People say that money is not the key to happiness.
But I always figured, if I have enough money, I could have a key made.
*.*
I had a really great with this really great lady I just met.
Well, it wasn't really a date-date, more like we ate dinner and saw a movie together.
Then the plane landed.
*.*
Lines:
So, the Queen of England is newly single and Bill Gates suddenly announced he's getting divorced, interesting...
Did you know the Flat Earth Society has members around the globe?
Parenting is basically an 18-year long episode of "Survivor."
Some of you are too young to know how it feels to take a ton of pictures and then find out two weeks later they all sucked.
Apparently, its rude to ask the parents of a kid on a leash if it was a 'rescue'.
Skilled workers are hard to find. That's why idiots are promoted to management.
There are two types of people in this world. Those who say, "Oh, big stretch" when a dog stretches, and sociopaths.
Onion rings are basically vegetable donuts.
Worry is a waste of creative thinking.
I finally got 8 hours of sleep. It was over 3 days, but still...
The best murder weapon would be a Tupperware container lid, because no one would ever be able to find it.
Dear Mother-in-law, please stop telling me how to raise my kids; I live with one of yours and I've seen your work.
The older I get, the more I find myself involuntarily hissing like a vampire when I walk into the bright sun.
Thank you for pretending not to see me when I was pretending not to see you.
*.*
Dentist warns his patient: “This might be a bit painful.”
Patient: “That’s okay, I can handle it.”
Dentist: "I'm sleeping with your girlfriend.”
*.*
What does a metal frog say?
Rivet.
Quote of the Times;
Ya, the Satanic pedophile elites who control every western country just shut down the world over a cold and rigged an American election while grooming your children with degenerate and anti-White propaganda, but let’s not get too radical in response here guys. – Torba
Link of the Times;
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2021/06/indiana-jones-american-epic-hero-stephen-klugewicz.html
Issue of the Times;
Even the Federal Reserve doesn’t believe the Federal Reserve anymore by Simon Black
More than twenty years ago when I was a young Army intelligence officer fresh out of the academy, my commander summoned me to his office one afternoon because he had a ‘special mission’ for me.
I was beyond excited.
My assumption was that it would be a clandestine assignment to lead one of our unit’s counterintelligence teams in the Middle East. Or perhaps it would be temporary duty as an aide to the commanding general who would be visiting soon.
It was none of the above.
Instead, my commander looked at me and said, “Lieutenant, I need you to plan our unit’s long-term budget for the next ten years, and I want it on my desk this afternoon.”
Huh?
Aside from the obvious disappointment of being handed such a lame assignment, I was dumbfounded that they would entrust something like budget planning to a 22-year old with zero experience in the matter.
But the task took me all of 15 minutes to complete. I looked at what our unit’s current budget was for that fiscal year… and then I spent a few minutes researching the inflation rate.
According to Yahoo (yes, this was so long ago that people still primarily used Yahoo instead of Google), the projected inflation rate was 2%.
So basically I just added 2% to our spending every year for the next 10 years, and poof, long-term budget complete.
That’s the day I learned how government financing works; quite often the people who come up with these numbers don’t have a clue what they’re doing and base everything on some very simple assumptions about the future.
A few weeks ago, the White House unveiled its own 10 year budget, which forecasts US federal spending into the early 2030s.
Similarly, they make their own assumptions about the future. In fact, they list key assumptions about inflation, interest rates, etc. on page 60 of their budget report.
This is really interesting… because the Federal Reserve-- i.e. the US central bank that is responsible for controlling inflation-- insists that they’ll keep inflation at 2% over the long term.
But apparently the White House doesn’t believe its own central bank… because the 10-year Biden Budget assumes an inflation rate that’s, proportionally, 15% higher than what the Federal Reserve promises.
This lack of confidence is pretty remarkable; think about it-- the US Treasury Secretary, who would have been instrumental in drafting the budget, used to be the Chair of the Federal Reserve.
So even the Fed’s own alumni don’t believe the Fed when they say that they’ll keep inflation at 2%.
And why should anyone believe the Fed? Inflation has been soaring, yet the Fed has been completely dismissive of it, claiming that inflation is ‘transitory’, i.e. it’s a temporary phenomenon that will eventually stop.
We’ve discussed this before-- there is some truth in that statement. But the real issue is far more complicated.
Let’s have a look at what inflation really is…
In simplistic terms, inflation is too much money relative to the amount of stuff in an economy. And ‘stuff’ literally means ANYTHING-- a loaf of bread, a brand new Tesla, services performed by your accountant, and even assets like Bitcoin, stocks in the S&P 500, real estate, etc.
There’s a finite amount of goods and services in any economy. There’s only so much property available, only so many loaves of bread that are baked. And there are only 500 companies in the S&P.
Similarly, there’s also a certain amount of money-- all the combined income and savings of everyone in the economy.
In a market-based economy, consumers and investors make choices about where all that money ends up; they choose to purchase loaves of bread, Teslas, or shares in S&P 500 companies.
And based on the laws of supply and demand, the prices for those goods, services, and assets will rise or fall according to consumer preference.
But then the Federal Reserve steps in… and arbitrarily expands the money supply. And by “expand”, I mean “flooded the economy with a supernova orgy of money.”
This is pretty much what the Fed has done ever since the LAST financial crisis in 2008; back then its balance sheet was about $800 billion. Today it’s $8 trillion-- 10x bigger.
This means that the Fed has stuffed enormous quantities of money into the economy over the past 12+ years… and especially over the last year.
Since COVID started, the Fed has doubled the size of its balance sheet and expanded the money supply more than any year in US history except for 1943. That’s really saying something.
So- let’s go back to our inflation definition: now there are trillions of dollars of new money in the system.
But at the same time, there’s a lot less stuff.
Countless businesses closed, others were forced to shut down, and workers have been paid to stay home.
All of those policies mean less stuff is being produced in the economy.
So-- more money, less stuff means that prices have generally been rising. That’s inflation.
Some of this really is temporary. Eventually most of those surviving businesses will open, and others will replace the ones which failed. So production will start to catch up.
But longer term, there are a lot of other factors to consider—
1) Tax policy. Remember, these guys want to raise taxes in the US, especially on investors and large companies. In fact their proposed corporate tax rate is 28%.
Yet they’ve just announced a proposal with other nations to set a “global minimum tax” of 15%. So they’re essentially creating a huge incentive for US companies to stop producing in America and head overseas for a lower tax rate. It’s genius.
2) Idiotic COVID policies. We’ve talked about this before-- COVID compliance is expensive.
Here’s a great example-- a lot of hotels are keeping a used room vacant for 24 hours after a guest checks out to ensure ‘proper ventilation’ before any new guest can stay in that room.
This means that hotels will never be able to operate at full capacity, which will cost them a ton of money. And ultimately those costs will be paid by consumers in the form of higher room rates. That’s inflation.
3) Incentives to NOT work.
This one is nuts; they give people money to NOT work. And then the government complains that the unemployment rate is too high… so they need to continue giving money to unemployed people!
It’s a never-ending cycle that creates major disincentives to produce, i.e. less stuff in the economy.
It’s even dumber than when the federal government gave money to farmers during the Great Depression to DESTROY their crops.
There are so many more examples and trends, each of which makes it more difficult to produce (i.e. less stuff) at a time when there’s more money flooding the economy. That causes inflation.
So it’s no wonder the White House is skeptical when the Fed claims that inflation will be 2%. There are simply too many forces that will keep inflation higher in the future.
News of the Times;
https://soapboxie.com/us-politics/Hillary-Violated-State-Department-Policy-to-Get-Convicted-Child-Traffickers-Out-of-Haiti
https://www.unz.com/sbpdl/her-name-is-anat-kimchi-white-female-doctoral-student-researching-disparity-in-probation-sentences-randomly-murdered-by-black-male-in-chicago/
https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2021/07/03/actress-kirstie-alley-warns-hollywood-is-putting-society-on-a-path-to-accept-pedophilia-protect-your-children/
https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/2021/06/26/statewide-manhunt-for-othal-wallace-ends-saturday-morning/
https://summit.news/2021/06/25/3-dead-3-injured-after-attack-by-knifeman-in-wurzburg-germany/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/06/tragedy-food-deserts-causing/
https://jonathanturley.org/2021/06/26/report-united-states-ranks-last-in-media-trust/
https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/06/the-chosen-jesus-tv-show/619306/
https://freebeacon.com/courts/white-males-absent-from-biden-judicial-slate/
https://www.dailywire.com/news/gwen-berry-blasted-for-anthem-protest-try-this-s-in-an-actually-oppressive-country
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-06-24-fbi-entrapment-exposed-research-document.html
https://www.wnd.com/2021/06/see-white-privilege-gender-equity-indoctrination-plans-kindergartners/
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/san-francisco-homeless-camp-costs-60000-tent-year
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2021/07/02/imaryland-sanctuary-county-twice-freed-illegal-alien-ms-13-gang-member-accused-of-trying-to-rape-15-year-old/
https://electionwiz.com/2021/07/04/exposed-biden-center-received-54m-from-china-after-launch-of-presidential-bid/
Reserve?
Throwaway?
My roommate claims that he caught me with a sex doll.
This is completely untrue and slanderous. He caught me with a sex action figure.
*.*
A painting by Picasso that was stolen nine years ago during a heist at a Greek gallery has been found.
The gallery manager said, "I never thought to look in the fuvking rubbish bin".
*.*
Oneliners:
A retired husband is a wife's full time job.
Happiness is the place between too little and too much.
Circular arguments often make the rounds.
Even at a Mensa convention, someone is the dumbest person in the room.
When in doubt. . . mumble.
Money can't buy everything, but then again, neither can no money.
I have seen the truth and it makes no sense.
If a nickel knew what it is worth today, it would feel like two cents.
A lot of pessimists get that way from financing optimists.
When you have your head up your arse, 4 of the 5 senses do not work
I'd rather visit the zoo than most of my relatives.
If only the good die young then what does that say about senior citizens?
Commercial truck owners should be required to pay into a state windshield repair fund.
Don't attempt to run from the past, it is always behind you.
People like you are the reason people like me need medication.
*.*
Last month we had:
June 19th - Juneteenth, celebrating the freedom of the slaves.
June 20th - Fathers Day, children showing appreciation for caring fathers.
Potentially inconvenient having two such days on the same weekend.
Luckily, very few were celebrating both.
*.*
I took the wife out to eat.
"You always pray before dinner when we're at home.", she said.
"Here, the chef knows how to cook.", I replied.
Quote of the Times;
If only there were a flag every American could raise that represented liberty and justice for ALL. – Boebert
Link of the Times;
https://pjmedia.com/columns/kevindowneyjr/2021/06/19/slave-stories-history-forgot-black-people-owned-slaves-too-n1455761
Issue of the Times;
Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society by John Tierney
Disposable products are sanitary, efficient, and environmentally sound.
For half a century, it’s been a term of disdain: the “throwaway society,” uttered with disgust by the environmentally enlightened. But now that their reusable tote bags are taboo at grocery stores and Starbucks is refusing to refill their ceramic mugs, they’ve had to face some unpleasant realities. Disposable products aren’t merely more convenient than the alternative; they’re also safer, particularly during a pandemic but also at any other time. And they have other virtues: the throwaway society is healthier, cleaner, more economical, less wasteful, less environmentally damaging—and yes, more “sustainable” than the green vision of utopia.
These are not new truths, even if it took the Covid-19 pandemic to reveal them again. The throwaway age began because of public-health campaigns a century ago to control the spread of pathogens. Disposable products were celebrated for decades for promoting hygiene and saving everyone time and money. It wasn’t until the 1970s that they became symbols of decadent excess, and then only because of economic and ecological fallacies repeated so often that they became conventional wisdom.
In a strange turn of events, the most affluent society in history suddenly turned into a mass of neurotic hoarders. Sifting through garbage for valuables, an activity formerly associated with the most destitute inhabitants of Third World shantytowns, became a moral duty in American suburbs. Greens campaigned for “zero waste” and a “circular economy” in which disposable products would be outlawed. They confidently predicted that the throwaway society was doomed, but if they’d known anything about its history, they would have realized that it was created for very good reasons—and that it will endure long after their lamentations are forgotten.
At the start of the twentieth century, American consumers were still living in what today’s greens would consider a state of grace. They carried their own baskets and cotton bags to the grocery store and brought home food wrapped in biodegradable paper. They didn’t use disposable towels in public bathrooms, which provided cloth towels attached to rollers. There were no Styrofoam cups for coffee and no plastic bottles of water. When people wanted water in a public place, they’d get it from the spigot of a drinking fountain by filling a tin cup chained to the fountain.
This “common cup” was the ultimate reusable product—much to the horror of public-health experts, who blamed it for spreading tuberculosis, pneumonia, diphtheria, meningitis, and other diseases. Alvin Davison, a biologist at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, analyzed cups from public schools and reported in 1908 that a single sip from a student left a residue of 100 dead skin cells and 75,000 bacteria. He used the scrapings from one school cup to induce fatal cases of pneumonia and tuberculosis in guinea pigs.
His article “Death in School Drinking Cups” provided support to “Ban the Cup” campaigns around the country. The first successful one was led in Kansas by Samuel Crumbine, a colorful doctor who had started his career in Dodge City (he was the model for Doc Adams in the long-running Gunsmoke television series) and went on to lead various public-hygiene crusades. The term “flyswatter” comes from a slogan he popularized, “Swat the fly” (which came to him while listening to the crowd at a baseball game urging a hitter to swat a sacrifice fly ball). After watching train passengers with tuberculosis and other diseases drinking water from a common cup, Crumbine got so upset that he threw the cup out the train’s window, and proceeded to persuade his colleagues on the state board of health to ban the common cup in trains, schools, and other public places in Kansas in 1909.
The ban left Kansans with a new problem: What were they supposed to use at a public fountain? Fortunately, as Crumbine later recalled, “Necessity proved to be the mother of invention.” Shortly after banning the cup, Crumbine was visited by a former Kansan named Hugh Moore, who brought with him samples of a product that his brother-in-law had invented: round paper cups that could be stacked in a dispenser next to a fountain. Crumbine’s endorsement provided crucial help to Moore in selling his product, originally called Health Kups and later renamed Dixie Cups.
It was the birth of the throwaway society, and Moore became its first great evangelist. He was an indefatigable promoter, and he wasn’t just selling cups. He had a genius for marketing fear. Later in life, he would launch another movement by publishing a pamphlet in 1954, “The Population Bomb” (a title later borrowed by Paul Ehrlich for a best-selling book) and founding the Population Crisis Committee. In 1910, Moore started a newspaper, The Cup Campaigner, filled with warnings from public-health experts and horror stories of respectable women and innocent children sickened by drinking from common cups. It was illustrated with cartoons showing unsavory-looking men sipping from metal cups and images of the Grim Reaper lurking at fountains.
Soon, dozens of cities and states had banned the common cup, and Moore had plenty of customers, starting with the railroads. The Erie Lackawanna Railroad featured disposable cups in an advertisement that depicted a character named Phoebe Snow, dressed immaculately in white as she drank from a paper cup. The ad was a paean to disposability:
On railroad trips
No other lips
Have touched the cup
That Phoebe sips.
Sales of disposable cups soared during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, a tragedy evoked long afterward in Dixie Cup ads with warnings like, “Now’s no time to flirt with Contagion!” The company expanded into making paper cups for ice cream and milkshakes, promoted with the slogan “Used but once and thrown away”—in hygienic contrast to the dirty glass from a soda fountain pictured in a 1930s ad with the headline “This Tainted Kiss Awaits Your Lips.”
Meantime, Moore and his competitors were promoting other advantages of disposable products. The invention of cup lids in the 1920s made it easy for people to carry off their drinks. Restaurants could serve customers more quickly and cheaply by using cups and plates that didn’t need to be washed and dried. Consumers were liberated from chores, as Life illustrated in 1955 with an elaborately staged photo for an article titled “Throwaway Living,” a phrase that wasn’t used in disdain. The photo showed dozens of disposable products—plates, cups, pans, towels, ashtrays, a napkin and tablecloth, a baby’s bib and diaper—apparently flung heavenward by two ecstatic parents and their child. “The objects flying through the air in this picture,” the magazine exulted, “would take 40 hours to clean—except that no housewife need bother.”
Disposability remained a self-evident virtue in the 1960s, when Bethlehem Steel advertised its new soda cans by showing photos of two women. One smiled as she tossed metal cans into the trash; the other looked miserable as she struggled to lug armfuls of empty glass bottles back to the store. The ad posed what, at the time, was a rhetorical question: “Why make hard work out of enjoying soft drinks?”
But before long, an army of activists and scholars was inventing one reason after another to make even harder work. The first popular objection to disposable products came in the 1970s, the decade of the first Earth Day and the “energy crisis” and best-sellers with titles like Limits to Growth and The End of Affluence. Scientists had supposedly determined that humanity was running out of oil and other natural resources, so it was everyone’s moral duty to conserve dwindling supplies for posterity.
The precious little petroleum remaining could not be wasted on frivolities like plastic plates. There weren’t enough trees left to keep making Dixie Cups for the growing population. Ecologically conscious college students banished paper towels from their dorm bathrooms, in favor of cloth towels. Crumbine would have been appalled—another of his pioneering victories in Kansas had been a ban on cloth roller-towels in public bathrooms—but the planet’s health took precedence over the public’s.
The picture became even bleaker in the 1980s, when journalists and environmentalists came up with another objection to throwaway products: there was nowhere to throw them away. The “garbage crisis,” caused by a supposed shortage of space in landfills, prompted municipalities across America to launch curbside recycling programs. Towns expected to save money by reducing the need for landfilling, whose cost was projected to soar as space became scarce, and they expected to make money by selling recyclables and turning “garbage into gold.” As the planet’s supply of natural resources dwindled, prices for the raw materials were sure to rise, and the stuff in trash would become “too good to throw away.”
But the dreaded landfill shortage never occurred—and it never made any sense, given how much open land there is in America and how little of it is needed to bury trash. Nor did the world run short of oil or other natural resources. Those gloomy predictions never made any sense, either—certainly not to economists who had bothered to study long-term trends. Some resources do become scarce at times, causing prices to rise, but entrepreneurs respond by finding new supplies or cheaper substitutes. As a result, the real prices for energy and other natural resources have been falling for centuries, especially compared with the cost of labor, which has been rising for centuries. The only resource becoming consistently more expensive is humans’ time.
These trends created the throwaway society: as people grew wealthier and raw materials got cheaper, they could afford to buy more products and throw them away in order to save their increasingly valuable time. And these trends doomed the fantasies of recyclers because their industry required increasingly expensive human labor to produce decreasingly valuable raw materials.
New York City confidently predicted that it would save money by starting a mandatory recycling program in 1992, but it took so much extra labor to collect and process the recyclables that the city couldn’t recoup the costs from selling the materials. In fact, the recyclables often had so little value that the city had to pay still more money to get rid of them. The recycling program cost the city more than $500 million during its first seven years, and the losses have continued to mount. A new study by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute shows that eliminating the city’s recycling program and sending all its municipal trash to landfills could now save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually—enough money to increase the parks department’s budget by at least half.
Even those calculations underestimate the cost of recycling because they include only the direct outlays, chiefly the $686 per ton that the city spends to collect recyclables. But what about all the valuable time that New Yorkers spend sorting and rinsing their trash and delivering it to the recycling bin? For a New York Times Magazine article in 1996, I hired a Columbia University student to keep track of how much time he spent recycling cans and bottles and how much material he gathered in a week. Using those figures (eight minutes to gather four pounds), I calculated that if the city paid New Yorkers a typical janitor’s wage for their recycling labors, their labor would cost $792 per ton of recyclables—over $100 per ton more than what the city pays its sanitation workers to collect it.
As the economics of recycling worsened, cities in America and Europe found that the only viable markets for their recyclables were in poor countries, chiefly in China and other Asian nations, where processing recyclables was still profitable, thanks to lower wages and lower standards for worker safety and environmental quality. But as those countries have gotten wealthier, they’ve become reluctant to accept foreign trash. As bales of unwanted recyclables pile up in warehouses, towns have had to start sending them to landfills, and dozens of American municipalities have finally had the sense to cancel their recycling programs.
But most seem determined to persevere, even as they face huge budget shortfalls because of the pandemic. Now that the original objections to the throwaway society have proved false, green activists are relying on other reasons to keep making work for the rest of us.
One morning in 1996, I sat with a class of fifth-graders in Manhattan as they gazed mournfully at a photo of a supermarket package of red apples. It was part of a slide presentation by the director of environmental education for the Environmental Action Coalition, the guest lecturer at that day’s science class.
“Look at the plastic, the Styrofoam or cardboard underneath,” she told the class. “Do you need this much wrapping when you buy things?”
“Noooo,” the fifth-graders replied.
It was all so obvious to them, the fifth-graders as well as their lecturer. She was barely out of college, but she thought that she knew more about selling produce than supermarket executives and packaging engineers who had spent their careers studying this question. She was sure that plastic wrap and Styrofoam were wasteful and harmful to the environment because she had never seriously considered the alternative or wondered why those products were introduced.
To merchants and shoppers in the late 1920s, there was nothing wasteful about the revolutionary packaging material introduced by DuPont. Cellophane seemed miraculous because it was not only moisture-proof but also transparent. “EYE IT before you BUY IT,” DuPont advertised, and shoppers welcomed this new feature enabling them to judge the quality of produce and meat before they paid up. Cellophane kept things fresh much longer, an advantage advertised to everyone from homemakers to soldiers. During World War II, a DuPont ad showed a German soldier looking on enviously as American prisoners of war opened packages of cigarettes from home that were wrapped in cellophane: “The prisoners who have better cigarettes than their guards.”
Soviet citizens in the 1980s were similarly envious of Westerners’ new plastic grocery bags, which sold for $5 apiece on the black market in Moscow. The bags were coveted partly as a status symbol (a hard-to-get imported product) and partly because they were so light and compact. In a shortage-plagued economy, Muscovites never knew when a scarce item would suddenly become available in a nearby store, so they wanted to have an empty bag with them, just in case.
American merchants and shoppers switched from paper to plastic packaging because it reduced waste. Plastic was cheaper because it required fewer resources to manufacture. It required less energy to transport because it was lighter. Plastic took up less space in landfills than paper, and it further reduced the volume of household trash because it preserved food longer. The typical household in Mexico City, for example, generated more garbage than an American household because it bought fewer packaged products and ended up discarding more food that had spoiled.
But activists eager to find some reason to oppose disposable products have ignored these advantages. They blame America’s throwaway society for polluting the oceans with plastic, though virtually all that pollution comes from either fishing vessels or from developing countries with primitive waste-management systems—mostly the Asian countries that were importing plastic recyclables from America. Instead of castigating American consumers, environmentalists should blame themselves for creating the recycling programs that sent plastic to countries where it was allowed to leak into rivers. The best way to protect marine life is to throw used plastic into the trash, not the recycling bin, so that it goes straight to a well-lined local landfill instead of ending up in the ocean.
And instead of campaigning to ban plastic grocery bags, green activists should be promoting their environmental advantages. Banning them results in higher carbon emissions because the substitutes are thicker and heavier, requiring more materials and energy to manufacture and transport, and these paper bags and tote bags typically aren’t reused often enough to offset their initial carbon footprint. (See “The Perverse Panic over Plastic,” Winter 2020.) Greens may feel virtuous lugging groceries home in a paper or tote bag, but the shoppers choosing plastic are actually doing more to combat global warming and reduce consumption of natural resources.
They’re also reducing the risk of getting sick, just as Samuel Crumbine and Hugh Moore could have told them a century ago, and just as public-health researchers have been warning for a decade. Their studies have repeatedly shown that dangerous bacteria and viruses linger on reusable tote bags unless shoppers wash them regularly, which few bother to do. The Covid-19 pandemic finally forced some public officials to heed these warnings and allow the single-use plastic bags once again, but Greenpeace and other groups are still hoping to reinstate the bans once the pandemic is over. The reusable bags would be perfectly safe, they argue, if only people would wash them regularly.
But why should people spend their valuable free time washing tote bags when there’s a cheaper, more convenient, and environmentally benign alternative? It makes sense only for those who consider the throwaway society to be intrinsically sinful. They derive solace from reusing and recycling because it eases their guilt for being rich enough to afford so much stuff. If they want to perform these rites voluntarily, fine, but there’s no reason to force everyone else to do penance. Agonizing over what goes into the trash can is not a universal moral imperative—and it’s not exactly a sign of spiritual enlightenment, either.
It’s actually the most literal form of materialism: a single-minded devotion to preserving raw materials at the expense of more important things in life. Instead of decrying the throwaway society, we should be celebrating the prosperity that made it possible and the freedom that it provides. As crude and corny as the old Dixie Cup ads could be, they possessed a humanism sadly absent in today’s environmental sermons.
One ad in 1970 showed a bored young woman morphing into a glum middle-aged woman and then a despondent old woman as she stood over the kitchen sink washing a mountain of glasses. “Use Dixie Cups and the Best Years of Your Life Won’t Go Down the Drain,” it promised, and went on to calculate that the typical American mother had to wash 7,000 glasses per year.
“Do you enjoy spending all that time in hot water?” it asked, as it extolled the throwaway society’s alternative. “Think of it. You’ll have more time on your hands, and less dishwater. Time to spend with the kids. To make yourself a pantsuit. To live a little.” You may not yearn to make a pantsuit, but the rest of it still sounds pretty good.
News of the Times;
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-06-29-jj-ceases-opioid-business-following-230million-settlement.html
https://www.worldviewweekend.com/news/article/behind-vaccine-veil-doctor-cites-whistleblowers-inside-cdc-who-claim-injections-have
https://technofog.substack.com/p/when-the-fbi-framed-four-innocent
https://mishtalk.com/economics/swiss-reject-climate-change-with-zoomers-and-millennials-leading-the-way
https://americanmind.org/salvo/fully-oligarchic-luxury-californication/
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2021/06/22/california-to-use-federal-money-to-pay-all-back-rent-for-low-income-residents/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/open-borders-not-enough-joe-biden-now-flying-family-members-fake-refugees-county-not-even-approved-us-taxpayers-dime/
https://noqreport.com/2021/06/27/biden-quietly-signed-race-conscious-executive-order-that-will-destroy-americas-government/
https://www.usasupreme.com/two-black-teens-burn-mentally-ill-white-man-alive-and-kill-him-the-media-ignores-another-hate-crime/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/06/welcome-back-carter-joe-returns-inflation-america/
https://www.lifenews.com/2021/06/21/worlds-most-premature-baby-given-0-chance-to-survive-celebrates-his-first-birthday/
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/florida-gov-signs-bill-permitting-college-students-record-professors
https://americanpatriotdaily.com/latest/clarence-thomas-gave-joe-biden-an-ultimatum-that-set-biden-up-for-a-big-defeat/
https://sandrarose.com/2020/10/cdc-reveals-hospitals-counted-130000-heart-attacks-flu-and-bacterial-pneumonia-as-covid-19-deaths/
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russian-navy-loves-drones-and-good-reason-188340
This is completely untrue and slanderous. He caught me with a sex action figure.
*.*
A painting by Picasso that was stolen nine years ago during a heist at a Greek gallery has been found.
The gallery manager said, "I never thought to look in the fuvking rubbish bin".
*.*
Oneliners:
A retired husband is a wife's full time job.
Happiness is the place between too little and too much.
Circular arguments often make the rounds.
Even at a Mensa convention, someone is the dumbest person in the room.
When in doubt. . . mumble.
Money can't buy everything, but then again, neither can no money.
I have seen the truth and it makes no sense.
If a nickel knew what it is worth today, it would feel like two cents.
A lot of pessimists get that way from financing optimists.
When you have your head up your arse, 4 of the 5 senses do not work
I'd rather visit the zoo than most of my relatives.
If only the good die young then what does that say about senior citizens?
Commercial truck owners should be required to pay into a state windshield repair fund.
Don't attempt to run from the past, it is always behind you.
People like you are the reason people like me need medication.
*.*
Last month we had:
June 19th - Juneteenth, celebrating the freedom of the slaves.
June 20th - Fathers Day, children showing appreciation for caring fathers.
Potentially inconvenient having two such days on the same weekend.
Luckily, very few were celebrating both.
*.*
I took the wife out to eat.
"You always pray before dinner when we're at home.", she said.
"Here, the chef knows how to cook.", I replied.
Quote of the Times;
If only there were a flag every American could raise that represented liberty and justice for ALL. – Boebert
Link of the Times;
https://pjmedia.com/columns/kevindowneyjr/2021/06/19/slave-stories-history-forgot-black-people-owned-slaves-too-n1455761
Issue of the Times;
Let’s Hold On to the Throwaway Society by John Tierney
Disposable products are sanitary, efficient, and environmentally sound.
For half a century, it’s been a term of disdain: the “throwaway society,” uttered with disgust by the environmentally enlightened. But now that their reusable tote bags are taboo at grocery stores and Starbucks is refusing to refill their ceramic mugs, they’ve had to face some unpleasant realities. Disposable products aren’t merely more convenient than the alternative; they’re also safer, particularly during a pandemic but also at any other time. And they have other virtues: the throwaway society is healthier, cleaner, more economical, less wasteful, less environmentally damaging—and yes, more “sustainable” than the green vision of utopia.
These are not new truths, even if it took the Covid-19 pandemic to reveal them again. The throwaway age began because of public-health campaigns a century ago to control the spread of pathogens. Disposable products were celebrated for decades for promoting hygiene and saving everyone time and money. It wasn’t until the 1970s that they became symbols of decadent excess, and then only because of economic and ecological fallacies repeated so often that they became conventional wisdom.
In a strange turn of events, the most affluent society in history suddenly turned into a mass of neurotic hoarders. Sifting through garbage for valuables, an activity formerly associated with the most destitute inhabitants of Third World shantytowns, became a moral duty in American suburbs. Greens campaigned for “zero waste” and a “circular economy” in which disposable products would be outlawed. They confidently predicted that the throwaway society was doomed, but if they’d known anything about its history, they would have realized that it was created for very good reasons—and that it will endure long after their lamentations are forgotten.
At the start of the twentieth century, American consumers were still living in what today’s greens would consider a state of grace. They carried their own baskets and cotton bags to the grocery store and brought home food wrapped in biodegradable paper. They didn’t use disposable towels in public bathrooms, which provided cloth towels attached to rollers. There were no Styrofoam cups for coffee and no plastic bottles of water. When people wanted water in a public place, they’d get it from the spigot of a drinking fountain by filling a tin cup chained to the fountain.
This “common cup” was the ultimate reusable product—much to the horror of public-health experts, who blamed it for spreading tuberculosis, pneumonia, diphtheria, meningitis, and other diseases. Alvin Davison, a biologist at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, analyzed cups from public schools and reported in 1908 that a single sip from a student left a residue of 100 dead skin cells and 75,000 bacteria. He used the scrapings from one school cup to induce fatal cases of pneumonia and tuberculosis in guinea pigs.
His article “Death in School Drinking Cups” provided support to “Ban the Cup” campaigns around the country. The first successful one was led in Kansas by Samuel Crumbine, a colorful doctor who had started his career in Dodge City (he was the model for Doc Adams in the long-running Gunsmoke television series) and went on to lead various public-hygiene crusades. The term “flyswatter” comes from a slogan he popularized, “Swat the fly” (which came to him while listening to the crowd at a baseball game urging a hitter to swat a sacrifice fly ball). After watching train passengers with tuberculosis and other diseases drinking water from a common cup, Crumbine got so upset that he threw the cup out the train’s window, and proceeded to persuade his colleagues on the state board of health to ban the common cup in trains, schools, and other public places in Kansas in 1909.
The ban left Kansans with a new problem: What were they supposed to use at a public fountain? Fortunately, as Crumbine later recalled, “Necessity proved to be the mother of invention.” Shortly after banning the cup, Crumbine was visited by a former Kansan named Hugh Moore, who brought with him samples of a product that his brother-in-law had invented: round paper cups that could be stacked in a dispenser next to a fountain. Crumbine’s endorsement provided crucial help to Moore in selling his product, originally called Health Kups and later renamed Dixie Cups.
It was the birth of the throwaway society, and Moore became its first great evangelist. He was an indefatigable promoter, and he wasn’t just selling cups. He had a genius for marketing fear. Later in life, he would launch another movement by publishing a pamphlet in 1954, “The Population Bomb” (a title later borrowed by Paul Ehrlich for a best-selling book) and founding the Population Crisis Committee. In 1910, Moore started a newspaper, The Cup Campaigner, filled with warnings from public-health experts and horror stories of respectable women and innocent children sickened by drinking from common cups. It was illustrated with cartoons showing unsavory-looking men sipping from metal cups and images of the Grim Reaper lurking at fountains.
Soon, dozens of cities and states had banned the common cup, and Moore had plenty of customers, starting with the railroads. The Erie Lackawanna Railroad featured disposable cups in an advertisement that depicted a character named Phoebe Snow, dressed immaculately in white as she drank from a paper cup. The ad was a paean to disposability:
On railroad trips
No other lips
Have touched the cup
That Phoebe sips.
Sales of disposable cups soared during the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, a tragedy evoked long afterward in Dixie Cup ads with warnings like, “Now’s no time to flirt with Contagion!” The company expanded into making paper cups for ice cream and milkshakes, promoted with the slogan “Used but once and thrown away”—in hygienic contrast to the dirty glass from a soda fountain pictured in a 1930s ad with the headline “This Tainted Kiss Awaits Your Lips.”
Meantime, Moore and his competitors were promoting other advantages of disposable products. The invention of cup lids in the 1920s made it easy for people to carry off their drinks. Restaurants could serve customers more quickly and cheaply by using cups and plates that didn’t need to be washed and dried. Consumers were liberated from chores, as Life illustrated in 1955 with an elaborately staged photo for an article titled “Throwaway Living,” a phrase that wasn’t used in disdain. The photo showed dozens of disposable products—plates, cups, pans, towels, ashtrays, a napkin and tablecloth, a baby’s bib and diaper—apparently flung heavenward by two ecstatic parents and their child. “The objects flying through the air in this picture,” the magazine exulted, “would take 40 hours to clean—except that no housewife need bother.”
Disposability remained a self-evident virtue in the 1960s, when Bethlehem Steel advertised its new soda cans by showing photos of two women. One smiled as she tossed metal cans into the trash; the other looked miserable as she struggled to lug armfuls of empty glass bottles back to the store. The ad posed what, at the time, was a rhetorical question: “Why make hard work out of enjoying soft drinks?”
But before long, an army of activists and scholars was inventing one reason after another to make even harder work. The first popular objection to disposable products came in the 1970s, the decade of the first Earth Day and the “energy crisis” and best-sellers with titles like Limits to Growth and The End of Affluence. Scientists had supposedly determined that humanity was running out of oil and other natural resources, so it was everyone’s moral duty to conserve dwindling supplies for posterity.
The precious little petroleum remaining could not be wasted on frivolities like plastic plates. There weren’t enough trees left to keep making Dixie Cups for the growing population. Ecologically conscious college students banished paper towels from their dorm bathrooms, in favor of cloth towels. Crumbine would have been appalled—another of his pioneering victories in Kansas had been a ban on cloth roller-towels in public bathrooms—but the planet’s health took precedence over the public’s.
The picture became even bleaker in the 1980s, when journalists and environmentalists came up with another objection to throwaway products: there was nowhere to throw them away. The “garbage crisis,” caused by a supposed shortage of space in landfills, prompted municipalities across America to launch curbside recycling programs. Towns expected to save money by reducing the need for landfilling, whose cost was projected to soar as space became scarce, and they expected to make money by selling recyclables and turning “garbage into gold.” As the planet’s supply of natural resources dwindled, prices for the raw materials were sure to rise, and the stuff in trash would become “too good to throw away.”
But the dreaded landfill shortage never occurred—and it never made any sense, given how much open land there is in America and how little of it is needed to bury trash. Nor did the world run short of oil or other natural resources. Those gloomy predictions never made any sense, either—certainly not to economists who had bothered to study long-term trends. Some resources do become scarce at times, causing prices to rise, but entrepreneurs respond by finding new supplies or cheaper substitutes. As a result, the real prices for energy and other natural resources have been falling for centuries, especially compared with the cost of labor, which has been rising for centuries. The only resource becoming consistently more expensive is humans’ time.
These trends created the throwaway society: as people grew wealthier and raw materials got cheaper, they could afford to buy more products and throw them away in order to save their increasingly valuable time. And these trends doomed the fantasies of recyclers because their industry required increasingly expensive human labor to produce decreasingly valuable raw materials.
New York City confidently predicted that it would save money by starting a mandatory recycling program in 1992, but it took so much extra labor to collect and process the recyclables that the city couldn’t recoup the costs from selling the materials. In fact, the recyclables often had so little value that the city had to pay still more money to get rid of them. The recycling program cost the city more than $500 million during its first seven years, and the losses have continued to mount. A new study by Howard Husock of the Manhattan Institute shows that eliminating the city’s recycling program and sending all its municipal trash to landfills could now save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars annually—enough money to increase the parks department’s budget by at least half.
Even those calculations underestimate the cost of recycling because they include only the direct outlays, chiefly the $686 per ton that the city spends to collect recyclables. But what about all the valuable time that New Yorkers spend sorting and rinsing their trash and delivering it to the recycling bin? For a New York Times Magazine article in 1996, I hired a Columbia University student to keep track of how much time he spent recycling cans and bottles and how much material he gathered in a week. Using those figures (eight minutes to gather four pounds), I calculated that if the city paid New Yorkers a typical janitor’s wage for their recycling labors, their labor would cost $792 per ton of recyclables—over $100 per ton more than what the city pays its sanitation workers to collect it.
As the economics of recycling worsened, cities in America and Europe found that the only viable markets for their recyclables were in poor countries, chiefly in China and other Asian nations, where processing recyclables was still profitable, thanks to lower wages and lower standards for worker safety and environmental quality. But as those countries have gotten wealthier, they’ve become reluctant to accept foreign trash. As bales of unwanted recyclables pile up in warehouses, towns have had to start sending them to landfills, and dozens of American municipalities have finally had the sense to cancel their recycling programs.
But most seem determined to persevere, even as they face huge budget shortfalls because of the pandemic. Now that the original objections to the throwaway society have proved false, green activists are relying on other reasons to keep making work for the rest of us.
One morning in 1996, I sat with a class of fifth-graders in Manhattan as they gazed mournfully at a photo of a supermarket package of red apples. It was part of a slide presentation by the director of environmental education for the Environmental Action Coalition, the guest lecturer at that day’s science class.
“Look at the plastic, the Styrofoam or cardboard underneath,” she told the class. “Do you need this much wrapping when you buy things?”
“Noooo,” the fifth-graders replied.
It was all so obvious to them, the fifth-graders as well as their lecturer. She was barely out of college, but she thought that she knew more about selling produce than supermarket executives and packaging engineers who had spent their careers studying this question. She was sure that plastic wrap and Styrofoam were wasteful and harmful to the environment because she had never seriously considered the alternative or wondered why those products were introduced.
To merchants and shoppers in the late 1920s, there was nothing wasteful about the revolutionary packaging material introduced by DuPont. Cellophane seemed miraculous because it was not only moisture-proof but also transparent. “EYE IT before you BUY IT,” DuPont advertised, and shoppers welcomed this new feature enabling them to judge the quality of produce and meat before they paid up. Cellophane kept things fresh much longer, an advantage advertised to everyone from homemakers to soldiers. During World War II, a DuPont ad showed a German soldier looking on enviously as American prisoners of war opened packages of cigarettes from home that were wrapped in cellophane: “The prisoners who have better cigarettes than their guards.”
Soviet citizens in the 1980s were similarly envious of Westerners’ new plastic grocery bags, which sold for $5 apiece on the black market in Moscow. The bags were coveted partly as a status symbol (a hard-to-get imported product) and partly because they were so light and compact. In a shortage-plagued economy, Muscovites never knew when a scarce item would suddenly become available in a nearby store, so they wanted to have an empty bag with them, just in case.
American merchants and shoppers switched from paper to plastic packaging because it reduced waste. Plastic was cheaper because it required fewer resources to manufacture. It required less energy to transport because it was lighter. Plastic took up less space in landfills than paper, and it further reduced the volume of household trash because it preserved food longer. The typical household in Mexico City, for example, generated more garbage than an American household because it bought fewer packaged products and ended up discarding more food that had spoiled.
But activists eager to find some reason to oppose disposable products have ignored these advantages. They blame America’s throwaway society for polluting the oceans with plastic, though virtually all that pollution comes from either fishing vessels or from developing countries with primitive waste-management systems—mostly the Asian countries that were importing plastic recyclables from America. Instead of castigating American consumers, environmentalists should blame themselves for creating the recycling programs that sent plastic to countries where it was allowed to leak into rivers. The best way to protect marine life is to throw used plastic into the trash, not the recycling bin, so that it goes straight to a well-lined local landfill instead of ending up in the ocean.
And instead of campaigning to ban plastic grocery bags, green activists should be promoting their environmental advantages. Banning them results in higher carbon emissions because the substitutes are thicker and heavier, requiring more materials and energy to manufacture and transport, and these paper bags and tote bags typically aren’t reused often enough to offset their initial carbon footprint. (See “The Perverse Panic over Plastic,” Winter 2020.) Greens may feel virtuous lugging groceries home in a paper or tote bag, but the shoppers choosing plastic are actually doing more to combat global warming and reduce consumption of natural resources.
They’re also reducing the risk of getting sick, just as Samuel Crumbine and Hugh Moore could have told them a century ago, and just as public-health researchers have been warning for a decade. Their studies have repeatedly shown that dangerous bacteria and viruses linger on reusable tote bags unless shoppers wash them regularly, which few bother to do. The Covid-19 pandemic finally forced some public officials to heed these warnings and allow the single-use plastic bags once again, but Greenpeace and other groups are still hoping to reinstate the bans once the pandemic is over. The reusable bags would be perfectly safe, they argue, if only people would wash them regularly.
But why should people spend their valuable free time washing tote bags when there’s a cheaper, more convenient, and environmentally benign alternative? It makes sense only for those who consider the throwaway society to be intrinsically sinful. They derive solace from reusing and recycling because it eases their guilt for being rich enough to afford so much stuff. If they want to perform these rites voluntarily, fine, but there’s no reason to force everyone else to do penance. Agonizing over what goes into the trash can is not a universal moral imperative—and it’s not exactly a sign of spiritual enlightenment, either.
It’s actually the most literal form of materialism: a single-minded devotion to preserving raw materials at the expense of more important things in life. Instead of decrying the throwaway society, we should be celebrating the prosperity that made it possible and the freedom that it provides. As crude and corny as the old Dixie Cup ads could be, they possessed a humanism sadly absent in today’s environmental sermons.
One ad in 1970 showed a bored young woman morphing into a glum middle-aged woman and then a despondent old woman as she stood over the kitchen sink washing a mountain of glasses. “Use Dixie Cups and the Best Years of Your Life Won’t Go Down the Drain,” it promised, and went on to calculate that the typical American mother had to wash 7,000 glasses per year.
“Do you enjoy spending all that time in hot water?” it asked, as it extolled the throwaway society’s alternative. “Think of it. You’ll have more time on your hands, and less dishwater. Time to spend with the kids. To make yourself a pantsuit. To live a little.” You may not yearn to make a pantsuit, but the rest of it still sounds pretty good.
News of the Times;
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-06-29-jj-ceases-opioid-business-following-230million-settlement.html
https://www.worldviewweekend.com/news/article/behind-vaccine-veil-doctor-cites-whistleblowers-inside-cdc-who-claim-injections-have
https://technofog.substack.com/p/when-the-fbi-framed-four-innocent
https://mishtalk.com/economics/swiss-reject-climate-change-with-zoomers-and-millennials-leading-the-way
https://americanmind.org/salvo/fully-oligarchic-luxury-californication/
https://www.breitbart.com/economy/2021/06/22/california-to-use-federal-money-to-pay-all-back-rent-for-low-income-residents/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/open-borders-not-enough-joe-biden-now-flying-family-members-fake-refugees-county-not-even-approved-us-taxpayers-dime/
https://noqreport.com/2021/06/27/biden-quietly-signed-race-conscious-executive-order-that-will-destroy-americas-government/
https://www.usasupreme.com/two-black-teens-burn-mentally-ill-white-man-alive-and-kill-him-the-media-ignores-another-hate-crime/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/06/welcome-back-carter-joe-returns-inflation-america/
https://www.lifenews.com/2021/06/21/worlds-most-premature-baby-given-0-chance-to-survive-celebrates-his-first-birthday/
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/florida-gov-signs-bill-permitting-college-students-record-professors
https://americanpatriotdaily.com/latest/clarence-thomas-gave-joe-biden-an-ultimatum-that-set-biden-up-for-a-big-defeat/
https://sandrarose.com/2020/10/cdc-reveals-hospitals-counted-130000-heart-attacks-flu-and-bacterial-pneumonia-as-covid-19-deaths/
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/russian-navy-loves-drones-and-good-reason-188340
Expertise?
Telling your suitcase there's no vacation this year can be tough.
Nothing worse than emotional baggage.
*.*
Each year, a lawyer takes his holidays at an out of the way, country hotel.
With each visit, he continues his affair with the hotel owner’s daughter.
On his visit this year he finds out she has given birth to twin boys.
“Why on earth didn’t you tell me?” said the astonished lawyer.
“You know I would have married you and provided for the babies.”
The woman replied, “That may be so. But when I told my parents I was pregnant, we talked over the options and decided it was far better to have a couple of bastards in the family than a lawyer".
*.*
In a development that many are calling the most stunning and brave thing to ever happen in the world of sports, a WNBA point guard has come out as heterosexual.
The player, Megan Frederickson, has been playing for the Portland Fire for the last four years. She's broken many records over her short career, becoming the first player to score three baskets in a game, the first player to go over sixty seconds without a total air ball, and the first player to play a whole game without bursting into tears. She even got a record twelve fans to tune in to one of her games.
But now, she's shattering her most significant barrier yet, becoming the first out heterosexual player in the league.
Frederickson came out to her fans and teammates in an emotional video posted to TikTok Thursday.
"I was staring at myself in the mirror and I suddenly realized I just can't hide who I am anymore," she said. "I have to be true to myself. I can't pretend to be a lesbian anymore just because it's what's expected of me. I'm sick of this homonormative culture in this league. It's time for me to really be me."
Frederickson's wife is broken up but says she understands and supports the player's choice to live out her truth in a heterosexual relationship.
CNN is currently combing through her social media history looking for old racist tweets.
*.*
A mother asked her small son what he would like for his birthday.
"I'd like a little brother," a boy said.
"Oh my, that's such a big wish," said the mother. "Why do you want a little brother?"
"Well," said the boy, "there's only so much I can blame on the dog."
*.*
The fact that germs enter my body without my consent is wrong.
And to be honest it makes me sick.
Quote of the Times;
The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood. – Jefferson
Link of the Times;
https://nypost.com/2021/06/14/north-korean-defector-slams-woke-us-schools/
Issue of the Times;
The suicide of expertise by Glenn Reynolds
Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?”
According to Foreign Affairs magazine, Americans reject the advice of experts so as "to insulate their fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong.” That’s in support of a book by Tom Nichols called The Death of Expertise, which essentially advances that thesis.
Well, it’s certainly true that the “experts” don’t have the kind of authority that they possessed in the decade or two following World War II. Back then, the experts had given us vaccines, antibiotics, jet airplanes, nuclear power and space flight. The idea that they might really know best seemed pretty plausible.
But it also seems pretty plausible that Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?” Not only have the experts failed to deliver on the moon bases and flying cars they promised back in the day, but their track record in general is looking a lot spottier than it was in, say, 1965.
It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.
And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty.
In the realm of foreign affairs, which should be of special interest to the people at Foreign Affairs, recent history has been particularly dreadful. Experts failed to foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, failed to deal especially well with that fall when it took place, and then failed to deal with the rise of Islamic terrorism that led to the 9/11 attacks. Post 9/11, experts botched the reconstruction of Iraq, then botched it again with a premature pullout.
On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.
It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.
By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”
Then there’s the problem that, somehow, over the past half-century or so the educated classes that make up the “expert” demographic seem to have been doing pretty well, even as so many ordinary folks, in America and throughout the West, have seen their fortunes decaying. Is it any surprise that claims to authority in the form of “expertise” don’t carry the same weight that they once did?
If experts want to reclaim a position of authority, they need to make a few changes. First, they should make sure they know what they’re talking about, and they shouldn’t talk about things where their knowledge isn’t solid. Second, they should be appropriately modest in their claims of authority. And, third, they should check their egos. It doesn’t matter what your SAT scores were, voters are under no obligation to listen to you unless they find what you say persuasive.
And you know what makes you less persuasive? The kind of contempt displayed by Foreign Affairs. If expertise is dead, it’s because those who claimed it overplayed their hands. It’s not the death of expertise, so much as a suicide.
News of the Times;
https://fee.org/articles/we-just-got-even-more-proof-that-stay-at-home-orders-lethally-backfired/
https://summit.news/2021/06/16/video-joe-rogan-warns-whats-happening-in-mexico-could-easily-happen-here-due-to-defunding-of-police/
https://www.infowars.com/posts/high-school-student-exposes-mental-impact-of-crt-teachings-made-me-feel-like-horse-st-like-worthless-scum-undeserving-of-living/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/hillary-clinton-campaign-official-founder-org-end-sexual-violence-children-arrested-child-rape-charges-sentenced-13-yrs-prison/
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=17658
https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-law-requires-florida-students-to-be-taught-about-the-evils-of-communism_3870014.html
https://jimtreacher.substack.com/p/when-everything-is-racism-nothing
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/06/germany-right-wing-extremist-who-threw-burning-bottle-at-families-on-playground-was-actually-a-muslim-migrant
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/18/is-it-racist-to-confront-a-suicide-bomber/
https://www.theblaze.com/news/eric-clapton-musician-friends-gone-covid-vaccine
https://rumble.com/vissad-midwife-ends-the-term-birthing-person-in-one-amazing-minute.html?mref=23gga&mc=8uxj1
https://www.globalresearch.ca/a-sinister-agenda-behind-california-water-crisis-looming-food-supply-catastrophe/5747504
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/meet-one-chipmaker-entire-world-now-depending
https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2021/06/24/nih-yes-a-chinese-scientist-asked-us-to-delete-his-data-from-early-wuhan-covid-samples-and-we-did-n398722
https://national-justice.com/louisiana-another-fbi-agent-arrested-raping-small-children
Nothing worse than emotional baggage.
*.*
Each year, a lawyer takes his holidays at an out of the way, country hotel.
With each visit, he continues his affair with the hotel owner’s daughter.
On his visit this year he finds out she has given birth to twin boys.
“Why on earth didn’t you tell me?” said the astonished lawyer.
“You know I would have married you and provided for the babies.”
The woman replied, “That may be so. But when I told my parents I was pregnant, we talked over the options and decided it was far better to have a couple of bastards in the family than a lawyer".
*.*
In a development that many are calling the most stunning and brave thing to ever happen in the world of sports, a WNBA point guard has come out as heterosexual.
The player, Megan Frederickson, has been playing for the Portland Fire for the last four years. She's broken many records over her short career, becoming the first player to score three baskets in a game, the first player to go over sixty seconds without a total air ball, and the first player to play a whole game without bursting into tears. She even got a record twelve fans to tune in to one of her games.
But now, she's shattering her most significant barrier yet, becoming the first out heterosexual player in the league.
Frederickson came out to her fans and teammates in an emotional video posted to TikTok Thursday.
"I was staring at myself in the mirror and I suddenly realized I just can't hide who I am anymore," she said. "I have to be true to myself. I can't pretend to be a lesbian anymore just because it's what's expected of me. I'm sick of this homonormative culture in this league. It's time for me to really be me."
Frederickson's wife is broken up but says she understands and supports the player's choice to live out her truth in a heterosexual relationship.
CNN is currently combing through her social media history looking for old racist tweets.
*.*
A mother asked her small son what he would like for his birthday.
"I'd like a little brother," a boy said.
"Oh my, that's such a big wish," said the mother. "Why do you want a little brother?"
"Well," said the boy, "there's only so much I can blame on the dog."
*.*
The fact that germs enter my body without my consent is wrong.
And to be honest it makes me sick.
Quote of the Times;
The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood. – Jefferson
Link of the Times;
https://nypost.com/2021/06/14/north-korean-defector-slams-woke-us-schools/
Issue of the Times;
The suicide of expertise by Glenn Reynolds
Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?”
According to Foreign Affairs magazine, Americans reject the advice of experts so as "to insulate their fragile egos from ever being told they’re wrong.” That’s in support of a book by Tom Nichols called The Death of Expertise, which essentially advances that thesis.
Well, it’s certainly true that the “experts” don’t have the kind of authority that they possessed in the decade or two following World War II. Back then, the experts had given us vaccines, antibiotics, jet airplanes, nuclear power and space flight. The idea that they might really know best seemed pretty plausible.
But it also seems pretty plausible that Americans might look back on the last 50 years and say, “What have experts done for us lately?” Not only have the experts failed to deliver on the moon bases and flying cars they promised back in the day, but their track record in general is looking a lot spottier than it was in, say, 1965.
It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confident assertions by highly credentialed authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasure.
And these are not isolated failures. The history of government nutritional advice from the 1960s to the present is an appalling one: The advice of “experts” was frequently wrong, and sometimes bought-and-paid-for by special interests, but always delivered with an air of unchallengeable certainty.
In the realm of foreign affairs, which should be of special interest to the people at Foreign Affairs, recent history has been particularly dreadful. Experts failed to foresee the fall of the Soviet Union, failed to deal especially well with that fall when it took place, and then failed to deal with the rise of Islamic terrorism that led to the 9/11 attacks. Post 9/11, experts botched the reconstruction of Iraq, then botched it again with a premature pullout.
On Syria, experts in Barack Obama’s administration produced a policy that led to countless deaths, millions of refugees flooding Europe, a new haven for Islamic terrorists, and the upending of established power relations in the mideast. In Libya, the experts urged a war, waged without the approval of Congress, to topple strongman Moammar Gadhafi, only to see — again — countless deaths, huge numbers of refugees and another haven for Islamist terror.
It was experts who brought us the housing bubble and the subprime crisis. It was experts who botched the Obamacare rollout. And, of course, the experts didn’t see Brexit coming, and seem to have responded mostly with injured pride and assaults on the intelligence of the electorate, rather than with constructive solutions.
By its fruit the tree is known, and the tree of expertise hasn’t been doing well lately. As Nassim Taleb recently observed: “With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers.”
Then there’s the problem that, somehow, over the past half-century or so the educated classes that make up the “expert” demographic seem to have been doing pretty well, even as so many ordinary folks, in America and throughout the West, have seen their fortunes decaying. Is it any surprise that claims to authority in the form of “expertise” don’t carry the same weight that they once did?
If experts want to reclaim a position of authority, they need to make a few changes. First, they should make sure they know what they’re talking about, and they shouldn’t talk about things where their knowledge isn’t solid. Second, they should be appropriately modest in their claims of authority. And, third, they should check their egos. It doesn’t matter what your SAT scores were, voters are under no obligation to listen to you unless they find what you say persuasive.
And you know what makes you less persuasive? The kind of contempt displayed by Foreign Affairs. If expertise is dead, it’s because those who claimed it overplayed their hands. It’s not the death of expertise, so much as a suicide.
News of the Times;
https://fee.org/articles/we-just-got-even-more-proof-that-stay-at-home-orders-lethally-backfired/
https://summit.news/2021/06/16/video-joe-rogan-warns-whats-happening-in-mexico-could-easily-happen-here-due-to-defunding-of-police/
https://www.infowars.com/posts/high-school-student-exposes-mental-impact-of-crt-teachings-made-me-feel-like-horse-st-like-worthless-scum-undeserving-of-living/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/hillary-clinton-campaign-official-founder-org-end-sexual-violence-children-arrested-child-rape-charges-sentenced-13-yrs-prison/
https://www.campusreform.org/article?id=17658
https://www.theepochtimes.com/new-law-requires-florida-students-to-be-taught-about-the-evils-of-communism_3870014.html
https://jimtreacher.substack.com/p/when-everything-is-racism-nothing
https://www.jihadwatch.org/2021/06/germany-right-wing-extremist-who-threw-burning-bottle-at-families-on-playground-was-actually-a-muslim-migrant
https://www.spiked-online.com/2021/06/18/is-it-racist-to-confront-a-suicide-bomber/
https://www.theblaze.com/news/eric-clapton-musician-friends-gone-covid-vaccine
https://rumble.com/vissad-midwife-ends-the-term-birthing-person-in-one-amazing-minute.html?mref=23gga&mc=8uxj1
https://www.globalresearch.ca/a-sinister-agenda-behind-california-water-crisis-looming-food-supply-catastrophe/5747504
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/meet-one-chipmaker-entire-world-now-depending
https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2021/06/24/nih-yes-a-chinese-scientist-asked-us-to-delete-his-data-from-early-wuhan-covid-samples-and-we-did-n398722
https://national-justice.com/louisiana-another-fbi-agent-arrested-raping-small-children
Top?
Why do some fish live in saltwater?
Pepper makes them sneeze.
*.*
They plan to begin construction of the world's first space hotel in 2025.
There's a part of me that wants to be their first guest just so I can write in my review that; "it lacks atmosphere."
*.*
Loosen Up:
Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
I have seen the truth and it makes no sense.
All things being equal, fat people use more soap.
If you can smile when things go wrong, you've someone in mind to blame.
One-seventh of your life is spent on Monday.
By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.
Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.
There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.
This is as bad as it can get, but don't bet on it.
Never wrestle with a pig: You both get all dirty, and the pig likes it.
The trouble with life is, you're half way through it before you realize it's a 'do it yourself' thing.
*.*
Five Foods Animal Rights Groups Hope McDonalds will start serving:
The Veggie Wedgie
A Double Hummus with Cheese
Tofu McNuggets
The Big Mac and Cheese
Broccoli McFlurry's
*.*
Fun fact: Australia's biggest export is boomerangs.
It's also their biggest import.
Quote of the Times;
A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down. – Glasow
Link of the Times;
https://dailyreportusa.com/massivechinese-spy-defects-to-usa-with-dirt-on-hunter-biden-intel-on-wuhan-bioweapons-research/
Issue of the Times;
My Top 10 media lies: Goodwin by Michael Goodwin
Another one bites the dust. Another media lie, that is.
The latest lie to die is the false claim the feds cleared Lafayette Park of protesters last year so then-President Donald Trump could hold a photo op. The Interior Department’s inspector general says police planned to clear the park so a contractor could install a fence, a decision unrelated to Trump’s walk to a nearby historic church burned in a riot.
If the debunking feels familiar, it’s not your imagination. Only the details differ from earlier cases where the media mob got it all wrong. Sadly, the truth usually emerges not because of the press, but despite it.
Take growing acceptance of the idea the COVID-19 pandemic started with a leak from a virology lab in Wuhan, China. The idea was always plausible, but the press and big tech declared it a “conspiracy theory” and snuffed it out of circulation.
But after China couldn’t prove the virus jumped from bats to humans, the lab-leak theory gained credence. Suddenly, it became acceptable to share it on Facebook, which appointed itself guardian of all that is proper in American discourse.
The pattern is so pronounced that it’s easy to assemble your own list of Top Ten Media Lies. On mine, the recent cases involving Lafayette Park and the lab-leak theory are Nos. 8 and 9.
No. 1 is the oldest and biggest: Trump colluded with Russia to win in 2016 and might be a Russian agent. That scam involved crooked FBI agents and led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who took two years to conclude there was no evidence to back the charge.
Yet the probe had enormous impact, with the drumbeat of anonymous leaks hampering the Trump agenda and helping Democrats take the House in 2018.
Even before it was gone, other distortions appeared.
Remember Lie No. 2, the “Muslim ban” that wasn’t? Or No. 3, the mantra that the 2017 tax cuts were only for the “rich” despite studies showing 80 percent of the population benefitted?
How about the “kids in cages” firestorm, complete with gripping photographs of migrant children in metal containers?
That was Lie No. 4 and the hottest story going, with Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rushing to the border with photogenic outrage. They vanished when it was revealed the Obama-Biden administration built the cages and the heart-wrenching photos were from 2014.
Apologies, corrections and retractions came in bunches, right? You must be kidding. Big media and big tech are too big to admit error.
Even now, with historic surges of young people at the border, the press doesn’t complain about Biden banning their cameras. That’s not journalism — it’s complicity.
Lie No. 5 was the Ukraine impeachment of Trump, a creative fiction based on a complaint from an anonymous member of the swamp who never testified. But others did to say the president, in trying to get information on Biden family corruption in Ukraine, was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.
What Trump actually did was threaten the scam Joe Biden and son Hunter created that involved selling the suggestion that Joe’s influence could be had by hiring Hunter.
That’s the sort of thing reporters are supposed to expose, not protect.
Not so long ago, I saw such conduct as an outgrowth of bias. Because much of the press is an echo chamber of the far left, my assumption was that slanted coverage resulted from political prejudice.
That is true in many cases, but too benign to fully explain our new era. Five years after the New York Times and others abandoned standards of fairness to become anti-Trump activists, press misconduct is repeatedly exposed as willful malpractice. In a word, lies.
Over and over again, they are the boy who cried wolf. It’s getting so where it’s safer to assume what the media insists is absolutely true probably isn’t.
Just as liberals have become illiberal, media have become more focused on suppressing the truth than revealing it.
Take Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is No. 6 on my Top Ten, although it rivals Russia, Russia, Russia in importance. When The Post first showed how the contents revealed his shady foreign business deals and how his father helped him, it was not unreasonable for the Times, Washington Post and others to hold off until they could confirm the explosive information late in the campaign.
The role Rudy Giuliani played in getting the material to The Post, which the paper disclosed, created additional concern because Giuliani was Trump’s lawyer.
So there were legitimate reasons for caution — up to a point. But the real motivation in avoiding the story soon became apparent.
The outlets that held their noses over the laptop had no trouble embracing the claim from Joe Biden’s campaign that the e-mails on it were “Russian disinformation.”
In what felt like a coordinated move, big tech instantly blocked The Post and other users from sharing them.
The final proof that media caution had morphed into coverup came when Tony Bobulinski emerged. A former partner of Hunter and Jim Biden, Joe’s brother, in a joint venture with a Chinese energy conglomerate, Bobulinski authenticated the critical e-mails because he had received them as CEO of the venture.
He also solved a riddle by saying the “big guy” slated to get a secret 10 percent stake was Joe Biden. Bobulinski told me he met with him in early 2017 and said Joe knew everything about the plan to introduce American mayors and governors to Chinese officials so the Chinese could buy US infrastructure.
All this was public information because of The Post, Fox News and a few others, yet most media cast doubts on the revelations. They were especially loathe to report anything supporting Joe Biden’s role, even though Bobulinski gave all his evidence to the FBI.
That cone of silence goes well beyond bias. That is Lie No. 7.
Finally, the 10th lie remains active, so the truth has not fully emerged.
The subject is ballot integrity, which the left demonizes as improper voter suppression. Joe Biden made the astonishing claim that demands for photo identification are the new Jim Crow.
Naturally, his claim was magnified by the media, with CNN creating a logo declaring “Voting Rights Under Attack.” Even the normally sober Pew Trusts said, “Republican Wave of Voting Restrictions Swells.”
One count had 361 bills introduced in 47 states, and Wikipedia labels all of them attempts to restrict voting access. Craven corporate leaders piled on.
Never mind that polls show overwhelming support for voter ID laws, with a March survey finding 69 percent of black voters and 75 percent of all respondents favor such measures.
The finding provides hope and reminds us there are antidotes to a corrupt press: Facts, facts and more facts. Or, as the late economist Herb Stein put it, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
Media lies are no exception.
News of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/the_collective_insanity_thats_rapidly_erasing_america.html
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/06/us-troops-forced-to-segregate-by-race-and-sex-for-privilege-walks-told-theyre-racist-and-more-sen-cotton-says/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/biden-dumping-illegal-migrants-around-the-nation-without-notice
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/black-suspect-two-day-long-shooting-spree-targeting-white-males-according-police/
https://identitydixie.com/2021/06/14/the-soldiers-of-other-people/
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-06-14-us-government-spends-on-vaccine-hesitancy-propaganda-ads.html
https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/en/news-page/world/global-time-bomb-first-case-of-postmortem-study-of-patient-vaccinated-against-sars-cov-2-mrna-found-in-every-organ-of-the-body
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/06/14/video-cop-who-got-fired-for-tik-tok-trolling-lebron-beats-cancel-culture-on-live-tv-n1454608
https://nypost.com/2021/06/14/yet-more-bloodshed-and-bedlam-in-nyc-as-voters-turn-to-eric-adams-for-help/
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/everyone-hates-wind-turbines.php
http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2014/09/full-spectrum-war.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9693965/Biden-falsely-claims-criminal-MAGA-rioters-killed-Capitol-cop-Brian-Sicknick.html
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/the-battle-against-crt-gets-physical.php
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/16/hungary-bans-lgbt-content-for-minors-n1455033
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/scottmorefield/2021/06/15/a-group-of-parents-sent-their-kids-face-masks-to-a-lab-for-analysis-heres-what-they-found-n2591047
Pepper makes them sneeze.
*.*
They plan to begin construction of the world's first space hotel in 2025.
There's a part of me that wants to be their first guest just so I can write in my review that; "it lacks atmosphere."
*.*
Loosen Up:
Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.
I have seen the truth and it makes no sense.
All things being equal, fat people use more soap.
If you can smile when things go wrong, you've someone in mind to blame.
One-seventh of your life is spent on Monday.
By the time you can make ends meet, they move the ends.
Not one shred of evidence supports the notion that life is serious.
There is always one more imbecile than you counted on.
This is as bad as it can get, but don't bet on it.
Never wrestle with a pig: You both get all dirty, and the pig likes it.
The trouble with life is, you're half way through it before you realize it's a 'do it yourself' thing.
*.*
Five Foods Animal Rights Groups Hope McDonalds will start serving:
The Veggie Wedgie
A Double Hummus with Cheese
Tofu McNuggets
The Big Mac and Cheese
Broccoli McFlurry's
*.*
Fun fact: Australia's biggest export is boomerangs.
It's also their biggest import.
Quote of the Times;
A true friend never gets in your way unless you happen to be going down. – Glasow
Link of the Times;
https://dailyreportusa.com/massivechinese-spy-defects-to-usa-with-dirt-on-hunter-biden-intel-on-wuhan-bioweapons-research/
Issue of the Times;
My Top 10 media lies: Goodwin by Michael Goodwin
Another one bites the dust. Another media lie, that is.
The latest lie to die is the false claim the feds cleared Lafayette Park of protesters last year so then-President Donald Trump could hold a photo op. The Interior Department’s inspector general says police planned to clear the park so a contractor could install a fence, a decision unrelated to Trump’s walk to a nearby historic church burned in a riot.
If the debunking feels familiar, it’s not your imagination. Only the details differ from earlier cases where the media mob got it all wrong. Sadly, the truth usually emerges not because of the press, but despite it.
Take growing acceptance of the idea the COVID-19 pandemic started with a leak from a virology lab in Wuhan, China. The idea was always plausible, but the press and big tech declared it a “conspiracy theory” and snuffed it out of circulation.
But after China couldn’t prove the virus jumped from bats to humans, the lab-leak theory gained credence. Suddenly, it became acceptable to share it on Facebook, which appointed itself guardian of all that is proper in American discourse.
The pattern is so pronounced that it’s easy to assemble your own list of Top Ten Media Lies. On mine, the recent cases involving Lafayette Park and the lab-leak theory are Nos. 8 and 9.
No. 1 is the oldest and biggest: Trump colluded with Russia to win in 2016 and might be a Russian agent. That scam involved crooked FBI agents and led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who took two years to conclude there was no evidence to back the charge.
Yet the probe had enormous impact, with the drumbeat of anonymous leaks hampering the Trump agenda and helping Democrats take the House in 2018.
Even before it was gone, other distortions appeared.
Remember Lie No. 2, the “Muslim ban” that wasn’t? Or No. 3, the mantra that the 2017 tax cuts were only for the “rich” despite studies showing 80 percent of the population benefitted?
How about the “kids in cages” firestorm, complete with gripping photographs of migrant children in metal containers?
That was Lie No. 4 and the hottest story going, with Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rushing to the border with photogenic outrage. They vanished when it was revealed the Obama-Biden administration built the cages and the heart-wrenching photos were from 2014.
Apologies, corrections and retractions came in bunches, right? You must be kidding. Big media and big tech are too big to admit error.
Even now, with historic surges of young people at the border, the press doesn’t complain about Biden banning their cameras. That’s not journalism — it’s complicity.
Lie No. 5 was the Ukraine impeachment of Trump, a creative fiction based on a complaint from an anonymous member of the swamp who never testified. But others did to say the president, in trying to get information on Biden family corruption in Ukraine, was guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors.
What Trump actually did was threaten the scam Joe Biden and son Hunter created that involved selling the suggestion that Joe’s influence could be had by hiring Hunter.
That’s the sort of thing reporters are supposed to expose, not protect.
Not so long ago, I saw such conduct as an outgrowth of bias. Because much of the press is an echo chamber of the far left, my assumption was that slanted coverage resulted from political prejudice.
That is true in many cases, but too benign to fully explain our new era. Five years after the New York Times and others abandoned standards of fairness to become anti-Trump activists, press misconduct is repeatedly exposed as willful malpractice. In a word, lies.
Over and over again, they are the boy who cried wolf. It’s getting so where it’s safer to assume what the media insists is absolutely true probably isn’t.
Just as liberals have become illiberal, media have become more focused on suppressing the truth than revealing it.
Take Hunter Biden’s laptop, which is No. 6 on my Top Ten, although it rivals Russia, Russia, Russia in importance. When The Post first showed how the contents revealed his shady foreign business deals and how his father helped him, it was not unreasonable for the Times, Washington Post and others to hold off until they could confirm the explosive information late in the campaign.
The role Rudy Giuliani played in getting the material to The Post, which the paper disclosed, created additional concern because Giuliani was Trump’s lawyer.
So there were legitimate reasons for caution — up to a point. But the real motivation in avoiding the story soon became apparent.
The outlets that held their noses over the laptop had no trouble embracing the claim from Joe Biden’s campaign that the e-mails on it were “Russian disinformation.”
In what felt like a coordinated move, big tech instantly blocked The Post and other users from sharing them.
The final proof that media caution had morphed into coverup came when Tony Bobulinski emerged. A former partner of Hunter and Jim Biden, Joe’s brother, in a joint venture with a Chinese energy conglomerate, Bobulinski authenticated the critical e-mails because he had received them as CEO of the venture.
He also solved a riddle by saying the “big guy” slated to get a secret 10 percent stake was Joe Biden. Bobulinski told me he met with him in early 2017 and said Joe knew everything about the plan to introduce American mayors and governors to Chinese officials so the Chinese could buy US infrastructure.
All this was public information because of The Post, Fox News and a few others, yet most media cast doubts on the revelations. They were especially loathe to report anything supporting Joe Biden’s role, even though Bobulinski gave all his evidence to the FBI.
That cone of silence goes well beyond bias. That is Lie No. 7.
Finally, the 10th lie remains active, so the truth has not fully emerged.
The subject is ballot integrity, which the left demonizes as improper voter suppression. Joe Biden made the astonishing claim that demands for photo identification are the new Jim Crow.
Naturally, his claim was magnified by the media, with CNN creating a logo declaring “Voting Rights Under Attack.” Even the normally sober Pew Trusts said, “Republican Wave of Voting Restrictions Swells.”
One count had 361 bills introduced in 47 states, and Wikipedia labels all of them attempts to restrict voting access. Craven corporate leaders piled on.
Never mind that polls show overwhelming support for voter ID laws, with a March survey finding 69 percent of black voters and 75 percent of all respondents favor such measures.
The finding provides hope and reminds us there are antidotes to a corrupt press: Facts, facts and more facts. Or, as the late economist Herb Stein put it, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”
Media lies are no exception.
News of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/the_collective_insanity_thats_rapidly_erasing_america.html
https://americanmilitarynews.com/2021/06/us-troops-forced-to-segregate-by-race-and-sex-for-privilege-walks-told-theyre-racist-and-more-sen-cotton-says/
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/washington-secrets/biden-dumping-illegal-migrants-around-the-nation-without-notice
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/black-suspect-two-day-long-shooting-spree-targeting-white-males-according-police/
https://identitydixie.com/2021/06/14/the-soldiers-of-other-people/
https://www.naturalnews.com/2021-06-14-us-government-spends-on-vaccine-hesitancy-propaganda-ads.html
https://halturnerradioshow.com/index.php/en/news-page/world/global-time-bomb-first-case-of-postmortem-study-of-patient-vaccinated-against-sars-cov-2-mrna-found-in-every-organ-of-the-body
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2021/06/14/video-cop-who-got-fired-for-tik-tok-trolling-lebron-beats-cancel-culture-on-live-tv-n1454608
https://nypost.com/2021/06/14/yet-more-bloodshed-and-bedlam-in-nyc-as-voters-turn-to-eric-adams-for-help/
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/everyone-hates-wind-turbines.php
http://ajacksonian.blogspot.com/2014/09/full-spectrum-war.html
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9693965/Biden-falsely-claims-criminal-MAGA-rioters-killed-Capitol-cop-Brian-Sicknick.html
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/06/the-battle-against-crt-gets-physical.php
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/tyler-o-neil/2021/06/16/hungary-bans-lgbt-content-for-minors-n1455033
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/scottmorefield/2021/06/15/a-group-of-parents-sent-their-kids-face-masks-to-a-lab-for-analysis-heres-what-they-found-n2591047
Blackrock?
Ever since my girlfriend got pregnant, everything in my life has changed.
My phone number, my address, my name. Everything.
*.*
A husband and wife had been arguing all day when they drove pass a herd of donkeys.
The wife says "Those jackasses relatives of yours?"
Husband replied, "In laws."
*.*
Lines:
When I say, "I'm hungry," we've got about 23 minutes before I'm a different person.
Finally, my winter fat is gone. Now I have spring rolls.
Moses: the first man to download files from a cloud using a tablet.
The pandemic isn't officially over until they start serving samples again at Costco.
I eat mostly whole foods. Whole pizzas. Whole pies. Whole burgers and fries.
Someone once told me, "You're never going to forget me!" I just don't remember who.
My going out clothes have missed me so much. I put them on and they hugged me so much, I could barely breathe!
Most people don't think I'm as old as I am until they hear me stand up.
Due to personal reasons, I will still be fat this summer.
My morning routine includes 10 minutes of sitting in bed, thinking about how tired I am.
I don't usually brag about going to expensive places, but I just went to the gas station.
Today's kids will never know the strength it took to roll the car window down.
A shout out to everyone who has searched for their phone while holding it in your hand. My people!
You're never too old to throw random stuff into someone's shopping cart when they aren't looking.
Last week, my therapist told me to live in the moment. I haven't stopped thinking about that since.
*.*
I hate hotel towels.
So thick and fluffy.
I can't hardly close my suitcase.
*.*
Dating a girl with a tattoo on the back of her neck is much like having a bathroom with a magazine in it.
It gives you something to read while you're in the sh!tter.
Quote of the Times;
I think it's great to have a US President part of the club and very willing to cooperate. - French President Emmanuel Macron.
Link of the Times;
https://dailycaller.com/2021/06/10/facebook-human-trafficking-report-children-sex-trafficking/
Issue of the Times;
"This Is Wealth Redistribution": Blackrock And Other Institutional Investors Buying Entire Neighborhoods At Huge Premiums by Tyler Durden @ Zerohedge
As the real estate market continues to break records, a cabal of institutional investors has been tossing gasoline on the fire - buying up properties hand-over-fist as middle-American renters watch their dreams of home ownership fade at the hands of pension funds and other financial behemoths.
"You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house," according to real estate consultant John Burns, whose firm estimates that in many of the country's hottest markets, roughly one 20% of homes sold are bought by someone who never moves in.
"That’s going to make U.S. housing permanently more expensive," said Burns, who thinks home prices will climb as much as 12% this year, on top of last year's 11% rise.
"Limited housing supply, low rates, a global reach for yield, and what we’re calling the institutionalization of real-estate investors has set the stage for another speculative investor-driven home price bubble," his firm concluded - finding Houston to be a favorite location for investors, who have accounted for 24% of home purchases in the area.
The coronavirus pandemic sparked a race for home-office space and yards. Occupancy rates reached records and rents are rising with home prices. The ecosystem of companies that service, finance and mimic the mega landlords is booming.
Burns counted more than 200 companies and investment firms in the house hunt: computer-assisted flipper Opendoor Technologies Inc., money managers including J.P. Morgan Asset Management and BlackRock Inc., platforms such as Fundrise and Roofstock that buy and arrange for the management of rentals on behalf of individuals and builder LGI Homes Inc., which now reports wholesale home sales to bulk buyers in its quarterly results. -WSJ
In one example, a bidding war broke out over a D.R. Horton complex in Conroe, Texas - after the homebuilder put the entire subdivision up for sale. After a "Who's Who of investors and rental-home firms flocked to the December sale," the winning bid of $32 million came from an online property-investment company, Fundraise LLC, which manages over $1 billion for around 150,000 individuals, according to the Wall Street Journal.
D.R. Horton ended up booking roughly twice what it typically makes selling houses to middle-class homebuyers according to the report.
"We certainly wouldn’t expect every single-family community we sell to sell at a 50% gross margin," said CEO Bill Wheat at a recent investor conference.
What does this mean for the average American family? We'll let Twitter analyst @APhilosophae take it from here in this ominous, yet soberingly accurate thread:
entire neighborhoods out from under the middle class? Lets take a look. Homes are popping up on MLS and going under contract within a few hours. Blackrock, among others, are buying up thousands of new homes and entire neighborhoods. https://t.co/mBDLgtoyEc
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
As an example, a 124 new home neighborhood was bought in its entirety in Texas. Average Americans were outbid to a tune of $32million. Homes sold at an avg if 20% above listing. Now the entire neighborhood is made up of SFR's. What are SFR's??https://t.co/luVQEXUeKy
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
This is wealth redistribution, and it ain’t rich people’s wealth that’s getting redistributed. It’s normal American middle class, salt of the earth wealth heading into the hands of the worlds most powerful entities and individuals. The traditional financial vehicle gone forever.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
Thats right!
FEDERAL RESERVE FUNDED FINANCIAL INSTITUTE.
Let that sink in for a minute. Got it? They’re using your tax dollars to fuck over the lower and middle class, and its permanent. This is a fundamental reorganization of society.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
In the US and other nations home ownership is often the 1st and most vital step. This can provide for generational wealth and success. But as permanent, guaranteed renters youre pissing away a lifetime of equity and the chance for mobility. You just become a peasant.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
This is warfare. Make no doubt about it. Lloyds bank in London is doing it, as is every great financial institute across the world. This must be stopped. Its a greater threat than the slow creep of Communism, BLM or anything else you can think of COMBINED. It is a death stroke.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
Now imagine every major institute doing this, because they are. It can be such a fast sweeping action that 30yrs may be overshooting it. They may accomplish feudalism in 15 years.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
News of the Times;
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/06/11/dementia-joe-forgets-where-he-is-again-n1453995
https://nypost.com/2021/06/07/guatemala-protesters-tell-kamala-harris-trump-won/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/06/mystery-tv-news-reporter-broke-clintons-secret-tarmac-meeting-dead/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/eco-terrorist-letter-received-forest-service-sent-bidens-bureau-land-management-nominee/
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-emergency-meeting-heart-inflammation-pfizer-moderna-covid-vaccine/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-allocates-46-million-for-unexpected-urgent-refugee-and-migration-needs_3855588.html
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/blm-co-founder-who-backed-killer-2-jewish-college-daniel-greenfield/
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-fed-is-wrong-inflation-is-sticky.html
https://reason.com/2021/06/11/keystone-pipelines-cancellation-shows-how-arbitrary-presidential-power-subverts-the-rule-of-law/
https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/06/11/unvaccinated-students-at-prom-in-new-hampshire-had-numbers-written-on-their-hands/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hcq-hunters-laptop-trump-shreds-democrats-over-vindicated-bombshells
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/arizona-leftists-protest-hotel-being-turned-into-a-migrant-center/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/09/22/the-bay-areas-small-business-closure-crisis-is-already-here/
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ontario-has-a-backlog-of-nearly-16-million-medical-services-ontario-medical-association
https://theamericansun.com/2021/06/14/a-shift-on-the-right/
My phone number, my address, my name. Everything.
*.*
A husband and wife had been arguing all day when they drove pass a herd of donkeys.
The wife says "Those jackasses relatives of yours?"
Husband replied, "In laws."
*.*
Lines:
When I say, "I'm hungry," we've got about 23 minutes before I'm a different person.
Finally, my winter fat is gone. Now I have spring rolls.
Moses: the first man to download files from a cloud using a tablet.
The pandemic isn't officially over until they start serving samples again at Costco.
I eat mostly whole foods. Whole pizzas. Whole pies. Whole burgers and fries.
Someone once told me, "You're never going to forget me!" I just don't remember who.
My going out clothes have missed me so much. I put them on and they hugged me so much, I could barely breathe!
Most people don't think I'm as old as I am until they hear me stand up.
Due to personal reasons, I will still be fat this summer.
My morning routine includes 10 minutes of sitting in bed, thinking about how tired I am.
I don't usually brag about going to expensive places, but I just went to the gas station.
Today's kids will never know the strength it took to roll the car window down.
A shout out to everyone who has searched for their phone while holding it in your hand. My people!
You're never too old to throw random stuff into someone's shopping cart when they aren't looking.
Last week, my therapist told me to live in the moment. I haven't stopped thinking about that since.
*.*
I hate hotel towels.
So thick and fluffy.
I can't hardly close my suitcase.
*.*
Dating a girl with a tattoo on the back of her neck is much like having a bathroom with a magazine in it.
It gives you something to read while you're in the sh!tter.
Quote of the Times;
I think it's great to have a US President part of the club and very willing to cooperate. - French President Emmanuel Macron.
Link of the Times;
https://dailycaller.com/2021/06/10/facebook-human-trafficking-report-children-sex-trafficking/
Issue of the Times;
"This Is Wealth Redistribution": Blackrock And Other Institutional Investors Buying Entire Neighborhoods At Huge Premiums by Tyler Durden @ Zerohedge
As the real estate market continues to break records, a cabal of institutional investors has been tossing gasoline on the fire - buying up properties hand-over-fist as middle-American renters watch their dreams of home ownership fade at the hands of pension funds and other financial behemoths.
"You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house," according to real estate consultant John Burns, whose firm estimates that in many of the country's hottest markets, roughly one 20% of homes sold are bought by someone who never moves in.
"That’s going to make U.S. housing permanently more expensive," said Burns, who thinks home prices will climb as much as 12% this year, on top of last year's 11% rise.
"Limited housing supply, low rates, a global reach for yield, and what we’re calling the institutionalization of real-estate investors has set the stage for another speculative investor-driven home price bubble," his firm concluded - finding Houston to be a favorite location for investors, who have accounted for 24% of home purchases in the area.
The coronavirus pandemic sparked a race for home-office space and yards. Occupancy rates reached records and rents are rising with home prices. The ecosystem of companies that service, finance and mimic the mega landlords is booming.
Burns counted more than 200 companies and investment firms in the house hunt: computer-assisted flipper Opendoor Technologies Inc., money managers including J.P. Morgan Asset Management and BlackRock Inc., platforms such as Fundrise and Roofstock that buy and arrange for the management of rentals on behalf of individuals and builder LGI Homes Inc., which now reports wholesale home sales to bulk buyers in its quarterly results. -WSJ
In one example, a bidding war broke out over a D.R. Horton complex in Conroe, Texas - after the homebuilder put the entire subdivision up for sale. After a "Who's Who of investors and rental-home firms flocked to the December sale," the winning bid of $32 million came from an online property-investment company, Fundraise LLC, which manages over $1 billion for around 150,000 individuals, according to the Wall Street Journal.
D.R. Horton ended up booking roughly twice what it typically makes selling houses to middle-class homebuyers according to the report.
"We certainly wouldn’t expect every single-family community we sell to sell at a 50% gross margin," said CEO Bill Wheat at a recent investor conference.
What does this mean for the average American family? We'll let Twitter analyst @APhilosophae take it from here in this ominous, yet soberingly accurate thread:
entire neighborhoods out from under the middle class? Lets take a look. Homes are popping up on MLS and going under contract within a few hours. Blackrock, among others, are buying up thousands of new homes and entire neighborhoods. https://t.co/mBDLgtoyEc
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
As an example, a 124 new home neighborhood was bought in its entirety in Texas. Average Americans were outbid to a tune of $32million. Homes sold at an avg if 20% above listing. Now the entire neighborhood is made up of SFR's. What are SFR's??https://t.co/luVQEXUeKy
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
This is wealth redistribution, and it ain’t rich people’s wealth that’s getting redistributed. It’s normal American middle class, salt of the earth wealth heading into the hands of the worlds most powerful entities and individuals. The traditional financial vehicle gone forever.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
Thats right!
FEDERAL RESERVE FUNDED FINANCIAL INSTITUTE.
Let that sink in for a minute. Got it? They’re using your tax dollars to fuck over the lower and middle class, and its permanent. This is a fundamental reorganization of society.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
In the US and other nations home ownership is often the 1st and most vital step. This can provide for generational wealth and success. But as permanent, guaranteed renters youre pissing away a lifetime of equity and the chance for mobility. You just become a peasant.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
This is warfare. Make no doubt about it. Lloyds bank in London is doing it, as is every great financial institute across the world. This must be stopped. Its a greater threat than the slow creep of Communism, BLM or anything else you can think of COMBINED. It is a death stroke.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
Now imagine every major institute doing this, because they are. It can be such a fast sweeping action that 30yrs may be overshooting it. They may accomplish feudalism in 15 years.
— CulturalHusbandry (@APhilosophae) June 9, 2021
News of the Times;
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2021/06/11/dementia-joe-forgets-where-he-is-again-n1453995
https://nypost.com/2021/06/07/guatemala-protesters-tell-kamala-harris-trump-won/
https://www.wnd.com/2021/06/mystery-tv-news-reporter-broke-clintons-secret-tarmac-meeting-dead/
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2021/06/eco-terrorist-letter-received-forest-service-sent-bidens-bureau-land-management-nominee/
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/cdc-emergency-meeting-heart-inflammation-pfizer-moderna-covid-vaccine/
https://www.theepochtimes.com/biden-allocates-46-million-for-unexpected-urgent-refugee-and-migration-needs_3855588.html
https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/06/blm-co-founder-who-backed-killer-2-jewish-college-daniel-greenfield/
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-fed-is-wrong-inflation-is-sticky.html
https://reason.com/2021/06/11/keystone-pipelines-cancellation-shows-how-arbitrary-presidential-power-subverts-the-rule-of-law/
https://www.bostonherald.com/2021/06/11/unvaccinated-students-at-prom-in-new-hampshire-had-numbers-written-on-their-hands/
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/hcq-hunters-laptop-trump-shreds-democrats-over-vindicated-bombshells
https://bigleaguepolitics.com/arizona-leftists-protest-hotel-being-turned-into-a-migrant-center/
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/09/22/the-bay-areas-small-business-closure-crisis-is-already-here/
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ontario-has-a-backlog-of-nearly-16-million-medical-services-ontario-medical-association
https://theamericansun.com/2021/06/14/a-shift-on-the-right/
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
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And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.