Progressive or “woke” culture –as exemplified by critical race theory, anti-racism of the Ibram X. Kendi variety, and, especially on college campuses, the DEI juggernaut – is necessarily and inevitably antisemitic at its core. That these related movements have now exposed their antisemitism publicly is no surprise: antisemitism is bred in their bones.
I believe her.
EVERGREEN: Google Is Completely Out of Control.
DEMOCRATS HAVE BEEN THE JUNIOR ANTI-SEX LEAGUE FOR DECADES: Is The Modern GOP an ‘Anti-Sex Movement?’
At least if you’re talking about heterosexual sex.
April 2, 2024
FIGHT THE POWER:
It's hard to overstate how important – and strategically brilliant – @jk_rowling's power move was today, a first-move checkmate that effectively
neutered Scotland's dangerous new #HateCrimeBill. By openly and unambiguously breaking this law – on a massive public platform – on… https://t.co/dWKhCSERud— The Heretical Liberal 🇨🇦🏳️🌈 (@Rob_ThaBuilder) April 2, 2024
Plus:
Again with the legacy guff… if your friend History thinks women don't deserve sex-based rights, healthy kids should be medicalised and free speech needs stamping out, I'm not interested in being his buddy. He sounds a massive dick. pic.twitter.com/MYwtoxbSz7
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 2, 2024
Vaguely related, but funny:
This pretty much explains today's society
— Mahatma Gandhi (Parody) (@GandhiAOC) April 2, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Tuesday’s Groovy.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: My husband convinced me to get pregnant. I had the baby, got laid off, and left him — I’m happy with all of my decisions. “I let strangers — an immigrant family — live in my house and pay my utilities while I share a bedroom with my daughter in my childhood home. Instead of putting her in care and finding a new job, I made use of the government benefit, reduced my bills, and embraced the multigenerational family home.”
TSUNAMI WARNING ISSUED IN SOUTH-WESTERN JAPAN AFTER MAGNITUDE-7.5 EARTHQUAKE NEAR TAIWAN:
A tsunami warning has been issued for south-western Japan after an earthquake with a preliminary magnitude of 7.5 struck in the ocean near Taiwan.
The warning was issued for coastal areas near the southern prefecture of Okinawa, National broadcaster NHK said.
The tsunami is expected to be up to 3 metres.
The strong quake knocked out power in several parts of the Taiwan capital Taipei, according to a Reuters witness.
Power wasn’t the only thing knocked out in Taiwan:
BREAKING: Multiple buildings collapse after quake hits eastern Taiwan – witnesses pic.twitter.com/VcdavC7abb
— BNO News (@BNONews) April 3, 2024
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Why Young Men and Young Women are Drifting Apart.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Model goes on date with soldier then bonks him on camera to ‘thank him for his service.’
FOR BIDEN THAT’S NOT A BUG, IT’S A FEATURE: Biden’s LNG Export Embargo Hurts Farmers, Too.