A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
My favorite NYT headline of August 5, 2020 characterizes schools that are 100-percent closed as “open fully”:
Supporting those in New York, Maskachusetts, Chicago, and California who now say that lockdowns and school closures never happened, this headline cannot be found either with a Google search or a search on nytimes.com itself.
Full post, including commentsEvery day this summer, the New York Times offers a climate panic story. “Tracking Dangerous Heat in the U.S.” is updated daily and Phoenix is always a dangerous place to be (folks in Atlanta can get away with “Extreme Caution”; South Florida is literally toast):
The same newspaper previously alerted us to the connection between urban growth and oppressive heat. Example from 2018… “5 Ways to Keep Cities Cooler During Heat Waves”:
Cities can be miserable during heat waves. All that concrete and asphalt soaks up the sun’s rays, pushing temperatures up even further. Tall buildings can block cooling breezes. Exhaust from cars and air-conditioners just adds to the swelter.
This is known as the urban heat island effect: A large city’s built-up environment can make it 2 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the surrounding countryside during the day and up to 22 degrees warmer at night. That extra heat is becoming a serious public health problem.
More people means bigger cities and bigger cities inevitably will be hotter cities (humans moving around on pavement will never emit less heat than grass). You might think that the natural position for a climate alarmist, therefore, would be to oppose policies that drive population growth, e.g., low-skill immigration, government handouts conditional on having kids, etc. Yet the NYT consistently promotes population growth, especially via open borders. For example, a recent piece from the paper’s in-house Nobel laureate.. “How Immigrants Are Saving the Economy” (Professor Dr. Paul Krugman, Ph.D.):
There are surely multiple reasons. But you may not have heard about one ingredient in the economy’s special sauce: a sudden, salutary rebound in net immigration, which soared in 2022 to more than a million people, its highest level since 2017. We don’t know whether this rebound will last, but it has been really helpful. It’s an exaggeration, but one with some truth, to say that immigrants are saving the U.S. economy.
I’m not sure how net immigration is measured if the undocumented walk across the border and never talk to a Census Bureau worker, but Prof. Krugman is talking about a substantial new city of humans being created every year in the U.S. (for reference, the population of Phoenix per se is 1.6 million).
What about artisanal production of population growth? A June 2023 editorial says that we should ladle out more cash to “families” (usually “single parents”) who do minimal work and choose to have multiple kids. It looks like Americans respond to financial incentives. The middle class is being bred out of existence because they can’t afford family-size housing. Those who don’t work have plenty of kids because the (too-poor-to-have-kids) taxpayers provide them with family-size housing. The rich have kids, but there aren’t enough of them to make a difference in population statistics.
Channeling the spirit of “If you don’t like seeing me naked, you should shop at a different Publix”.. “If you don’t like summer heat waves, why do you advocate for a larger U.S. population?”
I arrived in Pasadena, California last night. I disclosed my plan to walk to dinner to a gal at the front desk. She expressed surprise that anyone would be willing to walk for 10 minutes due to the heat (85 degrees and dry). Separately, after risking heat stroke and/or death, I found that the June 2023 official Pride markings on sidewalks, transformers, and stores (Rainbow-first retail) were all still up.
More photos to follow, but here’s a preview of how city property is decorated in case there is a merchant who does not do his/her/zir/their share:
(This would be illegal in at least some parts of the U.S. ummah: “‘A sense of betrayal’: liberal dismay as Muslim-led US city bans Pride flags”)
Related:
Full post, including commentsLike the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal has worked tirelessly to spread the Good News about the Miracle of Low-Skill Migration. An example from 2015… “Migrants Offer Hope for Aging German Workforce”:
By some estimates, Britain is on course to eclipse Germany as Europe’s biggest economy by 2030, thanks in part to its large numbers of young, energetic immigrants.
Germany “is going to be severely challenged” by demographics, said Peter Sutherland, the United Nations special representative for international migration. Managing the trends “requires a great deal of proactive thinking” and openness to immigration, he said.
About 20% of asylum seekers were from war-torn Syria—more than from any other country—and four out of five arriving Syrians are believed to be from “average or even well-off economic circumstances and have a good education,” the agency said.
In the 1950s, Italians and other Southern Europeans flooded in to help rebuild the country, contributing significantly to its fast postwar economic recovery. In the following decades, millions of Turks arrived and many ended up working in German industrial companies, helping its economy more.
This summer, however, the same newspaper informs us that the countries that have been getting rich via low-skill immigration every year since 1950 are now, in fact, poor. “Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off.’”:
Europe’s current predicament has been long in the making. An aging population with a preference for free time and job security over earnings ushered in years of lackluster economic and productivity growth.
Adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, wages have declined by about 3% since 2019 in Germany, by 3.5% in Italy and Spain and by 6% in Greece.
Karim Bouazza, a 33-year-old nurse [in Brussels] who was stocking up on half-price meat and fish for his wife and two children, complained that inflation means “you almost need to work a second job to pay for everything.”
The eurozone economy grew about 6% over the past 15 years, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the U.S., according to International Monetary Fund data. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every U.S. state except Idaho and Mississippi, according to a report this month by the European Centre for International Political Economy, a Brussels-based independent think tank. If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the U.S. and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today, the report said.
Apparently, expert consensus is that there is no longer a connection between low-skill migration and economic vibrancy. The 2023 WSJ article does not contain any of the following words or phrases: “migrant”; “immigrant”; “refugee”; “asylum-seeker”.
Separately, here’s a luxury car in one of Europe’s richest countries, the Netherlands (photographed in Delft, July 6, 2023):
The Netherlands now contains 27 percent migrants and children of migrants and thus should be insanely rich if we believe the Wall Street Journal’s 2015 Science.
Full post, including commentsThe New York Times regularly runs stories about Floridians suffering from “fascism”, “tyranny”, and “authoritarianism”, the most accurate descriptions of being governed by Ron DeSantis. What else is true about Florida, according to the newspaper of record? “36 hours: Florida Panhandle” (NYT, July 6, 2023):
The word “paradise” appears twice in the article as the most succinct characterization of the destination covered.
So… Florida is “fascist”, but also “paradise” for a tourist. Does this make sense? Did the NYT recommend attending the 1938 rally in Nuremberg, Germany (after Anschluss) because the city was a “paradise” of historical buildings, culture, and parks?
Full post, including commentsFollowing up on Ireland in the European heat wave… the latest map from the New York Times shows that Palm Beach County is suffering from 125-degree heat:
If it gets even 1 degree hotter, we might be into the “Extreme Danger” zone:
Due to a toilet trip lever failure (everything in this 20-year-old house seems to have been designed to last for exactly 20 years), we cautiously ventured out to Home Depot in the local strip mall (Palm Beach Gardens; 4 miles from the ocean). We decided to eat lunch at one of the high-end restaurants there and found that these two people had chosen to flirt with Danger at an outdoor table rather than enjoy the comfortable indoor air-conditioned environment where they’d received their food. Not shown: the person on the right (pronouns unknown) was wearing massive fuzzy bunny slippers, ordinarily marketed for use in frigid New England winters.
After stopping into PetSmart, we passed by a table-service restaurant in which a Floridian is wearing long pants and a sweater in what the New York Times says might be 125-degree heat:
Here’s what the Google says about afternoon temps in the heat dome over the strip mall:
Fortunately, I hope to be escaping to comfortable 93-degree weather in Oshkosh, Wisconsin for next week’s EAA AirVenture:
“Should You Still Wear a Mask?” (NYT, April 2022):
Experts weigh in on where, and when, you can safely take one off.
If you have compromised immunity, for example, or live with someone who does, it’s a good idea to continue wearing a mask
“A Positive Covid Milestone” (NYT, today):
“Even for most — not all but most — immunocompromised people, vaccines are actually still quite effective at preventing against serious illness,” [Dr. Ashish Jha, who was until recently President Biden’s top Covid adviser] said. “There has been a lot of bad information out there that somehow if you’re immunocompromised that vaccines don’t work.”
Most immunocompromised people are at little additional risk from Covid — even people with serious conditions, such as multiple sclerosis or a history of many cancers.
Where did the “bad information” that Dr. Jha mentioned come from? Separately, the NYT seems to have discovered that a virus cannot kill the same human twice:
The United States has reached a milestone in the long struggle against Covid: The total number of Americans dying each day — from any cause — is no longer historically abnormal.
The good news is that the mask religion lasts longer than mask Science. Two photos from last week in Ireland (signage that was ignored) and a young slender apparently healthy person wearing a mask outdoors… in front of the Science museum in Salt Lake City (June 2023):
Email from the New York Times:
The Morning: 115 degrees Fahrenheit
Today, New Orleans will reach 113 degrees in the heat index. Houston will reach 111. Mobile, Ala., and Jackson, Miss., will also surpass 110. And those are only a few of the places that will experience dangerous heat this week.
In New Orleans, the heat index will hit 111 degrees today, climb to 115 by Thursday and remain above 110 for the week.
From the Google:
Whether the high temp this week will be 98 or 115, I hope that our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters in New Orleans can find a way to stay comfortable.
Full post, including commentsPravda says “The U.S. is now two years into abnormally high inflation“:
But wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that we have roughly the inflation that we should expect given the level of deficit spending that we voted for? To prevent runaway inflation, the EU established a deficit limit of 3% of GDP for member countries and a debt-to-GDP ratio of 60%. The US deficit has been 5-15% since 2020 and was higher than 3% before that:
U.S. debt-to-GDP is 115 percent, according to the World Bank (compare to 45ish percent in Germany and Korea and 92 percent in over-the-EU-limit France, the only country with a larger welfare state than the U.S. has).
What’s the news from the New York Times?
U.S. inflation today is drastically different from the price increases that first appeared in 2021, driven by stubborn price increases for services like airfare and child care instead of by the cost of goods.
We can buy as many DVD players as we want, in other words. It is only services that are going to be unaffordable to the non-elite. What percent of the economy is subject to a wage-price spiral, then? 77.6 percent.
Related:
Full post, including commentsAs my only exposure to this channel is when walking through FBOs, I’m not an expert on Fox News or the recently departed Tucker Carlson. However, I’m wondering if Fox would be smart to try to replace him with Casey DeSantis, who has experience as a TV newscaster. Here is the kinder/gentler DeSantis in 2021 (source):
Readers who do watch Fox News: will you miss Tucker Carlson and whom should Fox hire as a replacement?
Also, what does Tucker Carlson do for a second act? Wikipedia says that he is 53, so he won’t be ready to run for U.S. president until at least 2045. Could Mr. Carlson succeed in a run for Congress in a district where Fox News viewership is high? Presumably he can never achieve a comparable level of fame/following as what he had on Fox, so why bother trying to reboot as a TV personality?
Also, readers who watch CNN (again, not me, except when passing through some commercial airports): will you miss Don Lemon? The BBC says that he hatefully suggested that men were better at soccer than women, contrary to ChatGPT’s findings. He also dissed my favorite Republican candidate, Nikki Haley, for being “not in her prime” at 51 years old (“prime” for a Democrat is 86, the age that Joe Biden will be when he passes the baton to President Harris in January 2029).
Related:
Full post, including commentsThe New York Times informs us that humanity faces an “existential crisis” and/or “existential threat” due to climate change (2014 example regarding a New York politician). We also face an “existential threat” from coronavirus (NYT Editorial Board, May 24, 2020). Finally, there is the imminent threat of nuclear war (NYT, Oct. 5, 2022).
With humans potentially going extinct from climate change or COVID-19 and/or being killed millions at a time via nuclear weapons, what is today’s most important news? “porn star” occurs twice in the follow screen shot and “hush money” once. From the front page text, in other words, we learn that a sex worker allegedly got paid for having sex and then not talking about it.
