Posts Tagged ‘unemployment’

LinkSwarm For February 2, 2024

Friday, February 2nd, 2024

Let’s get this out of the way:

Tons of Fani Willis’ crooked shenanigans come to light, Ukraine bags another warship, all those things they said the vaccine wouldn’t do it’s doing, and an anger management therapist who was very poor at his job. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • If you were wondering why Fulton County DA (and Trump prosecutor) Fani WIllis was so eager to bump uglies with married lover Nathan Wade, it turns out that his business partners bankrolled her campaign, and she gave them lucrative contracts.

    Business partners of District Attorney Fani Willis’ alleged lover Nathan Wade, whom she appointed to work on the case against former President Donald Trump, made donations to her campaign before receiving lucrative contracts from her office.

    Terrence Bradley, Wade’s former partner, and Christopher Campbell, his current partner, have collectively contributed more than $5,000 to Willis’ campaign, contribution disclosure reports show. Moreover, both men have each raked in tens of thousands of dollars from contracts with the district attorney’s office, according to county records.

    Campbell is a partner at Wade & Campbell Firm, where he works with Wade. Bradley formerly worked with Wade at Wade, Bradley & Campbell Firm, and also represented Wade in his divorce case until Sept. 2022.

    The donations add another wrinkle to Willis’ already-scrutinized relationship with Wade.

    Willis was accused in a motion earlier this month by Trump co-defendant Michael Roman of benefiting from the “lucrative” contract she awarded Wade when he took her on vacations using money earned from the position. Wade filed to divorce his wife on Nov. 2, 2021, the day after his contract with the district attorney’s office began, and has earned nearly $700,000 from the Fulton County District Attorney’s office since his appointment.

    Quid Pro, meet Quo. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • More Willis shenanigans: “DA Fani Willis fired a whistleblower who informed her about the intentional misuse of federal funds and there’s audio of their conversation.”

  • If you’re having trouble keeping track of all Fani Willis’ lawbreaking, here’s a timeline.
  • Old and Busted: “If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black!” The new hotness: Black voters just aren’t into Biden.

    Resident Biden appears to be in serious trouble with black voters ahead of the 2024 election, and black lawmakers and organizers are starting to panic.

    “What I’m hearing in my district is how ‘Bidenomics’ hasn’t really hit them in the pocket,” New York representative Jamaal Bowman told National Review earlier this week on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. “I need him in the barbershops. I need him on the basketball courts. I need him talking to the hip-hop community. I need him talking to the sports and athletics community to really get at what is troubling black men.”

    Polling suggests Bowman is right to be concerned. Just 50 percent of black adults said they approve of Biden in a national AP-NORC poll last month — a 36-point drop from July 2021. An October Siena College/New York Times poll found that 22 percent of black voters surveyed in six competitive presidential battlegrounds say they will vote for Trump over Biden in 2024, a stunning polling shift from a reliably Democratic coalition that helped Biden win the White House in 2020. That same survey found Trump’s numbers were even higher among black men.

    In the 40 years he’s spent in political activism, National Black Farmers Association president John Boyd Jr. says the Biden administration has done worse than any other administration in his lifetime in opening its doors to black voters. That lack of outreach, Boyd warns, may come back to bite him in November.

    Wait, black people like jobs and safe neighborhoods and dislike inflation and illegal aliens sucking up welfare benefits? Who knew?

  • “U.N. Agency for Palestinians Discloses Involvement of Employees in October 7 Attack.”

    The U.N.’s agency for Palestinians said that it fired several employees after receiving information from Israel showing that they had taken part in the October 7 terrorist attacks. The State Department indicated that twelve U.N. employees allegedly took part in the attacks and announced that it had temporarily paused funding for the agency while it reviews the situation.

    The U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) delivers aid to Palestinians across Gaza, the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The U.S. is UNRWA’s largest donor, providing $343 million of its budget in 2022.

    In a statement Friday morning, UNRWA commissioner general Philippe Lazzarini disclosed that Israel had presented his agency with evidence of its employees’ involvement in Hamas’s massacre of Israelis.

    “To protect the Agency’s ability to deliver humanitarian assistance, I have taken the decision to immediately terminate the contracts of these staff members and launch an investigation in order to establish the truth without delay. Any UNRWA employee who was involved in acts of terror will be held accountable, including through criminal prosecution,” he said.

    Sure they will. The question is why the United States ever funded UNRWA, since the funds seem to go straight into rockets and murder tunnels to kill Israeli civilians with?

    The Trump administration cut off all funding to UNRWA in 2018, saying that the U.S. shoulders a disproportionate share of its budget. Blinken resumed funding to UNRWA three years later, pledging that the U.S. would seek reforms to the organization.

    Oh. That’s why…

  • They continue to play games with the job numbers.
  • It’s not just Fani Willis. “DOJ Opens Criminal Probe into Cori Bush for Allegedly Funneling Campaign Funds to Husband.”
  • Austin news via Libs of Ticktock:

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • Ohio senate overrides the Governor’s veto of bill banning child genital mutilation and males playing female sports. Good.
  • Japan is not having America’s woke nonsense.
  • UPS is laying off 12,000 workers. You know, because of how strong that Biden economy is…
  • Mail is screwed up in Missouri City, Texas (southwest of Houston) because a new sorting machine didn’t fit in the building.
  • You know all those crazy “fringe” “conspiracy theories” about the Flu Manchu vaccine? Yeah, about that.

    We found the number of myocarditis reports in VAERS after COVID-19 vaccination in 2021 was 223 times higher than the average of all vaccines combined for the past 30 years. This represented a 2500% increase in the absolute number of reports in the first year of the campaign when comparing historical values prior to 2021.

  • Ukraine bags another Russian warship, in this case the Tarantul-class corvette Ivanovets.
  • “Starbucks Employee Opposed to Unionization Sues to Declare National Labor Relations Board Unconstitutional.” “The National Labor Relations Board should not be a union boss-friendly kangaroo court run by powerful bureaucrats who exercise unaccountable power in violation of the Constitution.” This is another post-Chevron lawsuit that has the potential to completely dismantle the administrative state.
  • Language on Texas 2021’s Proposition 2 declared illegal.

    Proposition 2 allowed counties to create transportation reinvestment zones (TRZs), a power they did not previously have. According to the Texas Department of Transportation, a TRZ is a kind of tax increment financing district where a “zone is created, a base year is established, and the incremental increase in property tax revenue collected inside the zone is used to finance a project in the zone.”

    The proposition did not include language about the use of increased ad valorem taxes to pay bonds or notes issued by the county in the TRZ district. A similar measure in 2011 that included such language was voted down.

  • “Anger management therapist loses his temper and murders a homeless man.” To be fair, the transient did try to fark with his dogs…
  • Woman with Master’s degree finds out that her trade school husband has quadrupling her salary with no debt.

  • Disney losses lawsuit against Ron DeSantis over Reedy Improvement District.
  • Media site called The Messenger blew through $50 million and closed down in less than a year. No, I never heard of it either…
  • George Carlin’s estate sues makers of AI Carlin.
  • “Texas Finds Loophole With New ‘Super Ouchy Pokey Wire.'”
  • “Tragic Report Reveals Thousands of Journalists Still Have Not Been Laid Off.”
  • I think he likes to swim…

    (Hat tip: Ace of Spades HQ.)

  • LinkSwarm For January 5, 2024

    Friday, January 5th, 2024

    Happy New Year, everyone! The Biden Recession bites deeper, Israel dirtnaps a top terrorist, Harvard’s chief plagiarist finally steps down, and the crypto CEO who wasn’t there. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

    

  • Once again, the new job numbers are horrible.

    The monthly nonfarm payrolls (from the Establishment Survey) may have been weak at 216K but the far more accurate Household Survey showed that the number of Employed workers actually collapsed by an unprecedented 683K, the biggest drop since the US economy was shutdown by covid!

    Even scarier, while the monthly grind higher in the payrolls number (pulled from the far less accurate Establishment Survey) means that US jobs hit a record high every month with bizarre consistency and in December this was certainly the case, the total nonfarm employment number rose to an all time high 157.232 million, the abovementioned collapse in US Employment (per Household survey) meant that there were only 161.183 million employed people in the US, the lowest since June, with the now traditional divergence between these two surveys glaringly obvious.

  • Israel takes out senior Hamas leader in Beirut.

    A senior Hamas leader was killed Tuesday in a drone strike in Beirut, Lebanon, during a meeting between Palestinian factions at a Hamas office.

    Saleh al-Arouri, deputy chairman of Hamas’s political bureau and commander of the terror group’s military wing in the West Bank, and at least five others died from the explosion, which occurred near Hezbollah’s headquarters in Beirut, Lebanese state media reported. Several more were injured. Following the blast, Hamas blamed Israel for the “Zionist raid” amid its ongoing war with the Jewish state. Israel has not claimed responsibility for the strike.

    Many Israeli officials declined to comment. However, Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich posted a statement on X shortly after the attack: “Surely your enemies will perish, O Israel.”

    In November, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu indicated he ordered the nation’s Mossad spy agency to eliminate Hamas leaders around the world after the militant group’s coordinated October 7 attack. Netanyahu’s office also declined to comment about the explosion.

    Al-Arouri, whom Hamas described as “one of the architects” of the terror attack on Israel, had close ties with Yahwa Sinwar, the group’s leader in Gaza. Al-Arouri is the most senior Hamas leader to have been killed since the war began in early October.

  • Supreme Court to take up Trump’s Colorado ballot case.
  • A good chunk of the Epstein files have finally been released. Some revelations: Bill Clinton “likes them young” and Donald Trump didn’t have sex with at least one girl who was asked under oath about it.
  • Harvard President Claudine Gay finally does the right thing and resigns in wake of burgeoning plagiarism scandal.
  • A three act farce: Act 1: “Ohio governor Mike DeWine (R.) on Friday vetoed a bill that would have banned both transgender procedures for minors and trans student-athlete participation in school sports in the state.” Act 2: Turns out DeWine has taken taken over $40,000 in donations from pro-child-genital-mutilation hospitals. Act 3: “Republican Ohio governor Mike DeWine issued an “emergency” executive order Friday banning child gender-transition surgeries after receiving intense backlash last week for vetoing a bill with a broader but similar mandate.” Ohio’s Republican legislature can and should override DeWine’s foolish veto.
  • “President of Illinois NAACP suspended after saying migrants are ‘savages who are ‘raping people, breaking into homes.'” Speaking the truth is now crime
  • Border Protection Officer Charged with Human Smuggling. Emanuel Celedon is also charged with bribery and drug trafficking.”
  • Robert F. Kennedy, jr. qualifies for the presidential ballot in Utah.

    Last month, American Values 2024, a super PAC supporting the third-party candidate, announced a plan to spend nearly $15 million to get Kennedy on the ballot in ten states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, New York and Texas. All are important to winning the 2024 race.

    I don’t see RFK Jr. doing even as well in Utah as Egg McMuffin did in 2016, and of the other states, only Arizona, Colorado, Michigan and Nevada might have any effect on the election, all four of which went (however fraudulently) for Biden in 2020.

  • Harris County Criminal Court Judge Arrested for Domestic Violence on New Year’s Eve. Harris County Judge Frank Aguilar is alleged to have assaulted and impeded the breathing of a female victim.” Aguilar is, of course, a Democrat.
  • “Louisiana sporting goods employees fired for chasing shoplifter who stole gun.” Get bent, Academy. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Crypto hedge fund CEO may not have actually existed. That’s some mighty fine vetting there, investors…
  • Ricky Gervais has a great idea: He and Dave Chappelle should co-host the Oscars. That would indeed be a smash ratings success, and I would watch the Oscars for the first time this century.
  • New commie gaming regulations lop $80 billion off Chinese video game company values.
  • TGIFriday’s just closed 36 locations in 12 states, including four in Texas. Thanks, Joe Biden.
  • Plus for Sephora “Body Butter”: Smoother skin. Minus: Attracts Spiders.
  • Mythbuster‘s Adam Savage keeps buying replica torturer baby masks from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. Also, he watched it once a day, every day, for six months while working at a movie theater. Which explains a lot.
  • “Texas Agrees To Two-State Solution With Austin.”

    This is the only way for us to live in peace,” said Texas Governor Greg Abbot. “The citizens of Austin have been at war with the people of Texas for many years now, and to end the bloodshed for future generations, we are willing to recognize Austin as its own separate and sovereign land.”

    The resolution brought much-needed relief to the war-torn area, where battle lines had been drawn along the border of Austin. “The weirdo hipsters of Austin can stand down now,” said Texas Senator Ted Cruz in a statement acknowledging the resolution. “The people of Austin can now stop patrolling the perimeter of the city in armored tanks and go back to driving electric vehicles, painting strange murals nobody understands, and hating everything the United States stands for.”

  • “Detroit Pistons relegated to the WNBA.”
  • Bluehost is dog slow today, so I should wrap this up.

    Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.





    LinkSwarm for September 1, 2023

    Friday, September 1st, 2023

    A whole lot more Biden Recession hits the economy—unexpectedly! The poor go hungry, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor confirms Biden corruption, people keep flocking to Texas and Florida, McConell’s brain blows up (again), and a whole lot of Texas laws take effect. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!

  • Unemployment rate surges (unexpectedly!) as every single monthly payroll estimate this year has been revised downward. Those who assured us that federal government economic data would never be altered simply to help boost Democrats were lying to us.
    

  • Poor people are buying less food because they can’t afford it. “Among households using the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program’s boosted pandemic benefits, 42% skipped meals in August and 55% ate less because they couldn’t afford food, more than double last year’s share, according to a Wednesday report from Propel Inc., a benefits software developer.”(Hat tip: ZeroHedge.)
  • Prosecutor confirms that it was indeed Biden corruption in Ukraine.

    Victor Shokin, the fired Ukrainian prosecutor investigating Biden family corruption (that Donald Trump was impeached for asking about) has spoken out for the first time since 2019 – and says the Bidens did it.

    To review – Shokin had an active and ongoing investigation into Ukrainian energy company Burisma and its owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, according to a 2020 US Senate Committee report.

    Zlochevsky, who hired Hunter Biden to sit on his board, granted his own company (Burisma) permits to drill for oil and gas in Ukraine while he was Minister of Ecology and Natural Resources. Shokin stated in a 2019 deposition that there were five criminal cases against Zlochevesky, including money laundering, corruption, illegal funds transfers, and profiteering through shell corporations while he was a sitting minister.

    Now, Shokin tells Fox News that be believes the Bidens were taking bribes.

    “I do not want to deal in unproven facts. But my firm personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed,” Shokin told the outlet. “The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in U.S. money in exchange for my dismissal – my firing – isn’t that alone a case of corruption?” he asks in another clip.

  • “Young High Income Earners Are Flocking To Florida And Texas, New Study Shows…”To the surprise of likely no one, Florida and Texas are once again No. 1 and No. 2. Florida gained a total of 2,175 high earners aged 26 to 35 after accounting for both inflows and outflows, while Texas gained a net 1,909. Despite the losses, New York (-5,062) and California (-4,495) still have the highest count of young high earners of any state by a wide margin.
  • China tried to seize another island in the South China Sea. It didn’t go well for them. (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • Mitch McConnell’s brain is broken, as he freezes up the second time in two months.
  • Dispatches from the groomer menace: “Woman Says Her Daughter Was Sex Trafficked After School Hid Gender Transition.”
  • Katy ISD rejects the radical social justice agenda. “The agenda item included policy updates in regard to requiring sex-specific spaces to be ‘safeguarded,’ which include bathrooms and locker rooms. Policies were also updated on pronoun usage as teachers and staff will not be required to use student “preferred pronouns” and content prohibiting ‘gender fluidity’ instruction.”
  • By contrast, Richardson ISD won a grant to support the gay agenda in schools.
  • Texas laws that take effect today, including a ban on child sexual mutilation (AKA “gender affirming care”), banning men from college women’s athletics, and banning DEI from public universities.
  • Also, Texas voters will get a chance to vote on a right to farm constitutional amendment in November.

  • Remember flash mobs of people rampaging through stores looting and beating random people? One just happened again in California.
  • Relations between the coup junta in Niger (which observers want you to know is pronounced kneeJ) and France gets spicier. The junta is trying to expel the French ambassador and he’s not going. The tiff might very well turn kinetic, and I doubt the Wagner Group mercs are up to taking on French regulars.
  • Ecolooneys protest Burning Man by blocking roads, promptly get beatdown from tribal police.
  • Disney Stock Plunges To 9 Year Lows After Multiple Woke Box Office Failures.”
  • Also, investors are suing them over “Alleged Chapek Era “Cost-Shifting Scheme” to Hide Streaming Losses.” Maybe everyone lost the streaming wars. (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Colin Furze offers up a bunch of helpful shop tips.
  • “Texas Governor Signs Legislation Making It Legal To Make Climate Protestors Dance By Firing Six-Shooters At Their Feet.”
  • China’s Slacker City

    Saturday, May 6th, 2023

    Remember how a bunch of young Chinese just decided to give up and let it rot? Recently, a whole bunch of them have decided to make Dali in Yunnan Province their own slacker city.

    Takeaways:

  • “Recently a city has become popular because it has been occupied by young people who want to lie flat. It’s Dali, a historical and cultural city in Yunnan province, southwest China, with a population of about 650,000. It has few factories in the area, and tourism accounts for a large share of the municipality’s revenue.”
  • It’s built around a large lake.
  • “A few video bloggers who are secondary landlords in Dali city claim that an army of 100,000 people lying flat have gathered and have occupied the city.”
  • “Here 350 yuan a room per month.” That’s a bit over $50.
  • “The cost of living in Dali is 8,000 Yuan a year. That is $1,162.”
  • “Young people [in China] see no hope for their future and choose to lie down. Their motto is no buying a home, no car, no marriage, no baby, no consumption.”
  • Chinese woman: “It isn’t that I don’t want to have children. I can’t afford it. Housing is so stressful! Without a home, I’m afraid to get married. The cost of having a baby is high. There’s no money or time to raise them, and women’s work is easily affected by childbirth.” All things that help contribute to China’s disasterous demographics.
  • “I’m a leek. I resigned myself to my fate, but I won’t drag a child down to this mess.” “Leek” was a buzzword five or six years ago for someone the Chinese government regarded as a disposable worker/consumer. Sort of like “cog in the machine.”
  • “Before the lying flat people converged on the city of Dali, it had already become a gathering place for digital nomads,” i.e. people who can work remote jobs from anywhere with a decent Internet connection.
  • For the past 20 years, the professional software engineer has been synonymous with young and rich in China. They’re the 996th Generation, who work from 9 AM to 9 PM, 6 days a week, sacrificing their health, but also enjoying the dividends of China’s dotcom boom over the last 20 years. But now China’s Internet industry has entered an era with State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs) in, private companies out, where even big tech companies are being nationalized. The overall economy is slowing down, regulatory bans are proliferating, and the epidemic is exacerbating this trend. Engineers are at increased risk of losing their jobs, and their income and benefits are reduced from time to time. Engineers who have lost their jobs will join the ranks of those who are lying flat. They usually have nothing to do, spending most of their time on the internet playing games and chatting, consuming two packs of instant noodles a day.

  • “The employment market in Shanghai is very bad right now…what is scary is that there are no jobs for you to work again. Private companies are closing their doors, going bankrupt.”
  • As always, it’s hard to determine just how widespread “lying flat” is among young Chinese. If the videos are anything to go by (a big “if”), they all seem considerably cleaner and better behaved that America’s ranks of tent-dwelling, drug-addicted transients. And many seem to be actually renting space for their tents.

    At 9:50 in, you see that cyberpunk dystopian scene of hundred of young video blogger “hosts” broadcasting from their own tiny spaces under a bridge. “Why are there so many young people in China working as online hosts? It’s not that it’s glamorous, it’s more of a helpless attempt under the current job hunting predicament.” Supposedly this happens in multiple Chinese cities, though evidently streaming locally in rich areas like Shanghai brings higher “tips.”

    What a life…

    Credit Crunch Crisis Carpocalypse

    Tuesday, April 11th, 2023

    I’ve already covered how small business bankruptcies are at record highs and manufacturing is at a three year low. To those woes add a severe credit crunch.

    How severe? How about $105 billion drop in loans in just two weeks.

  • “This credit crunch greatly increases the chances that America is going to have a deflationary recession or depression at some point in 2023. And, in fact, we could already be in it.” Ya think?
  • “We’re going to see the unemployment rate start to spike in America in the second half of 2023, In fact, we’re already seeing a big increase in unemployment claims data from the Federal Reserve shows that continued unemployment claims has surged since September.”
  • “We’re seeing a big surge in mortgage defaults right now across America, particularly on what’s called FHA mortgages. FHA mortgages are these first-time home buyer loans that the US government sponsors and allows people to only put three to five percent down. Well, these loans now have a 12% default rate in the most recent month of February 2023.”
  • Debt-to-income ration is now higher than it was at the pre-subprime meltdown peak in 2008.
  • “The Biden Administration has been very aggressive in wanting to expand mortgage access to low-income borrowers who can’t afford these mortgages. And they do this under the guise of expanding the benefits of home ownership to everyone, but really what they’re doing is they’re saddling at-risk economic households with a lot of debt near the peak of a housing bubble.”
  • “When banks tighten the belt and businesses can no longer get loans, businesses have to shut down, or what businesses have to do is, they have to start liquidating their holdings and taking whatever cash they have and use it to pay expenses. This is actually a concern of mine.”
  • “This bank credit crunch which is occurring right now could cause even more bank runs in the future” as people pull money out of the bank to cover expenses.
  • Quantitative tightening is back on.
  • “Mortgage application demand is on par with what we saw basically in the worst of the last housing crash in 2008, 2009, 2010, and so, no, there is no recovery.”
  • “The regular home buyer is still out of the housing market and is not returning.”
  • “The money supply in America is contracting…every other time in history it contracted, which was four times, we had a depression, a panic and a banking crisis.”
  • Cheerful enough. But if you’re a car dealer, things are even worse:

  • Banks are cutting off backing loans and providing credit to dealerships.
  • Not just used car dealers, but even national brand, nameplate dealerships.
  • This all started back in 2020, when banks started lending way too much money on cars that simply aren’t worth it, to consumers that simply couldn’t afford these payments, and shouldn’t have got the car in the first place…Let’s fast forward to 2023. We’re seeing record high repossession rates, and we’re seeing record high portfolio sell-offs, where people are just liquidating their paper because they don’t want to take on the risk of all these really bad auto loans, because they owe too much money. People are not making payments and they see the value of cars going down.

  • The fewer banks dealers can pit each other against for loan terms, the higher the interest rate consumers have to pay.
  • Dealers (not the banks) are also the ones who get screwed if a customer misses their first through third car payment.
  • Texas car dealer: “He was floored because he sells a lot of trucks between $45- and $65,000 trucks. Four of his banks told him that they’re no longer lending over twenty five thousand dollars.” (Previously.)
  • “I promise you this: it’s only gonna get worse.”
  • But wait! It gets worse!

  • “Capital One is going to start pulling their floor plans from dealers.”
  • “Floor plans” are the lines of credit dealers use to purchase cars to populate their lots, even the big nameplate dealers.
  • “Dealers are overexposed right now. They have paid way too much for their inventory and now they are having a hard time selling it.”
  • “It is so much harder now than it has been in the last two years to get people approved for loans to be able to sell these vehicles.”
  • “[Banks] do not want to get stuck holding the bag on these cars.”
  • “Dealers have been stupid. They have overpaid and they have too much inventory right now.”
  • “Some of these dealers, if they’re having cars 60, 90 days and maybe they’re getting a little bit behind on their payments [the] floor plan company will actually go to these dealers lots and they will take these cars that have been sitting too long, they’ll take them to the auction.”
  • “If they didn’t have the cash, the liquidity, to begin with, then they have to start liquidating cars, and they have to liquidate them fast to be able to pay their flooring lines…if they lose these flooring lines, they might as well not be in business, they don’t have the cash to be able to buy more inventory to be able to sell it to make more money.”
  • Banks pulling their floor lines could potentially crash the whole car market.
  • Things are going to get worse for car dealers before it gets better, and six months from now might be a great time to buy a car, assuming you’re not too busy shooting starving looters trying to steal your canned goods…

    LinkSwarm for February 10, 2023

    Friday, February 10th, 2023

    Here’s a longer-than-usual LinkSwarm, since last week’s edition was wiped out by the ice storm power outage.

  • The leftwing corruption of all government institutions continues apace. “US lost 287,000 jobs while government was reporting +1 million in gains.” (Hat tip: Instapundit.)
  • More cheery Biden Economy news: “Warning Signs Indicate a Great Depression May Be Coming.”

    “That’s because economic growth is slowing down,” explains research fellow EJ Antoni. “Even the areas which contributed positively to gross domestic product (GDP) are not necessarily signs of prosperity. For example, business investment grew at only 1.4 percent in the fourth quarter, but that was almost entirely inventory growth. Nonresidential investment, a key driver of future economic growth, was up just 0.7 percent.”

    “Meanwhile, residential investment fell off a cliff,” Antoni continued, “dropping 26.7 percent as consumers were unable to afford the combination of high home prices, high interest rates and falling real incomes. No wonder homeownership affordability has fallen to the lowest level in that metric’s history.”

    There was a gain in net exports, but that was largely a mirage created by a major slowdown in international trade. “Imports are simply falling faster than exports, which shows up as an increase in GDP.”

    But probably most concerning to Antoni is the sharp decline in real disposable income in 2022, which exceeded $1 trillion.

    “This is the second-largest percentage drop in real disposable income ever, behind only 1932, the worst year of the Great Depression,” he observed. “To keep up with inflation, consumers are depleting their savings and burning through the ‘stimulus’ checks they received during 2020 and 2021. Credit card debt continues growing, while savings plummeted $1.6 trillion last year, falling below 2009 levels.”

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Boom. “Texas has punted Citigroup from the syndicate that’s set to manage the Lone Star state’s largest-ever municipal bond offering, saying the bank’s policies for gun retailers discriminate against the firearms industry.”
  • “DeSantis Admin Revokes Liquor License of Orlando Venue That Hosted Sexual Drag Show for Children.” Good.
  • “DeSantis Takes Wrecking Ball To ‘Diversity, Equity, And Inclusion’ Bureaucracy In Florida Public Universities. Even better!
  • Also, the College Board caved and removed Critical Race Theory material from its Advanced Placement African American Studies.
  • DNC to Iowa: Drop Dead.
  • 368 Arrested, 131 Rescued In California Sex Trafficking Operation.”
  • Just what our health care system needs: “25 People Charged In Fake Nursing Diploma Operation,” in Delaware, New York, New Jersey, Texas, and Florida.
  • Hunter Biden admits that that the laptop is his. This is 100 times more important a story than the Chinese spy balloons.
  • “U.S. Deploys 100 New Tank Transporters to Move M1 Tanks Quickly in Europe.”
  • Suicide bomber blows up mosque in Pakistan.
  • Journalists drop the mask. “Objectivity Has Got To Go.”
  • Related: CNN Ratings hit nine year low.
  • Gawker shuts down. Let’s have a moment of silenceOK that’s enough. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Grand Theft Pollo. The food service director of an impoverished Illinois school district was charged with stealing $1.5 million of food — most of which was chicken wings. Vera Liddell, 66, allegedly began stealing from the Harvey School District during the height of COVID-19.” (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • That old Communist Magic: “Food in Cuba is both scarce and unaffordable as prices double while incomes remain stagnant.” (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • Important safety tip: Try not to poke downed kamikaze loitering munition drones with a stick.
  • It now costs more to fuel an electric car than a gas-powered one.
  • Bill Maher continues to take regular red pills. “The problem with communism and some very recent ideologies here at home, is that they think you can change reality by screaming at it.”
  • We could be heroes, just for one day. Or once a month, as the case may be…
  • Over 400 sandwiches and pre-packaged meals recalled due to listeria.
  • This week in rapper murders: “Tampa rapper arrested for young mother’s murder days after being acquitted of recording studio double-murder.”

    A Tampa jury acquitted Billy Adams of killing two men in a makeshift recording studio in Lutz. He walked free from a Tampa courtroom on January 27.

    Three days later, a young mother who was pregnant with her second child was found shot to death in a residential area of New Tampa. Her toddler was still in her vehicle nearby.

    A week after her death, Tampa police said Billy Adams “did admit to being the one to pull the trigger.”

    (Hat tip: Dwight.)

  • How Louis C.K. uncancelled himself.
  • Related: Louis C.K. discusses how he develops a set on Joe Rogan.
  • The ice storm took out KXAN’s transmitter tower. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • The last 747 rolls out. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Ozzy Osbourne retires from touring at age 74. Honestly, the odds Ozzy would even make it to 74 must have seemed pretty daunting throughout much of his life.
  • Professional eater vs. giant calzone.
  • World’s oldest dog is a Good Boy.
  • LinkSwarm for December 2, 2022

    Friday, December 2nd, 2022

    Howdy! Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving! I spent six days up in the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex, visiting relatives and buying some 180 books, some for myself and some to deal. Enjoy a Friday LinkSwarm!
    

  • We keep hearing that it’s impossible rig government unemployment statistics, but something funny is going on.

    A superficial take of today’s jobs report would note that both jobs and earnings “blew past expectations, flying in the face of Fed rate hikes”, and while that is accurate at the headline level, it couldn’t be further from the truth if one actually digs a little deeper in today’s jobs numbers.

    Recall that back in August, September, and October we showed that a stark divergence had opened between the Household and Establishment surveys that comprise the monthly jobs report, and since March the former has been stagnant while the latter has been rising every single month. In addition to that, full-time jobs were plunging while part-time jobs were surging and the number of multiple-jobholders soared.

    Fast forward to today when the inconsistencies not only continue to grow, but have become downright grotesque.

    Consider the following: the closely followed Establishment survey came in above expectations at 263K, above the 200K expected – a record 7th consecutive beat vs expectations – and down modestly from last month’s upward revised 284K…

    … numbers which confirm that at a time when virtually every major tech company is announcing mass layoffs…

    … the BLS has a single, laser-focused political agenda – not to spoil the political climate at a time when Democrats just lost control of the House as somehow both construction (+20K) and manufacturing (+14K) added jobs according to the BLS, when even ADP now reports that these two sectors combined shed more than 100,000 workers in November.

    Alas, there is only so much the Department of Labor can hide under the rug because when looking at the abovementioned gap between the Household and Establishment surveys which we have been pounding the table on since the summer, it just blew out by a whopping 401K as a result of the 263K increase in the number of nonfarm payrolls (tracked by the Household survey) offset by a perplexing plunge in the number of people actually employed which tumbled by 138K (tracked by Household survey). Furthermore, as shown in the next chart, since March the number of employed workers has declined on 4 of the past 8 months, while the much more gamed nonfarm payrolls (goalseeked by the Establishment survey) have been up every single month.

    What is even more perplexing, is that despite the continued rise in nonfarm payrolls, the Household survey continues to telegraph growing weakness, and as of Nov 30, the gap that opened in March has since grown to a whopping 2.7 million “workers” which may or may not exist anywhere besides the spreadsheet model of some BLS (or is that BLM) political activist.”

  • Senate passes bill to avoid rail strike.
  • “Zuckerberg, Soros Bankrolling Left-Wing Think Tank Conducting Racial Census of Hill Staff.”

    A non-profit bankrolled by some of the nation’s largest corporations and left-wing billionaire George Soros is conducting a racial census of House and Senate staff as part of its effort to establish a “Bipartisan Diversity and Inclusion Office,” according to internal emails obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

    Senate and House staff received emails from a researcher at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies starting in July asking them to confirm their “racial and ethnic identity” as part of an alleged data collection effort. In at least two cases, senior congressional staffers who declined to provide their races were told by the researcher that the organization’s current data indicated they “may identify as white” and asked the staffers to update if the information was incorrect.

    Information collected by the group will be used in its annual report that lobbies for “structural changes on Capitol Hill that would allow for more people of color to be hired in senior positions,” a previous report from the group states. That report is made possible in part by millions of dollars in donations to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies from Apple, Google, Meta, Pfizer, the Soros-backed Open Society Foundation, among dozens of other large corporations and nonprofits.

    The Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies’ survey is part of a broader trend by left-wing organizations to pressure workplaces and governments to increase affirmative action policies. Often couched in promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” those policies have received criticism for coming at the expense of competence and offering advantages based on race instead of merit.

    (Hat tip: Instapundit.)

  • “Collin County Ends Automatic Deduction of Union Dues.” Good.
  • “‘Philadelphia is a war zone’: Moment thug casually strolls up to parking officer and shoots him in the head in broad daylight in Dem-led city.” (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
  • Speaking of Blue Zone violence, some occurred only a few miles from my house, when lawyer Gavin Rush walked into the bar where his ex-girlfriend worked and tried to shoot her before patrons wresteled him to the ground.

    Rush was charged with a second-degree felony, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon family violence. An emergency protection order was issued against him, and he was soon back on the streets after making a $40,000 bond, KVUE reported.

    “For $4,000, you can get out, go home, watch Netflix after trying to murder your ex-girlfriend — are you kidding me?” one of the customers said.

    So in addition to aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and possible attempted murder, our super-genius lawyer also violated section 46.03 of the Texas penal code by carrying a gun into a bar. And he bonded out. For all that Democrats blather about “gun violence,” they don’t seem top treat gun felonies with any seriousness when they actually occur. Thanks, Soros-backed DA Jose Garza!

    But it turns out that Rush didn’t just go go home to watch Netflix, as he was found dead on Thursday.

  • Slippery, meet slope. “Assisted suicide plans for children unveiled at Toronto’s Sick Kids hospital.” (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)
  • “Wisconsin School Counselor Sues District after Firing over Objections to Child Gender Transition.” Bend the knee, peasant.
  • Newly Elected Conservative School Board Fires Superintendent, Bans Critical Race Theory.”

    In one meeting, Deon Jackson went from South Carolina’s Berkeley County school superintendent to unemployed.

    His firing came at the hand of a newly-elected school board, which appears to have declared a judgment day for woke practices in its district.

    In its first meeting after the Nov. 8 election, the board fired superintendent Jackson and school counsel Tiffany Richardson. Then it hired Anthony Dixon as superintendent and retained Brandon Gaskins as counsel. And before the day was over, the board banned teaching critical race theory and created a board to review library books for pornographic content.

    Moms for Liberty, an activist group that supports parental rights in education, endorsed six of the board’s nine members. Many Moms for Liberty candidates won school board elections this November.

    Faster, please.

  • The road portion of the Kerch Strait bridge has been repaired.
  • Reality continues to outpace The Babylon Bee: “Former White House ‘Disinformation Czar’ Nina Jankowicz Registers As Foreign Agent.”
  • Speaking of disinformation, CNN carries out more mass layoffs, including Chris Cillizza. Let’s have a moment of silences for his careerOK that’s enough.
  • Today’s hate crime hoax comes to you from pedo-friendly California Democratic State Senator Scott Weiner.
  • Legal Insurrection conducts a 2024 presidential preference poll. Not surprisingly, DeSantis comes in first and Trump second. Nikki Haley third over Ted Cruz is a mild surprise. Greg Abbott ranked dead last, tied with Liz Chaney, is a much bigger one.
  • The B-21 Raider strategic bomber was officially rolled out today.
  • San Francisco police to arm robots with bombs. The Robocop joke are already made at the source.
  • U.S. defeats Iran in EuroFlopBall.
  • I used to joke “becoming a book reviewer for riches and fame is like becoming a monk for the kinky sex and hard drugs.” I may need to amend that joke.
  • Sarah Hoyt on bad feminist worldbuilding.
  • Epic fail: Crashing your car. SuperEpicMegaFail: Into a fireworks store. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Pilot builds tiny home out of a scissor lift airline snack truck.
  • Here’s your chance to pick up a shooting script for Citizen Kane.
  • World’s oldest cat dies in Texas at age 30.
  • Colin Furze turns himself into a Weeble.
  • LinkSwarm for August 5, 2022

    Friday, August 5th, 2022

    Ron DeSantis drives more enemies before him, the Biden Administration keeps doubling down on tranny madness, Batgirl dies for DC’s sins, and the most “Ewww” inducing headline of the year. It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
    
    

  • Why America can’t build.

    Construction projects are undertaken within a legal and regulatory system that presents persistent, costly obstacles, while projects are being overseen by agencies who lack the resources and in some cases even the expertise to manage them.

    Sepulveda’s numerous lawsuits and stakeholder conflicts are an example of a phenomenon that can be traced back to the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969. NEPA mandates developers to provide environmental impact statements before they can obtain the permits necessary for construction on huge swathes of infrastructure.

    Shortly following the passage of NEPA, California’s then-governor Ronald Reagan signed the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) into law, which required additional environmental impact analysis. Unlike NEPA, it requires adopting all feasible measures to mitigate these impacts. Interest groups wield CEQA and NEPA like weapons. One study found that 85 percent of CEQA lawsuits were filed by groups with no history of environmental advocacy. The NIMBY attitude of these groups has crippled the ability of California to build anything. As California Governor Gavin Newsom succinctly put it, “NIMBYism is destroying the state.”

    It is also destroying the U.S.’s ability to build nationally. The economist Eli Dourado reported in The New York Times that “per-mile spending on the Interstate System of Highways tripled between the 1960’s and 1980’s.” This directly correlates with the passage of NEPA. If anything, the problem has gotten worse over time. Projects receiving funding through the $837 billion stimulus plan passed by Congress in the aftermath of the financial crises were subject to over 192,000 NEPA reviews.

    The NEPA/CEQA process incentivizes the public agencies to seek what is often termed a “bulletproof” environmental compliance document to head off future legal challenges. This takes time, with the average EIS taking 4.5 years to complete. Some have taken longer than a decade. A cottage industry of consultants is devoted to completing these documents, earning themselves millions in fees.

    The NEPA consultants are just one of the numerous types of consultants that benefit from the way we build. Most infrastructure in the U.S. is built through a huge number of state and local agencies: for example, there are 51,000 community water systems alone in the U.S. This decentralized structure makes it much more difficult to develop the depth of expertise needed to manage the complexities posed by megaprojects. Often, the multiple public agencies that are involved with projects also have overlapping authorities, creating bureaucratic delays and slowing decision making.

    The expertise problem is compounded by the fact that agencies are often staffed with a workforce of people either just at the beginning of their careers or near the end of them. Those at the beginning tend to leave if they are ambitious, which leaves senior positions in the hands of agency lifers. Because of this dynamic, and the fact that it is not economically feasible to have the wide range of expertise needed in-house, public agencies employ engineering consulting firms. These firms fill a valuable niche. If you are building a complex project—say, a long-span bridge or a desalination plant—you want advice from someone who has designed and built dozens of them. The problem arises when you become too dependent on such advice.

    The High-Speed Rail project was undermined by such a failure. At its peak, the agency responsible for the project, the California High-Speed Rail Authority, had fewer than 30 permanent employees managing the $105 billion project. Instead of hiring staff, the Authority relied heavily on outside consultants. These consultants were well paid, with the primary consultant compensation for HSR at $427,000 per engineer, compared with the Authority’s in-house cost of $131,000 per engineer. This structure creates a principal-agent problem where they are incentivized to maximize their billable hours. As a California State Auditor assessment of the project noted, consultants “may not always have the state’s best interest as their primary motivation.”

    This lack of in-house institutional expertise leads to bad decision-making. Bent Flyvbjerg, a professor at Oxford University who has written extensively about megaprojects summarized the problem when asked about California’s HSR project: “If you depend on consultants to know what you are doing then you are in real trouble…a good balance is where the owners are not outsourcing all the knowledge. A bad balance guarantees a bad outcome.”

    The pitfalls of this lack of balance appeared before large parts of the project began. In 2014, Dragados, the contractor for a 63-mile section of the HSR, proposed radical design changes that they projected could save $300 million. The fact that Dragados’s bid was $500 million lower than its competitors and that it rested upon a design concept that had not been thoroughly vetted should have caused alarm. As a senior engineer who worked on the original environmental compliance document for HSR and reviewed the concepts told the Los Angeles Times, “it is mind-boggling they would entertain some of the things that Dragados proposed.”

    Dragados’s approach may have been driven by the fact it didn’t have the experience of its competitors; it had never built a rail project in the U.S. before and needed an edge to be selected. It was a measured risk because it knew there were ways to limit its financial exposure if its design ideas didn’t work. A Los Angeles Times investigation of the project in 2021 found Dragados had issued 273 change orders for additional payment and had completed less than 50 percent of its planned work four years after its section was supposed to be complete. Its design ideas had been almost completely abandoned as unworkable and Dragados’s section of the work was $800 million over budget.

    The principal-agent problem arises with union construction labor as well. Skilled union workers, such as electricians and carpenters, make solid hourly wages, but their pay really explodes with overtime. A 2011 study by the Real Estate Board of New York found that some union crane operators made up to $500,000 a year in pay. Union contracts mandate unnecessary positions as well, to the benefit of its members. The same study found 50 workers in unnecessary positions such as relief crane operators on the World Trade Center Project, including 14 unproductive employees making $400,000 a year at the project.

    Similar statistics can be found on other projects; an investigation into the costs of the East Side Access rail project in New York, which cost nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track, found that only 700 of the 900 workers being paid on the project were needed. A TBM, which is largely run automatically and typically staffed with under 10 people, ostensibly had 25 or 26 people working on it. Because you can’t drill without a TBM, and you can’t build a high-rise without a crane operator, these union workers have inordinate power.

    A common retort to the claim that union labor drives up costs is that other countries, especially in Europe, have both high union participation and lower project costs. But it is widely recognized in the industry that unions increase project labor costs by 20 to 25 percent on average in the U.S.

    The fundamental problem isn’t unions per se, but rather the way that unions operate within parts of the U.S. system. The Netherlands has strong unions, but the Port of Rotterdam has been automated to an extent that has proven impossible in the U.S. due to union resistance. As the president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, Harold Dagget, recently put it, his union will “fight tooth and nail” against further automation in the U.S. Any attempt at real construction innovation runs into similar barriers at every level of the system. There are too many layers of permission needed to innovate, including groups whose interests run counter to innovation.

    Innovation in physical work ultimately means substituting or complementing labor through technology to improve productivity. If your pay depends on overtime, you want inefficiency. The average dockworker at the Port of Los Angeles makes over $100,000 a year, largely due to overtime. The majority of foremen and managers earn more than $200,000, and the mariners who guide ships in and out of the port average nearly $450,000.

    The result is that innovation is inhibited by both labor resistance and a decentralized government bureaucracy that has neither the incentives nor the capability of driving real change. Perhaps it should not be shocking that U.S. construction productivity has fallen by half since the 1960s according to research conducted by the consulting firm McKinsey.

    Rent-seeking Uber Alles.

  • Soros slammed for America’s crime wave. Including this handy chart:

    In San Francisco, Soros-funded DA Chesa Boudin has seen a flood of departures from his office due to his criminal justice reform policies.

    Boudin campaigned on a platform to end mass incarceration, eliminate cash bail, and vowed to create a panel to review sentencing and potential wrongful convictions. Following his election in November 2019, Boudin announced he would deemphasize the prosecution of drug cases, so-called quality-of-life cases, and property offenses.

    Under his watch, vehicle break-ins increased 100-750% in parts of the city between 2020 and 2021, with the number of reported vehicle thefts reaching 1,891 in May 2021—more than double the 923 reported in May 2020.

    San Francisco also recorded one of the largest increases in burglaries among major cities last year, with a jump of 47 percent—a trend that has continued this year. Fatal and nonfatal shootings in the first six months of this year were up more than 100 percent from the year-earlier period, increasing to 119 from 58, the city’s police chief said at a July press conference.

    More than 700 people died of drug overdoses in 2021 in the city, a record that is likely to be surpassed this year, according to the chief medical examiner.

    Rudy Giuliani – the former Mayor of New York City whose claim to fame was a massive reduction in crime (and who’s traded barbs with Soros in the past), isn’t letting the billionaire off the hook.

    “If there is one single person responsible for the record increases in murder and violence in America’s cities it’s George Soros,” Giuliani said in a Monday tweet.

    “Major contributor to BLM, Antifa, Democrat Party, Biden, Harris and 40 or so pro Criminal DAs. The blood is on his hands,” he added.

  • Speaking of Soros, a resigning Chicago prosecutor slammed Soros-backed Illinois Attorney General Kim Foxx on his way out the door.

    Assistant State’s Attorney James Murphy described an understaffed office in turmoil in his email to colleagues, saying, “I cannot continue to work for an Administration I no longer respect.”

    “I would love to continue to fight for the victims of crime and to continue to stand with each of you, especially in the face of the overwhelming crime that is crippling our communities,” Murphy wrote. “However, I can no longer work for this Administration. I have zero confidence in their leadership.”

    Murphy, who could not be reached directly for comment, zeroed in on many of the issues that have made Foxx a target of opponents who argue she’s gone easy on some accused of violent crimes, as carjackings and gun violence have risen in the Chicago area.

    Murphy wrote that he first started thinking about leaving the office early in 2021 with Foxx’s involvement in the passage of the SAFE-T Act, a wide-ranging law that aims to reform the state’s approach to criminal justice, including by narrowing the definition of who can be charged with first-degree murder.

  • Florida Governor Ron DeSantis shows he plays for keeps by sending state police to physically remove a guy from his office for refusing to follow the law.

    DeSantis has suspended State Attorney Andrew Warren for ‘picking and choosing which laws to enforce based on his personal agenda,’ and has appointed Susan Lopez as his replacement during the suspension.

    Warren, who had served the Thirteenth Judicial Circuit, has most recently refused to follow state policy criminalizing abortion in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade – and repeatedly refused to enforce laws cracking down on child sex-change surgeries, according to DeSantis.

    The liberal state attorney also declined to prosecute 67 protesters arrested in George Floyd demonstrations, and said in 2017 that he would only pursue the death penalty “in the very worst cases,” and not where “mental illness played a role.”

    “We are suspending Soros-backed 13th circuit state attorney Andrew Warren for neglecting his duties as he pledges not to uphold the laws of the state,” DeSantis’ office said in a statement, per Fox News.

    Update: DeSantis sent state police to physically remove Warren from his office, “with access only to retrieve his personal belongings, and (ii) to ensure that no files, papers, documents, notes, records, computers, or removable storage media are removed from the Office of the State Attorney…”

  • But that’s not the end of DeSantiss bad-assery this week. He also got PayPal to unfreeze Moms For Liberty’s account.

    PayPal has reportedly unfrozen Moms for Liberty’s account funds after Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his state would crack down on woke banking.

    Payment platform PayPal allowed grassroots, anti-woke education group Moms for Liberty to access its funds after DeSantis’s new initiative against woke banking, Florida’s Voice reported. Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich reportedly told Florida’s Voice that her organization had been using PayPal for more than a year before the platform censored the group.

    Descovich reportedly said that many Moms for Liberty donors give monthly and automatically through PayPal. The payment processor not only stopped these donor payments but froze $4,500 belonging to Moms for Liberty, and prohibited any transfer of the money out of the account, according to Florida’s Voice. PayPal subsequently reversed its block by unfreezing the funds.

    PayPal notified Descovich that Moms for Liberty’s accounts were initially frozen during DeSantis’s July 15 speech at the Moms for Liberty National Summit, according to Florida’s Voice. The funds were unfrozen after DeSantis announced his initiative against woke banking.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Biden’s Department of Agriculture is trying to destroy corn farming in America.

    The world is facing serious food and energy shortages as an outgrowth of the war in Ukraine and supply-chain shortages. Farmers are working to solve these problems, but we need help from the federal government if we are going to have any chance of success.

    That’s why national corn grower leaders recently called on the Biden administration to address regulatory overreach.

    That call comes after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently revised its atrazine registration, a move that could restrict access to a critical crop protection tool that has been well tested and shown to be safe for use. Farmers fear that new requirements will impose arduous new restrictions and mitigation measures on the herbicide, limiting how much of the product they use.

    The atrazine decision comes on the heels of a development involving the herbicide glyphosate. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear a case decided by a lower court from California, leaving in place a ruling that supports the claim that glyphosate use causes cancer – even as the EPA has repeatedly affirmed that the widely sold and well-studied herbicide is not carcinogenic.

    The Supreme Court’s decision came after the solicitor general in the Biden administration submitted an amicus brief advising the court against hearing the case.

    As a result, the door is now open for states to create a patchwork of regulations governing herbicide use, which will increase costs as manufacturers must now jump through hoops in every state, on top of making compliance difficult for the users of these products.

    Farmers in Iowa and across the country have also experienced major fertilizer price hikes and shortages over the last year, thanks in part to steps taken by the U.S. International Trade Commission to impose tariffs on fertilizers. Thankfully, ITC recently voted against adding tariffs on nitrogen fertilizers. But tariffs on phosphorous fertilizers from Morocco remain in place, driving up input prices for growers.

  • Speaking of foolish regulations that can contribute to famine, new “debarbonization” shipping rules could do just that.

    A new report found that more than 75% of ships will not meet the International Maritime Organization’s (IMO) new Environmental social and corporate governance (ESG) index aimed at decarbonizing the industry. This means that many ship owners will be forced to slow ships down to reduce emissions but doing so could deepen the global food and energy crisis by reducing available ship capacity.

    “IMO decarbonization targets will cause ships to slow down delaying food shipments and people will starve,” a global security analyst told gCaptain. “How many people will die as a result of the IMO’s ESG efforts is unknown at this time. I don’t think most shipowners even understand the severity of the EEXI threat but it could be millions of lives.”

    “Ships have to attain EEXI approval once in a lifetime, by the first periodical survey in 2023 at the latest.” The certification is currently voluntary, but banks and insurers may force ships to comply or be cut off. (Hat tip: Sarah Hoyt at Instapundit.)

  • Hanky panky in government jobs numbers?
  • Things the media doesn’t want to talk about: The leftwing whack-job who tried to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh thinks he’s a woman. Which I guess makes him a slightly different type of leftwing whack-job.
  • Russo-Ukrainian War update: “Ukraine takes out Russian ammunition railway connecting Kherson to Crimea.” I keep seeing rumors of a big Ukranian counteroffensive to retake Kherson, but it seems like it’s slow to make much headway.
  • “Chuck Schumer’s son-in-law lands lucrative gig at private equity giant Blackstone.” Of course he has.
  • The Biden Administration wants to force religious hospitals to embrace tranny madness.

    In 2016, the Obama administration’s Department of Health and Human Services issued a rule that would have forced doctors across the country to assist in transitioning patients out of their biological sex, regardless of a provider’s medical opinion or conscience objections.

    “A provider specializing in gynecological services that previously declined to provide a medically necessary hysterectomy for a transgender man,” for example, “would have to revise its policy to provide the procedure for transgender individuals in the same manner it provides the procedure for other individuals.”

    The rule left no room for religious physicians or institutions to breathe, instead menacing them with draconian fines, were they not to toe the controversial new line.

    In stepped the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which swiftly secured a preliminary injunction in federal court that stopped the rule from going into effect, on the grounds that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act, and likely violated the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. It was a decision later confirmed in 2019, and made permanent by a 2021 ruling.

    On August 4, however, Becket attorney Luke Goodrich, who has been working on the case since the Obama-era rule was first issued, will march back into the courtroom, having been dragged back in by the Biden administration and Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra.

    “They say that our lawsuit was only about the 2016 rule. . . . They say, ‘well, all you were challenging was the 2016 rule, and you won that, but now we’re using a different rule or a different rationale for imposing the same requirement on you, and so you have to file a new lawsuit,’” explained Goodrich.

    Under the Biden administration’s theory, the Affordable Care Act provides the administration with “all the authority” it needs “to punish groups that don’t perform gender transitions and abortions,” Goodrich told National Review. The 2016 rule also included language that Becket alleges would force religious institutions to perform abortions.

    Remember how Republicans said ObamaCare would endanger religious liberty and the MSM dismissed their concerns? Just like “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.”

    According to Goodrich, “the merits are completely resolved and haven’t been appealed; the fight on appeal is about the scope of relief.” He described an effort to work around a losing legal argument by burdening religious objectors and opening up new fronts of battle.

    “They want religious organizations to have to play Whac-A-Mole every time the government violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and they want a ruling that will leave them free to keep violating religious liberty every time they shuffle the same legal requirement from one volume of the Federal Register to another,” he said.

    That strategy is observable in the proposal of yet another, even broader rule — modeled after the 2016 one — issued by Becerra, who has made his political brand on waging one ruthless culture war after another.

    As attorney general of California, Becerra sought to punish independent journalists who exposed Planned Parenthood’s sale of fetal remains harvested during abortions. The Los Angeles Times editorial board described his decision to charge those involved with felonies “disturbing,” and the progressive Mother Jones called it “chilling.”

    He also happily enforced a plainly unconstitutional California statute requiring pro-life crisis pregnancy centers to provide pro-abortion materials to patrons, and, as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, voted against legislation that would allow providers not to perform abortions without fear of government reprisal.

  • Has Tranny Madness peaked in the UK? There, the Rugby Football Union and Rugby Football League just banned men from playing women’s rugby. In other news, there’s evidently women’s rugby.
  • More signs of sanity in the UK: “UK Police Chief Says Investigating Offensive Speech Is ‘Waste Of Time.'”
  • “What’s the worst performing stock in the Dow Jones Industrial Average so far this year? Disney.”

    The Mickey Mouse company, headquartered in Burbank, has lost about 35% of its value this year versus a nearly 15% loss for the broader index. As a result, tens of millions of Americans who hold Disney stock either directly or indirectly as part of passive index funds have seen their finances take a hit at the worst possible time as inflation spirals out of control.

    Disney’s poor financial performance is a product of its own making. In recent months, the company has aggressively waded into controversial cultural issues such as gender identity, making it clear it is putting politics over its shareholders and customers. Disney is a prime example of the threat posed to shareholders and the broader economy of “woke” capitalism. Its story should serve as a cautionary tale for other companies looking to follow in its footsteps.

    Disney has all but admitted it’s leveraging its prized position as a top children’s content creator to push a divisive cultural agenda. In March, Disney’s president of content told employees the company plans to have at least 50% of its regular characters come from “underrepresented groups.” Another top producer boasted about Disney’s “not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” including “adding queerness” to children’s programming. Yet another senior executive promised that Disney would implement a “tracker” to ensure programs contain enough “canonical trans characters.”

    We’re getting a look at what this woke agenda looks like in practice. An upcoming episode of Disney’s new children’s show “Baymax!” features a transgender man buying menstrual pads. “I always get the ones with wings,” says the “man” wearing a shirt with the transgender flag. Disney is also abolishing the words “boys” and “girls” at its theme parks.

  • “BLM Activist Shaun King Used Donor Funds To Buy $40k Thoroughbred Show Dog.” That’s infuriating. Not that premagrifter Talcum X siphoned BLM money into his own pockets. That part’s hilarious and predictable. No, that he spent forty grand on a dog when they are so many shelter dogs who need a home.
  • Heads up! It’s a tax-free back-to-school weekend in Texas on clothes and schools supplies under $100.
  • “GEICO closes all California offices, lays off workers.” California regulation just keeps paying dividends…
  • Crazy story: U.S. Bank caught opening fake accounts and credit cards with customer money. Fine are not enough. People need go to jail for this.
  • Amazon flashlight lumen ratings are bunk.
  • A pretty good list of the 95 Best Action Movies Ever. Has all the stuff you would expect to be on there (Die Hard, Hard-Boiled, The French Connection, etc.), plus a good bit of Jackie Chan, Sorcerer, Safety Last, Hot Fuzz, and even Andy Sedaris’ hilarious low-budget breastsplotation “classic” Hard Ticket To Hawaii.
  • Test screens for Batgirl were so bad that DC simply isn’t going to release the film. “They think an unspeakable ‘Batgirl’ is going to be irredeemable.”
  • And, oh yeah, the Critical Drinker is there. “Warner Brothers may be the first domino to fall, but something tells me they won’t be the last. And when other companies realize that you can safely drop THE MESSAGE and the people peddling it…well, the next year or two could turn out to be very interesting.”
  • Charming or terrifying? You make the call.
  • We have a winner for for Most “Eww” Inducing Headline: “Morgue Assistant Uses Testicles From Corpses To Help Win Annual Spaghetti Cook-Off.”
  • “Government That Shut Down Businesses, Parks, Schools, Beaches, And Churches For 2 Years Says There’s Nothing We Can Do To Stop A Disease Spread By Gay Sex.”
  • LinkSwarm for July 15, 2022

    Friday, July 15th, 2022

    The Biden Recession continues to wreck the pocketbooks of Americans, EU economies are sucking even worse than ours, more Bidens Behaving Badly, and unlimited abortion is not nearly as popular among the American public as it is among New York Times staffers.

  • Another month, another 40 year inflation high.
  • More Biden economic magic: “New Job Openings Drop In 47 States, Nationally Down 17%.”
  • The Euro has now reached parity with the dollar for the first time in 20 years.
  • Cold comfort from Peter Zeihan: The economy and food security is going to get much worse, but Europe is going to suffer much worse than America.
  • Support for unlimited abortion is deeply unpopular:

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Widespread criticism of Jill Biden’s failed hispander proves that Democrats are no longer interested in excusing Joe Biden’s many manifest failures.

    Democrats are just tired of Joe Biden and of having to explain away his poor performance. Since Biden was elected, the only thing that has gone right is that the Covid-19 pandemic effectively ended and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation is out of control, gas prices are at record highs, grocery bills are skyrocketing, the stock market is getting battered and people’s 401(k)s are shrinking, crime remains high, mass shootings keep bedeviling America’s public spaces, Russia’s invading Ukraine, there’s a global food and commodity crisis, and the Taliban is running Afghanistan and oppressing women again. Democrats are apoplectic that the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, a New York State gun law, and the EPA’s right to regulate carbon emissions without explicit approval from Congress. Parents are up in arms, the teachers’ unions look like callous fools who kept schools closed and harmed a generation of schoolchildren, and “abolish the police” looks like a suicidal public policy. Republicans notice that waves of illegal immigrants headed north shortly after Biden’s inauguration and haven’t stopped coming since.

    You didn’t even mention the Social Justice insanity and all the transexual madness.

    That New York Times poll found that 64 percent of Democrats want a different presidential nominee in 2024. Nobody’s willing to cover for this guy anymore; no one is inclined to avert their eyes when Biden or his wife blurts out something tone-deaf now.

    There are some of us who would argue that Joe Biden has always been an insecure, abrasive, presumptuous, disingenuous, demagogic, insufferable blowhard who was largely protected by a cozy, all-too-friendly relationship with a press inclined to airbrush his glaring character faults, presenting him as a wacky neighbor or a kindly, ice-cream loving grandpa.

    What we see now is what happens when much of the national media, the Democratic Party establishment, and liberal interest groups stop playing along with the narrative that Biden is a wiser, sharper, kinder, more energetic and sensitive man than he is. And the truth isn’t pretty.

  • Speaking of unwanted Bidens: “Hunter Biden could face prostitution charges for transporting hookers across state lines and disguising checks to them as payments for ‘medical services.'” I’ll believe Hunter Biden prosecution when I see it. Also, I’ve been treating the 4Chan “Hunter Biden iPhone leak” with a certain amount of skepticism. Certainly the Hunter laptop revelations were real, and Hunter is a big enough scumbag to do the the things alleged iPhone leak materials depict. But I try to be cautious about anything that fits too neatly into my preconceptions. (Hat tip: The Other McCain.)
  • “Left-Wing Nonprofit Scores $171.7 Million-$1 Billion Government Contract To Help Illegal Immigrants Avoid Authorities.”

    A liberal non-profit group has been given a taxpayer-funded government contract worth at least $171.7 million — which could potentially reach just under $1 billion — for assisting illegal immigrant minors in avoiding capture or incarceration by U.S. Border Patrol and state officials.

    The Department of the Interior was the awarding agency and “The Vera Institute of Justice,” based out of New York — which supports the “defund the police” movement and has lax views on immigration enforcement — was the beneficiary.

    (Hat tip: Director Blue.)

  • Is paper gold being manipulated?
  • China bubble update: Alibaba just just laid off one-third of its strategic investment team.
  • A look at the sniping war in Ukraine. (Hat tip: Dwight.)
  • Houston demonstrates the case against zoning.

    Thanks in part to a lack of zoning, Houston builds housing at nearly three times the per capita rate of cities like New York City and San Jose. It isn’t all just sprawl either: In 2019, Houston built roughly the same number of apartments as Los Angeles, despite the latter being nearly twice as large. This ongoing supernova of housing construction has helped to keep Houston one of the most affordable big cities in the U.S., offering new arrivals modest rents and accessible home prices even amid seemingly endless demand.

    Houston is by no means a model for planning. Like every other Sun Belt city, it struggles with segregation and sprawl. Yet its continued success as one of America’s most affordable and prosperous cities reveals the workability—indeed, the desirability—of non-zoning. Houston is a profoundly weird place, resistant to seductive oversimplifications. But it provides insight into what comes after the arbitrary lines that have misshapen our cities—and how we might get there.

    So why didn’t Houston adopt zoning like every other U.S. city? The answer comes down partly to process. Unique among major cities, Houston subjected zoning to a citywide vote. While most city councils had, historically, quietly adopted zoning after a few perfunctory public hearings, the Bayou City invited voters to decide on zoning in 1946, 1962, and 1993. Voters rejected it each time—a reality that calls into question the often-postulated popularity of zoning.

    Zoning critics rightly dispensed with the comforting myths surrounding zoning—that its purpose was to merely rationalize land use—and zeroed in on its tendency to restrict new housing construction, limit access to opportunity, institutionalize segregation, and force growth outward. Far from being duped, Houston’s working-class residents exhibited a subtler understanding of the purposes of zoning than many contemporary planners and rejected it accordingly.

    But the answer to why Houston remains unzoned also comes down to politics. Zoning proponents didn’t merely lose the referendums—they were also tactfully bought off by being allowed to have something resembling zoning in their immediate vicinity. Indeed, the dark little secret of non-zoning in Houston is that it depends on a system of land-use regulations known as deed restrictions, which empower certain communities—principally middle- and upper-class homeowners—to effectively “opt out” of non-zoning, writing their own land-use rules for their own neighborhoods. In exchange, Houston is able to protect the vast majority of the city from the types of arbitrary-use distinctions, density limits, and raucous public hearings that cause so much harm in every other U.S. city. That is to say, in exchange for respecting pockets of private land-use regulation, Houston is able to grow, adapt, and evolve like no other city.

    Deed restrictions are private, voluntary agreements among property owners—typically the homeowners of a particular subdivision or neighborhood—regulating how they can and cannot use their land. These rules are literally tied to the deed, meaning that a property owner must agree to them as a condition of the sale. Since the failed 1962 zoning referendum, the city has enforced these agreements on behalf of the relevant parties, refusing to issue permits that run afoul of their provisions and bringing legal action against violators.

    Is this system of publicly enforced deed restrictions “basically zoning,” as some might argue? On the one hand, deed restrictions—like zoning—demarcate specified areas subject to a distinct set of stricter land-use rules. Both zoning and deed restrictions in Houston are enforced by the government, principally with the aim of propping up home values and maintaining a certain quality of life. Many deed restrictions even have rules banning apartments and enforcing a strict two-and-a-half-story height limit.

    Yet, the similarities end there, and Houston’s system of deed restrictions is a significant improvement over zoning. For starters, deed restrictions only cover an estimated quarter of the city, largely in areas with low-rise, detached, single-family housing. Industrial areas, commercial corridors, mixed-use and multifamily neighborhoods, urban vacant lots, and yet-to-be-developed greenfields are virtually never subject to their provisions. This means that roughly three-quarters of Houston—including its more dynamic sections—are largely free to grow without anything even resembling zoning holding them back.

    Another key difference is that deed restrictions must be voluntarily opted in to. This serves to discipline deed restrictions in a way that is rarely true of zoning: If the rules are stricter than what prospective homebuyers might prefer, or not strict enough, or simply focus on the wrong concerns, this may translate into lower home values. This in turn nudges homeowners to think through the optimal form of land-use regulation to a degree that rarely happens with zoning.

  • Speaking of Houston, a new poll shows Harris County judge Lina Hidalgo in a dead heat with Republican challenger Alexandra del Moral Mealer. November will be a good time to determine if the Hispanic realignment in Texas extends to America’s fourth largest city.
  • After deciding to let drug-abusing transients use their restrooms, Starbucks is now closing 16 stores because of rising violence, and the fact that transients are shooting up in their restrooms. Golly, who could have possibly seen that coming?
  • “White progressives do not have the moral authority to excommunicate a black man from his race because they disagree with him.”
  • Best gun oil? Project Farm does some testing, and Clenzoil and BreakFreeCLP come out on top.
  • Beto O’Rourke Lags in the Polls.” Try to contain your shock. And I bet the polls overstate his popularity…
  • Score another one for the good guys.

    Another Texas school superintendent has stepped down amid criticism from parents concerned about liberal indoctrination in their children’s classrooms.

    At a special meeting Monday afternoon, Clear Creek Independent School District’s board of trustees accepted the retirement of Superintendent Eric Williams, effective in January 2023.

    Conservative parents in the Houston-area district had complained that Williams, who started in early 2021, was subjecting their students to liberal ideologies he brought from his former job as superintendent of

  • Justice for Jim Thorpe.
  • Somebody didn’t listen to Jack Handy. (Hat Tip: Ann Althouse.)
  • “San Francisco DA Announces Innovative New Plan To Arrest People For Breaking The Law.”
  • Been super hot in Austin this week, but there are ways to keep cool:

  • New Trend For Young Chinese: Give Up And “Let it Rot”

    Thursday, June 9th, 2022

    It’s tough to be a pimp young worker in today’s China. In addition to being repressed by the communist government, they’re unable to afford cars or houses, and many can’t even find jobs. As a result, some have turned to the philosophy of bai lan, or “Let it rot.” They’re just giving up on working or caring anymore and openly embracing loserdom.

    Naturally, the CCP is not pleased. Commies have never been tolerant of “parasitism” getting in the way of their political goals.

    A few takeaways:

  • The unemployment rate for those 16-24 is 18.2%. “The highest rate since official figures began.”
  • Even graduates of prestigious Peking University were competing for entry level bureaucratic jobs.
  • The repeat Flu Manchu lockdowns were the last straw for many. “What is the point of working hard when you can lose your basic rights as a human being, when your home can be broken into and when your private items can be thrown away at will? Chinese people once thought that if they worked hard and followed the rules they could have a good future but that seems to be an illusion.” Yeah, totalitarian Communist states are funny that way…
  • Unspoken is just how these young working-age Chinese who have given up manage to afford food and shelter, but I’m just assuming they’re following the time-honored tradition of sponging of their parents. What are they going to do, kick out their only heir?

    The problem with reports like this is that it’s hard for those of us outside China to determine just how widespread this phenomena is. Is it “Hey, all the young kids are listening to Mel Torme” or “Hey, all the young kids are listening to Nirvana”? It sucks to be young with dim prospects during a recession, and it sucks a lot worse to be under the heel of a communist dictatorship. Combining those isn’t a recipe for happiness.

    Hey Chinese bai lan sufferers: Have you considered launching a revolution against the communist government instead? That would give you lots of excitement and fill your life with purpose! It may shorten it as well, but I suspect it beats lying around waiting to die…