Days of Wine and Roses
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
Missouri v. Biden
Here’s how federal judge Terry Doughty yesterday described the digital censorship controversy at which pundits a half-year now have repeatedly rolled eyes, dismissed, and mocked as a nothingburger: “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Thomas Jefferson on Bidenomics
My fellow Americans –
President Biden is currently on a “Bidenomics” tour. Terrible name, “Bidenomics,” because nobody likes Biden so they’re not going to like anything with his name in it. Call it “Satanomics: The Economy is Stronger Than Hell,” which is a lie but so is everything else he says about the economy.
His economic team recently posted a “Here Are the Facts” video, the first of which is, “Under the Biden Harris Administration Inflation Has Fallen.”
That’s true — if by “Fallen” you mean “Risen.”
The annual inflation rate when Biden took office was 1.4 percent. In May 2023, it was 4 percent, about three times higher.
Inflation is lower today than the 9.1 percent peak that we hit last June, but you don’t get credit for pushing it to unprecedented levels and then watching it come back down, particularly since it only came down as the Federal Reserve was increasing interest rates at a historic pace over the past 15 months — from near zero to more than 5 percent.
The result, along with three of the four largest bank failures in the history of the country, is that buying a home or a car, paying down credit cards or getting a small-business loan are all more expensive under Bidenomics.
Another Bidenomics “fact”: Inflation is less than half what it was last summer.
Also not true. Inflation is slowing, but it’s cumulative. The 4 percent increase this May was on top of last May’s 8.3 percent increase for a two-year increase of nearly 13 percent. You raise prices 8.3 percent, then raise them another 4 percent on top of that.
Since Biden took office, inflation has increased by about 16 percent. And inflation is regressive — the less money you have, the more it hurts.
I can see how Biden jiggled the numbers for the first two claims, but this one I can’t:
“Wages are up, accounting for inflation, that’s real breathing room.”
In January of 2021, when Biden took office, average hourly earnings adjusted for inflation were $11.39. As of May 2023, that number was $11.03. It’s lower.
As George Orwell used to say, “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
National Math and Reading Scores are Plunging
National math and reading scores are plunging.
In the new educational philosophy, test scores are just a racist measure of racist things. Parents who are pro–standardized testing are far-right hate groups.
Obviously closing schools for years was really bad. You can see the scores drop off a cliff after 2020. But overall, the scores are actually lower than they were 40 years ago. We’ve made no progress in educating kids since 1980. There was progress till slightly after 2010 and then . . .
What has happened in that time? I bet deciding that math and reading are racist didn’t help. And teachers being primarily tasked with gender-discovery journeys also did not improve scores.
Midwestern public school teachers are trading tips on how to transition kids without telling parents. (I don’t know why these stories are only covered in non-US media.)
Having teachers paint your son’s nails does not improve test scores. Spending an entire semester on pronouns and the asexual spectrum does not improve test scores.
Maybe spending a few minutes on algebra instruction? It’s a weird idea, I know, but maybe it would improve test scores?
I think about my profession, software engineering, and where we would be if we had made no progress since 1980. Imagine using technology that was the same or worse than it was 40 years ago.
It’s hard to think of professions that have made no progress in 40 years. Education majors are just the dumbest people on earth.
An Alternative Approach to Student Loan Relief
The Supreme Court just struck down Biden's disastrous student loan forgiveness program. We have a bad habit in America of paying people to do the exact opposite of what we want them to do: more $$ to stay at home than to work, more $$ to be a single mother than married, more $$… pic.twitter.com/kexfAig09l
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) June 30, 2023
I knew Biden wasn’t allowed to do this.
Here’s the good news. You can just flip those signs over, write a new begging message on the back, and go stand on a freeway offramp.
Supreme Court Kills Affirmative Action
The Supreme Court Has Killed Affirmative Action. Mediocre Whites Can Rest Easier. — thenation.com
The author of that piece really hates white people. I don’t recommend reading it, you will not be a better person for having done so, as it consists solely of sweeping generalizations, broad judgments, unfounded inferences and racial insults.
Even if five points (out of a possible 100) were deducted for each verifiable fact, it still scores at least a 95. Grammar and spelling are passable.
The only “fact” I remember being cited in support of affirmative action is actually false:
In California, which ended its affirmative action policies over 25 years ago, the studies show that, without affirmative action, Black enrollment plummets, Latino enrollment plummets, AAPI enrollment goes up a little bit, and whites flood the remaining opportunities.
The article that the author links to doesn’t even say that. Black and Latino enrollment in the UC system has gone up, not down. A snippet from that article:
Black and Latino students increased to 43% of the admitted first-year class of Californians for fall 2022 compared with about 20% before Proposition 209.
(Proposition 209 is the law that ended affirmative action.)
What did happen after Prop 209 was a significant redistribution of black and Latino students. Their enrollment at the most elite UC schools, Berkeley and UCLA, dropped — by a lot — but went up at the other UC campuses.
After this redistribution, there was an increase in the number of black and Latino students graduating, including an increase of 55% in the number graduating in four years, an increase of 63% in the number graduating in four years with a grade point average of 3.5 or higher, an increase of nearly 50% in the number graduating with degrees in science, mathematics, and engineering, and an increase of about 20% in the number of earned doctorates.
Everybody talks about admission, no one talks about graduation. If you’re admitted to an elite school as a diversity admit, rather than because you’re academically capable of being there, your chances of graduating are not great.
That’s what was happening in California. Students who could have done well at another UC school were being affirmative-actioned into Berkeley and UCLA and never graduated.
Affirmative action supporters should be asked straight up why they don’t believe black Americans have the capability to overcome obstacles that other marginalized groups (Asians, Jews) have overcome. It amounts to the same thing.
Racism isn’t dead but it’s not stopping people from doing anything they want to do. We elected a black president (twice), so what is there that a black person can’t accomplish because of their race? (No Asian or Jewish presidents, FYI.)
Speaking of which, Obama and all the other affirmative action hucksters, despite many of them being black and having accomplished notable things in life, are permanently damaging the black race by telling kids, “People don’t like you because your skin is too dark. They don’t want you to succeed. You will not be treated fairly in life and your efforts will not be rewarded.”
What will happen to kids raised that way? They will fail. It’s child abuse. You want to raise kids to believe in themselves and their power to accomplish what they set out to do.
But kids can’t vote. If you preach the same message to black adults, i.e., that your failures in life are not of your own making, that you are not as well off as you should be because of white supremacy and structural racism and systemic racism and unconscious racism and all kinds of racism, they will give you money and votes and power, if that’s what you want, but again, at the expense of destroying your own race.
Thomas Sowell said this in 1964 and I think he was right (as usual):
To me the psychology of blacks is the single biggest obstacle to racial progress. It isn’t fashionable to say this, and it certainly isn’t pleasant, but truth does not depend on these considerations. With all due respect to the courage and dedication of the various civil rights groups, I think that when all the laws have been passed and all the gates flung open, the net result will be one tremendous anticlimax unless there is a drastic change of attitude among blacks.
Diversity at Harvard
The Harvard University president, vice president, provost, and 15 deans signed an email reaffirming the institution’s commitment to diversity after the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action on Thursday.
The Supreme Court ruled that the race-conscious admissions policies practiced by Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.
The email states that “diversity and difference are essential to academic excellence” and “to prepare leaders for a complex world, Harvard must admit and educate a student body whose members reflect, and have lived, multiple facets of human experience.”
Whatever that means. But what does race have to do with it? Why is race the deciding factor?
I think it would be easy to find a young black person and a young white person who’ve lived very similar lives. Or to find two young white people who’ve led very different lives. Or two young black people who’ve led very different lives. You agree?
And on the subject of “diversity,” I’d say Harvard has a very narrow definition. In 2023, the Harvard Crimson annual survey of Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences found that more than 77 percent of surveyed faculty identified as either “very liberal” or “liberal,” while 2.5 percent identified as “conservative” and less than 1 percent as “very conservative.”
Diversity = people of many different colors who all think exactly alike.
If Your House Burns Down and You Rebuild It, Did You “Create” a New House?
Over 13 million new jobs created.
More Americans are working than ever.
Record number of small business applications.Bidenomics is growing our economy.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 28, 2023
I love these Biden tweets on job “creation.”
ChatGPT tells me that the COVID-19 pandemic caused the loss of more than 22 million jobs in the United States. The 13 million jobs that Biden “created” are those lost jobs coming back. But he’s still 9 million short. What happened to those people?
The unemployment rate is low, which suggests that people have left the labor force for some reason. If COVID didn’t kill them all, then they may have retired, given up (not everyone wants to work at fast-food restaurants), or cobbled together a welfare package they can live on.
The labor force participation rate (shown below) has never come back to pre-pandemic level, and people who have left the labor force are not counted in the unemployment rate.
Billionaires
The average billionaire in America pays 8% in federal taxes.
Teachers and firefighters pay more than that.
That’s why I proposed a minimum tax for billionaires. Republicans are against it, but I’m going to keep fighting for it.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 26, 2023
Reading Joe Biden’s Twitter is exquisitely painful, like a sore tooth that you can’t stop pushing on with your tongue.
How do these things even go together? Americans are not taxed on their net worth, they’re taxed on their income. At least that’s what I think he’s talking about. Income tax. Although there are a lot of other federal taxes: self-employment tax, gift tax, excise taxes, etc.
Is he talking about taxing people’s net worth? I don’t know. I can’t figure it out.
I’m not a billionaire myself because I don’t know how to make that happen. If someone has figured out how to do it, good for them. They’re entitled to what they have.
Climate and Environmental Justice for Ignorant Bigots
When @KamalaHarris and I were elected, we vowed to enact the most ambitious climate and environmental justice campaign in American history. That’s exactly what we’ve done.
— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) June 25, 2023
“Climate and environmental justice”? What is that and how much does it cost?
Are we being atmospherically sodomized by ignorant climate change deniers?
Doing What He Loved
Jim Tweto, the patriarch of a family aviation business in Alaska whose fame endured a decade after his somewhat reluctant star turn on television, died June 16 when the Cessna 180 he was flying failed to gain altitude after takeoff. — aopa.org
“At least he died doing what he loved.”
“He loved crashing planes?”
Censorship is Not “Misinformation”
YouTube says it has removed a video of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaking with podcast host Jordan Peterson for spreading what the company says is vaccine misinformation. https://t.co/lIVNxVBbpq
— NBC News (@NBCNews) June 22, 2023
Vaccine misinformation has nothing to do with it. “Misinformation” is a meaningless but useful term because no one wants to just come out and say “We love censorship and we are silencing the views of anyone we disagree with.”
Instead, under the guise of “misinformation,” they can say that certain content cannot be allowed, in the interest of safety and the Common Good.
Google, which owns YouTube, donates vast sums of money to the Democratic party, and they are not going to have RFK Jr. clips on YouTube because if they do, people might decide to vote for him.
The Democratic party doesn’t like voting, they don’t like elections, what they like is to just choose presidential nominees themselves. You may have noticed that in the last two election cycles.
The Kennedy-Peterson interview is still available on Twitter.
Progress on DEI
The woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman’s garment: for all that do so are abomination unto the Lord thy God. — Deuteronomy 22:5
Far-Right ‘Moms for Liberty’ is a Hate Group?
Moms for Liberty, the far-right parental group known for protesting at school board meetings, has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a “hate group” for the first time ever. — msn.com
“Far-right” is an empty phrase assigned to, as far as I can tell, people who do not subscribe to neoliberal orthodoxy and who question U.S. institutions of power, like government and teachers unions.
And the lead paragraph, quoted above, indicates that “protesting at school board meetings,” which is actually a right protected by the Constitution of the United States, will earn you an SPLC designation as a “hate group.”
The SPLC also labeled 11 other “right-wing ‘parents’ rights'” groups as extremist groups.
The use of quotes in the story is noteworthy. The author has scare-quoted “parents’ rights” and labeled the parents’ rights groups en masse as right-wing, as though the idea that parents have rights is some kind of a fringe concept that most people reject.
“Hate group” is also scare-quoted, as though it doesn’t have any real meaning (it doesn’t) but in this particular case seems to mean a group that does not believe, as the SPLC obviously does, that the opinions of the government, teachers unions and school boards regarding racial politics and gender ideology are so obviously correct and so profoundly enlightened that only hate or bigotry can explain others’ holding different beliefs.
The Department of Justice issued a memo in 2021 urging the investigation of concerned parents, backtracked on it, but did not respond to a request for comment regarding ties between the administration and the SPLC.
Definitions of “Woke”
A “woke” person, or “social-justice warrior,” is someone who believes that (1) the institutions of American society are currently and intentionally set up to oppress (minorities, women, the poor, fat people, etc.), (2) virtually all gaps in performance between large groups prove that this oppression exists, and (3) the solution to this is equity — which means proportional representation regardless of performance or qualifications.
The attitude of a person who regards his or her opinions as so obviously correct and so profoundly enlightened that they may not legitimately be doubted or challenged, and that only hate or bigotry can explain others’ holding different beliefs.
At an American university, a conductor rehearsing a chorus said, “Now, ladies and gentlemen, please turn to Section B,” or whatever. A student reported him to administration. Administration gave him a warning. . . .
My colleague David Mastio worked at USA Today for a long while. At some point, a group of activists at the paper decided that “pregnant women” would no longer do. It had to be “pregnant people.” Mastio observed that the “people” in “pregnant people” are also known as “women.” The activists demanded that he be fired. Instead, he was demoted.
Book Banning
Biden administration to appoint anti-book ban coordinator as part of new LGBTQ protections — cbsnews.com
Oh, I’ve got the perfect candidate! This guy:
Seriously though, what does LGBTQ have to do with book banning? Book banning has a long history completely unrelated to LGBTQ, and the book banning that is attributed to LGBTQ seems to be either fake or due to the age-inappropriateness of the material.
DOJ to Work ‘Hand-in-Hand’ With LGBTQ Community To Address ‘Threats’
That’s a good idea because crazy trans hoes in the LGBTQ “community” are the most violent people I’ve ever seen. Riley Gaines doesn’t seem to be able to go out in public without police protection. Matt Walsh has security personnel living in his house.
High school girls have been beaten and raped by trans-identifying boys in high school bathrooms.
Here’s a nice sign that some trans activists brought to a women’s rally in London:
In keeping with the tradition of other violent, lunatic fringe organizations, members of the trans group wore masks over their faces, but from photos in the article, they all seem to be male.
I sense a strong aroma of three things:
- Misogyny
- Child endangerment
- Sexual gratification of deviant males
I don’t see violence directed at LGBTQ people. America loves gay people. Many trans people are harder to like because they’re too angry and violent and delusional but still, I’ve never heard of anyone attacking Lia Thomas or Dylan Mulvaney or Caitlyn Jenner or that cross-dressing admiral or the nuclear waste guy who steals women’s luggage.
I hope the DOJ can tamp down the LGBTQ violence.
Cats and Puppies
Pregnant Transgender Man Gets Backlash Over Glamour UK Pride Issue: “I’m A Pregnant Man, And I’m Trans” — msn.com
He’s going to have a hard time pushing the baby out his dick. Is an OB/GYN involved in the process? Why would a man go to an OB/GYN?
“My dog identifies as a cat. You know what that means?”
“No, what?”
“A cat can have puppies.”
It’s just a silly word game . . .
Abraham Lincoln used to ask “How many legs does a dog have if you call a tail a leg?”
The answer is four. As Abe would point out, calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.
And calling a woman a man doesn’t make her a man.