Last week we passed along the stunning news that two of the largest hotels in San Francisco have decided to walk away from their investment entirely, defaulting on $725 million in debt on the properties. Today the Wall Street Journal follows up with some comparisons with other cities. Short version: hotel traffic in other major cities has recovered, while hotel traffic in San Francisco has not….
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on This Week in San Francisco’s Doom Loop
Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote in a 2007 case: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
He was exactly right in saying so in that Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.
Too bad Roberts didn’t follow his own admonition in Allen v. Milligan, the Alabama redistricting decision released last week by the Supreme Court.
The fact of the matter is that we aren’t immune: Right now, today, each and every one of us is caught up in a cargo cult of some variety, going through pointless motions that we’ve been told (or that we’ve told ourselves) will lead to desirable outcomes. This occurs in business, in finance, in romance, and even in science… but one of its most insidious and impactful manifestations lies in entertainment and how we consume it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Cargo Cult of the Ennui Engine
Prime Minister Kristersson promised reforms that could see violent offenders given heftier prison sentences and a policy that could ban them from certain districts and municipalities.
Kristersson also mentioned that “more people must learn the language,” hinting at the fact many of those involved in gun crime and criminal gangs are from migrant backgrounds, something only recently admitted by Swedish police and others in the Swedish establishment.
Georgia GOP elects election deniers to key posts (Atlanta Journal-Constitution) In the Narrative media, ‘election denier’ is someone who suspects that Democrats might possibly cheat in an election.
One line of attack against various forms of socialism has been that these organizational models run contrary to human nature. Humans naturally want to keep the produce of their labor, so any system that requires them to give over their labor to the whole is going to require a great deal of force to implement. Similarly, humans are not equal in ability, so there will always be unequal outcomes. A system that supposes no one is in charge and everyone is equal is unnatural.
Libertarianism has a similar problem. Like communism, it assumes things about humans that are not true. This is why there are no libertarian societies. As Hans Hermann-Hoppe observed, there is no way to go from the present to a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. More important, there is no way to maintain a libertarian society within the rules of libertarianism. Like communism, libertarians imagine a world that is odds with the human condition.
In both cases, what we see is a clash between the model-dependent reality of the ideology and reality itself. It is not hard to imagine a society that operates by the sorts of rules the ideologue prefers. The trouble comes when you try to implement the scheme on flesh and blood human beings. As with every model, there are going to be things the model must ignore in order to make sense. In real life, the things that exist outside the model tend to land in a death camp.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Reality of Model Dependent Reality
Threatened by North Korean nuclear weapons and communist Chinese conventional air and missile fires, South Korea has decided to spend serious money on an old but often spurned military concept: the arsenal ship.
The concept is simple. Take a very large but comparatively inexpensive civilian commercial ship. Oil supertankers and huge container carriers fit the profile perfectly — they’re inexpensive when compared to navy warships.
Now pack the ship with vertical launchers and several hundred long- and mid-range missiles capable of destroying enemy shore targets and perhaps enemy surface ships. Add short-range air and missile defense weapons and presto, enormous sea mobile firepower bang for the buck, or in South Korea’s case, bang for their wons.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on On Point: South Korea Bets Arsenal Ships Will Give North Korea and China Second Thoughts
After the Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 ended segregation in public schools, many jurisdictions in the south engaged in what they openly called “massive resistance” to the Court’s decree, and enforcing the decision required both legislation and many follow-up lawsuits at every level of the federal judiciary for many years after.
It appears colleges and universities are already preparing their own “massive resistance” to a prospective Supreme Court finding later this month striking down race-conscious admissions (fingers crossed after the inexplicable VRA ruling last week).
Zuckerberg says ‘establishment’ asked Facebook to censor COVID misinfo that ended up true: ‘Undermines trust’ (Fox) And of course they went ahead and did so.
Zuckerberg says ‘establishment’ asked Facebook to censor COVID misinfo that ended up true: ‘Undermines trust’ (Fox) And of course they went ahead and did so.
The Finance website Insider Monkey used the latest homicide data to find which US cities have the highest number of murders so far this year. It is no surprise that many of the most dangerous metros are run by Democrats.
Insider Monkey compiled a list of 30 US cities using the FBI’s Quarterly Uniform Crime Report and police department data. For simplicity reasons, we’re only concentrating on half of the list — so 1-15.
And what we discovered is that metros between 1-15 were all controlled by Democrats. Not shocking whatsoever, considering their social justice reform policies are backfiring and turning many metro areas into crime-ridden hellholes.
With experienced pilots and ground crew leaving the service in droves, the Army is struggling to balance equipment modernization and unit training for large-scale, drone-driven war.
Are you ready for the government to take away your car? New proposed regulations on automobile emissions from the Environmental Protection Agency would require 60% of new car sales to be electric vehicles by 2030 and 67% by 2032, compared to the fewer than 6% that were on the road in 2022—for no environmental benefit.?
Those who like electric vehicles, or EVs, are in luck. But those who prefer gasoline-powered cars will see significant increases in their costs, both for new and used cars.
Last week I reviewed a book published by an American academic press—it hardly matters the title or author, for in the respect to which I wish to draw your attention they are almost all the same these days. With few exceptions, they capitalize the word black when it refers to a person, while keeping white (or brown) in the lower case.
This is no doubt a fashion, but it does not seem a purely spontaneous one. If there is no central enforcement, there might as well be one. The presses have been invaded by the termites of wokeness so thoroughly that there is no need of central direction.
It is unlikely in any case that the authors put up much of a fight, if any, against the imposition; most of them probably don’t even see it as an imposition. I suspect, however, that any author who did want to resist the fashion would soon be faced by a stiff fight, which he would probably lose. His desire to be published would overcome his scruples on a matter of principle.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on A Capital Offense
The owner of San Francisco’s first and fourth largest hotels announced Monday that it is going to walk away from the mortgage it owes for those buildings. The owners of the Hilton Union Square Hotel noted that San Francisco’s path to recovery remains clouded and elongated by major challenges,” including the fact that fewer groups want to hold conventions in a city now more famous for its homeless population than its cable cars and restaurants.
Last month, Nordstrom said that it was closing both its stores in downtown San Francisco. “The dynamics of the downtown San Francisco market have changed dramatically over the past several years,” said a Nordstrom official, “impacting customer foot traffic to our stores and our ability to operate successfully.”
The month before that, Whole Foods closed its downtown San Francisco store. The company cited safety concerns for its employees, but drug-related retail theft also played a role in the decision.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Downtown San Francisco Is Dying
Canadian wildfires are all over the headlines, but this latest dose of climate-related fear-porn is just another stage in a propaganda campaign aiming to “pivot from covid to climate”.
