The California economy may seem healthy on the surface, with home prices soaring, Silicon Valley booming and the state government posting big multi-year state budget surpluses thanks to a massive surge in capital gains tax revenues and income tax revenues from tech stocks.
But that good news masks a dangerous period ahead.
In fact, California’s heavy dependency on tax payments from the rich and on the continued strength of the tech economy makes the state highly vulnerable in the event of a significant slowdown — or, worse yet, a full-bore global recession. According to Jim Doti of the A. Gary Anderson Center for Economic Forecasting at Chapman University, the probability of a recession starting late this year or next is very high.
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November is probably going to be one of the worst beatings the Democrats have ever experienced, and O’Rourke — who couldn’t win a statewide race in Texas even in the high-tide year of 2018 — is going to get smashed flatter than an armadillo trying to cross I-10 in rush hour.
An informal metric for measuring the stability of a society is the distance between reality and the official truth of the ruling regime. The more lies the regime tells, the less stable it and the society over which it rules. Official lies are a good proxy for the degree of authoritarianism within the regime. The degree of authoritarianism is a good proxy for the level of official insecurity. The more thuggish the regime the less support it enjoys, thus the more it needs to lie to the people.
At the extreme end of this metric is a place like North Korea. The regime is deeply paranoid about everything. The Kim family does not trust anyone in the ruling class and no one in the ruling class trusts anyone, especially Kim. The one thing everyone agrees upon is they cannot trust the people. This is why they get images of the tubby Kim in heroic poses or stories of him making ten holes in one playing golf. The regime feels it needs to present him as a god to intimidate the people.
On the other end of the spectrum, you get a place like Switzerland that barely has a government relative to the rest of Europe. Many Swiss residents do not know who is currently holding the position of president. It is a rotating position currently held by someone calling herself Simonetta Sommaruga. The Swiss government has no need to turn her into a rock star or make while claims about her. The official truth of Switzerland is easy for everyone to see, so they have no need to lie.
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At a time when almost everyone in the nation is affected by supply-chain problems but almost no one is riding Amtrak, the Federal Railroad Administration is frantic about how Amtrak trains are being delayed by freight trains.
After all, we can’t delay the Bidens in getting home.
On this, the second anniversary of the death of George Floyd, the evidence is now overwhelming: American elites have blood on their hands for their hysterical response to a local police blotter incident that has since brought about many thousands of incremental dead bodies on the pavement. The Floyd fiasco has been the domestic policy equivalent of the Iraq invasion: a massive, self-inflicted national wound.
The proof is in the simultaneous eruption, once the great and the good turned sharply against the police during the mostly peaceful protests, in not just black-on-black shootings, but also in black traffic fatalities. It turns out that cops being made afraid to pull over black reckless drivers and jaywalkers leads more blacks to drive badly and/or pack a pistol.
The vegan runner who lines up next to me at the start of the weekly Park Run doesn’t even wear running shoes; he runs in bare feet and those feet look like something that would grace one of Tolkien’s hobbits. This got me thinking:
“What do vegans wear on their feet?”
It transpires that they wear quite a lot on their feet and I must admit that some of it looks quite smart. If Google is to be trusted then you can get shoes that, superficially, are almost indistinguishable from leather ones and they can even be polished to a reasonable shine (with the appropriate range of vegan cleaners and polishes, of course). Apparently if you’re a vegan soldier then the army has it covered in the shape of vegan combat boots.
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There was a “diplomatic incident” in Paris yesterday when a culture-enricher had his “Allahu Akhbar” moment in the lobby of the Qatar embassy and attacked a guard, beating him and strangling him. The police were called, but could not enter the building without a formal written request from a Qatari diplomatic official. By the time the necessary formalities were completed and police entered the lobby, the guard was dead.
It goes without saying that the grisly incident is being blamed on the mental illness of the murderer.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Nothing to See Here, It’s Just Another Lunatic
I’m agnostic on the subject of how much the vast media publicity for certain crimes (such as Buffalo) encourages copycat mass killing shootings, but this case sure looks like one. Of course, while this one will get lots of coverage, it’s Mexican on Mexican, so it won’t be as enthralling to the media as white-on-black in Buffalo.
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Have you ever dreamed of belonging to the woke nomenklatura, of being free to harass and bully the deplorables to your heart’s content? It sounds like a wonderful life, and many of your contemporaries have chosen it. But before you join them, listen to this true tale. (Caveat: You may or may not be able to worm your way into the web site. If you can’t, the following summary furnishes all the pertinent facts.)
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Within a few minutes after she posted her heresy, Krista was expelled from Law Mamas. Another member then complained, “Hey, I don’t love that we all just kicked out this girl from our group for making the statement.” She was expelled, too.
Freedom of speech is not a Progressive value.
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The German judicial system has arrogated unto itself the unenviable task of determining what is correct and incorrect within Christian theology and scriptures. I hardly need to add that what will be deemed theologically correct is that which is politically correct.
Some years ago, when the idea of central bank digital currencies (CBDC) was first floated, the new all-electronic money was touted as an innovation that would make commercial transactions easier, more convenient, and more secure for the consumer. Then, when the “pandemic” hit, digital money was also promoted as a touch-free way to avoid contagion with the dreaded coronavirus.
There was always much more to the CBDCs, of course. The full potential of the new currencies is now being openly discussed at Davos as I write this. Once cash is abolished and all your income and payments are put through via CBDC, every transaction you make will be fully tracked by the government and financial institutions (between which there will no longer be any meaningful distinction). What you spend your money on will be known in detail. Your spending habits will be analyzed by AI systems, which will monitor your carbon credits and your use of non-sustainable resources. Since the currency will be tied to your individual digital identity, your ability to purchase certain goods and services may be limited when the State deems it appropriate.
Throw in your cell phone and the ubiquitous 5G surveillance, which includes facial recognition, and you will have no privacy whatsoever, just as the WEF promised. You’ll own nothing except for the limited personal items that you are allowed to possess. And you’ll be happy! All while you eat those delicious crickets, which can be prepared in a mouth-watering variety of culinary ways.
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As Robert LeFevre said, “Government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.” The American people are witnessing a grand illustration of that truth in the form of the US Air Force airlift of baby formula from Europe to the United States. The airlift is part of the Biden administration’s response to a nationwide baby formula shortage that has desperate parents searching all over for the product and even venturing to create it themselves.
As the government credits itself for racing to the rescue, most people don’t realize the baby formula crisis is largely a creation of the government itself.
In 1930 William Empson elaborated Seven Types of Ambiguity for the literary crowd. The Biden administration is adapting the concept to give us Seven Types of Confusion. We can itemize the confusion that derives from gratuitous fabrication. We also have the confusion related to the persistent assertion of the thing which is not so, as Swift puts it in Book IV of Gulliver’s Travels. We continue with the confusion that descends with advanced age.
President Biden has rendered the official American policy of strategic ambiguity regarding Taiwan into another type of confusion. Following up on the confusion we documented in “Walk right back” yesterday morning, Biden reiterated our continuing commitment to the official policy even though he himself had contradicted it in his Tokyo press conference. The White House has posted the transcript here. Unlike Professor Empson, he could not explain — deepening the confusion.
“Before the pull of technology, we would never dream of wasting time on our phones instead of jumping straight into the pool and soaking up every minute of our vacation,” Lisa Checchio, Chief Marketing Officer for Wyndham, said at the time. “But today, adults and kids are so glued to their devices that we’ve had to add more pool chairs to accommodate all the poolside swiping.”
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The drug candidate, called CF33-hNIS (aka Vaxinia), is what’s called an oncolytic virus, a genetically modified virus designed to selectively infect and kill cancer cells while sparing healthy ones.
In the case of CF33-hNIS, the modified pox virus works by entering cells and duplicating itself. Eventually, the infected cell bursts, releasing thousands of new virus particles that act as antigens, stimulating the immune system to attack nearby cancer cells.
Previous research in animal models has shown the drug can harness the immune system in this way to hunt and destroy cancer cells, but up until now no testing has been done in humans.
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For progressives, “separation of church and state” means that religious believers must forgo all attempts to influence what the state does. Secular believers have no corresponding duty to refrain from demanding that the church submit to their preferences. Accordingly, leftists are loudly condemning the Roman Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco, the Most Rev. Salvatore Cordileone, for directing the priests in his diocese to refuse the sacrament of communion to Nancy Pelosi. Whoopi Goldberg, whose theological expertise derives from playing a nun in the movies, said of the Archbishop’s action, “This is not your job, dude.” Other progressive voices were less calm and restrained.
The San Francisco Examiner forthrightly demanded that Pope Francis sack the archbishop for holding and propagating opinions that deviate from progressive orthodoxy. The church, it declares, ought to be “a place that welcomes people of all political backgrounds and all faiths” (emphasis added).
The New York Times ran a hit piece on former CBS journalist Lara Logan by Jeremy Peters, who is the paper’s go-to reporter for criticism of conservative media figures: “Former Star At CBS News Follows Path To Far Right.”
After introducing Logan as someone who had “reached the heights of American journalism….as the chief foreign affairs correspondent for CBS News,” he lamented “today Ms. Logan cuts a far different figure in American media. Instead of on national news broadcasts, she can be found as a guest on right-wing podcasts or speaking at a rally for fringe causes, promoting falsehoods about deaths from Covid vaccines and conspiracy theories about voter fraud.”
Peters characterized her supposed decline as “one of the most puzzling in the modern history of television news.” But more interesting than what Peters had to say about Logan was his assumptions about what a mainstream journalist is allowed to believe.
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The honesty gap—the difference between Virginia students’ proficiency on Virginia’s Standards of Learning tests and their documented proficiency on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which assesses student performance across the country in math, reading, science, and civics—is stark.
For example, although the state boasts a whopping 76% of eighth graders who were proficient in reading in 2019, just 33% of Virginia eighth graders scored as proficient in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.
Similarly, whereas 77% of Virginia’s eighth graders scored proficient in mathematics on the Standards of Learning in 2019, that figure drops precipitously to just 38% of eighth graders as assessed by the National Assessment of Educational Progress. The same honesty gap exists for younger students, too.
Most on the Right know that as the Woke have driven the knuckle-dragging wrong-thinkers from their precious institutions, eventually they would turn on the only ones remaining to harangue — themselves.
To whit, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) this past week turned on one of the most reliably liberal and accepting members, who had just received the prestigious award of Grand Master status at their Nebulas convention, and kicked her, and her husband who wasn’t even present, out of the convention.
It’s been a week since a mentally ill racist murdered 10 people, most of them Black Americans, in a Buffalo supermarket. In the intervening days since this horrific tragedy, many have noted how often liberal journalists and politicians have tried to pin the blame for the mass shooting not just on the shooter and his far-right racist ideology, but anyone outside their progressive circles. In what was perhaps the most extreme example of this widespread trend, the cultural warriors of Rolling Stone insisted that the isolated and largely unhinged shooter was no outlier but “a mainstream Republican.”
Of course, one finds no such blame game when a shooter comes from the far Left, or when he is an Islamic militant or a Black nationalist; the same people blaming all Republicans for the Buffalo shooter can somehow clearly see that killers like the Waukesha murderer or the Jersey City shooter are crazed outliers rather than some kind of politically charged weapon. But the minute they can blame their political opponents for murderous extremists, they lose sight of this reality.
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Despite the doomsayers who claim Georgia’s Republicans are suppressing black voters, the record turnout has effectively blown the myth to pieces. But MSNBC crackpot Nicolle Wallace and lying PBS reporter Yamiche Alcindor teamed up during Monday’s Deadline: White House to put words in the mouths of Georgia Republicans and falsely assert they think that black Americans are too dumb to know how to vote or understand “the weight of American democracy.”
Unwavering from her false narrative despite how facts were actively proving her a liar, Wallace recalled how Georgia Republican Governor “Brian Kemp’s role in voter suppression in the state of Georgia was so reprehensible” that Major League Baseball moved the All-Star game. “[They] thought that voter suppression law was so offensive, they moved the All-Star game.”
Missing from this point is the fact that the MLB was essentially bullied by the left into moving the game when, in fact, there was no voter suppression going on.
Missing the days of 2020, when angry mobs were fixtures on America’s streets? If you’re nostalgic for the arson, destruction, and looting, abortion activists are promising more of it. Back by unpopular demand, the left’s riots are set to return once the final Supreme Court ruling on Roe v. Wade is handed down.
“This will be a Summer of Rage across America,” the Women’s March vowed after protests earlier this month. “We will be ungovernable,” the radicals threatened, until the violence they bring to our cities can be replicated in every mother’s womb.
Back at the Supreme Court justices’ houses, the five conservatives (and Chief Justice John Roberts) are getting a preview of what’s to come, as crowds of abortion extremists stake out their neighborhoods with bullhorns and signs.
Goldman Sachs Research Analyst Shot Dead In NYC Subway ‘And it was just last week when the mayor pleaded with Wall Street CEOs to ride the subway to work in an effort to bring employees back to their Manhattan offices.” With results as you see them.
I took the occasion of the testimony in the Sussman trial last week to weigh “Watergate in the balance.” John reviewed what we already knew in “Hillary did it.” On Saturday, the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal — I think this is Kim Strassel’s beat as a member of the board — played it straight in the editorial “Hillary Clinton did it.”
The Journal editorial lays out the template of the Russia hoax, minus the active participation of the FBI in pursuing the Crossfire Hurricane investigation, promoting the Steele Dossier in the FISA court and the Comey briefing of Trump as well as the conditions that led to the crippling Mueller investigation.
During the 2016 Democratic primary Hillary Clinton began to enthusiastically deploy identitarian arguments against Bernie Sanders. Her media surrogates derided his supporters as straight white “brocialists”. Bernie Bros were guilty of “mansplaining” anti-capitalism to the nation’s minorities and aspiring young girlbosses. “If we broke up the big banks tomorrow, would that end racism?”, Clinton asked on the stump.
In turn, Bernie supporters came to regard identity politics as a tool wielded by Democratic elites to deflect from their critiques of American capitalism and empire. One often heard variations of the joke that what the DNC really wanted was Cruise missiles painted with rainbow flags. Years later, that joke was made grimly literal in the viral “woke CIA” ad, in which an agency analyst announced “I am a woman of colour, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who has been diagnosed with generalised anxiety disorder”. By that point, the only people around to laugh at it were conservatives and various marginal Twitter anons.
“F’s” and “v’s” belong to a group of sounds known as labiodentals. They happen when you raise your bottom lip to touch your top teeth and are used in more than half of today’s human language. But science suggests we didn’t always have this linguistic ability.
As hunter gatherers, our ancestors ate a diet that was minimally processed and required more effort to chew. As a result, by adolescence their teeth would develop what’s called an edge-to-edge bite, where the jaw is elongated so that both the bottom and top teeth are completely flush with one another.
Cue the Neolithic period, where widespread agriculture meant more soft foods like stew and bread and less laborious chewing. Over time, the slight overbite that most people are born with stayed preserved, because chewing was less of an arduous process.
Except, of course, that you can do the same thing by touching your top lip to your bottom teeth, the human lower jaw being quite versatile. Yeah, you’ll feel like Mongo The Cave Man, but you can do it.
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