BRYAN S. JUNG: Establishment Corruption in Big Art. “Art is the only unregulated business that I know of in the world outside of the illicit drug business since the public had to be protected from criminal abuses in the stock and real estate markets over a hundred years ago.”
April 29, 2024
BE READY FOR NEXT WINTER: Thermajohn Long Johns Thermal Underwear for Men. #CommissionEarned
THE SONG REMAINS THE SAME:
And they said millennials were self indulgent, ignorant, and ego maniacs pic.twitter.com/WnEh1u90EE
— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) April 28, 2024
“I would like to observe that the older generation had certainly pretty well ruined this world before passing it on to us. They gave us this Thing, knocked to pieces, red-hot, threatening to blow up; and then they are surprised that we don’t accept it with the same enthusiasm with which they received it.”
— John F. Carter Jr., “These Wild Young People’ by One of Them,” in the Atlantic, 1920.
However, according to America’s Newspaper of Record, the cris de coeur of Sofia and her friends are having a major impact! Israel Withdraws From Gaza After Learning Of Protest By 19-Year-Old Fine Arts Major Roxy Barnett.
INFLATION, ONCE SET LOOSE, IS DIFFICULT AND PAINFUL TO REIN BACK IN: ‘We expect Powell to make a hawkish pivot’—Fed meeting to headline busy week for global markets. “We expect Powell to make a hawkish pivot. At the minimum, he’ll likely indicate the median FOMC participant now expects ‘less’ cuts this year. In a more hawkish direction, he could hint at a chance of no cuts — or even suggest a hike might be on the table, though not the current baseline.”
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER! ‘Honors College’ for black students receives $250K from Cal State system.
IN NEWSWEEK, AN ACTUAL GAZAN TELLS CAMPUS PROTESTERS THEY’RE IDIOTS:
You know what would help the Palestinians in Gaza? Condemning Hamas’ atrocities. Instead, the protesters routinely chant their desire to “Globalize the Intifada.” Apparently they do not realize that the Intifadas were disastrous for both Palestinians and Israelis, just as October 7 has been devastating for the people of Gaza.
They should be speaking up for the innocent victims of Hamas—both Palestinian and Israeli. Instead, they endorse Hamas’s ideology with posters announcing resistance “by any means necessary” and chants of “from the river to the sea,” effectively glorifying the Al-Qassam brigades, Hamas’ military wing, whose ideology is entirely based on the elimination of more than 6 million Israelis from the land.
I assumed individuals who initiated these slogans were uninformed about what they were advocating for. I saw the LGBTQ flag frequently flown among people chanting lines from Hamas’s charter, and I initially wanted to educate them, to warn them that the group they are honoring would most likely toss them from the top of a building or murder them like they did to Mahmoud Ishtiwi, a Hamas commander accused of homosexuality. Hamas harasses women who don’t cover their heads. Hamas tortures those who demonstrate against their authoritarian rule, as they did me when I protested.
All of this seems to be lost on the people who have named themselves our allies, to our misfortune.
Hate speech on college campuses starting with the one at Columbia has recently reached a frightening pitch. I’ve seen people yelling antisemitic things at Jewish students, including “Jews go back to Poland” and other horrible phrases. It has deteriorated to the point that Jews are no longer attending university classes due to the current hostile environment, and they are attending their classes online to avoid the demonstrators.
The only conclusion that can be drawn from these demonstrators’ silence concerning Hamas’ atrocities and their antisemitic chanting is that they are not concerned with protecting Palestinians. They are out in their tents because of a hatred of Jews and Israelis.
Well, that, and also because they’re morons. Or quite frequently both.
Campus protesters have been given a spurious moral legitimacy since the 1960s. But that’s not because they’re morally superior, or even moral. It’s just because they’re useful for the left.
SHE ACTUALLY DID THE TROPE: ‘Shoot the Dog’ Made Noem a Hollywood Villain.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Kink’ instructor teaches Northwestern students that US is an ‘empire of white supremacist imperialist policing.’
SUPPLY AND DEMAND, HOW DO THEY WORK? Home Prices Stagnate in Florida and Texas as Supply Soars. “Housing supply is soaring because both states have been building a lot of homes, which is limiting home price growth. Buyer demand is also lackluster because many people are priced out.”
The former should help with the latter, no? But the author is “particularly interested in the issues of climate change, race and gender equality and housing affordability,” and might have missed Econ 1. And as Milton Friedman liked to say, “Everything we know in economics we teach in Econ 1, and everything else is made up.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Polls Are Usually Garbage, But There Is One Thing Worth Noting in 2024. “Trump has had the overwhelming numbers of the mainstream media aligned against him all along. They’ve always hated Republicans, but they super ultra mega hate Donald Trump. Until Elon Musk purchased Twitter and rebranded it with a gentleman’s club name, all of social media was working against Trump.”
LIMITED TIME DEAL: SodaStream Terra Sparkling Water Maker. #CommissionEarned
OUT NEXT WEEK: From Cheryl Mendelson, Vows: The Modern Genius of an Ancient Rite. A look at marriage and commitment through time.
UNEXPECTEDLY: California Fast-Food Chains Are Now Serving Sticker Shock.
Consumers picking up burgers, burritos and chicken sandwiches at chains in the Golden State are grappling with prices that for months have been rising at a faster clip than in other states, according to market-research firm Datassential.
Since September, when California moved to require large fast-food chains to bump up their minimum hourly pay to $20 in April, fast-food and fast-casual restaurants in California have increased prices by 10% overall, outpacing all other states, the firm found in an analysis of thousands of restaurants across 70 large chains.
Prices at Chick-fil-A, Domino’s, McDonald’s, Burger King, Pizza Hut, Jack in the Box, and other fast-food chains have increased since September, the firm found. Chipotle said in an investor call Wednesday that prices at its nearly 500 California restaurants climbed 6% to 7% during the first week of April compared with last year, playing out across its menu.
“The state isn’t making it easy,” Chipotle Chief Executive Brian Niccol said in an interview.
California raised the minimum wage for fast-food workers to $20 an hour in April, a 25% increase from the state’s broader $16 minimum wage. Supporters, including Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom, said the law would improve wages and working conditions for hundreds of thousands of fast-food employees in the state.
About that last part: Fast food chains find a way around $20 minimum wage: Get rid of the workers.
Previously: California, Poverty Capital.
COMMUNISTS RUN OUT OF EVERYTHING: Long lines form and frustration grows as Cuba runs short of cash.
Long lines outside banks and ATMs in the capital, Havana, and beyond start forming early in the day as people seek cash for routine transactions like buying food and other essentials.
Experts say there are several reasons behind the shortage, all somehow related to Cuba’s deep economic crisis, one of the worst in decades.
Omar Everleny Pérez, a Cuban economist and university professor, says the main culprits are the government’s growing fiscal deficit, the nonexistence of banknotes with a denomination greater than 1,000 Cuban pesos (about $3 in the parallel market), stubbornly high inflation and the nonreturn of cash to banks.
“There is money, yes, but not in the banks,” said Pérez, adding that most of the cash is being held not by salaried workers, but by entrepreneurs and owners of small- and medium-size business who are more likely to collect cash from commercial transactions but are reluctant to return the money to the banks.
This, Pérez says, is either because they don’t trust the local banks or simply because they need the Cuban pesos to convert into foreign currency.
Most entrepreneurs and small business owners in Cuba have to import almost everything they sell or pay in foreign currency for the supplies needed to run their businesses. As a consequence, many end up hoarding Cuban pesos to later change into foreign currency on the informal market.
Converting those Cuban pesos to other currencies poses yet another challenge, as there are several, highly fluctuating exchange rates in the island.
For example, the official rate used by government industries and agencies is 24 pesos to the U.S. dollar, while for individuals, the rate is 120 pesos to the dollar. However, the dollar can fetch up to 350 Cuban pesos on the informal market.
So long as Washington is adding another trillion to our $35 trillion deficit every 100 days or so, we don’t have much room to chide Cuba.
ABOLISH THE IVY LEAGUE: Antisemitic Left-Wing Activists Are Showing Who Is Really in Charge on Ivy League Campuses.
PLAUSIBLE:
Ilhan Omar Paraglides Into Columbia Campus To Lead Protests https://t.co/dw9VL2IkzE pic.twitter.com/0xXer2c974
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) April 27, 2024
FOUR YEARS AGO TODAY IN THE ATLANTIC:
As Jon Miltimore of the Foundation for Economic Education wrote a year later: Today Is the 1-Year Anniversary of the Worst Pandemic Headline of 2020.
It’s a headline that certainly grabs your attention.
“Georgia’s Experiment in Human Sacrifice,” read the title of an April 29, 2020 article in The Atlantic.
Written by staff writer Amanda Mull, the story suggested Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp’s decision to reverse course on the state’s shutdown and lift restrictions on businesses was an experiment to see “how many people need to lose their lives to shore up the economy.”
The decision, readers were told, was reckless and deadly.
“Public-health officials broadly agree that reopening businesses—especially those that require close physical contact—in places where the virus has already spread will kill people,” Mull wrote.
Without the government to protect them, all Georgians could do is “try to protect themselves as best they can,” Mull said. But she concluded that, because of the way the virus works, another deluge of cases “could be inevitable.”
“[It] may be two or three weeks before hospitals see a new wave of people whose lungs look like they’re studded with ground glass in X-rays,” Mull wrote. “By then, there’s no telling how many more people could be carrying the disease into nail salons or tattoo parlors, going about their daily lives because they were told they could do so safely.”
To be fair, then-President Trump had similar fears as Mull when Gov. Kemp said he wanted to reopen the state:
In April 2020, businesses in Georgia were shuttered by government decree as in most of the rest of the country. Mr. Kemp was hearing from desperate entrepreneurs: “ ‘Look man, we’re losing everything we’ve got. We can’t keep doing this.’ And I really felt like there was a lot of people fixin’ to revolt against the government.”
The Trump administration “had that damn graph or matrix or whatever that you had to fit into to be able to do certain things,” Mr. Kemp recalls. “Your cases had to be going down and whatever. Well, we felt like we met the matrix, and so I decided to move forward and open up.” He alerted Vice President Mike Pence, who headed the White House’s coronavirus task force, before publicly announcing his intentions on April 20.
That afternoon Mr. Trump called Mr. Kemp, “and he was furious.” Mr. Kemp recounts the conversation as follows:
“Look, the national media’s all over me about letting you do this,” Mr. Trump said. “And they’re saying you don’t meet whatever.”
Mr. Kemp replied: “Well, Mr. President, we sent your team everything, and they knew what we were doing. You’ve been saying the whole pandemic you trust the governors because we’re closest to the people. Just tell them you may not like what I’m doing, but you’re trusting me because I’m the governor of Georgia and leave it at that. I’ll take the heat.”
“Well, see what you can do,” the president said. “Hair salons aren’t essential and bowling alleys, tattoo parlors aren’t essential.”
“With all due respect, those are our people,” Mr. Kemp said. “They’re the people that elected us. They’re the people that are wondering who’s fighting for them. We’re fixin’ to lose them over this, because they’re about to lose everything. They are not going to sit in their basement and lose everything they got over a virus.”
Mr. Trump publicly attacked Mr. Kemp: “He went on the news at 5 o’clock and just absolutely trashed me. . . . Then the local media’s all over me—it was brutal.” The president was still holding daily press briefings on Covid. “After running over me with the bus on Monday, he backed over me on Tuesday,” Mr. Kemp says. “I could either back down and look weak and lose all respect with the legislators and get hammered in the media, or I could just say, ‘You know what? Screw it, we’re holding the line. We’re going to do what’s right.’ ” He chose the latter course. “Then on Wednesday, him and [Anthony] Fauci did it again, but at that point it didn’t really matter. The damage had already been done there, for me anyway.”
The damage healed quickly once businesses began reopening on Friday, April 24. Mr. Kemp quotes a state lawmaker who said in a phone call: “I went and got my hair cut, and the lady that cuts my hair wanted me to tell you—and she started crying when she told me this story—she said, ‘You tell the governor I appreciate him reopening, to allow me to make a choice, because . . . if I’d have stayed closed, I had a 95% chance of losing everything I’ve ever worked for. But if I open, I only had a 5% chance of getting Covid. And so I decided to open, and the governor gave me that choice.’”
At that point, Florida was still shut down. Mr. DeSantis issued his first reopening order on April 29, nine days after Mr. Kemp’s. On April 28, the Florida governor had visited the White House, where, as CNN reported, “he made sure to compliment the President and his handling of the crisis, praise Trump returned in spades.”
Three years later, here’s the thanks Mr. DeSantis gets: This Wednesday Mr. Trump issued a statement excoriating “Ron DeSanctimonious” as “a big Lockdown Governor on the China Virus.” As Mr. Trump now tells the tale, “other Republican Governors did MUCH BETTER than Ron and, because I allowed them this ‘freedom,’ never closed their States. Remember, I left that decision up to the Governors!”
Curiously, Mull rather quickly got over her initial apocalyptic response, tweeting just a couple of months later: Atlantic writer who warned of Georgia’s human sacrifice by reopening says New York’s 8 p.m. curfew is ‘absolutely insane.’
But then, many on the left forgot their obsession with lockdowns, when, to paraphrase Martha and the Vandellas, the summer of 2020 was here, and the time was right for rioting in the street.
DON’T GET COCKY: New CNN Poll Is a Bloodbath for Joe Biden.
A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Court Upholds #TheyLied Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress Award Against Student Who Accused Professor of Sexual Assault.
ON SUNDAYS I DO A PROMO POST FOR MOSTLY INDIE WRITERS AND A FUN VIGNETTE CHALLENGE: Book Promo And Vignettes By Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.
OH, DEFINITELY: Good news: The nature of the riots this election year suggest the leftist rioters are losing steam.
This is more like Occupy Wall Street but even smaller and weirder.
