EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Another #Bidenomics Update: CA Wines Could Be at a ‘Breaking Point.’

An extinction-level event has not come to pass — yet. But regardless of the winery survival rate, it’s become clear in 2024 that the nature of the California wine industry has fundamentally changed. After decades of unfettered growth beginning in the 1990s, wine consumption started to flatten around 2018. Now, following what appeared to be a spike during the pandemic, it’s in dramatic decline.
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The elephant in the room is #Bidenomics – the hideous state of the economy thanks to inflationary policies. For many people, the extra funds available to indulge in life’s nicer things are no longer available, having been eaten by the cost of living and the plunging value of the dollar.

There’s the cost of CA wines compared to what’s coming out of Europe. CA produces a lot less volume than its European counterparts, for one thing, and as you can imagine, the overhead in Socialist Central is enormous.

California wines, overall, used to enjoy a value proposition over the imports but that’s changing, too.

KEVIN DOWNEY JR: Want Spies With That? Chinese and Iranian Moles Are Posing As DoorDash Drivers. “Chinese nationals tried to squeeze onto military bases in the U.S. roughly 100 times just in 2023, roughly once every three or four days. They sometimes pose as DoorDash drivers who have ‘wandered off course’ and ‘accidentally’ showed up at a secret nuclear site.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The Kurt Schlichter scenario is looking more plausible all the time.

AT AMAZON, Shop the Book Sale. #CommissionEarned

#RESIST: Texas Sues Biden Administration Over EV Trucking Mandates. “Better to get this law thrown out now than to wait until food become unaffordable because there aren’t enough reliable trucks to deliver it.”

MY LATEST SUBSTACK ESSAY: Harrison Butker, Harbinger?

UPDATE: Via a lefty friend’s Facebook page, here’s the full text of the speech, which my friend comments is much less objectionable than the press accounts. Yeah, go figure. He comments: “I don’t agree with it in its entirety, but I think that overall it’s splendid. And I think it’s a pretty good bet that of all the commencement speeches that will be given this year, this is the only one that will be remembered next year, and for quite a few years to come.”

WELL, BYE: ‘Hundreds’ of Columbia faculty to go on strike if police not removed from campus.

YOU CAN’T SPELL “CAVEAT EMPTOR” WITHOUT AN E AND A V: How About a Cheap Used Car? It’s Only Two Years Old, But There’s a Catch…

PSYCHO: Masked pro-Hamas activists show up at UMich regents’ homes in middle of the night, lay ‘fake corpses’ on lawn: Anti-Israel occupiers at the University of Michigan showed up at the homes of several regents early Wednesday morning and “staged protests,” by setting up an encampment on their lawn.

IT HAS TO DIE SOMEWHERE SO IT MIGHT AS WELL BE NOW AND IN GAZA: Nation Building’s Last Stand in Gaza.

Israel has been stuck living next door to a failed thirty year nation-building experiment gone bad. And everyone in the international community is worried that the Oct 7 war will see it taken apart.

Lately the nation building experts have taken to warning that Israel is doing it the wrong way. Former CIA Director David Petraeus who also oversaw American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been arguing that Israel needs to pivot to a “counterinsurgency” model. And then we’re back to “winning hearts and minds” instead of actually trying to win a war.

The Biden administration has never stopped insisting that Israel needs a “day after” plan for rebuilding Gaza under a PLO government and some “moderate” terrorists from Hamas. Three generations after it became the norm, fighting a war without nation building as an endgame is so impossible that warfare experts can’t even understand what they’re seeing in Israel.

But among all the other problems with nation building is that it doesn’t work. And the Israelis who have been living next to the original chernobyl of nation building know it better than anyone.

Nation building has failed in every single Muslim country it’s been tried, not just by the United States after 9/11, but by the British between WWI and WWII. The entire Middle East is one long great nation building disaster shaped by primeval nation building experiments such as the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Hashemite monarchies and finally the recession of colonialism.

Plus: “After two decades of failing to win a war (because we didn’t even try) maybe it’s time to let the Israelis give it a shot. What’s the worst that could happen? Gaza will be overrun by Islamic terrorists? Muslims will hate us and try to kill us? There will be op-eds in the New York Times?”

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The ‘Biden-Hamas 2024’ Campaign Isn’t Doing So Well. “Obviously, I didn’t pay any attention to the news while I was gone. I began to catch up a little as I headed to LaGuardia on Wednesday. As I was having a beer at the airport, the television nearest me had the news on. When they got around to the Trump-Biden debate news, a young Hispanic man who worked at the bar turned to me and said, ‘I’m getting popcorn for this.’ Then he leaned over to me and said, ‘I think Trump is going to win in a landslide.'”

ANOTHER BREWING CRISIS BY DESIGN: More Chinese Nationals Illegally Entered The U.S. In Two Days This Month Than In All Of 2021. “The CCP leadership’s chemical and political warfare against the U.S. coincides with a surge in the number of Chinese illegal aliens crossing the southern border without authorization. According to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection, more than 10,000 Chinese unlawful aliens have been apprehended since October 2022, compared to fewer than 500 in the same period in 2021. This increase may be attributed to various factors, such as the economic and social uncertainties and the limited personal freedoms in China, the demand for cheap labor, and the effectiveness of smugglers already positioned in the U.S.”

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): The Kurt Schlichter scenario is looking more plausible, too.

WHY IS HARVARD SUCH A CESSPIT OF ANTISEMITISM? BECAUSE IT CHOOSES TO BE. Harvard Ignored Its In-House Anti-Semitism Panel and Failed To Address Student Harassment, Congressional Report Finds: Incidents of anti-Semitic harassment on Harvard campus were elevated to school’s top brass but left unaddressed.

FLIGHT FROM REALITY: Scottish Green Party Expels 13 Members for Saying ‘Sex Is a Biological Reality.’ Somewhere, the Gods of the Copybook Headings frown and nod. “Denial of objective truth is one of the signs of a society’s downfall.”

AT AMAZON, Shop the Memorial Day Sale. #CommissionEarned

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ABOUT CHURCH? Empty pews are becoming a more common sight in thousands of churches across the country and the average age of attendees is steadily going older. But the latest video on HillFaith from the Colson Center offers three solid reasons why going to church on Sunday is good medicine for body and soul.

NO. NEXT QUESTION? Can Biden’s Military Tear Itself Away From Drag Shows Long Enough to Deal With Terrorist Threats?

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Inside Bob Casey’s Troubling Relationship with Erdogan’s Best Friend in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. “Murat Güzel, a prolific Democratic donor, credits Bob Casey with helping him get a start in politics. Casey’s wife, Terese, recently thanked Güzel for a $100,000 donation to another Pennsylvania committee.”

DON SURBER: The Summer of Correction: The political pendulum swings back like Miley Cyrus on a Wrecking Ball.

YOU KNOW, IF MY SHOCKED FACE GETS THESE MANY OUTINGS IT’S GOING TO NEED REPAIR:  NIH official finally admits taxpayers funded gain-of-function research in Wuhan — after years of denials.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): A lot of modified limited hanging-out going on now while people’s attention is focused on other things. See, e.g., Exclusive: Former Top Public Health Official Admits Covid Origins Not Settled, No Science to Back Social-Distance Guidance.

MATTHEW SCHMITZ: The New Midlife Crisis.

Works of popular art have begun to document the new crisis. Barbie, the 2023 blockbuster directed by Greta Gerwig, is a modern Pinocchio story. Initially, Barbie is a deathless, sexless being—unconcerned with men or children, immune to thoughts of mortality. No mere doll, she is the model career woman. “She has her own money, her own house, her own car, her own career. Because Barbie can be anything, women can be anything.” She is living Betty Friedan’s dream. But when Barbie becomes human, she must come to terms with biological realities. The film ends with her visit to an ob-gyn. In real life, the visits are to IVF clinics.

Men have much more time on their clocks, a fact that allows millennial males now entering middle age to defer any deliberation about what they want out of life. Instead of a second adolescence, they seem determined to enjoy perpetual adolescence. (Is it any wonder that female millennial professionals are desperate when they wake up at age thirty-five and realize they want a husband?) But how long can men defer the reckoning? The Worst Person in the World, a 2021 film by the Norwegian director Joachim Trier, offers an answer. It features a man who suddenly learns he has cancer. He is the paragon of creative-class success, an underground comic-book artist whose most famous creation has been turned into a movie. But he never managed to have the children he wanted. He lost the woman he loved. All he has left are his collections of comic books and records.

Baby Boomers got married, owned homes, and had kids. The price was conformity. No doubt it could be stultifying. But for most people, the crisis was mild. You could waste money on a sports car and still have grandchildren someday. That was true even if your affairs led to a messy divorce. What of my generation?

They threw the baby out with the bathwater.

FASTER PLEASE: ‘Insubordination’: College President Suspended for Agreeing to Protesters.’

WELL, HE IS, OR AT LEAST THE PEOPLE BEHIND HIM ARE: Chaos Candidate: Voters increasingly view Joe Biden as the source of America’s unraveling. “Biden’s immigration and inflation policies have hit the working class hard. Poorer communities are less able to insulate themselves from the disruptions caused by mass migration, and inflation cuts deeper when you’re barely making ends meet. The polarizing identity politics favored by the administration serves as a signaling mechanism for the college-educated elite but alienates many blue-collar families.”

VICTORIA TAFT WITH ANOTHER TRIAL UPDATE: Trump’s Long-Time Nemesis Sends Love Notes to Michael Cohen During His Testimony.

ELECTION INTERFERENCE AND DISINFORMATION: “The nation was largely denied information about the Biden family business in 2020, thanks to a compliant press corps, the censorship of social media, and a partisan cabal of former intelligence officials.”

OH, COME ON, WHO AMONG US HASN’T WANTED TO DO THAT?  Pro-Trump artist releases 100 penis-shaped balloons with faces of Alvin Bragg, Judge Merchan on them.