BECAUSE IF UPPER-CLASS LIBERAL WHITE WOMEN DO IT IT CAN’T BE A CRIME: Why Isn’t This Code Pink ‘Occupation’ an Insurrection?
Archive for 2024
April 10, 2024
SHOT: California McDonald’s franchisee mulls reducing hours, lifting prices to offset $20 minimum wage.
Scott Rodrick said he’s had to rethink his business strategy in the wake of the new law, which went into effect April 1 and has spurred some of his fast-food rivals to raise menu prices.
“There is more than extraordinary labor costs stressing restaurant P&Ls right now,” Rodrick, whose 18 McDonald’s are located in northern California, told Business Insider.
“The same grocery inflation that consumers at home worry about is also worrying restaurants just as a basket of groceries.”
“So what I’m really dealing with, outside of the historical pace of things, is this double-barrel shotgun of backdoor food costs and now labor going off and leaving a brutal mark on my unit profitability,” he added.
Rodrick had already lifted his prices between 5% and 7% between January and March in anticipation of the California law going into effect
“The appetite that my customers have for price increases is not unlimited,” he said.
Chaser: California fast food franchisee slams new minimum wage, invests in Nevada over six-figure loss. “I’ve already started to invest in the neighboring state of Nevada, where there just isn’t so much regulation, there isn’t so many different types of people telling you how to run your business.”
Hangover: Small business optimism hits 11-year low as inflation fears won’t go away.
POLITICAL WARFARE: Gulp: Jonathan Chait Is Right. “The simple truth is that the Right doesn’t do any of these things, despite the fact that the media freaks out any time more than two conservatives get together to say anything. Suddenly we are all Nazis trying to instigate a Beer Hall Putsch. The Left, though, relies on harassment as their primary tactic. Not speeches. Not protests. But harassment.”
ISN’T EVERYTHING? Even the Moon Is Racist Now?
SEIU: COMING TO A UNIVERSITY NEAR ME: The Service Employees International Union is attempting to organize the non-tenured, non-tenure-track faculty at the College of Arts and Sciences at my university. There is apparently a lot of this going around these day.
The countdown on the higher education implosion continues.
AT AMAZON, Shop the Lightning Deals. #CommissionEarned
SKYNET SMILES: Elon Musk says AI will be smarter than any human around the end of next year.
On Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted the imminent rise in AI superintelligence during a live interview streamed on the social media platform X. “My guess is we’ll have AI smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year,” Musk said in his conversation with hedge fund manager Nicolai Tangen.
Just prior to that, Tangen had asked Musk, “What’s your take on where we are in the AI race just now?” Musk told Tangen that AI “is the fastest advancing technology I’ve seen of any kind, and I’ve seen a lot of technology.” He described computers dedicated to AI increasing in capability by “a factor of 10 every year, if not every six to nine months.”
Musk made the prediction with an asterisk, saying that shortages of AI chips and high AI power demands could limit AI’s capability until those issues are resolved. “Last year, it was chip-constrained,” Musk told Tangen. “People could not get enough Nvidia chips. This year, it’s transitioning to a voltage transformer supply. In a year or two, it’s just electricity supply.”
Why do I get the feeling governments will make sure AIs get all the power they need while forcing us to get used to brownouts?
CLIMATE CHANGE IS AN OBSESSION OF THE GLOBAL ELITES: Biden Is Spending $1 Trillion to Fight Climate Change. Voters Don’t Care. “A Journal poll, which surveyed voters in seven swing states in March, found that just 3% of 18-to-34-year-old voters named climate change as their top issue, with most citing the economy, inflation or immigration. That is roughly in line with voters of all ages, 2% of whom cited climate change as their top issue.”
JOHN LUCAS: Where Will We Find Such Men?
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: The New, Improved RNC Is Zeroing In on the Right Priorities.
WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE THEY ARE: 57% Believe Democrats Use Illegal Immigration to ‘Build Permanent Majority.’
April 9, 2024
OPEN THREAD: On time tonight.
I’VE MOVED ON FROM NAPOLEONIC WAR NOVELS AND WWII NOVELS TO FUTURISTIC WAR NOVELS: I’m very much enjoying the Sentenced to War series, a vaguely Starship Troopers sort of setting, except that military service can be imposed as a punishment for violating traffic laws. Very well-written, decent on the hard-SF action, page-turning stuff.
SPENGLER: Horror and Humiliation in Gaza.
Like the Nazis, Islamist terrorism weaponized horror to demoralize the West. Christianity has a soft underbelly: It struggles to reconcile belief in a God who so loved the world that He sacrificed Himself for its salvation with the suffering of innocents. That was the nub of Voltaire’s attack on theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake killed 12,000 in 1755, as well as Ivan Karamazov’s protest that “if the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price.”
The post-Christian world, which eschews the mystery of Divine Providence in favor of a squeamish urge for earthly salvation, is all the more vulnerable to the theater of horror. The post-Christian West has become paralyzed by the fear that the world is beset by forces hostile to humankind, which J.R.R. Tolkien called “the black breath.”
All too well have the Western-educated, multilingual leaders of Hamas gauged the spiritual state of the West, and invented an atrocious way of conducting war in order to psychically paralyze it. Hamas cannot win a war against Israel, but it has sufficient power to force Israel to fight a war that cost many civilian lives. Whether the civilian death toll is the 32,000 that Hamas claims or the 18,000 estimated by pro-Israeli analysts is of minor importance.
During the U.S. Marines’ siege of Fallujah 20 years ago, I wrote that the battle for that city brought into focus the vulnerabilities of both the Americans and the Sunni resistance. Horror—the perception that cruelty has no purpose and no end—is lethal to the West, which cannot endure without faith in a loving Heavenly Father. For the Islamic world, meanwhile, humiliation—the perception that the ummah cannot reward those who submit to it—is beyond its capacity to endure.
The Muslim world said nothing when between 9,000 and 40,000 civilians died in the 2016-17 campaign against ISIS in Mosul. That involved Muslims (the Iraqi Army with American support) killing Muslims. But Gaza is not merely a slaughter but also a humiliation, the reduction of Hamas, and the displacement of most of the Gaza population. Muslims can accept Muslims killing Muslims, but they can’t abide Jews humiliating Muslims.
This toxic combination of horror and humiliation poisons world opinion against Israel. There is no near-term remedy. Horror elicits irrational responses. Never mind that Hamas forced an urban war upon Israel through unspeakable acts of brutality against Israeli civilians, and that it embeds terrorists in hospitals, schools, and other civilian installations to maximize casualties among its own civilians. Never mind that Israel’s response has occasioned fewer civilian casualties in urban combat than any other fighting force on record.
Read the whole thing.
I DUNNO, IRANIAN MONEY MAYBE? Why Is Biden Letting Hamas Off the Hook?
A GOOD AND FAITHFUL SERVANT FOR MANY YEARS, BUT NOW OBSOLETE: From Florida, ULA Delta IV Heavy lifts off for final time.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: America is losing its GPS dominance to China’s BeiDou satnav. “GPS’s capabilities are now substantially inferior to those of China’s BeiDou.”
COVID FOUR YEARS AGO: On April 4th 2020, less than three weeks into the Fauci, Birx, and Trump-approved lockdown, Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick wrote: From 9/11 to COVID-19. The last time New York was the center of a catastrophe, America rallied behind it. The nation’s reaction to its coronavirus outbreak is a different story.
It was always a fairy tale, but it was surely a nice one. Columbine’s tragedy was America’s tragedy. Las Vegas happened to all of us. Parkland, Florida, was everyone’s worst national nightmare. Regional differences were downplayed so we could grieve together. But Donald Trump came along to remind us that Puerto Rico is not really America, and Detroit is not really America, and California is definitively not America. It was an easy myth to puncture, and he has deftly and rapidly ensured that no city or state will ever be America’s battered sweetheart again. We are all on our own.
New York almost makes it too easy. The city has long been associated with unbounded greed and wealth, cultural elitism, and ethnic diversity. That encompasses Ted Cruz’s sneering dog whistle about “New York values” in 2016, and Trump’s newfound loathing of the city he called home for his entire life—a city he was maligning long before the coronavirus came along. Despite the country’s love affair with New York in the wake of 9/11 or even Hurricane Sandy in 2012, it’s also always been the case that the city coexists uncomfortably with the fantasy of rugged cowboys, wide-open spaces, and manly white men dominating nature, an American story Trump and his acolytes seem to love above all things.
Nobody can blame the coronavirus itself on this president, though we must keep track of how his failure to take action will cost untold American lives. But even as we sit here, waiting, it is worth remembering that Trump has led a three-year project in which leadership consists of laying blame, constantly and relentlessly, on everyone and anyone, and the more inchoate that group is, the better. Victims are to be further victimized, always. We have been so carefully trained in this response that even without Trump’s insistence that the media, Barack Obama, Andrew Cuomo, and thieving New York doctors are to blame for the rampant spread of the virus, we could fall easily into the habit of doing it ourselves. We haven’t had to do that; the president has still happily led the charge. The strangest thing is simply that New York is the same greedy, insomniac, starving, pushy, wisecracking, bighearted place it was in the days after 9/11. Americans need to hate her today because everyone needs to hate everything and everyone now. Just when we needed to rally together in a fight against death, we are realizing we’ve been primed to fight one another to the death instead. Even if the myriad historical acts of pulling together after national tragedies were planted in fantasy more than fact, the alternative—a vicious and slashing vilification of the other—will not keep any of us safe or free.
As I wrote four years ago, that last sentence is a classic case of projection. Isn’t Lithwick aware that the rest of the nation is also dealing with the same pandemic? And is a massively diverse group of people who don’t think in lockstep? I could be mistaken, but I don’t believe that Saul Steinberg drew his classic “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cover as a how-to guide to life for insular Manhattanites.
Flash-forward to today. Having been demonized by NYC’s “Defund the Police” “Progressives” since 2020, one GOP congresswoman has what must be an enticing offer for some at the NYPD: Rep. Beth Van Duyne Takes Out a Full Page Ad for NY Police: Come to North Texas Now.
Rep. Beth Van Duyne, who represents the Irving, Texas area of North Texas, is running an ad in the New York Post. The full-page ad encourages New York City police to come to North Texas.
The headline reads, “Ladies and Gentlemen of Law Enforcement It’s Time to Escape New York and Move To Texas!.” There is a list of 15 North Texas law enforcement agencies where New York officers can apply.
“Your lives don’t have to be endangered by violent career criminals who are never locked away,” the ad states. “You don’t have to be beaten on the streets by gangs of illegal immigrant criminals. And you don’t have to be endlessly insulted by budget cuts by Defund the Police politicians.”
“It’s time for you to leave these loathsome and destructive fools behind,” the ad continues. “Escape from New York.”
No word yet if Lithwick approves of Duyne’s suggestion.
MARGARET SANGER, LE CORBUSIER, AND PHILIP JOHNSON SMILE: Swastikas Are Progressive Now.
After Hamas supporters vandalized a synagogue with a swastika, leftist cheered this prototypical Nazi act as a progressive commitment to human rights.
“A swastika clearly has a deep and painful history for the people in our community, it’s a symbol of hatred and death,” Rabbi Ethan Witkovsky of Temple Beth El said.
However Malcolm Harris, a former Occupy Wall Street activist and author of ‘Palo Alto’ and other books published through Hachette, explained that swastikas were progressive now.
“Israel’s genocide has literally reversed the meaning of a swastika on a synagogue from a Nazi threat to a condemnation of genocide,” Harris, who also writes for The Nation and Wired, argued.
Harris claims that he viewed vandalizing a synagogue with a swastika as “an anti-zionist condemnation of Israeli genocide.” And if vandalizing synagogues with swastikas, the ultimate symbol of Nazi behavior is only “anti-Zionist”, not antisemitic, then there really is no difference between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, and between leftist anti-Zionists and Nazi antisemites.
David Austin Walsh, a postdoc at the Yale Program for the Study of Antisemitism, who has a book on the “far-right” coming out from Yale University Press, chimed in, “I’ll stipulate for the sake of argument that tagging a synagogue with a swastika has an ambiguous or multivariate meaning. How are we to determine which is the intended meaning?”
Marshall Steinbaum, an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Utah and a Senior Fellow at the Jain Family Institute, whined that, “I wish we lived in a world where spray-painting a swastika on a synagogue still meant Nazis”.
In the UK, where the London Met Police had previously arrested and threatened anti-Jihad protesters for flying the St. George’s flag, an officer explained to a Jewish woman complaining about swastikas at a pro-Hamas hate rally that the swastikas needed to be viewed in context.
In certain contexts, such as Neo-Nazi rallies, swastikas might be bad, but when leftists and their Islamist allies aim swastikas at Jews, these Neo-Neo-Nazis were actually progressive.
While the debate about whether vandalizing synagogues with swastikas and waving swastikas at Jews was antisemitic, the progressive swastika was making its way around the world.
Exit question: “I’ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer the following question without having to think real hard: ‘Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?’”
IF I WERE THAT MOUSE, I’D BE PISSED: Scientists Accidentally Made a Mouse Grow Legs in Place of Genitals.
FIRST-EVER? I THINK NOT. I REMEMBER “MOOD RINGS.” World’s First Real-Time Wearable Human Emotion Recognition Technology Unveiled.