Archive for 2024

November 26, 2024

AND THEY PASSED THE SAVINGS ON TO YOU: Macy’s found a single employee hid up to $154 million worth of expenses.

Macy’s announced Monday that a single employee was responsible for so many accounting irregularities that the company was forced to delay its quarterly earnings report, which the retailer had planned to release Tuesday.

The company recently discovered that the unnamed employee intentionally hid as much as $154 million in expenses over the course of nearly three years, prompting the retailer to conduct an independent forensic accounting investigation. The employee, whom Macy’s said is no longer with the company, “intentionally made erroneous accounting accrual entries” to hide small package delivery expenses.

Macy’s did not say why the employee hid the expenses.

I have a guess.

Posted at 2:47 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 26th, 2024

THE EUROPEAN MIND CANNOT COMPREHEND THIS: I ate like Trump for a week. I don’t understand how the man is still alive.

It was a picture that revealed more than just Donald Trump’s inner circle. Following the jubilation of the US election, the grinning president-elect was pictured on board Trump Force One tucking into a McDonald’s with Elon Musk and Robert F Kennedy Jr. Donald Trump Jr, seated to his right, would later joke that Mr Kennedy Jr’s mission to “make America healthy again” would have to wait until “tomorrow”. Mr Trump’s penchant for fast food was once again in the spotlight. But what does his diet consist of?

Breakfast – nothing. Lunch – nothing. Dinner – a McDonald’s, KFC, pizza or a well-done steak. Twelve Diet Cokes a day, and snacking on Doritos. The man appointed to become his own health secretary, RFK Jr, described what Trump eats as “poison”.

“His diet is exceptionally poor,” agrees Telegraph nutritionist Sam Rice. “It’s unbalanced, with far too many ultra-processed foods, too much saturated fat from red and processed meat, simple carbohydrates that can cause sugar spikes and lead to insulin resistance. It’s also low in fibre and gut-friendly plant foods. The copious amount of Diet Coke he drinks, which contains the artificial sweetener aspartame – identified as a possible carcinogen by the World Health Organisation – makes his diet a nutritional nightmare.”

Project 2025 and MAHA are poised to revolutionize school lunches for millions of American kids:

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 26th, 2024

EUSTACE TILLEY WEEPS: The New Yorker’s Cavalcade of Ignorance.

How honest are we about our ignorance? How honest do we want to be? In answer to that eternal question, which is—or should be—of particular interest to reporters, the 20-page, 12-essay onslaught of postelection “dispatches” that dominates the latest issue of The New Yorker is one of the most honest pieces of magazine publishing we are likely to ever see. Some of the greatest minds in America have gathered in the pages of the country’s leading weekly to declare how little they understand things now, and how little they care to understand them moving forward.

“Stunningly, Trump fared better in New York City this year than he did in 2020,” writes Jelani Cobb, which is frankly a stunning assessment coming from the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, given Trump’s marked improvement in the five boroughs in 2020 and the obvious and extensively documented rightward shift across the metro region over the past decade. “How could Americans be such nice and decent people and support someone so debasing, so deranged, so hate-filled [as Donald Trump]?” asks Adam Gopnik, who makes no attempt to answer these questions, though he clearly wants to be seen as a thoughtful person for asking them.

The New Yorker drew together some of its highest-end chroniclers of the American zeitgeist, who then reveled proudly in their own attachments to in-group biases and cliches. They celebrated a kind of communion with their suffering readership, who found comfort in the certainties these writers gave them. This communion is grounded in ignorance. “I was alarmed by the number of white men who had shown up to vote,” the short story writer Lorrie Moore recalls of her polling place, refusing to interrogate her alarm. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan introduces us to two Trump voters she met while door-knocking for Kamala Harris in Allentown, Pennsylvania, but they turn out to be a racist and a loner, exactly the types of people we needn’t trouble ourselves over.

By contrast, almost, Kelefa Sanneh nearly achieves a self-critical reckoning with Trump’s victory. “[A]s far as we can tell, Trump’s America is a place that is more polarized by education than it used to be and less polarized by whiteness and non-whiteness—by race, properly understood.” This casual, less-than-earth-shaking observation upends a decade of opposition dogma about Trump and his supporters, a party line that The New Yorker has held with monotonous discipline. But for now, Sanneh’s “as far as we can tell” must take the place of any actual engagement with the views and priorities of any Trump voter of any background, which barely appear across tens of thousands of words from the crème de la crème of The New Yorker. The 76.7 million Americans of all races and creeds and education-levels who vaulted the president-elect to a 86-vote victory in the Electoral College appear only as concepts and caricatures to them.

To be fair, maintaining that level of intellectual ignorance is a proud tradition at the New Yorker:

Posted at 2:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 26th, 2024

QUESTION ASKED: A Whimper, Not a Bang: Where Was Antifa After Trump’s Victory?

Unlike in Europe, significant Left-wing violent riots in America don’t appear spontaneously in response to lost elections; they exist in the context of more sweeping political mobilizations that can plausibly be described by allied media as “largely peaceful.” As with Nixon and the anti-war movement, the media is the essential element in creating conditions for justifying the cause of unrest and ignoring or contextualizing violent excesses.

In this way, Antifa is useful as a fearsome tip of the spear, then melting away into a grander social justice narrative that is, on its surface, familiar and sympathetic rather than threatening. As such, all successful modern Left-wing movements in this country are framed in the language of civil rights. The successes of the Left’s modern race-oriented protest movements — Trayvon Martin (2012), Michael Brown (2014), and George Floyd (2020) — illustrate that the Left learned valuable lessons about the kind of topical triggers that work, and those that fail. The coming mass mobilization in response to Trump’s promises on immigration and deportation will be an obvious inciting event, and law enforcement needs to be prepared, especially in blue states.

In short, we didn’t see post-election violence or mass protests because the scale of Trump’s victory meant that such rioting would appear — at least temporarily — as the angry self-indulgence of a minority that had been legitimately beaten at the ballot box. But the riots will come soon enough, and Antifa will menace the streets once again. While it wouldn’t have served to activate them during or after the 2024 campaign, the Democrats’ rhetoric about fascism and Nazism is a boon to Antifa, which looks forward to being presented again (as it was memorably in 2020, storming the beach at Normandy) as “freedom fighters” in the media’s next just cause.

Related: Welcome to protest season, where the cause changes but the tactics stay the same.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 26th, 2024

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Firefly sets January launch date for first lunar lander mission.

Firefly announced Nov. 25 that it is planning to launch its Blue Ghost 1 lander mission during a six-day window in mid-January. The spacecraft will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 from Florida.
…
The mission, called “Ghost Riders in the Sky” by the company, will last about 60 days. That includes a 45-day transit to the moon where the spacecraft first operates in phasing orbits around the Earth before going to the moon and entering orbit there. The spacecraft is intended to land near Mons Latreille, a volcanic feature within Mare Crisium on the northeastern part of the near side of the moon. The lander is designed to operate for a full two-week lunar day and several hours into the lunar night.

Godspeed…

Posted at 12:43 pm by Stephen Green on Nov 26th, 2024

RIP: Jim Abrahams, ‘Airplane!,’ ‘Naked Gun’ and ‘Hot Shots!’ Master of Mirth, Dies at 80.

Jim Abrahams, the writer-director who with brothers Jerry and David Zucker turned the comedy genre on its ear with such zany efforts as Airplane!, Police Squad! and The Naked Gun films, died Tuesday. He was 80.

Abrahams died of natural causes at his home in Santa Monica, his son Joseph told The Hollywood Reporter.

The trio made their first mainstream impression by writing the sketch-filled Kentucky Fried Movie (1977), directed by John Landis in his prelude to Animal House, and they also combined for Top Secret! (1984), starring a young Val Kilmer, and Ruthless People (1986), featuring Bette Midler and Danny DeVito.

Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane!, published late last year, is an absolutely hilarious oral history of ZAZ began their career, and made their epic comedy film whose riffs are still being quoted nearly 45 years after its release.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 26th, 2024

WATCHING LEFTIST NARRATIVES BEING DESTROYED IN REAL TIME: Scott Jennings Schools CNN By Pointing Out News Reported by CNN. Note carefully the dates on these two tweets:

Surrounded by people bemoaning Elon Musk’s very existence and the fact that he owns Twitter/X, Jennings pointed out that Twitter/X is the most ideologically diverse source of news available. Both Democrats and Republicans rely on Twitter for news at essentially the same rate. Before Musk bought Twitter it was a Democrat ghetto.

We know that because CNN reported it. Harry Enten–another treasure at CNN because he breaks down public opinion polling well and in a very entertaining way–went through the numbers for all to see.

This, being inconvenient to the Narrative™ that the left wants to impose, created outrage on the panel. Scott was spewing misinformation!

This exemplifies both the bubble that liberals live in AND how that bubble gets created and maintained. No matter how the facts are laid out, the Authority™ of Journalisming entitles the practitioners of that dark art to dismiss reality and create a new one.

That was the beauty of Twitter pre-Musk. It was an ideological bubble dominated by liberal activists, maintained by censors, in which inconvenient facts were never acknowledged. Now that the ideological bubble was popped, it is an abomination that must be destroyed.

Notice also that the panel simultaneously decried the influence of billionaires in the abstract–as if news organizations aren’t often owned by billionaires (NYT, Washington Post, L.A. Times, Facebook, LinkedIn, The Atlantic… have all been or are currently owned by billionaires in whole or in part, and billionaires subsidize specialized news on topics of interest at newspapers and the Associated Press)–but then turn around and express happiness at the idea of Bill Gates owning news sources.

It’s not the principle that bothers them but the ideology. Only leftists should speak because the left is the reality to them.

Similarly, as Steve noted in the last hour, this is what happens when a leftist who previously nattered on about the horrors of “Project 2025” is actually on a panel with one of its authors:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll on Nov 26th, 2024

THE PROBLEM WITH THE MONSTER UNDER THE BED IS THAT NOBODY KNOWS WHAT IT IS:

Given a second chance, he bungled it again.

Posted at 11:41 am by Stephen Green on Nov 26th, 2024

DECLINE IS A CHOICE: Thyssenkrupp to cut 11,000 jobs at steel division in major corporate shakeup.

Germany’s largest steelmaker, a division of Thyssenkrupp AG, is under pressure from cheaper Asian competitors, high power prices and a weakening global economy, leading to operating losses in four of the past five years.

Under the restructuring, Thyssenkrupp Steel Europe (TKSE), which has a workforce of 27,000, said it would cut 11,000 jobs in total – 5,000 of which would be axed by 2030 and another 6,000 shed through spin-offs or divestitures.

The goal is to reduce personnel costs by some 10% on average in the coming years.

“Urgent measures are required to improve Thyssenkrupp Steel’s own productivity and operating efficiency, and to achieve a competitive cost level,” the company said in a statement.

Plus: “Economy Minister Robert Habeck said German-made steel should be protected, while standing by Germany’s commitment to secure the sector’s future with more climate-friendly production.”

Sorry, Minister Habeck — you can secure the sector’s future or you can impose “climate-friendly” production but you can’t do both.

Posted at 10:39 am by Stephen Green on Nov 26th, 2024
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