REWARDING FASCISM: “So now we know what it takes to become a state: the murder of Jews. Rape, kill and kidnap Jews and seven months later, the leaders of Ireland, Spain and Norway will recognise your statehood. That’s the lesson of today’s coordinated spectacle of virtue-signalling in Dublin, Madrid and Oslo: pogroms work. The butchery of civilians gets results. Fascism has its rewards. This is ‘diplomacy’ at its most dangerous.”
The American Ornithological Society has banned the naming of birds after people and, in true Year Zero style, has set about renaming the 263 species already so tainted by their association with white men.
Infamous for its starvation wages, Walmart just posted staggering first-quarter profits. The surge is a result of its strategic shift toward catering to affluent shoppers while its full-time workers continue to rely on Medicaid and food stamps. https://t.co/jScx1YdJ07
OH: Rashida Tlaib has paid $435,000 to firm of anti-Israel activist for terrorism-tied groups. “Tlaib, who often faces criticism from both Republicans and Democrats for her anti-Israel rhetoric and defense of a phrase calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, has delivered more than $435,000 in payments earmarked for “fundraising consulting” since 2020 from her campaign and leadership PAC to Unbought Power, according to Federal Election Commission filings. The Florida-based limited liability corporation is operated by Rasha Mubarak, a close ally of Tlaib’s who recently held key roles for terrorism-tied organizations in the United States.”
Now there’s some new data that is further bad news for Biden. Not only are wages and salaries flat after adjusting for inflation, but so it net worth.
I’m motivated to share this data because Ezra Klein has a column in the New York Times that examines seven reasons why Biden is in political trouble.
Much of the analysis is very reasonable (Is Biden too old? Is there an anti-incumbent mood? etc).
But the economy was also on the list, and Klein compares Biden and Reagan in an attempt to argue that Biden is doing a better job than people think
In the Times-Siena poll, 21 percent of voters say the economy will drive their vote, while 7 percent say inflation is their top issue. …Biden’s numbers aren’t following the pattern we’ve seen with other recent presidents. …Biden’s recovery is stronger than what…Reagan…saw. In 1984, inflation was higher than it is now, unemployment was higher than it is now and the interest rate on a 30-year mortgage was above 13 percent — almost double what it is now. …Yet Biden is polling worse than Reagan…at this point in their re-election bids.
I already wrote a column (last November) showing that Reagan produced better results, but that’s not the part of Klein’s column that deserves the most criticism.
The silliest part of his analysis is that he simply looks at a moment in time and ignores context. Here are the two things to understand.
Inflation and interest rates were very high when Reagan took office and he made the tough policy choices that put those variables on a downward trajectory.
Inflation and interest rates were very low when Biden took office and he pursued policies that put those variables on an upward trajectory.
I imagine Klein fully understands that this context is important. But because he leans to the left, he is following the usual media strategy of trying to make Biden look good.
P.S. Regarding jobs, Biden took office while the economy was still dealing with government-mandated shutdowns, so his job numbers seem to look good, but not when compared to the pre-pandemic trend.
Regarding the latter, I showed last month that there’s been a significant erosion of economic liberty in the industrialized world since the turn of the century.
Now let’s look at the Economic Freedom of the Worlddata for the United States. As you can see, economic liberty increased during the Reagan and Clinton years, but has since declined.
The bottom line is that if “neoliberalism” failed, then the failure should have happened during the last two decades of the 20th century.
Yet Stiglitz wanted readers to think that today’s economic problems are caused by free markets when policy has been moving in the wrong direction for about twenty years.
Stiglitz is not the only one guilty of this logical error.
In a column for the New York Times, David Leonhardt also claims neoliberalism has failed.
…the centrism that guided Washington… — alternately called the Washington Consensus or neoliberalism — was based on the idea that market economics had triumphed. By lowering trade barriers and ending the era of big government, the United States would both create prosperity for its own people and shape the world in its image… That hasn’t worked out. …neoliberalism failed to deliver. The notion that the old approach would bring prosperity, as Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, has said, “was a promise made but not kept.”
Leonhardt’s column is not as empty as Stiglitz’s (he makes relevant points, for instance, about the unpopularity of trade and immigration, as well as the failure to encourage China and Russia to liberalize).
But he also ignores the evidence that neoliberal (or “Washington Consensus“) economic policies worked when they actually were in effect.
The bottom line is that I’m still waiting for Stiglitz, Leonhardt, or anyone else to respond to my never-answered question. If neoliberalism doesn’t work, they should have lots of examples.
Needless to say, I won’t be holding my breath. The recipe for growth and prosperity is the same today as it was 100 years ago and 200 years ago.
“Israeli researchers found that on average, between January and April, 124 trucks carrying food and humanitarian aid entered Gaza per day.” (Photo by Majdi Fathi/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Yesterday we reported on one of the many problems with International Criminal Court prosecutor Karim Khan’s request for arrest warrants for Israel’s prime minister and defense minister. Namely, the fact that there is scant evidence of the “deliberate starvation” that forms the heart of the ICC’s case, and that Khan ignores abundant evidence that Hamas is hoarding food and medical supplies.
Now, a new study published by the Hebrew University’s Institute of Biochemistry, Food Science, and Nutrition brings clarity to the contested question of food security in the Gaza strip. The working paper analyzed the adequacy of the food supply Israel has facilitated into Gaza since January. And the results are devastating to Khan’s case.
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, was conducted in conjunction with four other Israeli universities and the country’s ministry of health and found that “the quantity and quality of food delivered to Gaza have steadily improved and diversified since January 2024” and that “the food supply contains sufficient energy and protein for the population’s needs.”
Specifically, the Israeli researchers found that on average, between January and April, 124 trucks carrying food and humanitarian aid entered Gaza per day. That adds up to 3,211 calories worth of nutrition per Gazan, per day. The World Health Organization standard for calorie consumption is 2,900 per day for average-sized men and 2,200 per day for average-sized women.
“Contrary to claims that Israel has deliberately starved Gaza, Israel has gone to considerable lengths to facilitate food aid delivered to Gaza,” the authors write.
One of those authors, Aron Troen, a professor of nutrition science and public health at Hebrew University, told The Free Press, “We wanted to understand what the reality was. To do so we obtained the registry of each and every truck that has entered Gaza through the two southern land routes from January to April.”
Troen said that there were serious problems with a previous UN study on food security in Gaza, published in March, that claimed a famine was “imminent” in the northern part of the territory. For example, it did not examine the steps that Israel had taken to open humanitarian corridors and land routes into the territory.
This raises an important question for Khan and the International Criminal Court. If it’s true, as World Food Program director Cindy McCain recently said, that there is a famine in northern Gaza, who is to blame? Israel has been allowing food to enter Gaza, but as I reported Tuesday, the Israelis have documented how that food is commandeered by Hamas and hoarded for its families.
Troen said the group’s findings “raise significant questions about the failure of the international aid agencies to deliver the food and hold Hamas accountable for their disruption to distribution.”
Perhaps Khan would have benefited from the insights in the new working paper. One Israeli defense official told The Free Press that his government is prepared to share the paper with the court’s investigators.
His new life 6,000 miles away in Southfield, Michigan turned dark his sophomore year when he moved in with his teammate, Zavier Chimienti. Nedivi says Chimienti harassed him for four months beginning in September 2023, with anti-Jewish slurs, Nazi salutes, and full-on physical abuse.
But months after he reported the alleged abuse to both police and school officials, Nedivi is no longer on the soccer team. The school kicked both students off the team as it conducted its investigation, and, though court records show the police charged Chimienti, the investigation concluded that there was no discrimination.
An outside law firm, however, has concluded that the university mishandled its investigation. With a second external review of the evidence underway, records obtained by The Daily Wire appear to corroborate Nedivi’s allegations, including a teammate’s official witness statement to police, as well as text messages and pictures that document the claims.
Sources tell me at least two different active groups are working on political content moderation programs for the November election that tactically would go a step or two beyond what we observed with groups like Stanford’s Election Integrity Partnership, proposing not just deamplification or removals, but fakery, use of bots, and other “offensive” forms of manipulation.
If the recent rush of news stories about the horror of foreign-inspired AI deepfakes (“No one can stop them,” gasps the Washington Post) creating intolerable risk to the coming “AI election” sounds a bit off to you, you’re not alone. This is one of many potential threats pro-censorship groups are playing up in hopes of deploying more aggressive “counter-messaging” tools. Some early proposals along those lines are in the unpublished Twitter Files documents we’ve been working on. Again, more on this topic soon.
Also: beginning around the time we published the “Report on the Censorship-Industrial Complex,” Racket in partnership with UndeadFOIA began issuing Freedom of Information requests in bulk. The goal was to identify inexcusably secret contractors of content-policing agencies like the State Department’s Global Engagement Center. The FOIA system is designed to exhaust citizens, but our idea was to match the irritating resolve of FOIA officers by pre-committing resources for inevitable court disputes, fights over production costs, etc. Thanks to UndeadFOIA’s great work, we now have a sizable library of documents about publicly-funded censorship programs (and a few private ones scooped up in official correspondence).
We’ll be releasing those, too, focusing on a few emails per batch, and publishing the rest in bulk. There’s so much material that a quick global summary here would be difficult, but suffice to say that the anti-disinformation/content control world is much bigger than I thought, enjoying cancer-like growth on campuses in particular, in the same way military research became primary sources of grants and took over universities in the fifties and sixties. Some of these FOIA documents are damning, some entertaining, some just interesting, but all of them belong to the public. We’re going to start the process of turning them over, hopefully today.
Turn on the lights and watch the roaches scatter. And stomp on any that don’t.
No, they’re not cracking down on illegals storming the beaches. They’re not cracking down on drug dealers. They’re not even cracking down on homeless encampments.
It’s the yoga that’s gotta go, according to a new city ordinance in San Diego.
The amplitude of the recorded warmth in the 1940s was always a problem for purveyors of the human-caused global warming narrative. So the 1940s temperatures have been artificially cooled to make this less of a problem.
“So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip.”
“I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately.”
“It would be good to remove at least part of the 1940s blip, but we are still left with ‘why the blip?’.”
And, just as they had said they would do, 0.15°C of warmth has gradually been removed from the 1940s HadCRUT global temperature data over the last 15 years. They have “corrected” the data to align with their narrative.
What’s also noticeable here in this HadCRUT-changes-temperature-data chart provided by climate4you is just how much warmth has been added to 21st century temperatures since 2008.
The HadCRUT3 global temperature trend was recorded as 0.03°C per decade during the global warming hiatus years of 2000-2014 (Scafetta, 2022).
This was increased to 0.08°C per decade by version 4, as the overseers of the HadCRUT data conveniently added 0.1°C to 0.2°C to the more recent anomalies.
Today, in HadCRUT5, the 2000-2014 temperature trend has been adjusted up to 0.14°C per decade when using the computer model-infilling method.
So, within the last decade, a 15-year temperature trend has been changed from a pause to a strong warming. After all, when the observations don’t fit the narrative, it is time to change the observations.
WHY AM I REMINDED OF “FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON”? Just the News filed a short take that honestly makes me wonder if Fetterman has been red-pilled, or at the very least, somehow came out smarter after his stroke than he was before it happened:
“In the past, I’ve described the U.S. House as The Jerry Springer Show,” Fetterman posted on X. “Today, I’m apologizing to The Jerry Springer Show.”
I did not have “Fetterman getting into a beef with AOC” on my bingo card.
The article also adds this detail about Shani Louk – and perhaps it is true of the other bodies as well:
Louk’s father, Nissim Louk, said his daughter’s body had been discovered in a cool, deep tunnel and was still in excellent condition when it was brought home.
Hamas knew these people were dead but they allowed the families to believe they were still alive, the better to torment the relatives and encourage them to pressure the Israeli government to make concessions. It was also understand that a Rafah operation by the IDF would probably lead to the finding of some hostages, dead or alive. But the whole world, including Biden and company, seems to have wanted to protect Rafah.
A new study hot off the press has confirmed what most of us already knew: people who get "gender-affirming" surgery have more than 12 times higher instances of suicide attempts than those who don't get the surgeries.
THIS NAKBA DAY MESSAGE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY TRUTH: Also worth noting. Before the Palestinian cause became a thing, in the Arab world the “Nakba” or catastrophe wasn’t the displacement of Arabs from Palestine, but the failure of five Arab armies plus Palestinian Arab militias to wipe out the nascent state of Israel and kill or expel its Jewish residents.
RED ALERT: Stewart Baker writes at the Volokh Conspiracy: “Congress is Preparing to Restore Quotas in College Admissions … and Everywhere Else–as a Very Quiet Part of the Bipartisan ‘Privacy’ Bill.” I haven’t had a chance to review the bill yet. But the conservative civil rights lawyers who have had that opportunity all agree that this “bipartisan” bill will, if passed, be a disaster. I assume the GOP staffers involved simply didn’t understand the ramifications of the “disparate impact” provisions in the bill. But I’ll know more once I’ve read the bill myself. In the meantime: Dear Congress: Please don’t pass this bill.
(Yes, I noticed Glenn posted this last evening, but it’s important enough to post again.)
…Biden’s numbers aren’t following the pattern we’ve seen with other recent presidents. …Biden’s recovery is stronger than what…Reagan…saw. In 1984, inflation was higher than it is now, unemployment was higher than it is now and the interest rate on a 30-year mortgage was above 13 percent — almost double what it is now. …Yet Biden is polling worse than Reagan…at this point in their re-election bids.
By lowering trade barriers and ending the era of big government, the United States would both create prosperity for its own people and shape the world in its image… That hasn’t worked out. …neoliberalism failed to deliver. The notion that the old approach would bring prosperity, as Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, has said, “was a promise made but not kept.”
