IT DOESN’T REQUIRE MUCH KNOWLEDGE TO SUPPORT SOCIALISM; QUITE THE OPPOSITE, IN FACT: America’s Leading Socialist Unable to Explain Socialism’s Fundamental Tenet.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
March 7, 2023
March 6, 2023
TO HEAR MY 17-YEAR-OLD TELL IT, IT ALREADY IS: College Should Be More Like Prison.
Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security prison. My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working. They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization. The classes are often the most interesting part of these men’s prison lives. In some cases, they are the only interesting part.
Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet. Cyber-cheating, even assuming they wanted to indulge in it, is impossible. But more important, they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones. My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.
My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks. I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry. The students write essays in longhand; during the pandemic I taught a correspondence class via snail mail. Some of them do read “Middlemarch,” and their teacher finds the experience far more gratifying than trying to land a 747 on a rural airstrip.
High standards mean a lot — and do read the whole thing.
IS THIS A PREVIEW OF 2028 OR 2024? DeSantis Trashes Gavin Newsom on His Home Turf.
MUSEUM PIECES [VIP]: Russia Pulling 60-Year-Old T-62 Tanks Out of Storage for Frontline Combat. “It’s unknown how many of Russia’s thousands of mothballed T-64s could be made serviceable again. But if Moscow is now hitting their even older inventory of retired T-62s, it’s easier to believe Kyiv’s claims of exceedingly high combat losses of armored vehicles.”
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TRADITION IS THE NEW SUBVERSION: I Use Painting To Challenge The Left’s Vise-Grip On The Art World.
BIDENOMICS: Housing affordability hits historic low.
Fewer than a quarter of homes listed for sale nationwide qualified as affordable for the typical U.S. household, according to a new report shared exclusively with The Hill.
The report, released Friday by real estate brokerage Redfin, found that the number of affordable listings in 2022 fell by more than half from the previous year — the largest annual drop on the company’s record dating back to 2013.
Redfin analyzed home listings in the nation’s 100 most populous metros, marking a listing as affordable if its estimated monthly mortgage payment did not exceed 30 percent of the local county’s median income.
“Housing affordability is at the lowest level in history, which is widening the wealth gap—especially between generations,” said Redfin deputy chief economist Taylor Marr.
“Many millennials were able to buy homes before or during the pandemic homebuying boom, but many others were priced out of homeownership and forced to keep renting,” Marr added.
Previously: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
SO IT EVER WAS: How Does A Leftist Hero Become A Villain? Oppose the Regime.
SOMETHING TO HIDE: Report Suggests Fauci Tried to Suppress Lab Leak Theory.
THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE WHO SHOW UP: Beijing in crisis as China faces a child-free future.
Advanced economies around the world have the same problem with ageing populations. However, the issue has been exacerbated by China’s one child policy, says Louise Loo, of Oxford Economics, which compelled couples to have only one child between 1980 and 2016.
Births have languished even after the policy was scrapped, falling to a record low of 6.77 births per 1000 people last year.
Steve Tsang, director of the China Institute at SOAS, says: “It is easier to limit growth in population by repressive means. It is much more difficult to get people to have more children by the order of the Government.”
Officials last month urged regional chiefs to come up with “bold innovations” to boost the fertility rate, reflecting the growing panic about this demographic time bomb.
China also faces permanent scarring from Covid. Beijing’s zero Covid policy, which dragged on for far longer than the rest of the world, cost it 4.7 per cent of GDP, says Loo.
“Some of that is permanently lost,” she adds.
China’s population is expected to halve by 2100 — at best.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Finally — Trump Is Hitting the Right Notes Again. “He connected with people who desperately wanted to know that someone cared about their predicament, and he shamed this clown car administration into finally at least going through the motions.”
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Blackstone Defaults: Subprime Meltdown 2?
Though off in Finland, this story should probably receive more notice due to the “mortgage-backed” angle.
Remember the 2008 Subprime Meltdown, fueled by easy taxpayer-backed Fannie Mae money and bundled subprime mortgage securities? And how all sorts of banking fatcats got bailed out and never paid a price for their shenanigans?
Well, mortgage backed assets never went away, they just moved into commercial real estate. There’s untold trillions of dollars in Commercial Mortgage-Backed Securities (CMBS) across the world, and almost no one is keeping track of them. The average retail investor probably knows less about CMBS now than they did about subprime mortgages in 2008.
And you know one of the hardest-hit sectors following the Flu Manchu lockdowns? Commercial real estate.
Noted earlier today, San Francisco’s office vacancy rate hit a record high 27.6%, and New York City is also at a record 17%.
EDITH WILSON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Jill Biden and Gisele Fetterman Really Are Two of a Kind.
BLUE CITY CITY BLUES: Salesforce seeks to cut office space at Salesforce Tower after mass layoff. “The company confirmed that it listed around 125,000 square feet across six floors for sublease in the city’s tallest building, adding another large chunk of vacant space to downtown. San Francisco’s vacancy rate hit a record high 27.6% at the end of last year, according to real estate brokerage CBRE.”
March 3, 2023
MATT MARGOLIS: The Democrats Have Lost Their Senate Majority … for Now.
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: She Used the Kitty Litter in Self-Defense. “This week we have the suspect who tried to hide from police inside the house he’d set on fire, the soda and water urine test, and a Texas freelance state trooper.”
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BIDEN IS PIVOTING FOR REELECTION, NOW THAT THE DAMAGE IS DONE: Quietly, a Huge Potential Victory for Border Security.