Media outlets are publishing spectacular headlines as if the market crashed. This is nothing. The Dow lost 1.1 percent today, and apparently about .8 percent yesterday. Compare that to Black Monday in 1987, where the market lost almost 23 percent of its value in one day. Black Friday, October 24, 1929, saw a 22 percent decline, hence the "Wall Street Crash."
Here's the Wall Street Journal, "Dow Industrials Have Their Worst Day Since May." And at USA Today, "Dow's biggest 2-day drop since 2016 puts investors on edge as stock gauge briefly falls 400 points."
More, at Bloomberg, "Stocks Tumble, Bonds No Haven as Selloff Worsens: Markets Wrap." That's just not that big of a "tumble."
Seems to me media outlets are working to take a little luster off, if possible, the president's spin tonight at the State of the Union speech. Me, I'm quite bullish: My Roth IRA and 457b market fund have been growing wonderfully. I'm not worried at all. In fact I'm excited.
Tuesday, January 30, 2018
Monday, January 29, 2018
Laura Dunn
At the Other McCain, "Laura Dunn Is an Evil Liar":
When she was a freshman at the University of Wisconsin in 2004, Laura Dunn got drunk and had a ménage à trois with two guys. More than a year later, she decided she was a rape victim and filed a complaint with the university, and also reported the alleged rape to the campus police:
Keep reading.The investigation did not go well for Dunn. Because she reported the assault nearly a year-and-a-half after the event, one of the men had already graduated. The other insisted the encounter had been consensual, and since there were no witnesses or evidence, both the police and the university dropped the case. . . .If you haven’t yet read Christina Hoff Sommers’ account of this case, read the whole thing now, because it is central to understanding why and how the Obama administration effectively abolished due-process protections for university students accused of sexual misconduct. Dunn’s story was featured in a 2010 National Public Radio report that portrayed her as a trustworthy and sympathetic victim. The NPR story inspired the infamous 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter to U.S. universities that was interpreted as a mandate to impose extreme policies that in effect denied due-process to accused students, so that any accusation of sexual misconduct was treated as tantamount to proof of guilt.
[Dunn] filed a Title IX sexual discrimination complaint with the [federal Education Department’s] Office for Civil Rights. Dunn accused the University of Wisconsin of multiple violations, including subjecting her to a hostile environment and failing to provide a “prompt and equitable resolution” of her case.
But in 2008, four years after the original incident, she received an 18-page letter from the Department of Education with the verdict: “Based on its investigation, OCR determined that there is insufficient evidence to substantiate the allegations made in the complaint.”
All because Laura Dunn was a drunk teenage slut. Excuse me if I seem a bit judgmental, but didn’t I just tell you to read the whole story?
Indian Slavery
This is pretty fascinating -- and tells you something about how far down identity politics has infested historiography and cultural assimilation.
At NYT, "Indian Slavery Once Thrived in New Mexico. Latinos Are Finding Family Ties to It."
At NYT, "Indian Slavery Once Thrived in New Mexico. Latinos Are Finding Family Ties to It."
Latinos with roots in New Mexico are discovering ancestors who were Native American slaves, prompting new debates over identity https://t.co/B6VpNjXmq1
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 28, 2018
The Hateful Ideology and Rhetoric of Homosexual Rights
I get some mean and nasty homosexuals at my college. And to think, it's been 10 years since Proposition 8. Maybe a deep backlash is setting in, and none too soon.
Read Andrew "Milky Loads" Sullivan, at New York Magazine:
Read Andrew "Milky Loads" Sullivan, at New York Magazine:
Andrew Sullivan: Since achieving marriage rights, there’s been a radicalization of the gay rights movement’s ideology and rhetoric https://t.co/naGSy5UjH4— New York Magazine (@NYMag) January 28, 2018
"The sewer of most of Twitter is now so rank that even addicts have begun to realize that they are sinking in oceans of shitholery."— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2018
https://t.co/emm9BvPYSw via @intelligencer
"Social media has turned journalism into junk, has promoted addictive addlement in our brains, is wrecking our democracy, and slowly replacing life with pseudo-life."— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) January 26, 2018
https://t.co/emm9BvPYSw via @intelligencer
Sunday, January 28, 2018
Jennifer Delacruz's Sunday Weather
We've got Santa Ana conditions coming. It's going to be hot and dry.
Here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:
Here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:
Friday, January 26, 2018
Democrat Adam Schiff Spearheads Efforts to Sabotage Release of Damaging FBI Memo
From Kim Strassel, at WSJ, "Operation Sabotage the Memo":
Operation Sabotage the Memo https://t.co/061ZCV19jM— Kimberley Strassel (@KimStrassel) January 26, 2018
Rep. Adam Schiff has many talents, though few compare to his ability to function as a human barometer of Democratic panic. The greater the level of Schiff hot, pressured air, the more trouble the party knows it’s in.
Mr. Schiff’s millibars have been popping ever since the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, on which he is ranking Democrat, last week voted to make a classified GOP memo about FBI election year abuses available to every House member. Mr. Schiff has spit and spun and apoplectically accused his Republican colleagues of everything short of treason. The memo, he insists, is “profoundly misleading,” not to mention “distorted” and “political,” and an attack on the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He initially tried to block his colleagues from reading it. Having failed, he’s now arguing Americans can know the full story only if they see the underlying classified documents.
This is highly convenient, given the Justice Department retains those documents and is as eager to make them public as a fox is to abandon the henhouse. Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes had to threaten a contempt citation simply to get permission for his committee to gain access, and even then investigators had to leave Capitol Hill to view them, and were allowed only to take notes. Mr. Nunes has no authority to declassify them. The best he can do in his continuing transparency efforts is to summarize their contents. Only in Schiff land is sunshine suddenly a pollutant.
The Schiff pressure gauge is outmatched only by the Justice Department and the FBI, which are now mobilizing their big guns to squelch the truth. That included a Wednesday Justice Department letter to Mr. Nunes—written by Assistant Attorney General Stephen Boyd, designed as a memo to the media, copied to its allies in Washington, and immediately leaked to the public. And the department wonders why anyone doubts the integrity of all its hardworking professionals.
Mr. Boyd gets in his cheap shots, for instance slamming Mr. Nunes for moving to release a memo based on documents that Mr. Nunes hasn’t even “seen.” He apparently thinks Rep. Trey Gowdy —the experienced former federal prosecutor Mr. Nunes asked to conduct the review of those docs—isn’t qualified to judge questions of national security. He hyperventilates that it would be “reckless” for the committee to make its memo public without first letting the Justice Department review it and “advise [the committee] of the risk of harm to national security.” Put another way, it is Mr. Boyd’s position that the Justice Department gets to provide oversight of Congress. The Constitution has it the other way around.
The bigger, swampier game here is to rally media pressure, and to mau-mau Mr. Nunes into giving the department a veto over the memo’s release. Ask Sen. Chuck Grassley how that goes. Mr. Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, recently sent a referral to the department for a criminal probe into dossier author Christopher Steele. He then in good faith asked the department its views on an unclassified portion of that referral that he wants to make public. The department invented a classified reason to block public release, and has refused to budge for weeks.
The Boyd letter is also a first step toward a bigger prize: President Trump. Under House rules, a majority of the Intelligence Committee can vote to declassify the memo. Mr. Trump then has up to five days to object to its release. If he doesn’t object, the memo goes public. If he does, a majority of the House would have to vote to override him.
The shrieks of reckless harm and national security are designed to pressure Mr. Trump to object. And wait for it: In coming days the Justice Department’s protectors will gin up a separate, desperate claim that Mr. Trump will somehow be “interfering” in special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe unless he objects to the release. According to this view, it is Mr. Trump’s obligation not just to sit by while the media and the Mueller team concoct their narrative, but to block any evidence that might undercut it...
HIllary Clinton Protected Top Aide Accused of Sexual Harassment in 2008
Hmm, this should be a blockbuster today.
It's a NYT breaking scoop, "Hillary Clinton Chose to Shield a Top Adviser Accused of Harassment in 2008."
And at the Hill as well.
It's a NYT breaking scoop, "Hillary Clinton Chose to Shield a Top Adviser Accused of Harassment in 2008."
And at the Hill as well.
In addition to being a big story about harassment, this @maggieNYT @amychozick is another case study – of many – in Clinton refusal to discard associates regarded by many in her wide circle as toxichttps://t.co/GGMdMe8mvU
— Alex Burns (@alexburnsNYT) January 26, 2018
Via @maggieNYT and @amychozick: "Hillary Clinton Chose to Shield a Top Adviser Accused of Harassment in 2008" https://t.co/JJ7HfxYnGi pic.twitter.com/AevncHhWm0
— Sopan Deb (@SopanDeb) January 26, 2018
Clinton protected top staffer accused of sexual harassment during 2008 campaign: report https://t.co/K84smjbpRf pic.twitter.com/C79rHHdvUr
— The Hill (@thehill) January 26, 2018
I find it hard to believe Hillary Clinton would stand by and protect someone accused of sexually harassing a young subordinate.
— Alex Griswold (@HashtagGriswold) January 26, 2018
Hillary Clinton protected a top staffer accused of sexual harassment during her 2008 presidential campaign, The New York Times reported Friday.
Clinton's then-senior faith adviser, Burns Strider, was accused in 2008 of sexually harassing a young female staffer, according to the Times. Instead of firing Strider, as Clinton's campaign manager recommended, the campaign kept him on, docked him several weeks of pay and ordered him to undergo counseling.
The young woman who accused him was moved to a new job.
Strider was accused by a woman who shared an office with him of rubbing her shoulders without permission, kissing her on the forehead and sending her a number of sexually suggestive emails. The woman shared the complaint with Patti Solis Doyle, Clinton's then-campaign manager, who brought it to the candidate's attention.
But Clinton personally requested that Strider remain on staff. The young woman signed a non-disclosure agreement upon leaving the campaign and declined to comment for the Times story...
Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life
At Amazon, Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.
He's such a nice, thoughtful man. The more I listen to him the more I like him.
On Fox & Friends the other day:
He's such a nice, thoughtful man. The more I listen to him the more I like him.
On Fox & Friends the other day:
Jay Leno Takes the Dodge Demon to Pomona Raceway
From last night's Jay Leno's Garage:
Turns out they've got "street-legal" racing over there at Pomona, for $20.00. You have to meet the safety rules and specifications (one being which your car can't be faster than a 10-second quarter mile, heh). You wear a helmet if your car is faster that 14 seconds, which would be my Challenger V-6. But it's all cool and above board. Meaning safe.
Wheelies in the 2018 @Dodge Demon.— Jay Leno's Garage (@LenosGarage) January 25, 2018
Don't miss an all new episode of #JayLenosGarage TONIGHT at 10p on CNBC! pic.twitter.com/ZrBtWOL0Vb
Turns out they've got "street-legal" racing over there at Pomona, for $20.00. You have to meet the safety rules and specifications (one being which your car can't be faster than a 10-second quarter mile, heh). You wear a helmet if your car is faster that 14 seconds, which would be my Challenger V-6. But it's all cool and above board. Meaning safe.
Thursday, January 25, 2018
America's Extreme Poverty
From Professor Angus Deaton, at the New York Times, "The U.S. Can No Longer Hide From Its Deep Poverty Problem":
The other day, over at my local Ralph's supermarket on Culver and Walnut in Irvine, I saw a young woman with a baby panhandling for money in the parking lot. The baby was in a chest sling, sleeping; the woman was holding a sign, asking for money, which I couldn't read very well. I didn't even flinch. I walked over to her and asked if she and the baby had enough to eat. She said yes and held out her hand, showing some of the dollar bills folks had given her. I gave her a couple of bucks and urged her to get inside and get some food.
I remember when living in Santa Barbara, the staff at the local homeless mission told us not to give cash handouts to the city's downtown homeless people. The mission gave us food tickets that the homeless could use if they went down the organization's main shelter, which was on the south side of Highway 101. I guess a lot of panhandlers weren't buying food with the cash, but rather alcohol, drugs, or who knows what? But the beggars are persistent and ubiquitous, especially on State Street downtown. You want to help when you can, until you become so tired of the solicitations you give the beggars a wide berth (and I did that sometimes).
In any case, now I've been thinking about the homeless camp in Anaheim, and debating whether I should go over there myself to do a photo-blog. I'm not as motivated on this stuff as I used to be, although I'm just curious to check out the encampments. Many of the people there told the police they weren't moving, and it's a miles-long encampment, so I doubt we've heard the last of the news from that location.
And of course the homeless issue is just one facet of poverty in America; it's the most visible one, and gets a lot of media attention, especially given the current scale of the problem and the community backlash. As longtime readers will recall, I used to live in Fresno, and anyone who drives up Highway 99, and stops by and drives through some of the small migrant farming towns, which routinely have poverty and unemployment rates in the 30 and 40 percent range, knows what I'm talking about. It's hard out there. In California public policy is so bad it's a national disgrace. Remember, the so-called bullet train is scheduled for billions of dollars in cost overruns and may never be completed. How much money is being wasted on these high-theory policy programs, which mostly are focused on combating "climate change" as opposed to making any person's life better, to say nothing of relieving poverty? It makes me mad.
Note something else about Professor Deaton's essay: It reaffirms President Trump's nationalist focus of making our own country great again. We should be working in fact to help our own people more than we're helping other populations in other countries around the globe. Thinking about his findings, and his exhortations for citizens to give more, Deaton writes:
Well, don't rely on the Democrats to make any serious efforts to combat poverty and improve economic performance at home. That's not the agenda of the "intersectional" left right now. This radical intersectionality finds its home among the coastal urban elites in big cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York, Boston, and elsewhere. The poster child for the urban elitist mindset is California State Senator Scott Wiener, notorious for authoring legislation decriminalizing HIV-infected blood transfusions. He's also one of state's leaders behind the urban density movement, cosponsoring a recent bill seeking to change California's zoning laws to allow high-density and high-rise housing near urban public transportation centers. The rationale? To reduce "climate change," what else? If you build more units near transportation centers, less people will rely on private vehicles, with less pollution, so the theory goes. But the types of folks targeted by these policies are high-income tech- and cultural-sector workers who help drive up property values, already high property values, and keep low-income workers out and the poor down. Leftist policies are driving the unaffordable housing trends in the state. (See Berkeleyside for more, "Berkeley mayor on Wiener-Skinner housing bill: ‘A declaration of war against our neighborhoods’.")
You're going to have poverty. You're going to have it in a market economy. Those times when we've seen dramatic reductions in the poverty rate have been during periods of robust economic growth. We're currently seeing something of this right now, with the black unemployment rate falling to its historic low in December. (This happened during the late-1990s too, when the first dot com boom pushed national unemployment down to under 4 percent.) A rising tide lifts all boats, I heard somebody say.
Lots more could be added here, but I'll have to save more commentary for later.
RELATED: "A 'Mixed Bag'? Fifty Years Later and That's All to Be Said for 'War on Poverty'?"
This is a horrifying read from Angus Deaton. Alas, I fear he underestimates the ability of Americans to hide from reality. https://t.co/tpODq5u1yc— Daniel W. Drezner (@dandrezner) January 25, 2018
You might think that the kind of extreme poverty that would concern a global organization like the United Nations has long vanished in this country. Yet the special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, Philip Alston, recently made and reported on an investigative tour of the United States.Keep reading.
Surely no one in the United States today is as poor as a poor person in Ethiopia or Nepal? As it happens, making such comparisons has recently become much easier. The World Bank decided in October to include high-income countries in its global estimates of people living in poverty. We can now make direct comparisons between the United States and poor countries.
Properly interpreted, the numbers suggest that the United Nations has a point — and the United States has an urgent problem. They also suggest that we might rethink how we assist the poor through our own giving.
According to the World Bank, 769 million people lived on less than $1.90 a day in 2013; they are the world’s very poorest. Of these, 3.2 million live in the United States, and 3.3 million in other high-income countries (most in Italy, Japan and Spain).
As striking as these numbers are, they miss a very important fact. There are necessities of life in rich, cold, urban and individualistic countries that are less needed in poor countries. The World Bank adjusts its poverty estimates for differences in prices across countries, but it ignores differences in needs.
An Indian villager spends little or nothing on housing, heat or child care, and a poor agricultural laborer in the tropics can get by with little clothing or transportation. Even in the United States, it is no accident that there are more homeless people sleeping on the streets in Los Angeles, with its warmer climate, than in New York.
The Oxford economist Robert Allen recently estimated needs-based absolute poverty lines for rich countries that are designed to match more accurately the $1.90 line for poor countries, and $4 a day is around the middle of his estimates. When we compare absolute poverty in the United States with absolute poverty in India, or other poor countries, we should be using $4 in the United States and $1.90 in India.
Once we do this, there are 5.3 million Americans who are absolutely poor by global standards. This is a small number compared with the one for India, for example, but it is more than in Sierra Leone (3.2 million) or Nepal (2.5 million), about the same as in Senegal (5.3 million) and only one-third less than in Angola (7.4 million). Pakistan (12.7 million) has twice as many poor people as the United States, and Ethiopia about four times as many.
This evidence supports on-the-ground observation in the United States. Kathryn Edin and Luke Shaefer have documented the daily horrors of life for the several million people in the United States who actually do live on $2 a day, in both urban and rural America. Matthew Desmond’s ethnography of Milwaukee explores the nightmare of finding urban shelter among the American poor.
It is hard to imagine poverty that is worse than this, anywhere in the world. Indeed, it is precisely the cost and difficulty of housing that makes for so much misery for so many Americans, and it is precisely these costs that are missed in the World Bank’s global counts.
Of course, people live longer and have healthier lives in rich countries. With only a few (and usually scandalous) exceptions, water is safe to drink, food is safe to eat, sanitation is universal, and some sort of medical care is available to everyone. Yet all these essentials of health are more likely to be lacking for poorer Americans. Even for the whole population, life expectancy in the United States is lower than we would expect given its national income, and there are places — the Mississippi Delta and much of Appalachia — where life expectancy is lower than in Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Beyond that, many Americans, especially whites with no more than a high school education, have seen worsening health: As my research with my wife, the Princeton economist Anne Case, has demonstrated, for this group life expectancy is falling; mortality rates from drugs, alcohol and suicide are rising; and the long historical decline in mortality from heart disease has come to a halt...
The other day, over at my local Ralph's supermarket on Culver and Walnut in Irvine, I saw a young woman with a baby panhandling for money in the parking lot. The baby was in a chest sling, sleeping; the woman was holding a sign, asking for money, which I couldn't read very well. I didn't even flinch. I walked over to her and asked if she and the baby had enough to eat. She said yes and held out her hand, showing some of the dollar bills folks had given her. I gave her a couple of bucks and urged her to get inside and get some food.
I remember when living in Santa Barbara, the staff at the local homeless mission told us not to give cash handouts to the city's downtown homeless people. The mission gave us food tickets that the homeless could use if they went down the organization's main shelter, which was on the south side of Highway 101. I guess a lot of panhandlers weren't buying food with the cash, but rather alcohol, drugs, or who knows what? But the beggars are persistent and ubiquitous, especially on State Street downtown. You want to help when you can, until you become so tired of the solicitations you give the beggars a wide berth (and I did that sometimes).
In any case, now I've been thinking about the homeless camp in Anaheim, and debating whether I should go over there myself to do a photo-blog. I'm not as motivated on this stuff as I used to be, although I'm just curious to check out the encampments. Many of the people there told the police they weren't moving, and it's a miles-long encampment, so I doubt we've heard the last of the news from that location.
And of course the homeless issue is just one facet of poverty in America; it's the most visible one, and gets a lot of media attention, especially given the current scale of the problem and the community backlash. As longtime readers will recall, I used to live in Fresno, and anyone who drives up Highway 99, and stops by and drives through some of the small migrant farming towns, which routinely have poverty and unemployment rates in the 30 and 40 percent range, knows what I'm talking about. It's hard out there. In California public policy is so bad it's a national disgrace. Remember, the so-called bullet train is scheduled for billions of dollars in cost overruns and may never be completed. How much money is being wasted on these high-theory policy programs, which mostly are focused on combating "climate change" as opposed to making any person's life better, to say nothing of relieving poverty? It makes me mad.
Note something else about Professor Deaton's essay: It reaffirms President Trump's nationalist focus of making our own country great again. We should be working in fact to help our own people more than we're helping other populations in other countries around the globe. Thinking about his findings, and his exhortations for citizens to give more, Deaton writes:
None of this means that we should close out “others” and look after only our own. International cooperation is vital to keeping our globe safe, commerce flowing and our planet habitable.What to do?
But it is time to stop thinking that only non-Americans are truly poor. Trade, migration and modern communications have given us networks of friends and associates in other countries. We owe them much, but the social contract with our fellow citizens at home brings unique rights and responsibilities that must sometimes take precedence, especially when they are as destitute as the world’s poorest people.
Well, don't rely on the Democrats to make any serious efforts to combat poverty and improve economic performance at home. That's not the agenda of the "intersectional" left right now. This radical intersectionality finds its home among the coastal urban elites in big cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York, Boston, and elsewhere. The poster child for the urban elitist mindset is California State Senator Scott Wiener, notorious for authoring legislation decriminalizing HIV-infected blood transfusions. He's also one of state's leaders behind the urban density movement, cosponsoring a recent bill seeking to change California's zoning laws to allow high-density and high-rise housing near urban public transportation centers. The rationale? To reduce "climate change," what else? If you build more units near transportation centers, less people will rely on private vehicles, with less pollution, so the theory goes. But the types of folks targeted by these policies are high-income tech- and cultural-sector workers who help drive up property values, already high property values, and keep low-income workers out and the poor down. Leftist policies are driving the unaffordable housing trends in the state. (See Berkeleyside for more, "Berkeley mayor on Wiener-Skinner housing bill: ‘A declaration of war against our neighborhoods’.")
You're going to have poverty. You're going to have it in a market economy. Those times when we've seen dramatic reductions in the poverty rate have been during periods of robust economic growth. We're currently seeing something of this right now, with the black unemployment rate falling to its historic low in December. (This happened during the late-1990s too, when the first dot com boom pushed national unemployment down to under 4 percent.) A rising tide lifts all boats, I heard somebody say.
Lots more could be added here, but I'll have to save more commentary for later.
RELATED: "A 'Mixed Bag'? Fifty Years Later and That's All to Be Said for 'War on Poverty'?"
Wednesday, January 24, 2018
Aminatou Sow is Mad Because She Had to Pay Her Insurance Deductible Up Front, Before Her Scheduled Surgery
Um, that's how it works?
Leftists are so fucking stupid. Just stop. Fine. You want single payer. Push for it. But don't blame the insurance policy that you purchased. Buy a policy with an affordable deductible or quit bitching. That, or go on Medicaid. There's coverage available. Or, oh, you mean to tell me ObamaCare isn't that great after all? Who knew?
Seen on Twitter (make sure you read the whole thread; it's comedy gold):
Leftists are so fucking stupid. Just stop. Fine. You want single payer. Push for it. But don't blame the insurance policy that you purchased. Buy a policy with an affordable deductible or quit bitching. That, or go on Medicaid. There's coverage available. Or, oh, you mean to tell me ObamaCare isn't that great after all? Who knew?
Seen on Twitter (make sure you read the whole thread; it's comedy gold):
Money really is at the heart of everything that is fucked up with our healthcare. Case in point: I’m scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning. It’s been on the books for weeks. I’ve gone through extensive pre-testing and have followed up with the hospital every step of the way
— Aminatou Sow (@aminatou) January 22, 2018
Howard Kurtz, Media Madness
*BUMPED.*
Out next week, at Amazon, Howard Kurtz, Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War over the Truth.
Out next week, at Amazon, Howard Kurtz, Media Madness: Donald Trump, the Press, and the War over the Truth.
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