I’m not sure that the Biden administration, like the Obama administration before it, is undertaking multigenerational effort to destroy this nations “red” heartland.
But if they were, I wonder what they would be doing differently?
During his State of the Union address on Tuesday, President Biden said the key to controlling inflation is for businesses to “control costshttps://”:for businesses to “control costs”
“We have a choice. One way to fight inflation is to drive down wages and make Americans poorer. I think I have a better idea to fight inflation: Lower your costs, not your wages. Make more cars and semiconductors in America. More infrastructure and innovation in America.”
No word if the department of labor has reclassified “wages“ as “not a cost“ yet.
I will await Paul Krugman‘s word on the costs thst can be lowered by CEO degree.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Remember this thread jack fr
The previous two months was revised up by 709,000. This was a strong report — and surprising given the surge in Covid-19 cases in January.
Remember my response? I was right.
I concede that government jobs are jobs. Government employees spend paychecks to buy things, which is good for the economy in general. But creating new government jobs to pump up employment numbers is straight out of the FDR playbook. It doesn’t mean the economy is recovering. It’s a sign the economy is foundering and is only being propped up temporarily.
Can’t wait to see next month’s numbers.
Joe Doakes
And the government jobs aren’t assigned a new wealth is being created; it’s a sign that more of it is being transferred to the public sector.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
An altimeter is an instrument which tells you high you are. Pilots rely on them to avoid obstructions on the ground, to maintain separation between aircraft at different altitudes, and to make smooth landings.
The traditional altimeter works on air pressure. Air pressure decreases the higher you go from the Earth. If you properly calibrate your pressure altimeter, it works fine. I flew with one for years.
Modern technology has moved on. The newest altimeters work on radar. They send a radar beam down from the airplane to reflect off the ground. They are much more precise because they’re measuring the actual distance, not the calculated distance (assuming the pressure calibration is correct).
More precise, that is, unless something interferes with the radar. “RaDAR” is actually an acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging. A radar wave is a radio wave operating on a certain radio frequency. A ground transmitter operating on a nearby frequency can cause interference, making the radar altimeter malfunction. On a bright, sunny day, not a huge problem. The pilot can see the ground and estimate altitude by experience. At night or in bad weather, losing your altimeter is a terrifying problem. Anything which makes a radar altimeter malfunction is a potential disaster.
Such as, for instance, 5G cell phone frequency, which is also a radio wave. 5G was planned to roll out Wednesday but has been halted because major airlines are canceling flights for fear of it.
This isn’t a new issue. We’ve known it was coming for years. Suddenly, it’s a problem? Suddenly, major airlines are complaining about how the rollout is dangerous? Why wasn’t this worked out ages ago?
Remind me, who’s in charge of transportation issues in the United States? And who’s his boss, the man where the buck stops?
Joe Doakes
The more overwhelmed with bureaucrats our government becomes, the more amateurish it gets.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Richard Fernandez at The Belmont Club asks whether the Lesko Brandon administration is strolling into our next quagmire.
We canceled pipelines and oil leases at home, to signal our virtue on climate change. The price of gas at the pump, and natural gas for home heating, is going up. We’ve called on Saudi Arabia to pump more oil for us but we’ve also removed sanctions on Iran, which is funding Houthis in Yemen, who are attacking Saudi oilfields. The US could back the Saudis with arms sales or troops so they could keep pumping the oil we want, except Progressives insist the Saudis are repressing the Yemenis so we must not help them. Can “no blood for oil” be far behind?
We’ve caused a world-wide oil shortage and are about to stumble into another war in the Middle East with conflicting policy goals and no clear mission. But all the Left wants to talk about is Kyle.
Joe Doakes
Well, and Orange Hitler.
Who is hiding under youer bed.
Ooogabooga!
A friend of the blog emails:
On Tuesday, St Paul voters will vote on rent control.
Several council members are surprisingly against it. Of course, no surprise that CM Jalali is in favor of it. She tweets about how much she has supported development, and how even that development has not been enough to help tenets who continue to face high rent increases.
If she were really honest, she has mostly supported the tear down of single family houses in order for one developer to build apartments on Marshall Avenue. That particular developer was identified in The Villager as someone who donates to Jalali’s campaigns. She has opposed developments of decades long vacant lots elsewhere.As for the rent control measure on the ballot, I don’t see how it turns out any differently than the garbage collection- small, local landlords bought out by bigger, corporate landlords. They would be the only ones able to afford the rent control. And Jalali probably won’t stop until all the privately owned homes are bought out by corporate landlords so we all become renters, so we can all feel like one, you know. (So we can all be indebted to the whims of our overlords).
Like most everything in Saint Paul politics, this is a group of upper-middle-class progressives in Crocus Hill and Merriam Park playing “let’s build a utopia” with a real city – more or less – as their lab. Just like the indoor smoking ban, or the Tony Soprano Trash Collection “system” [1], or Minneapolis’s “Public Safety” charter referendum, there is no thought to unintended consequences, and plenty of reason to believe it’ll just be another money transfer to the city’s political class.
Given that the inevitable result of “rent control” is rent becoming inexorably less affordable, the developer class – which is finaincially joined at the. hip with the political class. – stands to benefit handsomely.
Saint Paul. Chicago on the Mississippi.
A recent experience (last night, actually) in the northern suburbs, but repeated elsewhere with alarming frequency.
My family traveled to our friendly local neighborhood Culver’s for dinner. We arrived at 6 p.m. We could see people sitting in the dining room and customers at the counter, so we assumed the restaurant was open for dine-in.
We got to the door and saw a sign mentioning that the restaurant would be closing at 8. This is a typical scenario — we are all getting used to labor shortages causing a variety of businesses to curtail their hours or even close on certain days. But as we attempted to enter the restaurant, the door was locked.
At the time of our arrival, four other groups were converging on the location. I knocked on the door, hoping one of the workers would hear it. They didn’t, but a customer did and came to the door to talk with us. “I think they’re closing the dining room,” the customer said.
A woman on the outside said, “but the sign on the door says they are closing at 8. It’s 6. Why are they closing?”
Another potential customer said, “this is ridiculous. It’s not 8. They should change the sign.”
“Perhaps they think they’re in Nova Scotia. It’s 8 there,” I offered. That got a chuckle out of yet another customer.
After a moment, a manager who appeared to be a year out of high school appeared at the door. “We’re very short staffed so we’re closing the dining room because we can’t provide the expected level of customer service.”
The woman who had noted the sign on the door said, “well, if you aren’t open, you should have a sign on the door.”
“I’ll go get a sign for the door,” the manager said. Then, reading the faces of the customers he was turning away, said “do you want me to get the general manager? I’ll go get the general manager.” He walked back in to the restaurant, but by then all of us decided to take our business elsewhere.
A few observations:
The Feds released the specifics on the suspects charged with “armed insurrection” on January 6.
Some knives, none of which were used. Some baseball bats and clubs and various chemical irritants.
Five guns – only two of which were found on the Capitol grounds, one of which was a government issued piece in the hands of a DEA agent with all the necessary paperwork, none of which were fired.
Byron York (with occasional emphasis by me)::
Some of the weapons were obviously brought with the intention of being in a fight. Others were clearly improvised on the spur of the moment; in one case, the deadly or dangerous weapon used was a desk drawer. In another, it was a traffic barrier. In yet another, it was a helmet. That doesn’t mean those objects could not be dangerous; one could beat a person to death with a desk drawer. But it does suggest the rioter did not arrive at the Capitol bent on armed insurrection.
In addition, the overall numbers are relatively small. Eighty-two people charged with weapons-related offenses, out of how many? That is about 12% of the 670 or so currently charged. And 670 is smaller than the total number of rioters on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6. Does that amount to an “armed insurrection”? Especially when just five people have been charged with possessing firearms, the weapon of choice for modern armed insurrectionists, and one of them didn’t arrive until after it was all over, and none of them fired the weapons, even in the intensity of the physical struggle that day?
And that is the problem with the “armed insurrection” talking point. By any current American standard of civil disorder, what happened on Jan. 6 was a riot. There were some instigators, and there were many more followers. A small number were anticipating a fight, probably with antifa. And as the day went on, some people lost their heads and did things they should regret for a very long time. But a look at the Justice Department prosecutions simply does not make the case that it was an “armed insurrection.”
If this – five guns out of 600+ people charged – is an “armed insurrection”, then the rioters who came to the Midway in May 2020 were Operation Barbarossa.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Some Liberals say $15 an hour minimum wage is too low, it should be $26 instead.
Cheap bastards. I agree with William F. Buckley: if raising the minimum wage is the right thing to do, why stop at $15 or even $26? Let’s make it $100 and we’ll all be rich.
Yesterdays sardonic quip is today’s proposal and tomorrow’s law.
That sounds familiar, doesn’t it?
Joe Doakes
Buried in the “Infrastructure’ bill is, well, a curious bit of “infrastructure” indeed:
Within a few years, you may have to convince your own car you’re fit to drive every time you get behind the wheel. The Biden administration’s massive infrastructure bill, which the House is expected to take up later this month, includes a provision directing the Secretary of Transportation to develop regulations that will require new cars to contain “advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology.”
The law would give regulators two to three years to develop rules mandating technology that would “passively monitor the performance of a driver of a motor vehicle to accurately identify whether that driver may be impaired” as well as “passively and accurately detect whether the blood alcohol concentration of a driver of a motor vehicle” exceeds legal limits. Automakers would have a further three years to comply, though the bill provides leeway for delay if the technology isn’t up to snuff yet—because the tech the bill is requiring is still in development.
Classifying “spying on people via their cars” as “infrastructure” is, if you think about it, disturbingly honest
Dominant liberal culture is, if nothing else, fiercely rule-abiding: they get very upset when they see anyone defying decrees from authorities, even if the rule-breaker is the official who promulgated the directives for everyone else.
While I appreciate the willingness of Glenn Greenwald, a man of the Left, to call out the hypocrisy of our Ruling Class, this observation isn’t quite right, actually. Dominant liberal culture is all about rule promulgation, not necessarily personally abiding by rules. As time goes on, the pretense fades, and why wouldn’t it? Nothing ever happens to the Ruling Class.
Dobie Gray, a more perceptive social critic than our man Greenwald, was all over this way back in ’65:
I’m in with the in crowd
I go where the in crowd goes
I’m in with the in crowd
And I know what the in crowd knows
Any time of the year, don’t you hear?
Dressin’ fine, makin’ time
We breeze up and down the street
We get respect from the people we meet
They make way day or night
They know the in crowd is out of sight
Back in ’65, the term “out of sight” roughly meant cool, fashionable, au courant, like that. Some 56 years later, out of sight has a more conventional meaning: in the shadows, behind the curtain, holed up in nondescript office buildings in and around the Beltway. Our in crowd is an industrious lot, and they keep coming up with more rules at all times, whether our Congresscritters weigh in or not.
Any time of the year, don’t you hear? Mocking fools, making rules
But many of our fellow citizens don’t hear, nor are they listening. Instead, we all hear our animatronic Leader of the Free World as he is sent out to joust with the Teleprompter.
We make every minute count
Our share is always the biggest amount
Other guys imitate us
But the original’s still the greatest
Just ask them. If you can identify them.
Remember – some animals are more equal than others.
My favorite part – the rows of black and latino service staff, swathed in masks, in the background behind the photos of all those “courageous” unmasked socialites.
Black unemployment, after hitting historic lows under “the most racist president ever”, is bouncing back up under Corn Pop’s pal:
Of course, the last jobs report produced about 1/3 the jobs expected. l
But at least things are going swimmingly along the Mexico border and in Afghanistan…
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
High capacity computers banned in California.
Well, who needs a computer capable of performing that many operations per second? One a month should be plenty.
Joe Doakes
Heh.
s
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Technological innovations are coming from abroad as Americans obsess over race, gender, and preventing people from questioning The Narrative.
This is how empires crumble.
Joe Doakes
If there’s going to be a backlash, let’s get it going. America’s current New Reality sucks.
Democrats, especially their “progressive” wing, have for years claimed to be the party of the worker, the little guy/gal, the underdog.
This is posited, at least by the class that chants the chanting points, as in contrast to the GOP, the “party of big business”.
And what does Berg’s Seventh Law tell us about everything Democrats say about their contrast with Republicans?
That’s right – it’s covering for their own stances:
No one is paying much attention, but Washington is building up a vast new multitrillion-dollar welfare class: corporate America.
Deep inside President Joe Biden’s budget are hundreds of billions of dollars of loans, grants and loan guarantees for corporate America. This Aid to Dependent Corporations is most prevalent in the area of renewable energy. Despite more than $100 billion already doled out to wind and solar companies over the past 30 years, the Biden plan would enrich often-very wealthy investors in solar and wind plants with another $100 to $200 billion in the president’s green energy scheme.
Forty years after Ronald Reagan, the old lefty saw “the real welfare queens are the CEOs” is finally true.
A friend of the blog emails:
I’m not going to weigh in on whether the Interstate system was bad for some neighborhoods when it happened.
But, every urban renewal project since then (like St Paul’s Green Line) seems to have been worse in terms of the impact on these neighborhoods. The goal in these current projects seems to be to keep poor neighborhoods poor and segregated.
So, I read this and anticipate that current St Paul activists/councilmembers are looking at Syracuse and drooling at what they can do to I94 and the businesses owned by Immigrants and POC that survived the Green Line and the 2020 riots. And how many accolades they’ll get from Macalester Groveland for “saving those people” from pollution of cars by destroying their businesses and displacing them out to suburbs.
It’s funny- they supposedly hate cars so much, but they never ask to close the section of Snelling Ave down between Selby and Grand, for instance. It’s always about shutting down streets in neighborhoods where they want to make sure to keep control of the residents.
I’ve wanted to tell these people – you want to make a statement? Muster all that political clout you have and shut down Lincoln and Portland Avenues from Hamline to Western. Or Dayton from Snelling to the River . Or just block all the streets south of West Seventh from Eagle down to Grand. Or Como from 280 east to Raymond. And make Crocus Hill, Merriam Park, Irvine Park and Saint Anthony Park, respectively, the urban meadows you envision.
Lead by example!
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
This is the “infrastructure” that ordinary people think the Susan Rice Administration wants to spend money on:
This is where the money actually would go:
Joe Doakes
The left, as Dennis Prager notes, destroys everything it touches.
Including words.
Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who for the past 57 years or so, tees off on the “Woke” generation:
“The woke generation — it’s terrifying, the miserable world they’re going to create for themselves,” the rocker said in a recent interview with DJ Zane Lowe on Apple Music.
“I mean, anyone who’s lived a life — and you see what they’re doing — you just know that it’s a route to nowhere, especially when you’ve lived through the periods of a life that we’ve had the privilege to,” Daltrey added. “I mean, we’ve had the golden era. There’s no doubt about that.”
The English rock legend went on to point out the differences between “the woke generation” and generations of the past, noting, “we came out of a war,” and have actually “seen the communist system fail” firsthand.
“But we came out of a war, we came out of a leveled society, completely flattened bomb sites and everything,” Daltrey said. “And we’ve been through socialist governments. We’ve seen the communist system fail in the Soviet Union. I’ve been in those communist countries while they were communist.”
“I’ve seen how ‘wonderful’ — really? — it was,” the rocker added, sarcastically.
People today forget, or never knew, that after UK went full-bore Labour at the end of World War 2, it subsequently took them nine years to end war-time food rationing. And while the food situation gradually improved, once “rebuilding” ended, the rest of the economy went in the tank.
Also – not bad for a guy that’s gonna be eighty in the next few years.
Mr. Mask Mandate, he dead:
Gov. Tim Walz said Thursday he’ll sign an order Friday ending Minnesota’s statewide mask-wearing mandate following the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance allowing fully vaccinated people to stop wearing masks.
Calling it a great day for Minnesota, the governor continued to plead with unvaccinated Minnesotans to get their shots to hold back the spread of COVID-19.
“So those peacetime emergencies are done and the business mitigations are coming to an end. I want to be clear it’s not the end of the pandemic, but it is the end of the pandemic for a lot of vaccinated folks,” he told reporters.
It’s the end of many things, actually — most importantly, it’s the end of Karen Nation enforcement and forcing shopkeepers and restaurateurs into indentured scolding, at least on this particular issue. Walz’s Nurse Ratched, Jan Malcolm, admitted as much:
“When things are no longer a rule or a mandate, they think therefore that everything is safe,” she said, noting that Minnesota still has a relatively high level of COVID-19 spread. “People may translate this guidance meaning that the pandemic is over.”
Malcolm said if it were feasible to keep a mask mandate just for unvaccinated people, “I definitely would have liked to see that. I just think that it’s not practically enforceable at this stage.”
I’ll bet she would have liked that. But apparently there is a limit after all. Maybe you don’t need to laminate the ol’ vaccine card.
The economic and social toll of the lockdowns is incalculable — how many families were separated, how many graduations were canceled, how many businesses were shuttered, how many of our elderly were consigned to death in nursing homes without being able to say goodbye or even have a final hug? Meanwhile, we’ve had the joy of experiencing Walz and his coterie treat our fair state as a protectorate. Now, suddenly, we say Goodbye to All That. The signs will come off the doors as soon as tomorrow, but the reckoning is about to begin.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
How bad are things under the Garden Administration? This bad: we are facing a shortage of chicken wings.
Oh, sure, they’ll blame bad weather in Texas or supply line interruptions from Covid and of course, everything changed on January 6th.
But this never happened when the Bad Orange Man was President. Just sayin’.
Joe Doakes
The number of things coming up scarce these days – from wings to plywood to ammo – all have rational supply chain explanations.
The fact that they all started in January? Right after the Harris administration unilaterally made the increase in gas prices inevitable, with ripple effects throughout the supply chain?
Weird.
“Green” industries – like the jobs “building solar panels” that the current administration is telling newly-unemployed pipeline workers to try to get – are fleeing Germany for…
…well, you can probably figure it out:
The number of jobs in the German renewables sector (production and installation) has fallen from about 300,000 in 2011 to around 150,000 in 2018, the German Trade Union Association (DGB) found in an analysis of employment in the energy transition.
The drop in employment is mostly due to the collapse of Germany’s solar power industry over the past decade, as many companies were forced out of business thanks to cheaper competitors from China scooping up most of the market. The number of jobs in solar PV panel production and installation fell from a record 133,000 in 2011 to under 28,000 seven years later.
Industries build around commoditizing technology – like solar panels – are inevitably going to be drawn to the cheap labor.
To be fair, Democrat policy is to skip the “cheap labor” phase of the continuum of misery, and drag most Americans straight to perpetual underemployment.
Decades ago, in an effort to keep housing “affordable”, the city of New York imposed rent control. No existing rental unit could increase its price, absent jumping throught a Byzantine series of bureaucratic hoops.
The “market” responded to the bureaucratic muddling – at first, creatively. The rent control stayed with the the renter. When the renter died or moved, the rental rate could move with the market. But the “ownership” of the rental could be passed down through any semblance of the original renters families – so children, nephews and nieces, stepchildren, further-order descendants, and utterly phony descendants – a fraud that was almost never investigated. Also, renters (and their descendants) could, and did, sublet, and even subdivide, apartments, renting the spaces out at much better than market rates and making a tidy profit on the deal. People are pretty creative when it comes to skirting rules, and New York City government is equally thud-witted and uncreative at creating the rules people skirt. It became almost
The second-order consequences were less salutary. While rents were frozen, utilities and property taxes were not – so landlords got squeezed hard. Landlords with sufficient means sold their properties to “co-ops”, or went condo, or found the few available loopholes – and there were very few, since the powers that be (and are) in New York treated landlords as a populist enemy to be demonized for political gain. The less affluent landlords fell behind on taxes. Squeezed by the city to pay up, repairs sufferend. Eventually these landlords stopped repairing their properties in less desirable areas, which quickly became even less desirable; vast swathes of Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens and Harlem fell into deep blight, with block after block of apartments abandoned…
…in a city with an “affordable housing crisis” where even in the 1980s, it was impossible to find a place to live for under $2,000 a month in 1985 dollars (which is $4,500 to 5,000 today).
Of course, all that blight begat crime. By the late ’70s, much of New York was a shooting gallery, wit over 2,000 dead per year.
Of course, there is a lot of money in New York, and a lot of people want to be there, so the real estate didn’t sit idle for too long – begetting the third-order consequences: developers moved in, took over the blighted, abandoned real estate, and built it back up. Of course, given New York’s regulatory “zeal” and astronomical taxes, it wasn’t just any developers. It was the ones with enough money to do the building, to navigate the bureaucracy (read “Money”) and pay the taxes (read – “keep the money coming”). The up-front costs were high – and the rest was even higher.
So after decades of “rent control”, one can not live in a decent place on Manhattan with an income of less than $500,000 a year.
I write this to highlight the path that the Minneapolis City Council – known among those in the know as “the dumbest city council between Chicago and Los Angeles” – is drooling to drive Minneapolis down.
Neo-populist progressive economicallly-illiterate stupidity – a barrel that, in Minneapolis, has no bottom.
SCENE: Mitch BERG is out on his porch waiting for some food delivery. He’s committed – can’t go inside yet – when Avery LIBRELLE happens around the corner.
LIBRELLE: Merg!
BERG: Uh, hey, Avery…
LIBRELLE: Stop with all the scare talk. Joe Biden is a moderate.
BERG: Biden is a moderate in the exact same sense that Brooke Shields was George Michael’s girlfriend in the ’80s.
LIBRELLE: What? Go on…
BERG: In the ’80s, various publicists circulated the story that Brooke Shields was dating George Michael – a fantastic singer who tripped every ‘gaydar’ set in the world when “Wham UK” started releasing music videos.
The “Relationship” was imposed on the couple, and the world, by the execs at Michael’s label for a bunch of reasons; in an age when being “gay” was still pretty closet-y and the likes of Freddy Mercury and Elton John kept their orientations very much under the radar, it protected Michael’s marketability. It benefitted both of their careers. It kept the whole “is he gay?” discussion from hampering record sales. And it was neither of their idea – it was a concoction of publicists working for their various record, studio and management companies, to keep everyone’s nests feathered.
LIBRELLE: And…?
BERG: Biden is the same thing. He was brought in to put a “crazy grampa” veneer on a party whose extremism has exploded like a diet Coke with a Mento dropped in. To make incipient communism less scary for soccer moms.
LIBRELLE: That’s just…
BERG: Just what?
LIBRELLE: I’m torn between “Racist” and “Anti-Palestinian”.
BERG: Naturally…
BERG’s delivery arrives.
And SCENE
You are playing pool in a bar. You strike the cue ball with the cue stick and the cue ball moves. That is a First Order Effect. The cue ball moves in response to your striking it with the cue stick.
The cue ball rolls along until it strikes another ball, perhaps the 10. The 10-ball moves. That is a Second Order effect of your cue stick action. The 10-ball rolls along until it strikes the 8-ball, knocking it into the pocket and causing you to lose the game. That is a Third Order effect of your cue stick action. They all result from your action. They are direct, predictable, foreseeable results and good pool players know better than to take that shot.
Governor Walz issues Executive Orders based on the First Order effects. He orders the bar closed to prevent the spread of Covid, the bar is closed, First Order Effect. What are the Second Order effects? The bartender and wait staff lose their jobs. They can’t pay their rent. They’re looking at eviction and homelessness, the Second Order Effect. They apply for unemployment and welfare, which increases the state budget deficit, leaving less money available for schools and local government aid, the Third Order Effect.
These are direct, predictable, foreseeable results and good Governors (in other states) know better than to implement those policies.
Joe Doakes
And if we had a caste of journalists who actually worked to tell the story, as opposed to logrolling people into compliance with the narrative they’ve been given, people would know this.