WSJ: Proles should be grateful that their chocolate ration has been increased to 20 grams

by philg

“Why Consumers Are Mad About Inflation Even Though It Has Fallen” (Wall Street Journal, today):

Prices are rising more slowly, but consumers fixate on how much lower they were before the pandemic, a problem for Biden.

Inflation has fallen sharply in the past year. The economy remains strong. Yet Americans remain deeply unhappy about the economy, often citing inflation. It continues to weigh on President Biden’s approval and re-election hopes.

Peasants aren’t sufficiently grateful, in other words, for all of the good things that the Party has done for them. They don’t credit Joe Biden for increasing their chocolate ration to 20 grams, for example.

I wonder if there will be spontaneous pro-Biden rallies to show gratitude for the lower airfares and car prices after the latest union contracts work their way through the system. CNBC:

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The right wingers who fund Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns, DEI programs, gun safety laws, and welfare schemes

by philg

I’ve got my mother’s AOL account password and try to log in every day or two to clear out the spam, unsubscribe her from all of the scam mailing lists that she’s on, etc. Considering that mom says she’d vote for Joe Biden even if he were a mental vegetable and/or dead, it is a little strange that she is on rightwing.org‘s mailing list:

The folks behind this are bravely defending “the American way”:

Where are these rightwing warriors based?

Glendale, California! In other words, every day they are paying taxes to keep Gavin Newsom’s lockdowns, DEI programs, gun safety laws, and welfare schemes going.

I find this even harder to understand than my mom being on their list!

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Dianne Feinstein, the first female U.S. senator (and cloth mask believer)

by philg

I was chatting with an Ivy League graduate who is a loyal Democrat and who follows the mainstream media. He shared that he had learned from news articles that the recently deceased Dianne Feinstein was the first female U.S. senator and, therefore, a true pioneer for her gender ID.

According to Wikipedia:

The first female U.S. senator, Rebecca Latimer Felton, represented Georgia for a single day in 1922, and the first woman elected to the Senate, Hattie Caraway, was elected from Arkansas in 1932. Fifty-nine women have served in the upper house of the United States Congress since its establishment in 1789.

(Senator Caraway held her Senate seat for more than 13 years. Like me, she was a prohibitionist.)

A gun owner with a concealed carry permit who wanted to deny her subjects the right to carry guns, Ms. Feinstein was also an early crusher of 2SLGBTQQIA+ dreams. A 1982 NYT article:

Mayor Dianne Feinstein today vetoed a San Francisco city ordinance that would have extended to live-in lovers, including homosexuals, the health insurance benefits that now go to husbands and wives of city employees.

The ordinance she vetoed was introduced by Harry Britt, the only publicly homosexual member of the Board of Supervisors. Mr. Britt was traveling in the East today, but his office released a statement in which he said that ”by vetoing this law, Mayor Feinstein has shown it is our nation’s institutions that lack civility. She has done serious harm to the efforts of gay men and lesbians to gain acceptance and understanding of our life styles.”

Dana van Gorder, a member of Mr. Britt’s staff, said the Mayor ”does not believe in the spirit of this legislation whatsoever.” The spokesman said that the homosexual community ”has had a sense for some time that she has viewed us with a certain moral judgment.”

At dusk about 200 people, many identifying themselves as homosexuals, gathered at the City Hall steps in response to a call for a protest. They cheered speakers who criticized Mayor Feinstein, and they chanted ”Dump Dianne.”

She sought to collect income tax and other revenues in Deplorable states, but not to send any money back to them until they accepted Faucism (press release):

The Science of cloth masks was powerful in the summer of 2020. A quote from the above:

“Research shows that masks reduce transmission of the coronavirus. CDC Director Redfield said this surge in COVID-19 cases could end within two months if we adopt ‘universal masking.’… countries that are successfully controlling this virus require masks. So why doesn’t the United States have a national mask mandate?”

(Remember to check cumulative excess deaths to see how those “countries that [were] successfully controlling the virus” eventually fared.)

What are some example articles that communicate to readers that Dianne Feinstein was the first female senator? From the New York Post:

US Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the trailblazing California Democrat who broke gender barriers throughout her five decades in politics, died Thursday night at her Washington, DC home following a number of health scares. She was 90.

The Guardian: “Senator Dianne Feinstein, trailblazer for women in US politics, dies aged 90″.

The Hill: “Senate loses giant in Dianne Feinstein: ‘A trailblazer in every sense of that word’”

New York Times: “Dianne Feinstein, a Trailblazing Senator, Dies at 90″

Related:

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Social justice in the Palo Alto high school

by philg

A friend sent me this assignment, recently given to students at the public high school in Palo Alto, California:

Let’s focus in on a few…

This is a little confusing. Racism explains why “Black and Latino men” are incarcerated at higher rates than other residents of the U.S. But how can racism explain why men are more likely to be incarcerated than people who identify with the other 73 genders recognized by Science?

What would happen to a student who cited Elizabeth Warren as an example?

This is the one that upsets me. Our house is 3 miles from the climate change-enhanced ocean, yet we are redlined by State Farm and excluded from homeowners insurance.

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Gifted education in public schools: Massachusetts vs. Florida perspectives

by philg

As a general rule, whatever is sacred in Massachusetts is illegal in Florida and vice versa. In MA, there is no state funding for gifted programs and the typical town-run public school system has no differentiation until 8th or 9th grade. The idea that children of all abilities go through material at a single level, with some bored and some lost, is sacred. In FL, by contrast, county-run school districts are required by state law to offer gifted education beginning in 2nd grade. Parking an academically-inclined student in a grade-level classroom is actually illegal.

A friend and I were chatting about this while on a walk with his dog in Wellesley, Maskachusetts back during my August trip up and down the East Coast. A neighbor walking her own dog joined the conversation and opined that public schools shouldn’t have gifted education because it tended to result in racial segregation, with Black students left behind, for example.

Where had she attended school? Milton Academy ($64,000/year for day students) and then an Ivy League college. Had she sent her own children to the Wellesley Public Schools where they could receive the benefits of sitting in a classroom with a diversity of academic talent if not a diversity of skin color? No. They also went to Milton Academy and then on to the Ivies.

Has the lack of gifted education in Maskachusetts public schools resulted in racial harmony? Let’s check NBC:

At one point, the teen grabbed a bigger stone, threatened the victim with it and called him “boy” and the N-word, according to the police narrative. …

The victim also wrote in his statement that the other juvenile “started laughing and called me George Floyd, obviously making fun of me and showing NO remorse.”

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Did anything interesting happen in the 2nd Republican primary debate?

by philg

I can’t bear to watch politicians, but I found a transcript of last night’s Republican debate.

A few sections…

HUME: Forty years after Reagan’s landslide reelection, the Republican Party faces critical questions: What does it mean to be a conservative?

VIVEK RAMASWAMY (R), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We fight for the truth.

GOV. RON DESANTIS (R-FL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: We are not going to worry about what the left and the media say about us.

Nobody else answered? Vivek’s answer seems crazy. Which truth is he fighting for? His truth? I can’t believe this guy is polling higher than my favorite, Nikki Haley. DeSantis’s answer is terrible in my opinion. Shouldn’t a conservative be able to exist without the “left” (whatever that might mean in America’s incoherent politics) and the media?

Should I be worried that I agree with Chris Christie?

During the Trump administration, they added $7 trillion, $7 trillion in national debt. And now, the Biden administration has put another $5 trillion on and counting. They have failed, and they’re in the spot they’re in now because none of them are willing to tell the truth; none of them are willing to take on the difficult issues. They just want to keep kicking the can down the road.

DeSantis basically says the same thing, but works in low-skill immigration, which drives up costs for everything that the working class might want to buy, e.g., housing, while feeding the elites:

DESANTIS: The people in Washington are shutting down the American dream with their reckless behavior. They borrowed, they printed, they spent and now you’re paying more for everything. They are the reason for that. They have shut down our national sovereignty by allowing our border to be wide open.

Now, I can tell you this as governor of Florida, we cut taxes; we ran surpluses; we’ve paid down over 25 percent of our state debt. And I vetoed wasteful spending when it came to my desk. And as your president, when they send me a bloating spending bill that’s going to cause your prices to go up, I’m going to take out this veto pen and I’m going to send it right back to them.

I rate this last statement “partly false” because the U.S. president doesn’t have a line-item veto as most state governors do. I guess a hypothetical President DeSantis could have vetoed coronapanic spending and massive spending programs authorized by individual bills, such as the “Inflation Reduction Act”.

More from Vivek:

Look, I have a different view on this. I think Trump was an excellent president. But the America First agenda does not belong to one man. It does not belong to Donald Trump. It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to you, the people of this country. … When we rallied behind the cry to make America great again, we did not just hunger for a single man. We hungered for the unapologetic pursuit of excellence.

He raises an interesting question: What are Republican voters voting for? “Pursuit of excellence” doesn’t seem right. Given the chance to sit on the couch and collect money from others who work, most Americans grab the deal with both hands. (My favorite recent example: police officers in a San Francisco exurb who got paid about $300,000 each while sitting at home suspended due to being investigated for criminal activity. One moved to Hawaii! (Mercury News). None of them chose to pursue any kind of productive employment or education during their suspension.)

Readers who watched this live or on video: What struck you as interesting? Does this format make sense? It didn’t seem as though any of the candidates had enough time to utter a coherent policy point of view.

Maybe the November 30 debate between DeSantis and Gavin Newsom will be more interesting:

If Biden on the union picket line is the senile version of AOC, maybe Gavin Newsom is fairly characterized as the young edition of Bernie Sanders, i.e., someone who can articulate a vision of vastly expanded government presiding over a miscellaneous collection of humans that has been vastly expanded via immigration.

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1dollarscan.com is now one-dollar-twenty-cents-scan

by philg

From September 28, 2021… When you love books enough to murder them: 1DollarScan.com:

This is a review of their cheapest possible service: $1/100 pages and no OCR, no enhancement, and no naming of the files.

The pricing today? $1.20/100 pages. 20 percent inflation in two years.

What does the government tell us that inflation has been? 11 percent.

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Coronapanic in Panama

by philg

This is a report on the coronapanic level in Panama observed during a February 2023 visit.

One of the first sights stepping off our Royal Caribbean ship was a mask directive in the duty free shop:

Walking outdoors in the sunshine near the canal:

Two years after coronapanic began, compliance with these indoor and outdoor directives was spotty. Note the chin diapers on the supermarket employees below, for example, and on a gal in an ice cream shop.

How devoted to Faucism was Panama? See “Panama’s Gender-Based Lockdown and the Resilience of Transgender Activism” (hrw.org):

On April 1, 2020, the government of Panama introduced a gender-based lockdown in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. This meant that women and men were only allowed to do essential shopping on alternate days. … An unintended consequence of this measure was that police and private security guards began to single out transgender people for profiling for being out “on the wrong day.” In some cases, they arrested and fined trans people, or prevented them from buying essential items like food and medication. These cases of discrimination occurred when security agents’ visually identified trans people, or after they checked the sex marker on their national identification cards.

Panama was celebrated by the United Nations for its California levels of school closure (more than one year). What were the results achieved by locking up the trans shoppers, kicking kids out of school for 1.5 years, forced masking, and coerced vaccination? Panama ended up with a slightly higher COVID-tagged death rate than no-lockdown, no-mask, no-school-closure Sweden (statista).

What if a Panamanian emerged from his/her/zir/their bunker having survived COVID? Our guide explained that Panamanians pay roughly 20 percent of income in tax. “That covers retirement and health care,” she said. “There is no property tax and you don’t have to pay anything when you go see the doctor.” A tourist from Canada asked if there were long waits to see doctors. “Oh yes,” the guide responded. “Sometimes you have to wait for two weeks.” Women retire at 57, men at 62, and police after 25 years of work (age 43 if they start at 18). Life expectancy is almost the same as in the U.S. (ranking), about 82 for women and 76 for men. Thus, women enjoy 11 additional years of retirement compared to men (5 years from the younger retirement age and 6 years from the longer life expectancy).

One mystery is how the life expectancy in Panama can be comparable to what we have here in the U.S. We are informed that abortion care for pregnant people is life-saving health care. The U.S. is the world’s abortion care capital. By contrast, “Abortion in Panama is illegal except in instances that the pregnancy is life-threatening or the health of the woman is at risk, or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. … The punishment for a woman who has an illegal abortion is one to three years in prison. The punishment for a doctor or other person who provides the procedure with the woman’s consent is 3 to 6 years in prison.” (Wikipedia) If abortion care is rare in Panama, how are Panamanians able to live just as long as Americans?

(Also, if Californians boycott U.S. states where abortion care is not available through 37 weeks, as pregnant people will find in Maskachusetts, why aren’t Californians boycotting Panama, including tourism and the purchase of products that have made the expensive trip through the Canal?)

Panama is an underrated tourist destination. The wildlife is as interesting as in Costa Rica. The historic old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, is a lot more pleasant than Cartagena. Everything is easier for the traveler because the country is so much richer than these neighbors. Let’s have a look at the old:

Some fancy church interiors:

The “latino style” shop:

(I stopped in to ask directions to the Latinx style shop.)

What pays for it all? Global commerce! Ships going through and also 500,000 containers per year being transferred to another ocean via the Panama Canal Railway.

Related:

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Sanctuary for undocumented immigrants in New Jersey

by philg

2020, nj.com:

A day after President Donald Trump’s administration filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn controversial restrictions on when police New Jersey can cooperate with federal immigration officials, Gov. Phil Murphy on Tuesday vowed to defend the policy “with great vigor.”

“Fearmongering for the purposes of an election only further complicates the work of law enforcement and jeopardizes public safety,” the governor said in a statement. “We will continue to provide a welcoming and inclusive home for our immigrant communities.”

“This is beyond inclusivity, celebrating and embracing diversity, being good human beings,” he continued. “I hope we always are that and continue to be. But this is cold-bloodedly about the safety and security of all nine million folks who call this great state their home.”

Now, Politico:

No sanctuary in New Jersey: Democrats about-face on migrants as election looms

The Biden administration’s decision to float Atlantic City International Airport as one of 11 potential sites to house migrants living in New York City put New Jersey Democrats in a tough spot.

… with state lawmakers up for reelection in November, Gov. Phil Murphy and other state Democrats — many who’d previously pledged to make New Jersey a “sanctuary state” — immediately pushed back.

“I don’t see any scenario where we’re going to be able to take in a program in Atlantic City or, frankly, elsewhere in the state,” Murphy said in a TV interview.

Does this mean that Gov. Murphy is now a “bad human being”?

A 2018 tweet from the “good human being” version of this governor:

(Immigration enabled cities to “flourish”)

Murphy was a “good human being” with a mask in January 2023:

(Why is it only “every child” who gets taxpayer-funded health care in New Jersey? Shouldn’t the governor also extend coverage to every adult, including undocumented migrants?)

In 2020, Murphy celebrated the ability of the undocumented to “fully participate” in an economy that he had shut down for coronapanic:

Back to 2018, concern for “our immigrant communities” (which presumably include the undocumented):

How did someone who was so good become bad?

Related:

  • ChatGPT and Women’s History Month (in which Governor Murphy says that he is passionate about “true equality” for women, but refuses to resign his unearned position of power so that a politician who identifies as a “woman” can take his place)
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Biden on the picket line: time to watch American Factory again

by philg

Loyal readers may recall my review of the Academy Award-winning documentary American Factory. After a Chinese glass manufacturer has been gulled into investing $500+ million in pre-Biden money, all of the Democrats in the region, including Senator Sherrod Brown, show up to exhort the workers to unionize and extract higher wages from the foreign chumps.

“Biden to become first sitting US president to appear on picket line at UAW strike” (The Guardian):

Joe Biden will become the first sitting US president to appear on a picket line on Tuesday, making an appearance in Michigan in an effort to show solidarity with striking members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) union, which is locked in an escalating dispute with America’s three biggest carmakers.

Biden’s trip is designed to burnish his self-proclaimed credentials as the most union-friendly president in US history and possibly also to earn the explicit backing of the UAW, which has yet to endorse his bid for re-election.

Biden voiced support for the strike by Ford, General Motors and Stellantis workers, which was entering its 12th day on Tuesday, and had announced he was dispatching his labour secretary, Julie Su, and Gene Sperling, a senior White House adviser, to help the union reach a settlement with company bosses.

In other words, this is a Presidential version of what is shown in the movie with, if memory serves, members of Congress and the governor. Will I be taking my own advice and watching the movie again in honor of our muscular leader? No. I canceled my Netflix subscription after the 2nd or 3rd price increase during what we are informed is a period of near-zero inflation.

Related:

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