Grim economic indicators at home and abroad
Posted By: DVC, 8/18/2022 1:09:51 PM
Both in America and in China, there’s grim economic news and, in both cases, I’m feeling pretty darn ambivalent about these reports. Both reports bode ill for the economy as a whole, but both are happening to entities that kind of asked for it. At home, Target’s profits have dropped by 90% (that’s not a typo) in the last quarter. Here’s what The Daily Mail (hat tip: Conservative Treehouse) reports: Target reported on Wednesday that its profits plunged nearly 90 percent last quarter after it was forced to slash prices to clear unwanted inventories of clothing, home goods and electronics.
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n the summer of 2020, as I have done every summer for the past 30 years, I commuted between my home in Kansas City and my cottage on Lake Erie in Chautauqua County, New York.
I was reminded of that summer when I came across a photo of a mandatory form that passengers from Missouri had to fill out before landing anywhere in New York state. At the time, Missouri was deemed a COVID “hot spot.” On the bottom of the form I wrote, “Under protest, self-destructive, wasteful, oppressive.”
Walking through the Buffalo airport, form in hand, passengers heard a repeated message from Gov. Andrew Cuomo hectoring us about masks
Investigators say the woman suspected of killing two people and injuring a third, at two separate locations in Midtown on Monday afternoon, specifically targeted her victims.
The shootings essentially locked down the Midtown neighborhood in the heart of Atlanta for a couple of hours.
The name of the woman arrested or how she is connected to the victims have not yet been released.
Westley Freeman, 41, of Atlanta, and Michael Shinners, 60, of Alpharetta, were both killed in the shooting, the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office says.
Around 1:46 p.m., Atlanta 911 received a call reporting a shooting at 1280 W. Peachtree Street, at the corner of 16th Street.
Study finds that over half of people with
Omicron Variant of Covid don’t even
know they had it 8 replies
Omicron Variant of Covid don’t even
know they had it 8 replies
It’s getting harder to keep the populace in a state of panic (and therefore attempt to justify mass mail in voting and other election security diminishments) now that Covid is following the path of most other viral epidemics. The virus evolves into a less lethal form (that doesn’t kill off the hosts, in other words) that spreads even more easily.
That seems to be the case with the Omicron Variant of Covid, as Shauneen Miranda of NPR reports:
Researchers at Cedars-Sinai, a nonprofit health organization based in Los Angeles, examined the infectious status of individuals during the omicron surge in the U.S.
Both in America and in China, there’s grim economic news and, in both cases, I’m feeling pretty darn ambivalent about these reports. Both reports bode ill for the economy as a whole, but both are happening to entities that kind of asked for it.
At home, Target’s profits have dropped by 90% (that’s not a typo) in the last quarter. Here’s what The Daily Mail (hat tip: Conservative Treehouse) reports:
Target reported on Wednesday that its profits plunged nearly 90 percent last quarter after it was forced to slash prices to clear unwanted inventories of clothing, home goods and electronics.
Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns formerly headed an influential D.C. think tank while it employed undisclosed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) members as well as individuals with Chinese government ties, the Daily Caller News Foundation has found.
During Burns’ tenure as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from February 2015 to November 2021, the think tank employed at least 20 policy experts whom the DCNF has identified as CCP members. These CCP members worked at both Carnegie’s Washington, D.C., headquarters and Carnegie-Tsinghua — the Beijing center Burns’ predecessor, Jessica Mathews, launched in 2010 in cooperation with Tsinghua University.
Does everyone realize that the often-repeated line from the anti-liberty left doesn't ever stand up to factual reality?
It's a construct primarily from the anti-liberty left side of the political spectrum. Like so many other lies from the left, it's been repeated so many times that people seem to accept it as the truth. But how many other aspects of popular culture have you seen that have been dead wrong? [snip]
One question destroys the liberal/conservative narrative fiction:
Were Stalin, Mao, and Hitler "ultra-liberal"?
This time, it is mega-floods in California replacing mega-droughts, and again they are supposedly caused by us and fossil fuels. Not once do journalists give a damn that their previous dire predictions have been 100% false.
To the compliant, complicit media, and other Democrats, floods, droughts, too much snow, too little snow, record cold, record warmth are all caused by us, instead of cyclical and natural. The solution is always bigger government and more control of our lives. It is arrogant and ignorant for anyone to pretend they can control temperatures, sea levels, and storm activities if we just hand over trillions of dollars
New Zealand: Mugged by Covid Reality
6 replies
In the first year of the pandemic, a team from Otago University in New Zealand (my former university) published an interesting study that provided some explanation for the strong public support for lockdown measures. This support came despite known or predicted collateral harms, including loss of livelihoods, elevated mortality from neglect of other diseases and ailments, “deaths of despair” from greater loneliness, and police abuses.
The answer, they said, is the moralization of restrictions in pursuit of a Covid eradication strategy. People did not take kindly even to mere questioning of the restrictions. With many governments, for example the British, deploying state propaganda to the full to instill fear
What is In Store for Russia?
12 replies
Russia's bloody and senseless war against Ukraine has been going on for almost six months. Instead of the original goal of quickly seizing Ukraine and turning it into a puppet state or a province (the name "Ukraine" is derived from the Russian word for “outskirts"), Russia has suddenly encountered an impenetrable wall of resistance.
Two questions logically arise: 1) why did Russia attack Ukraine? and 2) how and when will the war end?
Today's Russia is the heir to two political formations: feudal and then capitalist tsarist Russia, which died in 1917, and the communist Soviet Union, which lost the Cold War and disintegrated in 1991.
Growing up Trans in the 80s
12 replies
This is something I have never told anyone about. I don't know if this is the right platform for this, but I want people to know that it is possible to struggle with gender dysphoria as a child and become a healthy well-adjusted adult who conforms with your biological sex. I am glad I am not a child in this time. My life would have been ruined before adulthood.
I was born into a well-off family with a strong Christian faith and strong Southern pride. I was sixth out of seven children, being born the younger child of a set of twins.
The Florida federal magistrate judge who signed off on a search warrant authorizing the FBI raid of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort left the local US Attorney’s office more than a decade ago to rep employees of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein who had received immunity in the long-running sex-trafficking investigation of the financier. Sources tell The Post that Judge Bruce Reinhart approved the warrant that enabled federal agents to converge on the palatial South Florida estate on Monday in what Trump called an “unannounced raid on my home.” Reinhart was elevated to magistrate judge in March 2018 after 10 years in private practice.CORRECTION*
Marc Elias is a very smart man who hooked his wagon to the Hillary Clinton star and has been involved in almost all the attacks against Trump. His allegiances are clear, and he's incredibly excited about the Justice Department's decision to sic the FBI on Trump, a former and possibly future president. The main purpose is to keep Trump from being able to run again. That's it.
Since the day Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in November 2016, the Clinton camp, the Democrat establishment, the administrative agencies (AKA the Deep State), the NeverTrumps, and the media — collectively, the "anti-Trump coalition
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Representative Adam Schiff (D-CA) said Monday on MSNBC’s “Deadline” that former President Donald Trump was the first president of the United States “without character.”
Schiff said, “We have seen a pattern with Donald Trump, and that is when he’s not held accountable. He goes on to commit worse misconduct. He wasn’t held accountable for his Russia misconduct that led to Ukraine. He wasn’t held accountable for the worst misconduct in Ukraine that led to a literal attack on our democracy on January 6.”
He continued, “If he’s not held accountable and ever given an opportunity to exercise power again, we can expect things that are worst still.
On Monday’s edition of NBC’s “Top Story,” Commissioner of the New York City Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs Manuel Castro blamed the city’s poor handling of migrants bused to the city on Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) because Abbott didn’t warn them about the influx of migrants.
Host Tom Llamas asked, “So, Commissioner, you know cities in Texas have been dealing with this issue for decades. And now, New York City, Washington, D.C. dealing with the same issues, right now.” Llamas then read criticism from The New York Times of the city’s early handling of the migrants before asking, “So, what’s happening?"
Liz Cheney’s Agony
26 replies
When I was an undergraduate in the late 1960s, I underwent a kind of transformative experience during a classroom debate with another student that I believed I was clearly winning when the philosophy professor corrected me. He reminded me that when engaged in a philosophical debate, as opposed to the 9th grade Debating Challenge, the point is not simply to vanquish one’s opponent but to find the truth. In order to do the former one may use any means fair or foul to destroy the opponent. For the latter one must do the exact opposite and represent one’s opponent’s position in the strongest terms possible.
Ivy League professors write another op-ed
suggesting it’s time to jettison the Constitution 26 replies
suggesting it’s time to jettison the Constitution 26 replies
No doubt still sulking over the Roe v. Wade reversal — the opening sentence of their recent op-ed published in The New York Times is, “When liberals lose at the Supreme Court — as they increasingly have over the past half-century” — two Ivy League professors laid out their claims for an America without Constitutional limitations. They suggest, “the way to seek real freedom will be to use procedures consistent with popular rule.” Of course, the piece is polished sewage: tyranny of the majority is a very real, and very dangerous threat to the individual, (perhaps they should go read Federalist 10, but they likely wouldn’t understand that either).
As my colleague Brandon Morse reported, President Joe Biden is about to blatantly break the law to “cancel” thousands of dollars of student loan debt accrued by some of the most privileged members of society. Of course, nothing will actually be canceled. Instead, because the government will simply be out that money, the burden of those debts will be transferred from those who accrued them to hundreds of millions of taxpayers who didn’t.
The White House will announce on Wednesday the cancellation of up to $10,000 in student loan debt for for borrowers who make less than $125,000, a source
Gov. Kathy Hochul has a whopping 24-point lead over Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin with 11 weeks to go before Election Day, according to a new poll released Tuesday.
The incumbent Democrat had 55% support among likely voters in the poll conducted between Aug. 17 and Aug. 22 by SurveyUSA on behalf of WNYT-TV in Albany. Another 31% backed Zeldin and 14% said they were undecided.
There was some good news for Zeldin in the survey, with 33% of voters saying battling inflation was the most important issue when it comes to deciding their vote for governor. Health care and criminal justice reform were a distant second on 12% each.
The Biden administration is leaning toward canceling up to $10,000 in student loan debt for those who make less than $125,000 a year, according to a new report. CNN reported that the announcement could come Wednesday, and that additional forgiveness for specific parts of the population are on the table as well. Liberal Democrats such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have pressed for a far more sweeping loan forgiveness program. The income cap was seen as a way of insulating the White House from criticism that the debt relief is benefiting those who can afford their payments, per CNN.
President Joe Biden’s White House was intimately involved in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) criminal probe into former President Donald Trump, according to government documents reviewed by Just The News.
Several correspondences between Trump’s attorneys and members of the Biden administration revealed that the federal government appeared poised to waive Trump’s claims of executive privilege over documents that Trump kept at Mar-a-Lago until earlier this year.
Former Vice President Mike Pence confirmed on Wednesday that he has about as much chance of being the Republican nominee for president in 2024 as Nancy Pelosi has of joining the Radio City Rockettes. Demonstrating a tone-deafness of Olympian proportions, Pence had harsh words for the Republicans who are appalled at how the FBI has become a tool of the partisan vendetta of Old Joe Biden and Merrick Garland against Donald Trump. In Pence’s world, the stout-hearted G-Men are still of unquestionable integrity, square-jawed, patriotic, non-partisan, and ever-vigilant for truth, justice, and the American way.
Rep. Jerry Nadler was projected to win Tuesday’s contentious Democratic primary to represent New York’s 12th Congressional District, ousting longtime incumbent Rep. Carolyn Maloney after three decades in office. (Photo) With almost two-thirds of the district’s vote scanners reporting, Nadler had 55.9% of the vote compared to just 25.1% for Maloney. Attorney Suraj Patel, who was challenging Maloney for a third consecutive cycle, had 17.8%
New York’s controversial redistricting process pitted the two longtime allies — Nadler, 75, of the Upper West Side, and Maloney, 76, of the Upper East Side — against one other, sparking bad feelings that marred a 30-year career in the House.
This was the wild scene during a road rage incident in which a man comes charging out of an apartment complex to confront a man he says didn't stop at a stop sign.
The driver asks if he's a cop and to mind his own business, which seems to escalate things.
After the man from the apartments makes some threats about sticking something where the sun doesn't shine, the driver gives him the double 'let's go Brandon' salute.
The apartment guy then pulls a knife at which point the driver, which we now know is an undercover cop pulls a gun
Anthony Bradford, 19, approached a 12-year-old girl in a park on Detroit’s east side around 10 p.m. last Tuesday and demanded that she surrender her shoes. When the girl told Bradford to pound sand, he shot her. [Tweet]
Bradford was arrested and charged with armed robbery, assault with intent to murder, carrying a concealed weapon, felony firearm possession, resisting arrest, and obstructing.
The 12-year-old girl was shot in her right hip and is said to be in stable condition. Her name was not released.
Bradford’s probable cause conference was scheduled for Aug. 30, and his preliminary examination is set for Sept. 6.
Comments:
I hope Target goes bankrupt. Perhaps they might be bought out by sensible, non-political or even conservative owners.
As to China, the same, I hope they collapse. The Chinese Communist Party is a major force for destabilization and central control and crushing freedom in the world. Anything bad happening there will harm their ability to project their evil outside of their borders. I count that as good.