Sweden has earned the ire of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan for its refusal to ban Koran-burning and its failure to punish people who criticize Islam. Now the leader of Nyans — the recently established Turkish party in Sweden — says that Sweden must be willing to bend to President Erdogan.
So…. Peggy Noonan is eagerly awaiting Trump’s Waterloo? Can’t wait to get rid of him for good forever? Afraid that he might escape his current exile on Elba and return to power? And his deplorable loyalists, like all those French worshippers of Napoleon, might see their hero rise again?
I confess: I did not read her article, as I am too cheap to pay for the WSJ, and the article is behind a paywall.
One thing Trump did not do, and would never do, is invade Russia. Seems like Biden is headed in that direction…
Matthew Desmond, a Princeton sociologist who has won a MacArthur “genius” grant as well as a Pulitzer for his previous book, Evicted, devotes his latest work to expounding a “theory” that will explain “why there is so much poverty in this land of abundance,” the United States. According to Desmond, the American people as a whole are its cause.
Without offering a precise definition or measure of poverty, Desmond laments that America, the world’s richest country, has “more poverty than any other advanced democracy.” (That the United States is also by far the most populous advanced democracy might itself help to explain this alleged fact.) Relying chiefly on a report he had published in 2015, along with statistics issued by the Census Bureau and the OECD, Desmond asserts that “almost one in nine Americans” live in poverty, with over 38 million unable to “afford basic necessities” and another 108 million “getting by on $55,000 a year or less,” “stuck in that space between poverty and security.”
Of course a large majority of the world’s population—including India, Pakistan, Indonesia, China, most of Africa, and much of Latin America—would envy an individual or even a family with an income half that large.
In exceptionally rare comments given press, Pierre Brochand—the former director of the French Directorate-General for External Security (DGSE), which is among the world’s eminent foreign intelligence agencies—during an interview with Le Figaro, described the past days’ events as an “uprising or revolt against the French national state by a significant part of the youth of non-European origin present on its territory.”
“In terms of amplitude, official statistics suggest—for historians to verify—that nothing comparable has happened in French cities since the Revolution of 1789 or, at the very least, the weeks following the Revolution,” Brochand, who formerly served as France’s ambassador to Hungary and Israel, told the newspaper.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Ex-Spy Boss on Race Riots: Nothing Comparable Has Happened Since the French Revolution
On Saturday (July 8), pro-khalistani elements gathered outside the Indian High Commission building in London in the United Kingdom to protest against the killing of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
As per reports, about 40-50 of them demonstrated outside the Indian High Commission with flags and banners between 12:30 pm and 2:30 pm on Saturday. They also carried posters which incited violence against Indian High Commissioner Vikram Doraiswami and the Consul General of India in Birmingham, Dr Shashank Vikram.
The development came days after posters surfaced on social media wherein Khalistanis were seen threatening Indian diplomats. After India demanded protection for its diplomats, security was increased in the area to avert any untoward incident. According to journalist Aditya Raj Kaul, the Khalistani event was a ‘major flop’ and only a handful of people participated in the protests.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Khalistanis, threatening Indian diplomats, gather outside Indian consulates in UK, Canada, and Australia: Details
Unbeknownst to economists, the Keynesian bedrock of modern economics–using financial repression and government spending funded by debt to manage the business cycle of growth and recession–is an artifact of a century of expansive cheap energy and virtuous demographics.
Presented as quasi-scientific “laws of economics,” Keynesian policies of suppressing interest rates and funding stimulus with debt were only possible in an era in which energy per capita (per person) always became more abundant and affordable in terms of the purchasing power of wages, i.e. how many hours of labor does it take to buy the energy to fuel a vehicle, prepare a meal, etc.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on All Dreams End: The Collapse of Keynesian Economics
Nowadays, when White Liberal guilt has gone from being an annoying nervous tic to being a full-blown mass psychosis, you don’t get to celebrate, e.g., Independence Day without legions of prune-faced schoolmarms stepping up to tell us our country is rooted in oppression and cruelty, White Supremacy and slavery, duh duh duh duh duh
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on “So’s Your Old Man!”—Americans Should Adopt East Asian Response to Mass Guilt Accusations
Like all indoctrinated economics PhDs, I used to teach students that the Federal Reserve was created as a central bank in order to provide cash to banks experiencing a run on deposits so that bank failures would not become general and collapse the money supply and, thereby, employment and output. It all sounds so reasonable and rational until you realize that finance least of all is idealistic.
The Federal Reserve was actually created in order to save the big New York banks from their greed-driven mistakes, and that is the Fed’s principal activity. In recent decades the Fed has gone beyond merely saving the big banks from their mistakes to helping the big ones concentrate more banking into their hands. The Fed causes banking crises and then provides funds for the big banks to absorb the troubled regional banks. The Fed’s current policy of raising interest rates after a decade of negative interest rates has the entire banking system insolvent. This resulted in runs on the banks, which the Fed did not save by expanding reserves, instead permitting failure and acquisition. Obviously, what I had been trained to teach was false.
This is true of so much of what is taught in every subject.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Federal Reserve Has Been A Disaster For America
MSNBC’s Joy Reid was afraid to leave house on July 4th: ‘America is awash with guns’ (Fox) Considering how much she hates America, and how public she is about it, that was probably a wise decision.
No One Can Stop Talking About Justice John Marshall Harlan (N.Y. Times) Of course, a black guy with a BA who has spent his life writing about politics for left-wing rags knows more about what the Constitution means than two Supreme Court justices. That’s the Narrative.
Harvey Mansfield once quipped that the Democratic Party is a coalition of college professors and morons, which prompted “Lucretia” to remark on a podcast that it is impossible to tell the difference. But if higher education wasn’t an adjunct of the Democratic Party, surely the left would be charging the industry with consumer fraud and price gouging. The likes to talk endlessly about the soaring cost of health care, but the cost of higher education has risen more than any other sector of our economy over the last 40 years, because government has turned higher education into a giant subsidy-capture machine. And few things have been more central to increasing subsidies colleges could capture than easy student loans. One may hope the Supreme Court decision on Friday to disallow forgiveness of student loans by executive fiat will pump the breaks on college costs, but don’t count on it.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Daily Chart: College Bloat After the Loan Decision
A tourist who sparked outrage for engraving his initials into a wall of the Colosseum has apologized, saying that he wasn’t aware of the monument’s ancient significance.
Ivan Danailov Dimitrov, 27, in a letter to the city’s prosecutor and mayor, expressed regret for causing damage at the UNESCO World Heritage site while apologizing to the people of Italy and the global community.
Government schools.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Tourist Who Defaced Colosseum Unaware of Significance
Israeli security forces on Friday killed two Palestinians who carried out a shooting attack against police this week, Israel’s military said.
Israeli forces raided the occupied West Bank town of Nablus, the military said, and “both terrorists were killed following an exchange of fire.”
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA said Israeli troops had cordoned off a house where the two had holed up and that they had been “executed”.
The armed wing of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a major faction in the Palestine Liberation Organization, claimed the two men as members and said they had carried out the attack on Israeli police.
Wherever you go, Whatever you do, A Muslim waits there To try to kill you.
The recent controversy surrounding Ben & Jerry’s and its calls to reclaim “stolen Indigenous land” is heating up.
An Indigenous tribe, descended from the Native American nation, originally controlled the Vermont territory where the ice cream giant’s headquarters is located, and its chief wants it back, Newsweek reported Friday.
According to the report, Don Stevens, chief of the Nulhegan Band of the Coosuk Abenaki Nation — one of four descended from the Abenaki that are recognized in Vermont — said his tribe was “always interested in reclaiming the stewardship of our lands.”
Ben & Jerry’s has yet to reach out.
Proglodytes have absolutely no capacity for thinking things through. And these guys are supposed to be the smart ones? I think not.
Lots of people are arguing about whether college is good, or whether it should be the default, or whether it should look different than it looks now, or whether it’s even a worthwhile institution in the first place. This is no doubt a worthy and important line of inquiry, and yet I am sometimes tempted to bonk such people in the face with the juicy, swollen, succulent, painfully ripe fruit hanging much lower right in front of them: high school.
As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead. Unlike college, which trades off against starting your career immediately, you have to go to high school (or the homeschool equivalent) regardless. And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. So you’ve got a four-year chunk during which you’re smart enough to learn anything a novice adult version of you could; don’t have to support yourself with a salary; and have access to a space with lots of peers and shared materials for free. This is absolutely tantalizing, and yet the default model of high school is something we sleepwalked into and thus are utterly wasting.
The thing we’ve landed on, at least in richer areas, is for high school to be used for getting most of its students into college and a few of them into elite colleges, which means teaching them enough to get high standardized test scores and offering them a wide slate of organized activities that they can join and then list on their applications. But if high school is supposed to prepare you for college, and college is supposed to prepare you for the real world, then it’s suspicious that high school looks so little like the real world. So at least one of three things is true: high school isn’t doing a good job of preparing you to get admitted to college; or college admissions officers aren’t doing a good job of picking students who will succeed in college; or college isn’t doing a good job of setting you up to succeed in real life. Regardless of which it is, the best strategy to set yourself on the path toward a successful, happy life as a teenager is to spend your high school years directly trying to create such a life. If this prepares you for college, great; if it doesn’t, then there’s probably something wrong with college.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Escaping High School
We might assume that legacy admissions help privileged students at the expense of underprivileged ones. But I would wager that legacy students, if eliminated, are far more likely to be replaced by other kinds of privileged students than by underprivileged ones. And in ways that are far less obvious, legacy students, with their deep social and cultural connections, are part of the reason less advantaged students get so much out of elite schools.
…
Start by asking yourself what students get out of elite schools. I would like to believe that the most important benefit of these colleges is the exceptional knowledge that professors can deliver in the classroom. But if elite schools delivered special intellectual growth and professional training — what social scientists call human capital — privileged students would benefit greatly from them. And there’s no good evidence that they do.
Instead, other forms of capital play a bigger role: symbolic capital (the value of being associated with prestigious institutions), social capital (the value of your network) and cultural capital (the value of exposure to high-status practices and mores). Graduating from an elite school pays off on all three counts: It affiliates you with an illustrious organization, offers you connections to people with friends in high places and acculturates you in the conventions and etiquettes of high-status settings.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Legacy Admissions Don’t Work the Way You Think They Do
As I race toward decrepitude, my interaction with the healthcare system will increase, thus raising my awareness of its many faults. At this point, I am lucky to only have to see the doctor once a year for a physical. I have had occasional injuries in the past, but none of those required more than a single visit. Even so, the lunacy of the healthcare system is obvious even at this stage of my life.
The thing about the system is that it works to the interest of everyone except the patients, but we insist on calling it private healthcare. There is nothing private about it as every aspect is controlled by corporate interests, which both advance and direct government interests in the system. If you want to understand fascist economics, spend some time in the American healthcare system.
Something I did not mention in the show is that a sizable chunk of what passes for healthcare is either unnecessary or not healthcare. The legions of bureaucrats and functionaries that serve only the interest of the system are a great example of Pournelle’s iron law of bureaucracy. The system is an upside-down pyramid with the doctors and nurses at the bottom.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on A Rant About Healthcare
If you had to estimate the dimensions of a room without the benefit of a tape measure, you might walk its perimeter heel to toe, counting your steps. To estimate the height of a wall, you might count hand spans from floor to ceiling. In doing so, you’d join a long human tradition. Most human societies around the word—perhaps all—have employed similar body-based measurement strategies, according to a first-of-its-kind study published today in Science. And these informal body-based systems can persist for centuries after a culture has introduced standardized units of measure because, the authors argue, they often lead to more ergonomic designs of tools, clothing, and other personalized items.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why the Metric System Sucks
The former Yale psychiatry professor Bandy X. Lee spent the four years of the Trump presidency trying to convince Congress to remove him from office on mental health grounds. She was not the only shrink advocating the president’s removal, whether via special congressional committee or the invocation of the 25th Amendment (which removes power from the president if he is unable to perform his duties). But she was far and away the most prominent. She convened a notorious Yale conference on the presidential wits in early 2017 that resulted in a diagnostic book of that year called The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump.
Having failed to convince elected leaders to enact her agenda through, as she called it, “the [Mueller] special counsel’s report, impeachment, or the 25th Amendment,” she told the Mark Levin Show in 2019 “my last resort is to be a service to the public.” That meant launching a campaign to remove President Trump via the administrative declaration of a public health emergency that would suspend democratic rights nationwide due to what she called a “Trump mental health pandemic.” Although she rejoiced that “the healthy part of the population” won the 2020 election, making the emergency declaration unnecessary, the reprieve was temporary. It was urgent, she said, that Congress enact special measures to prevent anyone of Trump’s ilk from gaining office again given that half of the national electorate was, in her view, unfit to vote.
On June 20, Lee lost her appeal in federal court against a lower court ruling that upheld Yale’s decision of 2020 not to renew her courtesy appointment as a clinical professor. The reasons for the Yale decision are both technical and substantive. Lee was not a regular faculty member, so she could not appeal to academic freedom or even full-time employment protections. She had become a nuisance at Yale because of her repeated violations of the basic rule of psychiatry, namely that one should examine a “patient” before delivering a diagnosis, even if they are a public figure.
On July 4th, a Federal judge in Louisiana issued an injunction against the Federal government barring various departments from contacting social media companies with regards to censoring speech online. This is a practice that started in the Trump years but took off under the Biden administration. On a daily basis government actors contact the censors at these companies and tell them which posts to remove, users to ban and topics that are to be suppressed that day.
In the Trump years, this practice consisted mostly of government officials calling to complain about things that were obviously fake about the White House. Given the lunacy of the people running these companies, the complaints were ignored, but the complaints from fellow partisans were not ignored. A working relationship between the censors and the FBI, DHS and other agencies evolved. Under Biden it is one click away from being enshrined in government regulation.
Most people alive today remember when the media proudly refused to cooperate with the government on this stuff. They would make a big deal about not going along with government requests to suppress stories. It was all a lie, of course, but they felt the need to make a big show of it. The secret police had long ago infiltrated the major media companies to shape the news. Operation Shamrock and Operation Mockingbird we both used to control the media.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Death by a Thousand Lies
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a former public school educator, used his broad authority this week to sign into law a new state budget that increases funding for public schools ? for the next four centuries.
Wisconsin governors have expansive partial veto power, and Evers got creative with his use of it in this budget. He crafted the four-century school aid extension by striking a hyphen and a “20” from a reference to the 2024-25 school year. The increase of $325 per student is the highest single-year increase in revenue limits in state history.
The surprise move will ensure districts’ state-imposed limits on how much revenue they are allowed to raise will be increased by $325 per student each year until 2425, creating a permanent annual stream of new revenue for public schools and potentially curbing a key debate between Democrats and Republicans during each state budget-writing cycle.
Evers told reporters at a press conference in the Wisconsin State Capitol on Wednesday his action would “provide school districts with predictable long-term increases for the foreseeable future.”
This is why Democrats can’t be trusted with the reins of government.
