“Not all of the white working class struggles,” writes J.D. Vance, Ohio Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy. Across his state’s eastern border in Pennsylvania, John Fetterman epitomizes this assertion, to the extent he can be called “working-class” at all. Fetterman, with a net worth of $800,000, would have to be elegized as a kind of “Main Line,” if not exactly “Beverly” Hillbilly.
LARPing as a steelworker cum coal miner, Fetterman has been elevated by the key Democratic establishment institutions—the media, corporate world, academia, and Hollywood—to the status of demigod; one might call it the Zelensky treatment. Having ignored the white working class for so long, these institutions are dedicated to the illusion Fetterman can restore these benighted voters to the Democratic fold. Fetterman allows Democrat elites the deluded self-assurance that they still speak for the working class and align with its interests. Now, after a debate performance that will enter the annals of American political blunders, they are doubling down in support of their man.
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Despite his “working-class” posture, Fetterman did not struggle, at least financially. His tattoos and Carhartt apparel don’t conceal his graduate degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School. His family’s wealth has allowed him to maintain his hobby of the mayoralty of a minuscule municipality, which didn’t fare well under his watch. Contrast him with North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson, who worked in a factory before his political career. Fetterman is a giant of a man who wears the right clothing and sports the right facial hair and tattoos, but he isn’t “blue-collar Pennsylvania” any more than Mehmet Oz.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Comical Fetterman Mystique
Sometimes it’s wrong to begin a phrase with the word “just”. I offer as evidence two such situations. I think there’s a common thread to be drawn.
My wife works at a company that is often buttfucked by consultants and outside vendors, leaving her and her overworked colleagues to clean up the mess. Each such mess is usually introduced with the patent phrase “Oh just do X”, where X is some process that inevitably fails to work as advertised. Handwavium then generally ensues.
The great day is upon us. It used to be that the media would roll out some long serving geezers to give a lecture about the beauty of democracy. They would wax poetic about the wonderfulness of ordinary citizens doing their civic duty. Even though we may not like the results, we had to respect the process. That was when the results never questioned the elite consensus. These days the media rolls out conspiracy theorists telling us half the voters are actually Russian bots.
That will be the story tonight. The bad guys are expected to take it on the chin as normal people manage to outnumber the dead at the ballot box. The official line now is that the only way to preserve democracy is to have a one-party state. The Los Angeles Times makes this point in their fatwah against the Republicans. The Atlantic tells us that the Republicans will immediately implement a police state after the election, followed by the return of everyone’s favorite uncle.
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As Tucker pointed out, you will know the election is rigged if brain damaged hobo wins tonight.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Ivy Day In The Committee Room
The Idaho stop is the common name for laws that allow cyclists to treat a stop sign as a yield sign, and a red light as a stop sign. It first became law in Idaho in 1982, but was not adopted elsewhere until Delaware adopted a limited stop-as-yield law, the “Delaware Yield”, in 2017. Arkansas was the second state to legalize both stop-as-yield and red light-as-stop in April 2019. Studies in Delaware and Idaho have shown significant decreases in crashes at stop-controlled intersections.
This appears merely to legalize existing behavior on the part of bicyclists. I have yet to see anybody on a bicycle pay attention to either a stop sign or a red light.
The 2022 midterm election is once again characterized by extreme polarization between the parties. As Statista’s Katharina Buchholz details below, despite moderate positions gaining slightly this year, an annual survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs shows that moderates are in the minority in both parties the United States.
In July, 42 percent of self-described Democrats said they were moderates or conservatives, opposite 58 percent who considered themselves liberals. The gap is even bigger in the Republican Party, where 77 percent identified as conservatives and only 23 percent said of themselves that they were moderates or liberals. According to this survey, this makes Republicans in fact a whole lot more conservative than Democrats are liberal.
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Proving once again that she was only hired so the Biden administration could fill their diversity quota, President Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre struggled through another painful and cringeworthy press conference where she had difficulty stringing coherent sentences together in order to answer simple questions from reporters in the briefing room.
The following video report from Germany is the clearest evidence to date that migrant invasion is more than just a rag-tag bunch of impoverished third-worlders seeking to escape oppression, and more than just economic migrants hoping for a better life. It’s a deliberately-organized invasion of armed young men.
The orders given to the border police to hold off from interdicting the arms suppliers come from somewhere further up the chain of command. Why are such orders being issued? In order to answer that question we would have to figure out the answer to an additional question: Cui bono?
What we are seeing now is the execution of a carefully-crafted plan. I’m not privy to enough intelligence information to specify who the planners are, nor exactly what final outcome they intend. But the dénouement which will soon be arriving in Europe — and in the United States, in a slightly different form — is clearly a deliberate action.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Shock Troops of the Great Replacement
My mate and I have noted our supply of various spirits is running out just in time for the holidays. What this means is undertaking a two-hour road trip to an adjacent state where we can shop in a pleasant, supermarket-style store stocked with spirits and wine from across the country and around the world. The knowledgeable staff will help us choose new brands based on our tastes. We will drop several hundred dollars and return across the river with enough to get through the long, dreary winter. I will try and find a good brand of cinnamon whisky which, in my experience, is a highly effective cold medicine.
We cannot get this in our home state. Why? Because our state has a “Liquor Control Commission,” a relic of Progressive and Prohibition-Era socialism that “appoints private businesses to act as its agents and sell its products in exchange for a commission.” In effect, it protects a crony market of crappy, hole-in-the-wall liquor stores staffed by surly, resentful employees, and limits beverage selections to those it deems worthy of being sold in our state. It also regulates what brands of liquor can be distributed within the state, which is why (I suspect) the only cinnamon whisky on sale around here is ‘Fireball.’ Which is… not that good.
The store we go to is part of a national chain. The reason they do not operate in this state is because of this part of the Liquor Commission’s power: “Normal proof spirits (>21% ABV) are sold only in a limited number of agent stores.” I imagine securing a permit to be one of those “limited number of agent stores” is a hotbed of paybacks and backroom deals with some organized crime thrown in.
Country Squire readers will recall Australia’s terrifying Black Summer, 2019/20, when massive bush fires burned some 35 million acres, destroyed an estimated 3 billion vertebrates (perhaps driving a number to extinction), wrecked scores of irreplaceable rock paintings, wiped out 3000 buildings and, sadly, 47 people died. The tragedy may have cost Australia as much as A$80 billion.
Now research has revealed the cause of this catastrophe. In a work entitled “How 1970s conservation laws turned Australia into a tinderbox” a number of researchers from major academic institutions across Australia and elsewhere have published their findings in MDPI, the largest open-access, peer reviewed publication in the world. This, then, is grown-up, serious, local scientific analysis of a truly dreadful event.
The reason for the ferocity and extent of the fires is now clear. Detailed findings for one of the worst affected areas found that before the 1970s there were fewer bushfires, while after the 1970s, they became more prevalent, eventually resulting in the horror of the Black Summer. So, what changed in 1970? This new research demonstrates that the pivot point was legislation, introduced in the 1970s, based on the trendy idea that –
“Nature should be left to grow freely without human intervention”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on A Burning Issue
Few regions have been more consistently Democratic than the West Coast. Even compared with the Northeast, where Republicans occasionally win governors’ offices, the appropriately named “left coast” has been adamantine in its progressivism. Republicans haven’t won statewide office in California in years; in Oregon, it’s decades. Washington has elected a Republican secretary of state, but she now serves in the Biden administration. And the region’s major cities are overwhelmingly blue.
That could be changing, at least a bit. As cities from Seattle and Portland to San Francisco and Los Angeles fight crime and disorder, something of a political rebellion has broken out. One progressive fashion entrepreneur has called San Francisco “a city of chaos,” where his employees are not safe. The city, by some estimates, has deteriorated further and faster than virtually any urban area in the country. Within the last year, though, San Francisco recalled its progressive district attorney, Chesa Boudin, as well as left-wing members of the city school board. Meantime, remarkably, Seattle elected a Republican as city attorney, and Los Angeles district attorney George Gascón has faced backlash, and a possible recall. Voters have a chance to continue this rebellion this week.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on West Coast Blues
I was recently asked by a former colleague why I had increased my exposure to certain sectors in the equity market. After all, the information that had informed my decisions must already be priced in since the market is efficient, he argued. One could spend plenty of ink on the definitions of market efficiency as is usual in academia, but let’s just not. Instead, I’d like to argue that the market, at least important parts of it, may have become notably less efficient due to changes to the information landscape.
Many may be familiar with the concept tragedy of the commons. Jointly used land (commons) tends to be overused, polluted, and so on. Today’s information landscape actually resembles such a common. Today’s information commons has however become limited (reduced flora and fauna) and less valuable (the soil has been depleted), for several reasons.
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We hear the lament from the Left continually, even more so as election season dawns, and endlessly as election day approaches: “If you vote for the Republican, it will mark the end of democracy.”
We know this mantra by now. Trump tried to destroy democracy not only on January 6 but on the day he was born, actually on the day he was conceived. Rudi Giuliani is a threat to democracy. Steve Bannon is a threat to democracy. Fox News is a threat to democracy. The conservative columnists at the New York Times and Washington Post are threats to democracy. Sean Hannity. Tucker Carlson. Now, Elon Musk is a threat to democracy. They all must be canceled and destroyed — to save democracy.
But who is the real threat to democracy? Consider three examples: the Courts, the Legislature, and Elections.
On Friday NBC’s Today show reported a story bearing on the assault on Paul Pelosi. Within a few hours the network deep-sixed the story with the comment that “it did not meet NBC News reporting standards.” We posted the memory-holed story via Twitter and noted NBC’s retraction here.
How did the story fail NBC News reporting standards? They didn’t say.
The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi spoke to “people at the network.” He mocks anyone who reiterated the story despite NBC’s mysterious “retraction.” Farhi’s story ran under the headline “NBC retracts erroneous Paul Pelosi story that fueled conspiracy theories.” Subhead: “People at the network said the ‘Today’ show report was based on ‘unreliable’ information from a source who was unnamed in the story.”
Note that Farhi’s sources (assuming they are plural as he says) remain unnamed in his story.
If NBC didn’t publish stories with ‘unnamed sources’ they wouldn’t have anything to publish.
Controversial event on academic freedom at Stanford University goes forward amid controversy. Speakers include Amy Wax, Jordan Peterson, Scott Atlas, Joshua Katz and more.
Apparently it’s ‘divisive’ because the speakers are in favor of academic freedom rather than against. Inside Higher Ed ought to change their name to Inside Higher Indoc.
Liberals have tried to draw similarities between Elon Musk and Donald Trump, perhaps to justify their acquired distaste for the Tesla and new Twitter CEO. But the main thing the two provocateurs have in common is that they both drive the left into hysterical fits.
As President Biden last week warned in a dark speech that American democracy is “under attack” by Mr. Trump and “MAGA Republicans,” Democrats and their media allies hyperventilated that Mr. Musk would take a wrecking ball to Twitter. “The world’s richest man has apparently decided to set his $44 billion investment on fire,” wrote one Washington Post columnist.
Mr. Musk’s takeover is no more likely to destroy Twitter than Republican control of Congress will destroy democracy. Democrats are panicking because both will impose much-needed checks on progressive rule.
IKEA sent a cease and desist letter to the upcoming survival horror game The Store is Closed over its similarities with the company’s chain of warehouse locations.
As reported by Kotaku, the famed Swedish furniture giant sent the request to The Store is Closed‘s sole indie developer Jacob Shaw, who also goes by the studio name Ziggy. The letter demands that Shaw make significant design changes to the game, which is set in a large warehouse store that strongly resembles an IKEA. Lawyers for the furniture company claimed The Store is Closed commits copyright infringement due to comparisons made by some news outlets between the game and IKEA’s stores.
Spoilsports.
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fundamental question for any human society. You cannot have a society without first answering the question, who are we? History and biology do the heavy lifting for large human societies, while smaller societies, like social clubs, will have some sort of founding document to define the society. Of course, constitutions are not just for small scale societies. Big countries have them too.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Moral Divide
At this point what social scientists call “pattern recognition”—an updated version of Occam’s Razor—is kicking in. We’ve now had three Democratic presidents in a row— stretching back to Clinton in 1992, then Obama in 2008, and Biden in 2020—who all campaigned as moderates, but lurched sharply left once in office. In other words, Democratic presidential candidates lie to us, over and over again, and then voters issue a restraining order at the first opportunity. It’s as though voters need reminding every other decade how bad Democrats in power can be. “Swing voters,” wise up.
Which advertisers, pressured by whom? Let’s start with the first half of that question, answered in part by the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, among others. Many companies aren’t trying to hide it in what they may believe is a virtue signal.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on They’re Aiming at Elon Musk, but You Are the Target
Brain-damaged Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate brought in the big guns, if I may use that term, to whip up turnout in their strongholds yesterday. When I say Fetterman is brain-damaged, that is a statement of fact. When I say “big guns,” that is a metaphor. The flags behind Fetterman fell as he introduced his biggest gun. Some choose to see the perfect timing of the flags falling as a metaphor. You be the judge.
Sometimes being the Magic Negro just isn’t good enough.
Scientists at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) are scaling up the production of vertically aligned single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNT). This incredible material could revolutionize diverse commercial products ranging from rechargeable batteries, sporting goods, and automotive parts to boat hulls and water filters. The research was published recently in the journal Carbon.
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Jameesha Harris, a councilwoman in New Bern, N.C., bought a gun and obtained a concealed-carry license to protect herself and her children against a spate of death threats from constituents. Deanna Spikula, the top election administrator in Washoe County, Nev., resigned after receiving a battery of menacing emails, including one warning her to “count the votes correctly as if your life depends on it, because it does.” After speaking out against book bans, Amanda Jones, a librarian in Livingston Parish, La., received a death threat from a man in Texas who saw a photo of her posted in a right-wing Facebook group.
Across the U.S., there has been a surge of harassment, attacks, and violent threats targeting civic and public officials and their families. America is a nation shaped by violent acts and founded on principles that protect free speech, even when it is ugly or incendiary. Yet the specter of politically motivated violence today has become alarmingly pervasive, and the fear it engenders is upending the political landscape, according to more than two-dozen interviews with analysts and public officials.
Funny thing, there’s no mention of Antifa or BLM in this article. You might almost mistake it for a political hit job.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The United States of Political Violence
Once the domain of end-of-timers and right-wing radicals, the survivalist mindset is pushing into the mainstream thanks to rising climate-change disasters and civil unrest.
No, this isn’t a new SF novel from Sarah Hoyt’s site. But you could not be blamed for thinking it was at first blush.
The Dartmouth Review is the conservative alternative student newspaper at Dartmouth College.
From its promotional materials and online presence, it is clear that the University of Austin tries to market itself as something altogether different from its competitors. After all, in a country with more than 5,000 institutions of higher education, it is imperative for a school to separate itself from the pack. Nevertheless, Howland clarified that the difference UATX attempts to offer its potential students is a fundamental one. The University of Austin does not seek to reform America’s traditional model of a university but rather upend it.
Austin, although in the red state of Texas, is as blue as San Francisco, and therefore an odd choice for locating a new non-Woke University.
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Fauci says U.S. is at a ‘crossroads’ as COVID kills 2,600 a week and new Omicron variants bloom with winter coming soon (Fortune) So I guess it’s time to PANIC!
US Debt-Servicing Costs Skyrocket: $1.4 Trillion In Interest Payments On Deck The problem with all the drunken-sailor Democrat spending is that it has to be paid for by borrowing money, and now that the Fed has quit subsidizing Federal debt with negligible interest rates that chicken (say rather dragon?) is coming home to roost.
The Unruly Heirs of Sarah Palin (N.Y. Times) Upon the Restoration in 1660, royalists dug up the corpse of Oliver Cromwell and subjected it to various indignities. The Narrative Media don’t even wait for people to be in the ground first.
Price inflation and the resulting business cycles are monetary phenomena, and without increases in the money supply—i.e., monetary inflation—there is no price inflation. If the world were a very simple place, we would see this relationship clearly displayed: when the money supply increased, we would also see a general increase in prices soon thereafter. The world, however, is not a very simple place and an economy can include countless factors that can mask, delay, and otherwise obscure the connection between monetary inflation and price inflation.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on How The Soviets “Fixed” Inflation, But Wrecked the Economy
