Category Archives: Economics

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The foreign policy disaster that is Joe Biden He managed to drive a former friend into the arms of Russia and China

Remember how Joe Biden defeating the evil Donald Trump in 2020 was supposed to make the United States respected again?

Saudi Arabia Seeks Regional Embrace of Assad in Win for Iran

Kingdom keen to assert itself as regional political leader

Syria has been banished from Arab League for atrocities

By , and | April 5, 2023 | 7:44 AM EDT | Updated: April 6, 2023 | 4:41 AM EDT

(Bloomberg) — Saudi Arabia is leading efforts to formally bring Syrian President Bashar al-Assad back into the Arab inner circle as early as next month, in what would be a win for Iran and Russia and in defiance of US warnings after more than a decade of conflict.

For those of you stymied by Bloomberg’s paywall, you can read it for free here.

The kingdom is taking steps that would allow the Arab League grouping of regional states to end a suspension of Syria’s membership in time for a summit in Riyadh in mid-May, according to three people briefed by the Saudis and one person close to the United Arab Emirates government, which backs the plan.

Those efforts are ongoing and could be stretched out or even fall through, or Arab leaders could settle on an interim plan next month, the people said. The US is aware of the push, has warned against it but has realized it can do little to stop it, several of the people said.

Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is eager to cast the kingdom as the Arab world’s uncontested political and economic leader.

Following last month’s surprise restoration of ties with Iran, Riyadh now wants to be at the forefront of initiatives to calm regional conflict zones like Syria and ensure nothing disrupts its ambitious efforts to transform its economy, the Saudi daily Okaz said in an Op-Ed last week.

As we have previously reported, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of the country, really doesn’t like President Biden. Mr Biden directly, to his face, accused the Crown Prince of being responsible for the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, after Mr Khashoggi called the prince a liar, in public, in the pages of The Washington Post.

So, what did Saudi Arabia do?

U.S. Officials Had a Secret Oil Deal With the Saudis. Or So They Thought.

After Saudi leaders pushed to slash oil production despite a visit by President Biden, American officials have been left fuming that they were duped.

By Mark Mazzetti, Edward Wong and Adam Entous | Tuesday, October 25, 2022

WASHINGTON — As President Biden was planning a politically risky trip to Saudi Arabia this summer, his top aides thought they had struck a secret deal to boost oil production through the end of the year — an arrangement that could have helped justify breaking a campaign pledge to shun the kingdom and its crown prince.

It didn’t work out that way.

Mr. Biden went through with the trip. But earlier this month, Saudi Arabia and Russia steered a group of oil-producing countries in voting to slash oil production by two million barrels per day, the opposite of the outcome the administration thought it had secured as the Democratic Party struggles to deal with inflation and high gas prices heading into the November elections.

From The Wall Street Journal:

Saudi Arabia Considers Accepting Yuan Instead of Dollars for Chinese Oil Sales

Talks between Riyadh and Beijing have accelerated as the Saudi unhappiness grows with Washington

By Summer Said in Dubai and Stephen Kalin in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia | Updated March 15, 2022 11:48 AM ET

Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with Saudi Crown Prince and Prime Minister Mohammed bin Salman on arriving at Al Yamamah Palace in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on December 8. Photo: Saudi Press Agency via AP

Saudi Arabia is in active talks with Beijing to price some of its oil sales to China in yuan, people familiar with the matter said, a move that would dent the U.S. dollar’s dominance of the global petroleum market and mark another shift by the world’s top crude exporter toward Asia.

The talks with China over yuan-priced oil contracts have been off and on for six years but have accelerated this year as the Saudis have grown increasingly unhappy with decades-old U.S. security commitments to defend the kingdom, the people said.

The Saudis are angry over the U.S.’s lack of support for their intervention in the Yemen civil war, and over the Biden administration’s attempt to strike a deal with Iran over its nuclear program. Saudi officials have said they were shocked by the precipitous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan last year.

China buys more than 25% of the oil that Saudi Arabia exports. If priced in yuan, those sales would boost the standing of China’s currency. The Saudis are also considering including yuan-denominated futures contracts, known as the petroyuan, in the pricing model of Saudi Arabian Oil Co., known as Aramco.

That was 13 months ago, but maneuvers toward this continue apace. The yuan is not all that liquid right now, but the Chinese are making moves to push internationalization of the yuan to weaken the dollar’s grip on international trade, and as the world’s reserve currency.

The Chinese don’t have to buy in yuan; thanks to America’s seemingly insatiable desire for Chinese products, and the Chinese financing so much of the United States’ debt, they have plenty of dollars. But the inflation of the dollar under President Biden has made our currency worth less, and even if that is something of an international problem, there is significant weakness of the reputation of the dollar.

And now OPEC and its allies, including Russia, agreed on Sunday to widen crude oil production cuts to 3.66 million barrels per day (bpd) or 3.7% of global demand. American inflation has been coming down slowly — though it’s still higher than wages have increased — so Saudi Arabia and Russia, the number three and number two oil producers in the world, have decided to push American inflation higher.

It’s pretty amazing, when you think about it. President Biden insults the ruler of Saudi Arabia, and then wages a proxy war against Russia. China, which has no reason to love the US other than our dollars, makes some noises about Taiwan, and the US then proceeds to warn China about the consequences of trying to retake the island. Shockingly enough, all three start taking actions to hurt the United States and its economy. You don’t have to like Mohammed bin Salman or Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping to realize that they can hurt the United States, and that insulting them really isn’t a great idea, but the dummkopf from Delaware did it anyway.

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The Social Justice Warriors do not believe in people’s property rights

As we noted on Thursday, Philadelphia uses an unusual system for evictions, not relying on the Sheriff’s office, but a private firm:

Unlike other jurisdictions, Philadelphia courts rely on a private attorney, appointed by Municipal Court’s president judge and known as a landlord-tenant officer, to execute evictions. This attorney deputizes private security contractors to perform on-site lockouts in exchange for the right to collect millions in related eviction fees.

With a woman resisting a lawful eviction getting shot in the head by a deputy landlord-tenant officer on Wednesday morning, there were obvious outcries from the usual suspects:

Pa. lawmakers want to ban hired security from doing evictions after shooting of Philly tenant

A deputy landlord-tenant officer shot a woman while enforcing a court-ordered eviction. Lawmakers are proposing to change how the system operates.

by Ryan W. Briggs , Max Marin, and Jesse Bunch | Thursday, March 30, 2023

State lawmakers from Philadelphia are proposing to ban private firms from enforcing evictions after a security contractor shot a 35-year-old woman during an attempted lockout Wednesday.

The move comes after a shooting that has brought Philadelphia’s unusual eviction system into the spotlight.

While most jurisdictions deploy sworn law enforcement personnel, such as sheriff deputies, to enforce evictions, Philadelphia outsources much of that work to a private, for-profit law firm, known as a Landlord-Tenant Officer. This firm in turn contracts out the work of serving court notices and performing tenant lockouts to armed security guards, known as deputy landlord-tenant officers.

That unique arrangement would be banned under legislation State Sens. Nikil Saval and Sharif Street plan to introduce. A bill the Philadelphia Democrats plan to introduce next month would amend state codes to clarify that courts across Pennsylvania “cannot empower private companies or individuals to perform evictions,” according to a statement.

With “progressive” Helen Gym Flaherty running for Mayor of Philadelphia and letting us know how she feels about the eviction system, I can easily see how the rights of property owners can be abridged by the city government. If evictions are returned to the Sheriff’s office for enforcement, then the problems that the Sheriff’s office already have would hit eviction services. In the past, confiscated weapons have gone unaccounted or missing, and even though the then-new Sheriff, Rochelle Bilal, said that she had instituted a new, reformed system and was cleaning up the mess in November of 2020, we previously noted that Sheriff’s Deputy Samir Ahmad was arrested in October of 2022 for trafficking firearms.

The Sheriff is an independently-elected official in Philadelphia, and even the left-wing Editorial Board of The Philadelphia Inquirer has complained that Sheriff Bilal has failed in her attempts to reform the Department and that the whole office should be abolished. What if the next Sheriff campaigns on a pledge to not enforce eviction orders?

The original Fourteenth Amendment, via the National Archives.

The Fourteenth Amendment says, in part:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Our rights to property are confirmed in the Constitution of the United States, but we have a situation in which a lot of Philadelphians think that evictions for not paying your rent are somehow wrong. Philly’s leftist politicians — and Democrats outnumber Republicans about seven-to-one in registrations in the city — are very well able to see that landlords are not exactly the most popular people there.

Even if the Sheriff’s office completely supports court-ordered evictions, the city has had staffing shortages in virtually every department; giving eviction duty to the sheriff’s office means that more deputies would be needed, at a time when they are difficult to hire.

The eviction case was one of dozens at Girard Court Apartments in recent years.

The complex is owned by Odin Properties, which is among Philadelphia’s largest landlords. Owned by developer Philip Balderston and based in Philadelphia, its website advertises a full portfolio that encompasses some “10,000 apartments and 200,000 square feet of commercial space in 14 U.S. States.”

But a 2020 report from progressive advocacy group One PA also identified Odin as among “the highest evictors in Philadelphia,” having brought 470 eviction cases to Municipal Court in 2019.

One would expect that one of Philly’s “largest landlords” would also be among “the highest evictors” in the city; the more units one leases, the more non-paying renters he will have.

Who are “One PA,” which even the Inky called a “progressive advocacy group”? They are perfectly willing to tell you exactly who they are!

Housing is a fundamental human right and must be prioritized over the profits of landlords and developers. City Council must act now to protect Philadelphians and support low-income Black and brown residents to stay in their homes and continue to build thriving communities. They must pass rent control and “pay as you stay” property tax relief to create thriving communities in which their constituents can stay in their homes. Our communities need the Freedom to STAY.

Predatory landlords and developers are hiking rents, evicting tenants, operating unsafe housing, and displacing Black and brown Philadelphians, who often have the fewest resources to fight back due to a history of housing discrimination, racial and economic segregation, and depressed wages. These same communities face dramatic increases in property taxes, jeopardizing what wealth they have managed to build. Many low-income tenants find themselves moving every few years because of unsafe and unhealthy homes, hiked rents, and landlords selling their homes. At the rate of current rent increases, many families are not able to relocate to healthier, more stable conditions. They find themselves evicted, disrespected, and dismissed, time after time, causing homelessness and/or mental or physical illness for many. The system is stacked against low-income renters and homeowners and in favor of wealthy landlords and developers.

Translation: they believe that people have a right to the homes and apartments they rented, even if they don’t pay their rent. That landlords and developers invested their own money into building and buying housing units, that they have their property rights as guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, apparently means nothing to them.

Since the start of 2022, office addresses associated with Odin have appeared in at least another 727 different landlord tenant filings in Municipal Court. A typical month in Philadelphia sees between 1,500 and 2,000 eviction filings, according to the Eviction Lab at Princeton University, a figure that does not include illegal evictions.

A spokesperson from the Department of Licenses and Inspections said building inspectors issued several violations to the Girard Court complex during a January inspection that stemmed from complaints about nonfunctional fire alarms. That case is still listed as unresolved.

People seem to have a picture of landlords, or property owners, as Snidely Whiplash, tying Sweet Nell to the railroad tracks. But property owners have a right to their property, regardless of how wealthy or otherwise they are. The majority of rental property owners are actually small entrepreneurs who own five or fewer units. This statistic equates to 10.8 million investors representing 98% of all rental property owners or 80% of all rental properties.

As I mentioned previously, we own one rental unit, though it’s a not-for-profit, rented within the family property. The intention is that, once we go to our eternal rewards, our daughters and my sister-in-law’s son, will inherit the house, and, we hope, a significant appreciation in investment. We aren’t tying anyone to the railroad tracks!

Our Constitution is supposed to protect our rights, including protecting our rights from the tyranny of the majority. But I can see the “progressives” of Philadelphia trying to end the property rights of landlords and property owners in the City of Brotherly Love.

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The government in the Mile High City wants to run your life for you

In 1971, Jonathan Edwards released a song called Sunshine, and part of the lyrics are:

Sunshine go away today
I don’t feel much like dancing
Some man’s gone, he’s tried to run my life
Don’t know what he’s asking

He tells me I’d better get in line
Can’t hear what he’s saying
When I grow up, I’m going to make it mine
But these aren’t dues I been paying

How much does it cost, I’ll buy it
The time is all we’ve lost, I’ll try it
But he can’t even run his own life
I’ll be damned if he’ll run mine, Sunshine

Well, there certainly are a whole lot of people who want to run other people’s lives! From The Denver Gazette:

Denver imposes natural gas ban on heating, cooling equipment in commercial buildings, multi-family housing

Scott Weiser | Monday, February 27, 2023

New building codes in Denver will ban natural gas furnaces and water heaters in new commercial and multifamily construction starting in 2024 in a move that officials said demonstrates the city’s commitment to reaching “zero” emissions in two decades but which critics warned would be painful and costly to building owners and tenants.

And by 2027, natural gas will not be permitted for any heating or cooling equipment in new commercial buildings, the city’s building officials said in a news release.

These restrictions do not apply to gas stoves.

Sheer bovine feces: if natural gas will not be permitted for the primary application for natural gas, heating, it makes no economic sense to apply for and install gas lines for the much lower use in gas ranges. Continue reading →

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The internal segregation in Philly is only going to increase.

Philadelphia has a ‘diverse’ population — and I’ve come to despise the word ‘diverse’ — as a whole, but, as The Philadelphia Inquirer reported, is one of our most internally segregated large cities.

  • The eight-county region’s Black-white residential segregation is the fourth highest among the 20 biggest metropolitan areas, as defined by the Census Bureau. The region is the sixth-most segregated between Hispanic and white residents.
  • Among the 30 biggest cities, Philadelphia is second only to Chicago in its level of residential segregation between Black and white residents, according to data from Brown University. Between Hispanic and white residents, it’s the sixth-most segregated.
  • Considering every U.S. county that has at least 10,000 people and a Black population of at least 5%, Philadelphia is more segregated than 94% of them.
  • While residential segregation between Black and white residents has declined nationwide over the last several decades, it’s happened much slower in Philadelphia. The city’s position near the top of rankings of segregated places has stayed almost the same since 1980

The newspaper’s Editorial Board were aghast that the internal segregation of the City of Brotherly Love has meant that black and Hispanic residents feel far less safe than white residents. However, sometimes economic stories address the issue in ways that the opinion writers don’t notice: Continue reading →

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Some of the environmentalists seem to want us to return to nineteenth century living

The two articles were not that far apart on the main page of The Wall Street Journal’s website. The first was rather innocuous:

Ford Invests $3.5 Billion in Michigan Battery Plant With Chinese Partner’s Technology

The facility will help the auto maker reach a goal of producing 2 million electric vehicles annually later this decade

By Ryan Felton and Nora Eckert | Monday, February 13, 2023 | 1:47 PM EST

Ford Motor Co. is investing $3.5 billion to build a battery plant in Michigan with help from China’s Contemporary Amperex Technology Co.  Ltd., a win for the auto maker’s home state, which has seen many recent automotive projects head elsewhere.

Also see: William Teach: White House Climate Cult Czar Met With Private Ecoloons Group On Banning Gas Stoves

The facility, which will be built in Marshall, Mich., about 100 miles west of Detroit, is expected to create about 2,500 jobs, Ford said Monday. The auto maker said a wholly-owned subsidiary would manufacture the battery cells using technology and expertise provided by CATL, the world’s largest maker of batteries for electric vehicles.

Ford is seeking to boost its domestic EV-making supply chain to help it produce 2 million electric vehicles a year globally by the end of 2026. The company has secured about 70% of the battery capacity needed to reach its 2026 goal, it has said.

Auto makers are working to secure key minerals and build battery factories as they rush to produce more electric vehicles. Financial incentives for North American production of battery cells and materials included in the federal Inflation Reduction Act passed last year has accelerated those efforts, executives and analysts say.

There’s a lot more at the original, mostly business-related to battery production. But to the right and just a hair further down was this gem:

The Climate Crusaders Are Coming for Electric Cars Too

A new report makes clear the ultimate goal: tiny, uncomfortable apartments and bicycles for all.

By Allysia Finley | Sunday, February 12, 2023 | 3:15 PM EST

Replacing all gasoline-powered cars with electric vehicles won’t be enough to prevent the world from overheating. So people will have to give up their cars. That’s the alarming conclusion of a new report from the University of California, Davis and “a network of academics and policy experts” called the Climate and Community Project.

The report offers an honest look at the vast personal, environmental and economic sacrifices needed to meet the left’s net-zero climate goals. Progressives’ dirty little secret is that everyone will have to make do with much less—fewer cars, smaller houses and yards, and a significantly lower standard of living.

Of course, that’s just the introduction, and fairly alarmist, but Allysia Finley, the article author, was a Californian, educated at Stanford, and a writer for the Stanford Review and later the Orange County Register. She has seen, first hand, the idiocy of the left coast and how, too often, the silliness that starts in the Pyrite State metastasizes to other parts of the country.

Further down she notes:

The report concludes that the auto sector’s “current dominant strategy,” which involves replacing gasoline-powered vehicles with EVs without decreasing car ownership and use, “is likely incompatible” with climate activists’ goal to keep the planet from warming by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with preindustrial times. Instead, the report recommends government policies that promote walking, cycling and mass transit.

I’ve never lived in New York, and can only imagine what having to lug home your groceries on the subway would be like. But a short time in an apartment on a very narrow street on San Marco Island, in Venice, where there are no cars allowed, drove home to me the joys of having to shop for groceries in a small store, and then carry them all back to the third floor apartment. As I approach my seventieth year, though I’m still in pretty good shape, I have to wonder for how much longer I could do that.

It does, though, explain the small refrigerator and tiny kitchen; it’s not like you’d lug a week’s worth of groceries home!

Governments, the report says, could reduce “financial subsidies for private vehicles,” such as on-street and free parking. They could also impose charges on pickup trucks and SUVs (including electric ones) and build more bike lanes. Urbanites who suspect the expansion of bike lanes in their cities is intended to force people to stop driving aren’t wrong.

But what about suburbanites who need cars to get around? Reducing “car dependency” will require “densifying low-density suburbs while allowing more people to live in existing high-density urban spaces,” the report says. Translation: Force more people to live in shoe-box apartments in cities by making suburbs denser and less appealing.

Perhaps, to New Yorkers, that doesn’t sound like anything too much different from their lives today, but most people don’t live in Manhattan. And even in New York City, people in Queens and — horrors! — Staten Island aren’t living in the fifth-floor walkups that so many people associate with NYC.

All this may sound crazy, but it isn’t a fringe view on the left. A Natural Resources Defense Council report last year on lithium mining also concluded that the government needs “to reduce long-term dependency on single-passenger vehicles.” The Inflation Reduction Act included billions of dollars to promote bicycling and so-called livable neighborhoods.

Me? I live on a farm, and the nearest grocery store — and not that great a one — is six miles away, and a decent one is about 25 miles from our humble abode. Of course, I depend on my F-150 for work on the farm, but urban writers really don’t understand anything about that.

The looming shortage of minerals will cause prices for EVs—the only cars Americans will be allowed to buy if Mr. Newsom and his green friends have their way—to rise inexorably. Soon Americans may not be able to afford to buy a car even with a government subsidy. Then they will have no choice but to use mass transit or dust off their old 10-speed bike.

Note, too, that there won’t be nearly enough minerals to make the massive batteries necessary to back up an electric grid powered by unreliable wind and solar. So Americans will have to consume less energy—for instance, by setting their thermostats to 80 in summer and 65 in winter—and pay more for it.

Progressives’ ultimate goal is to reduce consumption—and living standards—because they believe humans are a menace to the Earth.

I would like to think that even the most dedicated of environmentalists would realize that what they want is simply not compatible with modern, American life, but I worry that the people who won’t be seriously affected, the New Yorkers who live in multi-million-dollar apartments in Central Park West, or luxury apartments in Center City Philadelphia within walking distance of their law offices, those who’ll be able to afford a luxury electric vehicle even if the mass of the plebeians will not, will somehow buffalo the mass of the public into thinking that this is the only way.

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Yet another tragedy in Philadelphia

No, this isn’t about homicides in the City of Brotherly Love, though Broad + Liberty has counted 39 as of this writing. No, this is about a horrible, awful, doubtlessly racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic tragedy that has gotten major play in the very #woke[1]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Philadelphia Inquirer!

As Philly gathers in bars to watch the Super Bowl, another reminder for the LGBTQ community of the lack of lesbian bars

Lesbian sports fans who want to watch the game in community are scrambling to find spaces that are affirming and feel safe.

by Massarah Mikati | Saturday, February 4, 2023

The Toasted Walnut, November 2020, via Google Maps. The homeless guy on his ass in front of the place probably didn’t help business much. Click to enlarge.

Leona Thomas made her way to the middle of the dance floor.Eighties music pulsed through the air, the dance floor full of women moving with it. Large TV screens — or at least, what was considered a big TV screen in 1985 — wrapped around the room, so the fans there could watch the Super Bowl without having to sacrifice dancing.

Thomas was a teen coming out, and the former Gatsby’s in Cherry Hill was one of the first lesbian bars she visited in the process. It was a space that not only welcomed her but wrapped her authentic self with acceptance. A space that normalized being queer. And a space that felt safe — especially to watch the Super Bowl.

Fast-forward 40 years, and the lesbian bar scene has dropped from 200 nationally to fewer than 25 today, according to the Lesbian Bar Project. In Philadelphia, that number has been zero since Toasted Walnut, its last lesbian bar and a popular place to watch the Eagles in their last Super Bowl, closed in 2021. Which leaves the question: Now that the Eagles have made it to the Super Bowl again, where will the lesbian community be able to comfortably cheer on the Birds?

There’s more at the link.

Naturally, I followed the internal link to the story about Toasted Walnut closing, and discovered what I expected from a story in a homosexual-supporting city like Philly: it wasn’t somehow hounded out of business, but, the closing in the spring of 2021 seems to have been one due to economic and business reasons. While the story didn’t mention it specifically, it included another link which said:

The Toasted Walnut, a lesbian bar in Philadelphia’s Gayborhood that was refuge to queer women for the past five years, will close for good, according to Billy Penn. Run by the former manager of Sisters — another lesbian bar that closed in Philly in 2013 — the Toasted Walnut was a staple for the lesbian community at its home on 13th and Walnut. The bar had been hibernating since November, but with additional financial pressure, it will no longer be able to reopen.

Toasted Walnut’s owner Denise Cohen tells Billy Penn that the pandemic made it especially challenging to keep the lights on, but that her own personal health problems have made it impossible. Cohen began going blind in her left eye in 2019 as a result of diabetes, then was diagnosed with uterine cancer at the end of 2020. Meanwhile, Cohen says her landlords wouldn’t meet at the negotiating table regarding the rent at the bar, which Cohen says costs $11,000 a month. With the additional costs for her healthcare, it would have been too much of a hardship to keep open. Cohen’s community has organized a GoFundMe to help pay for her healthcare.

Translation: in a city in which the Democratic leadership kept COVID-19 restrictions both stricter and longer-lasting than most, the Toasted Walnut was an economic casualty just like hundreds of others. But, as you might have guessed, that wasn’t really the reason the original article cited:

There are myriad reasons why lesbian bars have dwindled over the years, many rooted in gender disparities and economic barriers that women and nonbinary people face.

So, according to the author, Massarah Mikati, who “cover(s) what makes Philadelphia great: our communities of color,” it’s not that the Walnut drew too few customers, who spent enough money, to succeed economically, but that “gender disparities” and “economic barriers” shut the place down. Miss Mikati didn’t even mention that a huge number of bars, restaurants and other businesses which depended on a sufficient volume of in traffic failed during the panicdemic — no, that’s not a typographical error; panic is exactly how I see the restrictions imposed — failed.

The Walnut was located at 1316 Walnut Street, which is Philly’s Center City neighborhood, a block and a half from the Walnut-Locust Street SEPTA subway station, and there are two SEPTA bus stops within a block. There’s plenty of public transportation, and the area is about as safe as any in Philly. But the Lesbian Bar Project stated that “in the 1980s, there were roughly 200 Lesbian Bars in the United States. Today, there are fewer than 25.” Could it possibly be that a lesbian bar just isn’t a particularly strong business model?

The real thrust of Miss Mikati’s article was a lament that there aren’t “spaces” in which there are few, if any, men present, “spaces” in which non-heterosexual women can really feel “safe.” Were it more about economics, I’d probably not have written about it, but the author’s entire piece is a subtle lament, trying to convey the feeling that lesbians, in a very homosexual-supportive city, are somehow being deprived of something they deserve, when it’s really just simple economics.

IF another lesbian bar springs up in Philly, I really won’t care. It will face the same problems as any bar or restaurant, the problem of making money.

References

References
↑1 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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Layoffs at the Inky

Normally, when media companies are forced to make layoffs, they self-report them. As we noted a month and a half ago, that’s what The Washington Post did. The Philadelphia Inquirer? Not so much. While Kevin Kinkead of Crossing Broad reported, on December 6, 2022, that “Philadelphia Inquirer ‘Will Need to Consider Layoffs’ if New Buyout Number isn’t Reached,” a site search for Inquirer layoffs, last conducted at 8:06 AM EDT this morning,, yielded nothing at all about impending layoffs.

But now, there’s this:

In a series of eight separate tweets, beginning here, Diane Mastrull, President of the NewsGuild of Greater Philadelphia, told us this:

It is with a mix of disgust and outrage that I report that four of our members, three from the newsroom and one from advertising, were laid off this morning.

We hear over and over how our ownership here at The Inquirer “is different,” that ownership by a nonprofit does not involve the same financial pressures as ownership by for-profit companies and greedy hedge funds.

And yet, look at us, doing the same unimaginative, inhumane thing as all those other owners: putting committed employees out of work.

What a dark day this is, coming on the heels of company meetings touting the excitement of the new office we’ll be opening next week. The nourishment stations! The chairs! The views!

None of it makes a damn bit of difference when you are a company sending employees to the unemployment line.

We sold a printing plant and got a $10 million forgivable pandemic-assist loan from the government, and still our leadership can’t figure out how to run this company without layoffs.

Cuts that follow the other kind: buyouts.

But what a view the new offices will have!

Just sayin’.

My heart breaks for our four members. Keep them in yours today — and prepare for a fight to get what we deserve at the bargaining table.

In solidarity,
@dmastrull

We have previously mentioned the begging letters that we receive from the Lenfest Institute for Journolism[1]The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their … Continue reading, oops, sorry, Journalism, asking for donations above and beyond the subscription price. The Leftist Lenfest Institute is the non-profit organization which owns the Inquirer, and not only do they believe we should contribute, but they also want the federal government to subsidize reporters’ salaries.

As a supporter of newspapers, of print journalism, due to my poor hearing, the last thing I want to see is newsrooms shrink and reporters and staff laid off. That said, The First Street Journal has been very critical of the Inquirer’s biased coverage, based on publisher Elizabeth Hughes stated goal of making the Inquirer an “anti-racist news organization,” because in the application of that, the newspaper has resorted to censoring the news.

The Inky went so far as to tell readers that it was a “white paper” in a “black city,” and would have to change, even though the 2020 census found that only 38.3% of the city were non-Hispanic black. If the Inky were trying to drive away white subscribers, this would have been an excellent way to do it!

The very #woke[2]From Wikipedia: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from … Continue reading Inquirer, under Miss Hughes and Gabriel Escobar, the Executive Editor, does not want you to know about the daily bloodbath in the city’s streets. Instead, the publisher, the editor, and probably much of the staff want you to believe that the greatest threat of sudden death in the black community comes from a radical fringe of white mass killers, rather than from inside the community themselves. It suits their political agenda, but it has nothing to do with the truth.

The newspaper’s editorial slant is very heavily toward the left, the hard left actually. The Editorial Board have been all-in on homosexual and transgender activism, and former President Trump has been living, rent-free, in their heads for over six years now. The newspaper is pretty much a dedicated Democratic Party mouthpiece.

I’ve said it before: if I had Jeff Bezos’ money, I’d do what he did with The Washington Post: I’d buy the Inquirer and rescue it from its financial problems. But I would also clean house, I would make sure that the newspaper really did cover all the news, and publish all of the news, letting the chips fall where they may, regardless of whose feelings might get hurt. That’s what real journalists are supposed to do. With newspapers moving heavily toward digital rather than on-paper publishing, the space limitations of the past are mostly gone now, so newspapers really can publish all of the news.

Is the failure of the Inky to do that at least partially responsible for its financial woes? Did the four people who were laid off on Friday lose their jobs because America’s third oldest continuously published daily newspaper, the newspaper of record for our seventh largest metropolitan area has chosen not to report politically incorrect news?

Well, who can say, but the newspaper under its current leadership has not done much to make itself relevant to the majority of both city and metropolitan area residents. Yes, the advent of the 24-hour news networks and the internet have cut deeply into newspaper readership and subscriptions, and concomitantly into advertising revenue, but the Inquirer has managed to do a bang-up job of alienating more readers than some. As NewsGuild President Mastrull noted, the paper is owned by a supposedly non-profit journalism institute, but can’t even manage to break even.

References

References
↑1 The spelling ‘journolist’ or ‘journolism’ comes from JournoList, an email list of 400 influential and politically liberal journalists, the exposure of which called into question their objectivity. I use the term ‘journolism’ frequently when writing about media bias.
↑2 From Wikipedia:

Woke (/ˈwoʊk/) as a political term of African-American origin refers to a perceived awareness of issues concerning social justice and racial justice. It is derived from the African-American Vernacular English expression “stay woke“, whose grammatical aspect refers to a continuing awareness of these issues.
By the late 2010s, woke had been adopted as a more generic slang term broadly associated with left-wing politics and cultural issues (with the terms woke culture and woke politics also being used). It has been the subject of memes and ironic usage. Its widespread use since 2014 is a result of the Black Lives Matter movement.

I shall confess to sometimes “ironic usage” of the term. To put it bluntly, I think that the ‘woke’ are just boneheadedly stupid.
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The #ClimateChange activists really, really don’t understand how many Americans live They just blithely claim we can go out and spend $10,000 to $20,000 on things they insist we need

It was early Monday morning, March 12, 2018, when we received five inches of heavy, wet snow at our farm in Estill County, Kentucky, and we lost electricity, in our all-electric home, sometime before 4:30 AM. No, I’m not relying on memory; I’m actually kind of obsessive about recording things in my At-A-Glance Daily Diary, and I have a whole shelf of them, dating back to 1986, missing only 2001’s, which was lost somehow.

Fortunately, it was 42º F and sunny outside by afternoon, which helped some, but it still got down to 52º F inside the house. My wife, having to work the following day, drove to Lexington to stay at our daughter’s apartment, so she could do something really radical like take a shower in the morning. There was just enough sort-of warm water in the water heater for me to take a quick shower on Tuesday morning. While my wife could leave, I had to stay at home to care for the critters.

To make a long story short, we finally got sparktricity back at 4:54 PM on Thursday, March 15th. It had gotten as cool as 37º F inside the house, though warmer in my bedroom, which I heated with sunshine through the window and my own body heat. The high for that day was 58º F, so that helped some. I wonder how bad things would have gotten if we had lost power for 4½ days in mid-January.

Thus, it was with somewhat of a jaundiced eye that I noticed a series of tweets:

Dan Walters: These power outages have me even more appreciative of having a gas-fired stove, so we can at least have hot food. Something to ponder as officialdom tries to make homes all-electric

panama bartholomy: By now we recognize that burning gas in buildings is one of our leading air polluters, more than cars and power plants combined, part of the reason we have terrible air in CA. We can’t clean up our air and continue to burn gas. We also cannot run a gas system just for cooking (1)

panama bartholomy: If we replaced all of our furnaces with amazing 400% efficient heat pumps (http://bit.ly/3CuNhOU) and water heaters with heat pump water heaters we could cut over 90% of gas use to buildings and have dramatically better air. (2)

The embedded link led to this OpEd in The Washington Post:

Why everyone is going to need a heat pump

By Robert Gebelhoff, Assistant editor and Opinions contributor | January 4, 2023 | 2:43 PM EST

For anyone using fossil fuels to heat their homes, I have good and bad news.

The bad: You’re going to want to replace that system with heat pumps eventually, and it might be expensive. The good: The government can help you, and the change will have huge benefits for you and the world.

Oh, the government can help us? How will the government help us?

These heating and cooling systems, once considered useful only in warmer climates, have in the past few years become far more sophisticated. They are now the best chance we have to phase out fossil fuels as a means of heating and could set the stage for a climate policy revolution. . . . .

Americans are not yet as enthusiastic, but policymakers in many states recognize heat pumps’ potential. A New York commission recently approved a plan to require all new houses built in the state after 2025 to use electric systems rather than those running on natural gas, oil or propane. After 2030, it seeks to require homeowners to replace all fossil-fuel-burning systems with non-carbon-emitting ones once they give out.

New York’s approach is the most aggressive in the country, but it’s by no means alone. Fifteen states and more than 100 cities have plans to encourage heat pump installation. The federal government is in on the strategy, too. The Inflation Reduction Act provides generous rebates and tax incentives for those who install the devices, and the Energy Department has dedicated $250 million to increase their production.

Really? Generous rebates and tax incentives? In March of 2021, we had to replace our heat pump based HVAC — heating, ventilation and air conditioning — system due to the record-setting flooding on the Kentucky River. The rising waters destroyed the old system, but while they got into the crawl space, they did not get into our house itself. Replacing the old system was $6,100, $6,100 we didn’t want to spend. The price was lower for us in that the ductwork from the previous system was still in place and usable. Fortunately, we had the cash to do it, though I wonder just how many of my eastern Kentucky neighbors could say the same.

And if you are living paycheck-to-paycheck, $6,100 is a lot of money, money you have to pay up front to get your new HVAC system installed, months before you ever see those generous rebates and tax incentives. While the numbers fluctuate, surveys in May of 2022 showed that 49% of Americans didn’t have the cash available to handle an unexpected $400 expense.

Can people in such close financial straits get the credit to have a new HVAC system installed when they don’t have the cash?

These efforts are well worth the expense. Consider that buildings consume about 40 percent of all energy in the United States. Residential buildings alone contribute to about 20 percent of U.S. carbon emissions, with half heated by burning fossil fuels.

This is where Robert Gebelhoff, an Assistant editor and Opinions contributor for The Washington Post, tells us just how much he doesn’t understand much of America. “These efforts,” he wrote, “are well worth the expense.” Well, perhaps to someone who has a relatively high position for one of our nation’s most famous and important newspapers, (probably) earns a decent salary — and no, I couldn’t find Mr Gebelhoff’s salary or net worth — and could, I assume, afford that expense. And never forger: Mr Gebelhoff once blithely wrote, “NASA’s latest gamble might not pay out, but it’s worth the $2 billion anyway“. But both my wife and I grew up poor, and if we’re not poor now, having retired back to Our Old Kentucky Home, we can and do see plenty of poorer people living around us.

Heat pumps, in contrast, simply move heat from the outside air or ground inside — even during frigid winter months.

They do? Technically, yes, that’s how they operate. But taking heat from the outside air, when the outside air is 10º F, isn’t quite the same thing as doing so when it’s 45º F. That’s part of the reason why, as we have pointed out previously, wealthy New Englanders, when going through expensive home remodeling on Thie Old House, chose gas heating systems. We have also previously noted that it “seems that everybody wants a gas range,” even though the climate activists don’t want people to have that choice. Today’s left appear to be pro-choice on exactly one thing.

Our remodeled kitchen, including the propane range! All of the work except the red quartz countertops was done by my family and me. Click to enlarge.

Us? We remodeled our kitchen — the whole house was a livable but nevertheless fixer-upper home when we bought it — in 2018, after the power-outage but still planned before it, and we added what my wife wanted, a gas, propane actually, since there’s no natural gas service in our rural area, range, a propane water heater — our electric one was on its last legs anyway, so we needed to replace it — and a propane fireplace. When it got down to -5º F over the Christmas holiday, and our heat-pump based HVAC really couldn’t keep up, that fireplace kept it nice and warm at home. When the floods of 2021 destroyed the old heat-pump HVAC system, the propane fireplace kept us warm.

We had, of course, learned our lesson in our previous home in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. We got fourteen inches of heavy, wet snow on Christmas Day of 2002, and yes, the power failed there as well. We had a heating oil fired steam boiler for our heating system, but it still required a 110-voly, 20-amphere electric circuit to activate the boiler and run the pump. The power was restored at around 6:30 PM . . . on December 26th. We subsequently added a woodstove, which was easy enough, because the previous owner had installed a hearth and chimney for one.[1]If we had to replace that system with a heat-pump based HVAC one, it would have been very expensive. Not only would it need to be a system with 50% more capacity than the one we have here, because … Continue reading

A cheery fire in our wood stove in Jim Thorpe, December 18, 2016.

Would it be superstitious of me to note that we never had a subse-quent power failure of more than a few hours since we installed the alternate heating systems? 🙂

Naturally, I haven’t quoted every word of Mr Gebelhoff’s original, but, further down is this:

This is why heat pumps often save energy costs in the long term, even though they can be expensive to install, especially when replacing existing systems. Cost estimates vary widely depending on the size and age of a house, ranging from as low as $3,000 to upwards of $20,000.

How blithely he wrote that! Yes, heat pumps “often save energy costs in the long run,” but it’s that “expensive to install” part that one of the Washington elite just doesn’t get: you have to have the money to install them in the first place, and that “upwards of $20,000” part isn’t always easy for people. When 49% of Americans, hit hard by inflation in 2022, can’t handle an unexpected $400 expense, how does Mr Gebelhoff expect them to write a check for ten or twenty grand?

One last paragraph from Mr Gebelhoff:

Naturally, efforts to push consumers to embrace heat pumps have generated much anxiety on the right. Republicans in New York have panned their state’s plan as “radical” and claimed it will leave residents “in the dark and in the cold.” But policymakers must not flinch. Yes, retrofitting homes can be expensive. The answer is to offset the costs with subsidies, as many states are already doing.

With this, the Post’s columnist was right there on the cusp, right at the point of realizing that yes, the power can go out, but if he did realize it, he never mentioned it; there isn’t a single word in his column telling us what people who are completely committed to all-electric heat would do in sub-freezing weather — something fairly common in the winter in New York state, when the electricity failed. When Buffalo and Watertown and the other areas in upstate New York get hammered by three or four feet of lake-effect snow, power outages are frequent. If they happened to be dependent upon the type of fuel-oil burner that my family had in Pennsylvania, or the gas furnace my daughter had installed in her home in Lexington when her heat-pump powered HVAC system failed, a simple, gasoline-powered generator that can be bought at Home Despot or Lowe’s can provide the current the 110-volt, 20-amp circuit such systems use to keep their homes warm. A heat pump? The system I have here is on two separate — one for the exterior condenser and one for the crawl space unit — 220-volt, 50-amp circuits. That’s going to require a much larger, much more expensive generator.

Mr Gebelhoff isn’t stupid; you don’t get hired by The Washington Post if you’re an idiot. But, living in the liberal Washington bubble, he is seemingly ignorant about how many Americans live. Not to pick solely on him — his OpEd column is simply a catalyst for mine — but this is a common problem amongst the climate change activists: they simply do not understand the problems that so many Americans work, and can be completely airy-fairy about suggesting policies which will make Americans poorer.

References

References
↑1 If we had to replace that system with a heat-pump based HVAC one, it would have been very expensive. Not only would it need to be a system with 50% more capacity than the one we have here, because the house was 50% larger, but since the system in Pennsylvania was used steam radiators rather than forced air ducts, we’d have had to have those installed as well, in a house built in 1890.
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We tell you what the government will not: you’re going to get poorer this year

It was September of 2016, and the Obama Administration was having none of the bad economic news. The economy was doing great, we were told, unemployment was way down as the economy recovered from the 2008-9 recession, and everything was peaches but the cream. Trouble is, the American people just didn’t quite believe it:

Problem: Most Americans don’t believe the unemployment rate is 5%

by Heather Long | September 6, 2016 | 3:18 PM EDT

Americans think the economy is in far worse shape than it is. The U.S. unemployment rate is only 4.9%, but 57% of Americans believe it’s a lot higher than that, according to a new survey by the John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University.

The general public has “extremely little factual knowledge” about the job market and labor force, Rutgers found.

It’s another example of how experts on Wall Street and in Washington see the economy differently than the regular Joe. Many of the nation’s top economic experts say that America is “near full employment.” The unemployment rate has actually been at or below 5% for almost a year — millions of people have found jobs in what is the best period of hiring since the late 1990s.

But regular people appear to have their doubts about how healthy America’s employment picture is. Nearly a third of those survey by Rutgers believe unemployment is actually at 9%, or higher.

Republican candidate Donald Trump has tapped into this confusion. He has repeatedly called the official unemployment rate a “joke” and a even “hoax.”

As it happened, the U-6 unemployment rate — “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force.” — was in the nine percent range, 9.6% to be more precise, and if few people actually look at the various unemployment categories, the public can sort of feel them in their bones.

Well, the supposed good news is that the current ‘official’ unemployment rate has dropped to a multi-year low of 3.5% as the non-farm economy added 223,000 jobs in December. But, with the labor force participation rate still lower than before the disruptions caused by government reaction to the panicdemic — no, that’s not a typographical error, but exactly the spelling I believe it should have — the unemployment number is being held artificially low. The civilian labor force stood at 164,966,000 in December, just 262,000 higher than it was in December of 2019, the last pre-virus year, but the workforce-eligible population, those aged 16 and over, not in the military nor incarcerated, is 4,633,000 higher than in December of 2019, 264,814,000 vs 260,181,000.

When I say that the public feel it in their bones, I look at other indicators, and this story stood out for me:

Macy’s warns holiday-quarter sales will come in light, citing squeeze on shoppers’ wallets

by Melissa Repko | Friday, January 6 2023 | 4:33 PM EST | Updated Friday, January 6 2023 | 7:43 PM EST

Macy’s on Friday warned its holiday-quarter sales will come in on the lighter side, saying consumers’ budgets are under pressure and that it anticipates that squeeze to continue into this year.

The department store operator said net sales are now expected to be at the low- to midpoint of its previously expected range of $8.16 billion to $8.4 billion. It expects adjusted diluted earnings per share to be in the previously issued range of $1.47 to $1.67.

For the year-ago period, Macy’s reported revenue of $8.67 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $2.45.

Shares of the company fell about 4% in aftermarket trading Friday.

Macy’s is the latest retailer to provide clues about the consumer, as investors await holiday results and look for signs of whether demand is holding up as inflation remains high

There’s more at the original, and no, it isn’t behind a paywall.

So, Macy’s, a very-sensitive-to-Christmas retailer, is going to see an absolute drop in holiday revenue, yet the inflation rate in November — the December inflation figures are not out yet — was 7.1%. Macy’s has seen a total holiday revenue decline of roughly 5%, at a time when prices have increased 7.1%. And this was during the first real Christmas season in which people weren’t under mask mandates and the general malaise of the panicdemic.

There are real, solid reasons for this. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that average hourly earnings were 4.6% higher in December over December of 2021. That would be great . . . if the inflation rate hadn’t been much higher. The average American was poorer, in real terms, this Christmas than he was last Christmas. The Biden Administration doesn’t want people to know that, but the public can see it, can feel it, in their wallets and in their bones. And that’s why Macy’s saw a drop of revenue.

There’s more: we might not be in a recession now, but economists believe there will be one before 2023 is over:

Big banks are predicting that an economic downturn is fast approaching.

More than two-thirds of the economists at 23 large financial institutions that do business directly with the Federal Reserve are betting the U.S. will have a recession in 2023. Two others are predicting a recession in 2024.

The firms, known as primary dealers, are a collection of trading firms and investment banks that include companies such as Barclays PLC, Bank of America Corp., TD Securities and UBS Group AG. They cite a number of red flags: Americans are spending down their pandemic savings. The housing market is in decline, and banks are tightening their lending standards.

“We expect a downturn in global GDP growth in 2023, led by recessions in both the U.S. and the eurozone,” economists at BNP Paribas SA wrote in the bank’s 2023 outlook, titled “Steering Into Recession.”

The main culprit is the Federal Reserve, economists said, which has been raising rates for months to try to slow the economy and curb inflation. Though inflation has eased recently, it is still much higher than the Fed’s desired target.

The Fed raised rates seven times in 2022, pushing its benchmark from a range of 0% to 0.25% to the current 4.25% to 4.50%, a 15-year high. Officials signaled in December that they plan to keep raising rates to between 5% and 5.5% in 2023.

There’s more at the original, but it all boils down to one thing: if you’re wealthy, you’ll see some economic losses, but you’ll still be able to live. If you are living paycheck-to-paycheck, you’re in for some real pain.
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