Posts Tagged ‘Mike McDonnell’

LinkSwarm For April 12, 2024

Friday, April 12th, 2024

It’s been a week of petty frustrations, with simple things like paying for online transactions made impossible by websites that send out the wrong information despite the right information being on file. Speaking of frustration, Americans continue to be battered by high inflation, blacks continue to abandon Biden, and it turns out that the Pope might, just might, be Catholic after all.

  • Core inflation is up yet again.

    A hotter-than-expected consumer price index report rattled Wall Street Wednesday, but markets are buzzing about an even more specific prices gauge contained within the data — the so-called supercore inflation reading.

    Along with the overall inflation measure, economists also look at the core CPI, which excludes volatile food and energy prices, to find the true trend. The supercore gauge, which also excludes shelter and rent costs from its services reading, takes it even a step further. Fed officials say it is useful in the current climate as they see elevated housing inflation as a temporary problem and not as good a measure of underlying prices.

    Supercore accelerated to a 4.8% pace year over year in March, the highest in 11 months.

    Tom Fitzpatrick, managing director of global market insights at R.J. O’Brien & Associates, said if you take the readings of the last three months and annualize them, you’re looking at a supercore inflation rate of more than 8%, far from the Federal Reserve’s 2% goal.

    (Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)

  • Speaking of inflation, welcome to $7 Tree.
  • Black voters continue to abandon Biden in droves.

    According to a Wall Street Journal Swing State Poll, blacks, especially black males are abandoning Biden in huge numbers.

    While most Black men said they intend to support Biden, some 30% of them in the poll said they were either definitely or probably going to vote for the former Republican president. There isn’t comparable WSJ swing-state polling from 2020, but Trump received votes from 12% of Black men nationwide that year, as recorded by AP VoteCast, a large poll of the electorate.

    That’s an 18 percentage point swing, minimum, for black males, if the national results and the swing state voting is similar.

    By confirmed, I mean those who said they intended to vote for Trump.

    The gap is even larger if we factor in undecided voters. Biden is down by a massive 30 percentage points vs 2020.

  • Biden may not be on the ballot for the Ohio general election because the Democratic National Convention falls too late to certify him.
  • Pope turns out to be Catholic, comes out against child genital mutilation.
  • “Nebraska state Sen. Mike McDonnell announces that he’s switching from Democrat to Republican.”
  • Country musician Jason Aldean refuses to let Biden campaign use hit song “Fly Over States.”
  • Good: A teacher helping her son with homework. Bad: A teacher helping her son force female students into sex trafficking. “Klein Cain High School cosmetology teacher Kedria McMath Grigsby is accused of helping her son, Roger Magee, force the troubled teens into prostitution.”
  • Man driving eighteen-wheeler interntionally crashes into DPS office in Brenham, killing one.
  • Hard evidence that temperature data is being manipulated to show global warming.

    Investigative science writer Paul Homewood last year discovered considerable tampering in 2022 with the recent CET record. He initially found that in version one, the summer of 1995 had been 0.1°C warmer than 2018. In version 2, the two years swapped places with 1995 cooled by 0.07°C and 2018 warmed by 0.13°C. Alerted to these changes, Homewood then analysed the full record from version 1 to 2, and the graph below shows what he found.

    As can be seen, the adjustments up to 1970 are small with ups and downs offsetting each other. Homewood then found that the years from 1970 to 2003 had been cooled markedly, followed by significant rises to 2022. Homewood concludes that “unfortunately it is part of a much wider tampering with temperature globally – and the tampering is always one way, cooling the past and heating the present”. Given that we now know that the Met Office has been using class 4 statistics for two thirds of its database since 2006, the recent higher adjustments would seem to call for clarifying explanations from the state-funded Met Office.

    (Hat tip: Boreptach.)

  • Ukrainian drone attack hits radar site 650km inside Russia.
  • Speaking of drones, China is supplying tens of thousands of drones…to Ukraine. I did not see that coming, but China certainly can use the money.
  • Texas Lt. Governor Dan Patrick lays out his legislative priorities for 2025.

    Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has announced his interim charges for the Senate, a set of 57 issues he is calling on Senate Committees to investigate and research ahead of the legislative session next year.

    The list of charges runs the gamut of issues conservatives have called on the legislature to address, including property tax relief, protecting Texas land from hostile foreign ownership, and strengthening laws preventing electioneering by school districts and other political subdivisions.

    Some of the biggest reform proposals, however, have been reserved for higher education.

    Patrick has asked the Higher Education Subcommittee to study and make recommendations regarding the role of ‘faculty senates’, antisemitism on college campuses, as well as to review the implementation of a new state law banning DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) in state universities that went into effect earlier this year.

    “The Senate’s work to study the list of charges will begin in the coming weeks and months. Following completion of hearings, committees will submit reports with their specific findings and policy recommendations before December 1, 2024,” said Patrick.

  • When you think Houston Democratic Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee has already said the stupidest thing she possibly can, she goes out and proves you wrong.
  • I know you’re shocked, shocked to find out that gun-grabbing opportunist David Hogg’s political group Leaders We Deserve spent way more on administration than backing candidates.
  • Thanks to New York City’s idiotic rent control laws, not only would a hotel guest refuse to pay rent or leave, but a court actually ruled that he was the owner of the hotel.
  • First class stamps are going up to 73 cents. Thanks, Joe Biden.
  • If the commies running Vietnam accuse someone of a crime, I don’t automatically trust them, but Truong My Lan may actually be guilty.

    Behind the stately yellow portico of the colonial-era courthouse in Ho Chi Minh City, a 67-year-old Vietnamese property developer was sentenced to death on Thursday for looting one of the country’s largest banks over a period of 11 years.

    It’s a rare verdict – she is one of very few women in Vietnam to be sentenced to death for a white collar crime.

    The decision is a reflection of the dizzying scale of the fraud. Truong My Lan was convicted of taking out $44bn (£35bn) in loans from the Saigon Commercial Bank. The verdict requires her to return $27bn, a sum prosecutors said may never be recovered. Some believe the death penalty is the court’s way of trying to encourage her to return some of the missing billions.

    The habitually secretive communist authorities were uncharacteristically forthright about this case, going into minute detail for the media. They said 2,700 people were summoned to testify, while 10 state prosecutors and around 200 lawyers were involved.

    The evidence was in 104 boxes weighing a total of six tonnes. Eighty-five others were tried with Truong My Lan, who denied the charges and can appeal.

    All of the defendants were found guilty. Four received life in jail. The rest were given prison terms ranging from 20 years to three years suspended. Truong My Lan’s husband and niece received jail terms of nine and 17 years respectively.

    Snip.

    By 2011, Truong My Lan was a well-known business figure in Ho Chi Minh City, and she was allowed to arrange the merger of three smaller, cash-strapped banks into a larger entity: Saigon Commercial Bank.

    Vietnamese law prohibits any individual from holding more than 5% of the shares in any bank. But prosecutors say that through hundreds of shell companies and people acting as her proxies, Truong My Lan actually owned more than 90% of Saigon Commercial.

    They accused her of using that power to appoint her own people as managers, and then ordering them to approve hundreds of loans to the network of shell companies she controlled.

    The amounts taken out are staggering. Her loans made up 93% of all the bank’s lending.

    According to prosecutors, over a period of three years from February 2019, she ordered her driver to withdraw 108 trillion Vietnamese dong, more than $4bn (£2.3bn) in cash from the bank, and store it in her basement.

    That much cash, even if all of it was in Vietnam’s largest denomination banknotes, would weigh two tonnes.

    Yeah, none of that seems kosher…

  • Memorial Hermann Hospital: No liver transplant for you!
  • How CD sales and rock music both collapsed in the early 21st century.
  • A very interesting O.J. Simpson story:

    (Hat tip: Commenter Kirk.)

  • Strange news from Russia: Chechnya has banned music that’s slower than 80 beats per minute, or faster than 116 beats per minute. Both the Russian and Chechen national anthems are slower than that…
  • “John Tinniswood of Southport, UK is now the world’s oldest man.
  • How a programmer managed to rip off casinos for years. It helped that he worked for the Nevada Gaming Control Board…
  • “New ‘Biden Diet‘ Sweeps Nation: Pay The Same Amount Of Money But Eat 50% Less Food.”
  • Vatican Reluctantly Sides With God On Gender Theory.
  • Adorable prison break.
  • Hit the tip jar if you’re so inclined.