Haven’t blogged in a bit. Been golfing, very poorly I might add. I will not golf again until I take millions of lessons…..I am a danger to society with a golf ball and golf club in my hand. Or at least rooftops and windows.
Reading the news around the country we have entered a totally new time in several segments of it. One thing idiot liberals will do is not debate about the finer points of the policy and the fallout cause in effect, they will say the link you posted or the source you are citing isn’t credible. Hilarious. Blind they are. Frankly, they voted or at least stole the votes to get here, so let’s hope they get it gooder and harder.
I read Pirate Wires this morning about the closing of the San Francisco Whole Foods.
Immediately following the Whole Foods closure, the Chronicle’s coverage wasn’t actually terrible. First, a couple reporters accurately covered the shutdown as it was happening, and a third followed up the next day with a story about a drug addict who died in the store’s bathroom, which was possibly the final straw for management. But as the days followed, and the issue became politicized, the Chronicle pivoted with a piece from Nuala Bishari and Soleil Ho. The real reason Whole Foods closed? They tried selling caviar to poor people, and poor people can’t afford caviar. Business 101!
Hmmm, I guess it wasn’t because several times a man with a machete tried to assault employees. In 2015, I stayed in an Airbnb ($ABNB) in Noe Valley. There was a Whole Foods within walking distance. I’d see a few homeless on my way there but I bet it’s changed. The homeless on Mission at that time out populated normal people by a lot. They even had shoe markets and other kinds of markets on the corner……economics rules and so do gains from trade. Even for mentally ill people.
I also notice that no one wants to believe the immigration data that came out. People are fleeing from California, New York, and Illinois. Yesterday Guggenheim Partners said they were strongly considering a move from Chicago to Miami. Guggenheim isn’t exactly a bastion of conservatives. Hey Guggenheim employees, when you get to Miami realize exactly why you are going there. They have a very good Republican mayor by the way.
Read this Stuart Loren tweet thread. It’s long, 60 tweets. It links to a lot of sources that are not easy to read. But, he is dead on and I have been saying the exact same thing for years.
Predictably, the gaslight was on. Left-wingers tweeted that no one is really leaving Chicago and that it’s easy to recruit employees there and that it has a highly educated workforce. Of course, according to government data, “the leaving” has happened every year since 2011 and the flow of people leaving is getting stronger. The “replacement” people are lower income.
Randi Weingarten, president of the teacher’s union says they tried to keep schools open. Hah.
In my adopted home state of Nevada, we have two controversies. Our new Republican Governor Joe Lombardo is following through on his promise to “get shit done” and introduced a strong school choice bill joining a nationwide movement. Remember, increased spending on public education doesn’t correlate to improved results unless you correlate it to teacher/executive salaries. Currently, Democrats in Nevada look like they are siding with teacher’s unions and not students or parents but that could change. There is constituent pressure to have school choice in Nevada.
Additionally, the Oakland A’s said they are moving here. They want $500MM to move to Las Vegas to build a $1.5B stadium. University of Chicago economist Allan Sanderson has reams of research on why that’s a bad idea. Here is a column from 1996. Given what is going on in Oakland and the state of California, the A’s have every incentive to leave. I think there are small measures Nevada could take to figure out ways for any potential tax bite to be lessened, but they aren’t $500MM small. This is especially true when you listen to White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf. The White Sox TV deal pays them roughly $113MM a year before they sell a ticket, a hot dog, or parking. The A’s don’t have that kind of TV/Radio revenue, but I bet it’s close. Some casino should work a deal with them and do the whole thing privately. They will make billions. Use the Export-Import bank for loans, heh.
I love the escapades of Janet Yellen. Never ever take her seriously when she is talking about finance or economics. She is a schmuck. Yesterday she said the government would run out of dough on June 1. That’s false. What’s more important that no one is asking any questions about is Brian Wesbury’s tweet.
I know you ask about rate hikes, but that’s all anyone seems to do. I am also well aware that banks are running into trouble. But all of this has, at its core, the Fed’s experimental “abundant reserve” policy. Two questions about this come to mind. 1) The M2 measure of money is contracting faster than it has since the Great Depression (when we had bank failures)…does the Fed think there is a correlation? 2) Now that the Fed is running at a loss (paying more in interest than it earns on its assets), how is it paying day-to-day operating expenses, like salaries? Seriously…the Fed has negative cash flow, it has burned through its capital…where is the money coming from?
For what it’s worth, we are still in a bear market.
Chicago outgoing mayor Lori Lightfoot and newish NYC mayor Eric Adams say there is no more room at the Inn for illegals in their sanctuary cities. They shout racism and accuse Abbott of playing politics with immigration policy. That’s rich. Wonder what the new Chicago mayor Marxist Brandon Johnson will do? Put ‘em to work in a labor camp out near DeKalb?
This is a case of people who virtue signal finally feeling the effects of their virtue signal. Prior to Texas governor Greg Abbott bussing illegals all around the country, the crappy border policy advocated by Democrats fell in his lap, and the lap of other border states like Arizona, New Mexico, and California. California was a competitive state for Republicans until my friend Governor Pete Wilson lost his race due to fake demagoguing about immigration.
Keep bussing Governor Abbott. Keep bussing.
Segregation is only relevant if we are talking about Jim Crow. Turn on the government-run station PBS any night of the week and you will find a show or ads for a show on how terribly segregated the United States is. My friend Dan Proft was looking through the class offerings at Evanston High School in north suburban Chicago. Evanstan (which should be the correct spelling of the suburb) is also home to Northwestern U. It’s reliably hard left wing and they voted for reparations. Communist Jan Schakowsky represents them in Congress. The local public high school has decided to segregate calculus classes. Maybe they could segregate the lunch room too. What’s old is new again.
Of course, in a big mea culpa, the school changed the language to meet the law but the inference and social pressure will be immensely difficult on any student other than what the school wants to take the class.
Daily, the press briefing from the White House is a textbook experience in gaslighting. It’s a total falsehood. Secondly, the current Trump campaign playbook is a daily experience of gaslighting. Yesterday, when he criticized his former press secretary Kayleigh McEnany I was a bit surprised but then not surprised. Trump is so thin-skinned and brittle he will criticize anyone who ever worked for him that doesn’t work for him currently.
Trump was the right person for the time he took the reigns. He is the wrong person today. Bringing in a person who will turn the grit of the Trump personality into actual policy that can be executed so we can turn the car around is the right move.
I don’t know exactly what it will take to change the minds of the hard-core Trump supporters to leave him and support someone else but it needs to be done. Trump did a tremendous service to the Republican Party by exposing everything that was happening under the surface in the Democratic Party, and his own. He also showed people how to fight. But, it’s time to retire the bull in the china shop.
For you moderates, squishes, and RINOs out there, that doesn’t mean “sensible gun control” either. It means hard-core conservative policy based on positive economics. I am not advocating for Christine Todd Whitman and her brand of politics.
Republican pundits gaslight as well. While driving in the car yesterday I happened on the Sean Hannity radio program. When he was talking about monetary policy, I heard half-truths and half-baked ideas. We used to watch Tucker on Fox. Now we don’t turn the television on for any news.
Sad that the Republican pundits gaslight so hard as well because it’s an opportunity.
The News Business was a networked oligopoly. It was stratified and centralized. Powerbrokers ran the show. Chet Hundley and Walter Cronkite basically said the same exact thing every night. With the rise of things like Twitter, the oligopoly and centralization finally began to crack. When we saw real-time video of events like the “mostly peaceful” George Floyd protests along with absolutely two-faced Covid policy at the same time, our collective eyes were finally opened. The firing of Tucker Carlson sealed the deal and I think the entire segment of news is up for grabs.
Tucker isn’t always right to be clear. But, at least he is different and approaches a lot of topics no one else will touch along with speaking clearly and eloquently about them. He is the bull facing the herd, not the herd.
Typically, in situations like this that had a strong centralized network that sees a major break up, splintered factions run around like swarming bees. They look for a place to land. Many of them go belly-up and don’t exist anymore. That’s happening daily as news organizations that were once valued in the billions of dollars go bankrupt. Don’t believe me, see Buzzfeed and Vice.
Someone will build a new centralized network for news. However, it will look different than before and it will be managed differently-however, centralized powerbrokers will run it and reap the lion’s share of economic gains, or what microeconomics call “producer surplus”.
I wouldn’t be short Twitter in this environment, but it might not be the only horse in the race. Elon Musk is a good horse to bet on no matter what race he is running.
What’s probably true is an incumbent with a strong history or culture like CBS, Fox, CNN, etc won’t be the leader when the entire industry is reformulated. They will cease to exist, or be bit players sort of like Sears is in retail.
Be well. The snow is starting to melt in the great white North. Just in time for the New York Rangers to polish up their golf clubs. Will the Toronto Maple Leafs be next? I know a guy you can take lessons from.
You are 100% right, on Trump. I get the feeling that life is just one long reality TV show for him, using every imagined slight to publicly attack anyone who doesn't crawl over glass to worship him. He sounds like a child. It also displays how out of depth his political strategy is now. He used to have that down. Now he just attacks anyone on his own side, rather than attacking Democrats.
If Nancy Pelosi came out and started praising him every day in the media, I would bet that by day 14 Trump would be singing her praises to us. That's how transactional and vacuous he is.
I have no idea what's going to happen, but what person of any kind of quality is going to work for this guy? I wouldn't. No one will work for a leader who doesn't have their back, unless they can somehow rig the setup for themselves. And that's not who or what we need in our country.
Time to move on.
Enjoyed this. Lots of good tea-leaf reading. I used to think we should call this new epoch “The Neo-Feudal Technocratic Dark Age”. I’m thinking maybe we just call “The Gaslight Age”. It seems to be their hammer for all we, the nails.