GENERALS JANUARY AND FEBRUARY REPORTING FOR DUTY: Russia ‘Revs’ Up for Massive Winter Offensive In Eastern & Southern Ukraine.
Archive for 2024
January 19, 2024
TWO KINDS OF AMERICANS: There is former Planned Parenthood Director/now pro-life activist Abby Johnson and Anthony Fauci, the Richard Rich of the ruling American elite. My latest PJ Media column poses the question: Which type of American would you prefer to win the current civil war?
CREEPING, AND CREEPY: The Creeping Evil of Davos.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Inflation is ‘far from dead’: Why one large asset manager doubts U.S. can hit 2%.
One of Solloway’s biggest takeaways is that wage pressures across major economies are unlikely to subside by enough to be consistent with central banks’ inflation mandates. He is skeptical that U.S. inflation will settle around the Federal Reserve’s 2% target based on a few assumptions, one of which is that oil price declines seen over the past year are not likely be repeated in 2024. Solloway also questions the need for any rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.
“The risks of an escalation in the Middle East are still higher than anybody should feel comfortable with, and actual military conflict could certainly lead to a sharp, short-term rise in oil prices and another supply shock,” Solloway said via phone on Thursday. Such a supply shock “could lead to a ratcheting up of inflation expectations.”
Following the December U.S. consumer-price index reading on Jan. 11 and Thursday’s initial jobless claims data, “there doesn’t seem to be much weakness in the economic numbers looking out for the next six months,” he said. “Inflation between 3% and 4% is a more-than-likely event, and markets are not prepared for that after the last six months of good inflation readings.”
Once unleashed, inflation can be very difficult to tame. It takes some severe pain to really get the job done but, so far, we’ve only experienced some discomfort.
WHAT WOULD YOU SAY? About whether there are other life-forms in the uncharted immensity of the universe, that is. The latest “What Would You Say” video from the Colson Center on HillFaith makes a challenging case that the Bible does NOT teach we are the only living beings in the universe. Bet you didn’t expect that!
THE SINGLE BIGGEST THREAT I HAVE SEEN TO FREE SPEECH AND ACADEMIC FREEDOM (from my latest Substack):
[F]rom a legislative or regulatory standpoint, the single biggest threat I have seen to free speech and academic freedom on campus has been the DEI requirements implemented by the California Community Colleges system. In an effort to combat these requirements, FIRE sued the California Community Colleges Chancellor and the members of its Board of Governors, as well as the State Center Community College District.
In the case, FIRE is representing six tenured professors, each of whom teach at one of three Fresno-area community colleges within the State Center Community College District. Under the new regulations, all of the more-than-54,000 professors who teach in the system must incorporate “anti-racist” viewpoints into classroom teaching and pledge allegiance to contested ideological viewpoints. This includes requiring professors to “acknowledge” that “cultural and social identities are diverse, fluid, and intersectional,” and to develop “knowledge of the intersectionality of social identities and the multiple axes of oppression that people from different racial, ethnic, and other minoritized groups face.”
Under these regulations, faculty performance and tenure will also be evaluated based on professors’ commitment to and promotion of these government-mandated viewpoints. As our client, Reedley College professor Bill Blanken, said, “I’m a professor of chemistry. How am I supposed to incorporate DEI into my classroom instruction? What’s the ‘anti-racist’ perspective on the atomic mass of boron?”
BE COMFORTABLE: ComfiLife Knee Pillow for Side Sleepers. #CommissionEarned
“NO LABELS,” NO ACCESS: No Labels Party Asks Justice Department to Investigate ‘Conspiracy’ to Block Ballot Efforts.
CUNY FACULTY TAKE ON THEIR UNION. Debates about unionization aside, it’s malpractice for union leaders in NYC to be taking aggressive positions about the Israel-Hamas conflict. It has no effect on the war and no benefit for the workers it represents. Yet unions keep doing this stuff, and then wondering why they keep losing members and influence. I’ve talked to enough faculty members to know that they would really appreciate it if their unions laser-focused on getting them good pay and protecting their academic freedom rights.
CLOWARD AND PIVEN SMILE: Denver hospital system may collapse due to migrant crisis: ‘We are turning down patients.’ “Eight-thousand migrants from Central America accounted for approximately 20,000 visits in 2023. Denver Health asked the Federal Emergency Management Agency to provide funds for immigrants’ medical costs. The state and federal governments aren’t reimbursing the hospital, which spent $136 million for patients who didn’t pay.”
“SCHOLARS:” Scholars call for ‘social justice’ in civil engineering courses. Chase the Wokies out.
AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK! ‘Harvard Dialogues’ taps power of respectful debate.
AT AMAZON, Shop the Winter Sale. #CommissionEarned
IT ISN’T JUST SAN FRANCISCO: Blackstone is desperately trying to shift Manhattan office tower at HALF price after 26-storey building’s value tumbled from $605MILLION to $150MILLION.
The collapse has been pronounced in the biggest cities with DC facing a 21.1 percent vacancy rate and San Francisco’s 34 percent.
It has led to a 35 percent fall in office prices from their peak in early 2022 and left banks vulnerable to billions of dollars in shaky loans.
About $117 billion worth is expected to be due this year and needs to be repaid or refinanced, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association.
Economists last month found 40 per cent of office loans on bank balance sheets were underwater – owing more than the property is worth.
Smaller regional banks who loaned the money to buy them could themselves be at risk if the loans default as they are not big enough to handle the losses.
Blackstone bought the 600,000-square-foot property between 55th and 56th streets from real-estate investment trust Vornado with a $308million mortgage and began a major re-fit of the historic building.
It stopped paying the mortgage in March 2022 and occupancy had fallen to an eye-watering 7.4 percent by September of last year.
That’s a 7.4 occupancy rate, not a vacancy rate.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Antony Blinken Is the Worst Sec. of State Not Named Hillary Clinton. “Westerners who advocate for any kind of capitulation — which a Palestinian state is — to Hamas, Hezbollah, or any of the other Iranian-funded terrorist savage organizations are traveling in realms of delusion heretofore unseen. None of those groups are going to be mollified by being given a little more land and a cafeteria pass at the United Nations.”
IT’S A GAS, GAS, GAS: EV Sales Run Out of Juice in Europe as Germans Tighten Belts.
Automotive executives in Germany have been warning about an approaching cliff in EV sales for months, blaming the impending gloom on a combination of high manufacturing costs at home and a government decision to end incentives for consumers.
The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association, known as ACEA, said Thursday that sales of new EVs collapsed in Germany last month, when fully electric-car sales plunged 48% and plug-in hybrid sales tumbled 74%. Overall, new-car sales in the country declined 23% in December, compared with growth rates of 14.5% and 11% in France and Spain respectively.
The ACEA data showed that most of Europe was either still growing or muddling through in December as German car sales ran off the road. New-car registrations in the region, a proxy for actual sales, fell 3.3% in December compared with a year ago. Registrations finished the month at about 867,000. Sales rose 14% to 10.5 million for the entire year.
Why do Germans need cars at all when the country seems obsessed with deindustrializing?
TO BE FAIR, RIDICULOUS IS BETTER THAN YOU SHOULD EXPECT FROM BLINKEN: Blinken Unveils Grand Plan for Mideast Peace, and Yes, It’s Ridiculous. “Blinken unveiled his grand plan for Middle East peace: a Palestinian state. Yes, that’s right: Hamas murdered 1,200 Israelis, many in unimaginably gruesome ways, with Palestinian civilians gleefully cheering them on, and Blinken wants them to end up being the ones who emerge the winners from this present conflict.”
As an incentive for good behavior, the Arabs of Gaza and the West Bank shouldn’t be allowed a state until they’ve shown they can run their territories decently.
JUST LIKE BIDEN MADE OUR SOUTHERN BORDER: Soros Prosecutors = Paradise For Sex Traffickers. “It isn’t just petty criminals and the psychotic that soft-on-crime, Soros-backed DAs have opened the door for. It’s also made blue cities paradise for sex traffickers.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Year the Future Disappeared.
JOEL KOTKIN: Let America Sprawl: Planners’ preference for urban density should not supersede Americans’ preferences for suburban or exurban living. “America today is overwhelmingly a post-urban nation heavily concentrated in suburbs, exurbs, and even small towns. Across the entire nation, 92 percent of the population lives in counties with typical suburban population densities. In contrast, the urban cores, with population densities of at least 7,500 per square mile, accounted for barely 4 percent of the population, mostly located in and around New York City. These trends reflect deep-seated preferences. . . . These trends horrify many academics, city planners, big-city developers, and environmentalists. Opposition to car-oriented suburban development, notes historian Robert Bruegmann, reminded him of the Duke of Wellington’s complaint that trains would ‘only encourage the common people to move around needlessly.'”
Urban planners have not shown any particular skills at, you know, urban planning, as the squalid state of our cities today indicates.
Flashback: Learning to Love Sprawl. A column based on William Bruegmann’s Sprawl: A Compact History. “Rich people have always wanted to sprawl. . . . Sprawl didn’t become a problem until the wealthy and powerful were joined by the hoi polloi. Thanks to greater wealth and improvements in transportation, they were able to move from teeming tenements to less-urban settings. Once this started to happen — before the automobile hit the scene, and beginning outside the United States — social critics began to complain that sprawl was ruining pristine landscapes, and destroying the charm of urban life.”
It’s always been this way.
But that’s been the history of environmental activism from the beginning: rich white people doing well at the expense of the lower classes. In a 1977 Harper’s article, William Tucker explored the history of what’s regarded as the first big environmental movement in America: the opposition to Con Edison’s Storm King pumped-storage project. The project was designed to save energy costs and make it easier for Con Ed to handle summertime peak demand. It would also have provided a lot of jobs in a depressed area.
The catch is, it would have spoiled the views from rich people’s estates in the nearby mountains. As Tucker reports at length, those affluent landowners constructed an entire edifice of opposition to Storm King, for the most selfish of reasons. He quotes a local mayor, who was told by one of the landowners, “We’ve got it nice and peaceful up here, why do you want to spoil it?” The mayor reported, “I bit my tongue and didn’t say anything, but what I wanted to say was ‘What about all the little people down there in the village who need this plant? Did you ever think about them?’” No.
Hiring big law firms and elite PR firms, along with enlisting celebrities like Pete Seeger, who wrote a song about the mountain, the landowners managed to turn a selfish desire not to have to look at electric power lines that would benefit millions into a quasi-religious crusade on behalf of Nature. The plant was stopped, property values were protected and only the little people suffered.
It’s always the same. “Green Jim Crow,” as some call it.