YOUR GONNA NEED A BIGGER BLOG: Why Wealthy Coastal Elites Should Mind Their Own Business.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
July 28, 2022
POLAND HAS BEEN BUSILY TURNING ITSELF INTO A MAJOR REGIONAL MILITARY POWER: Poland to Buy 1,000 MBTs. Minister Błaszczak Also Outlines a Plan To Procure Extra F-35s or F-15s.
OUT WITH THE OLD SPEAK, IN WITH THE NEW: 6 terms Biden has redefined to further agenda, stigmatize opponents. “From ‘recession’ to ‘disinformation,’ the president and his team have weaponized language for political purposes.”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: NIH asks court to mask official who deleted Chinese COVID data, 19 months after outing him. “Republican senators blasted the National Institutes of Health for asking a court to retroactively seal the names of a Chinese researcher and an agency staffer involved in the deletion of data from its genetic sequencing library, calling the effort an ongoing ‘cover-up’ that ‘further underscores the agency’s shady efforts to conceal pertinent data” on the origins of COVID-19.'”
The Biden Administration is to China what San Francisco is to shoplifters.
THE R-WORD: Another Telltale Sign That the Recession Has Arrived. “Whether or not the White House cares to refer to the current situation as a recession, the fact is that between the crushing inflation, soaring interest rates, and unaffordable fuel prices, individuals and businesses are getting clobbered. And they are changing their behaviors.”
HE’S EXCEEDING EXPECTATIONS! So, It Turns Out That Biden Video Was Worse Than We Initially Knew.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Biden Thinks You’re Stupid About the Economy Because He’s Stupid About the Economy. “It’s a relief to know that we’re not suffering like some Third World you-know-what hole. We should all feel a lot of trepidation though, as Team Biden is determined to turn us into one.”
THIS SEEMS LIKE IT OUGHT TO BE A BIGGER STORY: Scenes From China’s Slow-Motion Collapse. “Remember the bank runs in China story after all those bank accounts in Hunan were frozen? I’ve been looking for signs of wider contagion amidst the Chinese banking sector, and mostly haven’t seen it. But I have seen a lot of other cracks appear in China’s overall economic system, so here’s a roundup.”
WE’RE LAUGHING AT THEM, NOT WITH THEM: The Left Can’t Meme: Stacey Abrams Edition.
SCOTT MCKAY: No, America Isn’t Over. “But a political era — that of the New Deal Democrats — is coming to its inglorious end.”
PJ MEDIA VIP ROUNDUP: Don’t forget that VODKAPUNDIT promo code if you’ve been thinking of joining us.
Matt Margolis: Cruz Says ‘Democrats Are Openly Racist,’ and It’s True. “Modest gains by Republicans in support among Hispanic and African-American voters significantly threaten the electoral prospects of Democrats.”
Megan Fox: I Do Not Consent to Public Displays of Kink and I Don’t Care Where You Fall On the Oppression Meter. “It’s time to have this conversation, folks. It’s time to talk about kink.”
Yours Truly: From World War III to Ukraine: Are the Russians &#%-(@^ Crazy? “Forgive the silly headline, but it was the best this history nerd could come up with after a recent news report had me going on a deep dive into the bad old days of the Cold War.”
July 27, 2022
HMM: DARPA’s new missile hints at truly game-changing technology. “This propulsion system, known as a rotation detonation engine (RDE), has the potential to be lighter than existing jet engines while offering a significant boost in power output, range, and fuel efficiency.”
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Biden Admin Sued for Holding School Lunch Money Hostage Over Transgender Policies.
PRODUCTION IS DOWN, RESERVES ARE DOWN — WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG? Biden Administration to Sell 20 Million More Barrels of Oil From Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
IF YOU HAVE TO PAY PEOPLE TO BUY SOMETHING AND THEY STILL WON’T…:EVs are Big in Colorado; But Are They Really?
As of Apr 1, Colorado has 51,645 EVs. With total state vehicle registrations near 2 million for the state, that’s approaching 3%. Keep in mind, though, that even in 2016, 17,155 EVs in Colorado were publicly owned: many were bought by the government. That’s about one-third of all EVs. As an artificial indication of widespread popularity, that shows a problem.
EVs can curb carbon pollution output. The level of cost, the level of planning, the level of extensive, highly detailed legislation, and public lobbying involved are not matching the public’s interest. Even the Colorado Sun noted as much. “These things won’t sell themselves, according to a new series of public-private partnerships that say retiring gas vehicles to stop climate change can’t be left to the free market.”
Conservation is impossible without trade-offs. Apocalyptic climate predictions and changes in temperature have long been leveraged as ways to end the debate over trade-offs. That strategy’s effectiveness has been mixed. Looking closely at EVs, at Colorado drivers’ needs, the state’s weather, and the real-world money calculus, electric cars are a hard sell. Most citizens are, with reason, not springing for an electric vehicle even with a slightly better local infrastructure to support it.
Lots of hard data in this article. Worth your time.
JOANNE JACOBS: Why teachers quit. “Very few said pressure from parents on curriculum or teaching was a major reason for leaving their jobs.”
LINCOLN BROWN: Tramps Like Bruce… “I think about Springsteen now as I see the small businesses that have closed and the growing number of people concerned about how they are going to live, now that his party is in power. I am sure he sleeps soundly at night knowing that the deplorables about whom he used to sing will pay the freight for the Left’s brave new world. No doubt, the struggles of the dispossessed do not reach his ears. After all, they are racist lowlifes. They deserve what they get for not being him.”
HMM: China Has a Crisis Brewing – Will It Be the Final Straw for Global Economy?
Last year, China’s largest real estate company, Evergrande, with a debt of nearly $300 bn, defaulted on its bond repayments. Real estate is now sinking the whole country. The sector contributes more than 25% to the Chinese GDP. Over the years, China has created a structurally imbalanced economy with large exposure to real estate. As much as 78% of household wealth is in the form of real estate holdings. Families pool in resources to buy homes, and thus house ownership has a huge significance for the Chinese people. Since last week, homeowners have been refusing to pay mortgage EMIs in 91 cities involving more than 300 projects, as developers have failed to deliver homes. China may be heading for an encore of the 2008 subprime crisis.
China’s Economy May Be ‘Slowing Down’, But Don’t Write Off BRI Yet
The total banking exposure to real estate stands at a whopping $9.2 trillion. Default by homebuyers and developers will spin up major banking stress in China, which is likely to have a global impact. For a couple of months now, rural banks in Henan have frozen the deposits of the public as they are unable to pay. Local politicians are protecting the defaulting banks amid charges of diversion of funds. Shockingly, the Bank of China has declared these deposits as ‘investment products’ and they can’t be withdrawn.China is behaving like a classic socialist economy, where no one owns anything and everything belongs to the state. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has deployed tanks on the streets to keep away people whose deposits have been frozen by the defaulting banks. The military and the police are protecting the defaulting banks and developers against citizens, who are now at risk of losing their life savings.
There’s a two-decade-old cottage industry based on “China is going to collapse at any moment now and this time we mean it.”
But the CCP isn’t as wise or as strong as it pretends to be, either.
YES: Three Cheers for the Patriarchy.
My second grade teacher, Mrs. Heron, once called me a sexist. I had claimed that boys were better than girls at all the sports I knew: baseball, football, and kickball, dodgeball, basketball, and soccer. And that opinion, I was told in front of twenty-five fellow classmates, was verboten.
But even to an eight-year-old in 1991, wasn’t it undeniable? The boys were bigger and more aggressive. They ran faster. They threw harder and could kick the ball farther. I saw it everyday on the playground. What was wrong with stating the obvious? It wasn’t like I was saying all girls were worse at everything. I even knew some girls were more athletic than many boys. But any fool could see that if the best boys faced the best girls at any of those sports, it would be a rout.
Nevertheless, even then, with the Cold War winding down in the latter years of George H.W. Bush’s presidential term, an irrational gender ideology that told little boys and girls to ignore, if not deny, the realities of biology was seeping into American public schools. Little did I know it had already affected an entire generation of college graduates. Thirty years later, it now dominates all of America’s elite institutions. Indeed, questioning it could even get you fired. Millions of Americans are told, nay coerced, to refute the testimony of their eyes.
Read the whole thing.