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NIMBY! Not in my back yard!

It seems that the left are much happier with liberal principles when they are applied to other people, on other neighborhoods!

Why does a wealthy California town say it opposes affordable housing? To save mountain lions

The town’s decision drew quick scorn as a brazen attempt to evade even minimally denser development in one of California’s most exclusive locales.

by Liam Dillon, Tribune News Service | Saturday, February 26, 2022 | 7:00 AM EST

The well-heeled Silicon Valley suburb of Woodside, Calif., has come up with a novel way to block plans that would potentially bring in more affordable housing: Declare itself Cougar Town.

Earlier this month, officials in the enclave of 5,500 people announced that all of Woodside was exempt from a new state housing law that allows for duplex development on single-family home lots.

The reason? The entire town is a habitat for potentially endangered mountain lions.

Really? As in cougars — and I mean cougars, the animal, not the Urban Dictionary cougars — roam the streets of Woodside?

Woodside’s decision drew quick scorn as a brazen attempt to evade even minimally denser development in one of California’s most exclusive locales. The bucolic, woodsy town near Stanford University and the heart of Silicon Valley has a median home value of $4.5 million. Among its residents have been the founders of technology giants Intuit, Intel and Symantec as well as Oracle founder Larry Ellison, who reportedly spent $200 million to build a Japanese-style 16th-century imperial palace across 23 acres.

San Mateo County, where Woodside is located, gave Joe Biden 291,496, or 77.89%, of its votes, while just 75,584, 20.20%, to President Trump. That’s much higher than the statewide advantage Mr Biden enjoyed, 63.48% to 34.32%. While I couldn’t find the breakdown for Woodside individually, it’s safe to say it’s a pretty liberal area.

The mountain-lion card is not playing well with advocates, who note the jarring irony of enormous mansions inhabited by few juxtaposed against the housing needs of many.

“Right now, you could have five people in a 5,000-square-foot mansion sharing one kitchen, and it’s OK,” said Sonja Trauss, executive director of YIMBY Law, a San Francisco group that advocates for local governments to approve more housing. “But once you have two kitchens, it’s suddenly a problem for the mountain lions?”

Why am I thinking of Comrade Kaprugina in Dr Zhivago, saying, “There was living space for thirteen families in this one house!”

Yuri Andreievich Zhivago replies, “Yes. Yes, this is a better arrangement; more just.” Of course, Yuri Andreievich understands what happens if he doesn’t toe the Bolshevik line. The left might think that zoning for cheaper houses, more “affordable” housing, is “more just,” but it’s obvious that the folks who’ve driven the median home value to an insane $4.5 million aren’t very interested in having neighboring homes, and neighboring people, who will bring down the values of their own housing, their own community.

We see it all over, in the tony areas of Philadelphia like Society Hill and Rittenhouse Square, where the well-to-do white liberals are quite happy to vote for Democratic politicians and liberal policies, as long as the poorer, black and Hispanic residents of the City of Brotherly Love are kept down in Kensington and Strawberry Mansion. Philadelphia is highly ‘diverse’ as far as overall population figures are concerned, but far more internally segregated on a by-neighborhood basis.

Business Insider noted:

California remains the state with the highest poverty level in the US, according to a September 2021 report from the US Census Bureau.

In the report, three-year poverty level averages were calculated for each state and the District of Columbia using the supplemental poverty measure, which found that 15.4% of California residents lived in poverty from 2018 to 2020. Only the District of Columbia had a higher rate of poverty — 16.5%.

The supplemental poverty measure expands on the official poverty measure, which was developed by Social Security economist Mollie Orshansky in the 1960s, by accounting for cost of living, work and medical expenses, tax credits, and government programs designed to assist low-income families and individuals.

If the Pyrite State has the nation’s highest percentage of poverty, it also has some of our wealthiest citizens, a lot of whom live in Hollywood, in Bel Air, and in Woodside. Seth Rogen is a Canadian comedian, actor, screenwriter, film producer, and voice actor who, according to the site Celebrity Net Worth, has a net worth of $80 million, and was excoriated for a mindless tweet in which he said that living in a big city, one has to simply accept that leaving valuables in your car means that people will break in and rob it. When you’re worth $80 million, you can afford to replace stuff. Mr Rogen isn’t homeless. He lives on a 10-acre estate in the West Hollywood Hills, having sold, for $2.16 million, another West Hollywood home behind high hedges and a tall, metal fence. ‘Twould seem that, despite his seemingly cavalier attitude toward petty robbery, Mr Rogan, a self-described left-winger, does care about security for his property and himself.

One wonders how many “affordable” duplexes Mr Rogan has had built on his 10-acre estate, to help the less fortunate in Los Angeles County.

As I have previously noted, the hypocrisy of the left is astounding! They are great at telling other people what they should do, but not so great at putting their money where their mouths — or keyboards — are.

 

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Los gringos estan locos!

I had to take a screenshot of this tweet, in case Dana Houle deletes it, and I can only say that I am highly disappointed that someone named Dana could be so boneheadedly stupid. You can click on the image to get to the original tweet . . . if it still exists.

Markos Moulitsas, the founder of the Lost Kos, tweeted something similarly stupid.

The bombs are falling, people are trying to flee — at least as of this writing, the roads out of Kyiv are jammed — and the American snowflakes are worried about whether the Ukrainians are wearing masks. https://www.thepiratescove.us/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_wacko.gif Los gringos estan locos!

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Bidenflation! The price of a gallon of milk has increased 121.21% since Joe Biden became President

Photo by Dana R. Pico, © January 4, 2022. Free use is granted, with appropriate credit. Click to enlarge.

In 2020, back when Donald Trump was President of the United States, a gallon of milk at the Kroger on Bypass Road in Richmond, Kentucky, was 99¢ per gallon. In 2021, the price had increased to $1.29 per gallon, in the same store.

Then, on January 4, 2022, I took a photo of the increased price, to $1.79 per gallon, and posted it on Twitter. That was a pretty big jump, 38.76%, but I at least hoped that the price would remain stable.

Photo by Dana R. Pico, © February 23, 2022. Free use is granted, with appropriate credit. Click to enlarge.

Well, I might have hoped that, but my hopes have been quickly dashed; a gallon of 1% milk, at the same store, even in the same dairy case, is now $2.19 per gallon, a 22.35% increase in 50 days! Milk has risen, in the same store, 121.21% since the end of 2020, since the end of President Trump’s term, since Joe Biden has moved into the White House.

121.21%!

We had previously noted that the January year-over-year inflation rate was 7.5%, higher than economists’ guesstimates, the highest in 40 years, and higher than the average hourly wage increase of 5.7%.

It’s one thing to see that statistics printed in The Wall Street Journal, and something entirely different to see them, in yellow and red cardboard signs, as you are reaching in to buy a gallon of milk.

The average working stiff might not read The Washington Post, might not pay attention to the statistics as given on finger-blackening newsprint or a flickering monitor screen, but he’s likely to have noticed how everything has gotten more expensive.

On September 16, 2016, Heather Long, then with CNN, published “Problem: Most Americans don’t believe the unemployment rate is 5%,” noting that, despite the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate, people believed that unemployment was much higher, around 9% or more, which I pointed out was close to the U-6 unemployment rate at the time. And no matter what the official ‘numbers’ are, when a gallon of milk has gone up 121.21% in just over a year, inflation certainly feels higher than 5.7%

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Tulsi goes to CPAC

While I like the concept of the Libertarian Party, supporting maximum freedom and individual rights, I will admit to not having much use for it. The primary function of a political party is to bring like-minded people together to win elections, to get their policies and principles into governing power; that’s the definition given to me by Dr Malcolm Jewell, one of my political science professors at the University of Kentucky, back in the horse-and-buggy days.

And that is where the Libertarian Party fails: whether people like its positions or not, the party fails in its most important function, getting people elected to office. On June 8, 2018, I went to the Libertarian Party’s website, to find their list of Libertarian Party candidates who were actually elected to public office. They claimed a total of 166 elected officials, with 52 of them holding partisan offices. Their highest, at the time, elected officials were three state representatives from New Hampshire, all of whom were elected as Republicans or Democrats, and none of whom were re-elected.

Representative Justin Amash (L-MI) switched to the Libertarian Party, due to his disagreements with President Trump, but he, too, was elected as a Republican. To date, there have been exactly zero candidates running as Libertarians who have been elected President, Senator, United States Representative, Governor, state Senator or state Representatives. For a party which has been around since 1971, that’s a pretty massive failure.

Former Representative Ron Paul, elected as a Republican, was the Libertarian Party candidate for President in 1988. Following that, he won the House seat again in 1996, and served in the House of Representatives until January of 2013. He twice ran for the Republican presidential nomination, in 2008 and 2012, failing both times.

His son, Rand Paul, was elected to represent Kentucky in the United States Senate in 2010, as a Republican, and re-elected in 2016; he is currently running for a third term, and is heavily favored. The Bluegrass State is home to two of the libertarian Republicans, with Representative Thomas Massie (R-KY 4), first elected in 2012. Dr Paul and Mr Massie used the TEA Party movement to help win election.

The electoral history has been simple: lower-case libertarians can win, if they run as Republicans, but running as upper-case Libertarians, the lose, and lose badly.

Now comes former Representative Tulsi Garrard Williams (D-HI 2). A Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination herself in 2020, but withdrew on March 19, and endorsed Joe Biden after doing poorly. The odious Hillary Clinton later floated rumors that Mrs Williams was going to run as a third-party candidate, to throw the 2020 election to President Trump. Mrs Williams is very much a liberal, but she’s also a libertarian, believing in people’s individual rights.

    Contrarian Dem Tulsi Gabbard To Headline CPAC

    by Paul Bedard, Washington Secrets Columnist | Monday, February 21, 2022 | 9:19 AM EST

    Former Democratic Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, a 2020 presidential primary candidate who has been critical of President Joe Biden and liberal lawmakers, will be the headliner at the main CPAC dinner event this week, officials told Secrets Monday.

    Gabbard, the former Hawaii congresswoman, will speak at the annual Ronald Reagan Dinner held by the American Conservative Union’s Conservative Political Action Conference. Glenn Beck is slated to be the keynote.

    Having a popular Democrat speak at the group’s main dinner, to be held Friday, is an “extraordinary event,” said a spokeswoman.

    Gabbard has recently roiled Democratic circles with her criticism of Biden’s handling of the Russia-Ukraine crisis and decision to only consider a black woman for the U.S. Supreme Court. She has also blasted Vice President Kamala Harris as a weak vice president.

    CPAC opens in Orlando Thursday and ends Sunday. Former President Donald Trump and virtually every conservative politician and pundit is expected to speak.

Again, Mrs Williams is no conservative, but her inclusion at CPAC tells us one thing: the GOP has completely co-opted libertarianism, and the future for the Libertarian Party is to stop being stupid, and become part of the Republican Party to which it naturally belongs.

Conservatives will never go along with everything for which the Libertarian Party stands, but there is much we can appreciate. And today’s Democratic Party, with its ‘progressive’ bent, is one which demands conformity over individuality, one which seeks to punish those who do not go along with its social demands and conformity policies. Mrs Williams may support universal health care, and even a guaranteed annual income, but she also supports our First Amendment rights, supports freedom of speech, and of the press, and or religion, of peaceable assembly, and due process of law. She has called out President Biden and his saber-rattling (sanctions-rattling?) against Russia, in a matter in which we cannot stop President Putin from taking. She has criticized his odious vaccine mandates. She was the best candidate the Democrats had, and while Republicans would have been upset that President Trump had lost, we wouldn’t be nearly as upset with Mrs Williams as President as we are with the dummkopf from Delaware and his ‘progressive’ filled administration.

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If someone was out to destroy transgender acceptance, what would he be doing differently?

We have covered the University of Pennsylvania’s transgender swimmer several times, and the question has always occurred to me: if ‘Lia’ Thomas really, really, really wants to be accepted as a woman, why engage in activities which prove him so radically different from real women?

Lia Thomas wins second Ivy League title with record-setting 200m swim

By Ryan Glasspiegel | Friday, February 18, 2022 | 8:30 PM EST

Getty Images. Click to enlarge.

Lia Thomas, a transgender swimmer for University of Pennsylvania, won her second Ivy League title this week with a record-setting effort.

Friday night, Thomas won the conference’s 200-meter freestyle competition with a time of 1:43.12, beating second-place Samantha Shelton by over 2.5 seconds.

Thomas’ finish set a new record at Harvard’s Blodgett Pool, besting the previous mark of 1:43.78, and comes a day after she won the Ivy League’s 500-meter freestyle. Her time of 4:37.32 in Thursday’s event was also a Blodgett Pool record.

Thomas swam for three years at Penn as a male, before transitioning to female.

There’s more at the original.

Will Thomas was, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s athletic department’s swimming and diving 2018-19 team roster, a sophomore member of the men’s team. He was “Second-team All-Ivy in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free after reaching the ‘A’ final of the Ivy League Championships and finishing second overall in each of the events.” The 2019-20 roster lists him as Lia Thomas, and states that he “Competed in four of Penn’s eight regular season events (as a male, and) won the 500 free against Villanova (Nov. 15).” The 2017-18 roster notes that he was “Ivy League Championships qualifier in 500 free (A final), 1000 free (A final), 1650 free (A final).”

Penn, an Ivy League school, erased Mr Thomas portrait from those rosters. For the 2021-22 season, he is now listed as Lia Thomas on the roster, complete with his portrait after ‘transitioning’. His individual biography page no longer lists his top times, or his past accomplishments on the men’s team, and simply notes that “All 2020-21 Ivy League winter sports were canceled on November 12 due to a nationwide outbreak of coronavirus COVID-19.”

Also see: Robert Stacy McCain: Exposing Gender, Inc.

Bruce Jenner, the 1976 Olympic Decathalon winner who thinks that he’s a woman now, said:

I’ve said from the beginning, biological boys should not be playing in women’s sports. We need to protect women’s sports.

Obviously this is about Lia Thomas who has brought a lot of attention to this issue. First of all, I respect her decision to live her life authentically. 100 percent. But, that also comes with responsibility and some integrity. I don’t know why she’s doing this. For two reasons: 1. It’s not good for the trans community. We have a lot of issues in the trans community that are very difficult and very challenging. We have a suicide rate that’s nine times higher than the general public.

Her hands are bigger. She can swim faster. That’s a known. All of this is woke world that we’re living in right now is not working. I feel sorry for the other athletes that are out there, especially at Penn or anyone she’s competing against, because in the woke world you have to say, ‘Oh my gosh, this is great.’ No it’s not.

I’ve asked it before: how does Mr Thomas, who grew up male, who competed athletically with men, doing well and occasionally winning at the collegiate level, justify in his own mind beating a bunch of real girls? How does Mr Thomas, in his tremendous concern to be accepted as a woman and not a male, justify competing in events which only serve to point out the differences between him and biological women? And now a third question has come to my mind: if someone was actively trying to sabotage the concept that #TransgenderWomenAreWomen, what would he be doing differently from what Mr Thomas is doing right now?

In the Bluegrass State, the General Assembly is working on legislation which would ban biological boys from competing as girls in sports, and other states have been doing similar things. Naturally, what my best friend used to call the Lexington Herald-Liberal gave activists OpEd space to complain about the bill. These legislative attempts might still exist had the world never heard of ‘Lia’ Thomas, but it is unquestionable that his actions have increased the pressure for them.

The Philadelphia Inquirer, which has been beating the drum for the acceptance of Mr Thomas as a legitimate women’s sports contender, reported on his latest victory:

Penn’s Lia Thomas wins third title, breaks another pool record in final day of Ivy swim championship

Penn secured itself as the top freestyle team in the league, as just before Thomas’ feat, junior teammate Catherine Buroker also notched a second Ivy League title in the 1,650-yard freestyle.

by Ellie Rushing | Saturday, February 19, 2022 | 8:41 PM EST

BOSTON ― For the third night in a row, University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas stood atop the medal stand and was named an Ivy League champion.

And in as many days, she broke a third Harvard University Blodgett Pool record, and a second Ivy League meet record in a thrilling 100-yard freestyle race.

It was the closing day of the Ivy League championship, and Thomas was seeded second in the 100 freestyle to Yale University’s Iszac Henig. In the preliminaries, Henig beat Thomas by about a second and established a Blodgett pool record.

Further down:

That performance including Penn securing itself — by far — as the top freestyle team in the Ivy League.

“There’s no secret, it’s just work,” (junior Catherine Buroker) said of that success.

Well, hard work, and having a biological male compete against real women, anyway.

That’s the part which will never go away: Yes, the University of Pennsylvania won the Ivy league Championship in women’s swimming, but everyone will know that Penn’s team might not have done so were Mr Thomas not competing, and many will assume that Penn just would not have won without him competing. As sixteen members of the team noted, in an unsigned letter, Mr Thomas went from being ranked “#462 as a male to #1 as a female”.

Was there ever any more convincing evidence that Mr Thomas is simply different from real women, in ways that actually matter when it comes to competitive sport?

What Will Thomas, in his selfishness, has done is to bring Penn a championship that will forever be questionable in people’s minds, and to convince people who were on the fence about transgender participation in women’s sports that no, it just isn’t fair. What more damage could he have done if he had consciously tried?

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The neo-conservatives beat the drum for war Are you willing to face nuclear annihilation over Ukraine?

It ought to be an established truth: if Bill Kristol and his gaggle of ‘neo-conservatives’ at The Bulwark support something, you just know that it’s wrong:

    The Right’s Argument Against Aiding Ukraine Is Wrong—and Dangerous

    A Russian conquest of Ukraine would be perilous for America and our allies.

    by Reuben Johnson | Friday, February 11, 2022 | 5:18 AM EST

    Kyiv – Conservative opinion in America seems to be hardening around opposition to U.S. support for Ukraine. The United States, the logic goes, has no stake in whether or not Russia invades Ukraine. Ukraine is a European nation and that makes it Europe’s problem.

    This argument is wrong and reflects a dangerous misunderstanding of what is at stake in Ukraine’s confrontations with Russia.

    For starters, modern Europe has never been able to handle its own military confrontations. The only nation in the NATO alliance that can lead the Europeans in a major multinational endeavor is the United States. There is a simple explanation for this imbalance: Because a European state strong enough to lead a coalition against a threat such as Russia would also be strong enough to dominate Western Europe. Which is not a state of affairs helpful to America’s interests.

Ignoring for the moment the pitiful grammar of the final sentence, the obvious question is: so what? At a certain point, it has to be asked what is to be gained here.

On March 31, 1939, finally realizing that Adolf Hitler’s word was worthless, the United Kingdom and France offered guarantees of Polish sovereignty. Two days after the Wehrmacht rolled in, on September 1, 1939, the United Kingdom and France declared war on Germany.

But they could do nothing about the invasion: they hadn’t the men or equipment in place, and when it came to actual war, in the spring of 1940, the two nations’ militaries reeled before an attack by Germany on their forces on French soil. In the end, Poland was ‘liberated’ not by the United Kingdom, not by France, but by the Red Army, and that ‘liberation’ meant not freedom, but 45 years of Communist domination.

    Next, what happens in Ukraine does not necessarily stay in Ukraine. Previous invasions of Ukraine by Russia have devastated the Donbas region and the cost has been tremendous. If Russia invades again, the cost of rebuilding Ukrainian infrastructure Russian forces destroy could, in the words of the former Polish Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, “turn Ukraine into a failed state.”

Well, that would then be Russia’s problem, wouldn’t it?

    Finally, tolerating a militaristic expansion of this kind would mean that “European security and stability” is a myth. There is every reason to believe that failing to stop Russia from continuing to try and destroy its much-smaller neighbor does not prevent war with Moscow, but rather makes likely a much larger, wider war in Europe in the future.

The North Atlantic Treaty was signed on April 4, 1949, as the Western democracies were worried that the huge Red Army could roll right in and conquer what was then the Federal Republic of Germany, West Germany more colloquially, and the Europeans hadn’t the strength to stop it. NATO’s guarantee was that an attack on one was an attack on all, which was, in effect, a guarantee that the United States, with its large forces and its nuclear weapons, would come to West Germany’s defense.

The USSR detonated its first atomic bomb on August 29, 1949, far earlier than it was estimated they could.

NATO was a military alliance, including the nuclear-armed United States, against the wholly conventionally-armed Soviet Union; that lasted for 4½ months.

Of course, the Soviets had no way of delivering atomic bombs to targets at the time, and only a few of the devices, but they kept building, and building, and building. By 1951, the USSR tested an air-dropped atomic bomb, which meant that the USSR now had deliverable nuclear weapons.

If NATO had kept to itself, and not expanded following the fall of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact, NATO might still be a credible deterrent. But NATO expanded into Poland, and the Baltic States, right on Russia’s doorstep. Russia now has the nuclear arsenal to completely destroy the United States; does anyone seriously believe that Joe Biden, or any American President, would put the lives of 330 million Americans in danger of nuclear incineration to defend Latvia, Lithuania or Estonia?

There is a part of the calculation that is going unsaid: while Western sanctions could impose some real costs on the Soviet Union Russian Federation, those sanctions would inevitably be temporary, while conquering Ukraine would be a permanent addition to Russia. Byelorussia is already approaching vassal state status. Xi Jinping is making the same calculations when it comes to conquering Taiwan.

Reuben Johnson, the article author, after several paragraphs on the history of Russian adventurism and the inability of NATO to stop them, got one thing absolutely right:

    All of which means that if Ukraine receives no help from NATO because they are not a full-fledged member, it will send an ominous signal. It would say that decades of partnering with our alliance, participating in its missions, and contributing personnel and equipment to its operations counts for nothing. If you are attacked by the Russians, there will be no boots on the ground coming to your aid. Which would make the status of being any kind of NATO partner nation worth nothing—and could cripple, if not destroy, the alliance.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is just as aware of that as Mr Johnson, and it is an incentive for President Putin to go ahead and act. More, he has an incentive to strike sooner rather than later:

    Which European Countries Depend on Russian Gas?

    by Katharina Buchholz | February 3, 2022

    As the United States and the EU are working on a strategy to replace natural gas supply to Europe should Russia turn off the tap in a standoff with Western powers over Ukraine, Qatar has said that it sees no way that it could replace the needed amount by itself. If new sanctions were to be introduced against Russian President Vladimir Putin personally or his country, this could trigger an energy crisis on the continent due to much of Europe’s reliance on Russian gas, which arrives on the continent via pipelines.

    According to Reuters, close U.S. ally Qatar wants guarantees that natural gas diverted to Europe would not be resold and has urged European countries to resolve their investigation into Qatari gas contracts in order to become a regular customer themselves – which could more permanently shift gas dependencies in Europe.

    Data from the European Union Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators shows which countries’ energy supply would be most at risk in the case of a Russian gas freeze. Among Europe’s major economies, Germany imports around half of its gas from Russia, while France only obtains a quarter of its supply from the country, according to the latest available data. The biggest source of French gas was Norway, supplying 35 percent. Italy would also be among the most impacted at a 46 percent reliance on Russian gas.

    The UK is in a different position, drawing half of its gas supply from domestic sources and importing mostly from Norway and also Qatar. Spain is also not on the list of Russia’s major customers, the biggest trade partners of the country being Algeria and the U.S.

    Some smaller European countries rely exclusively on Russian gas, namely North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Moldova. Dependence also was above 90 percent of gas supply in Finland and Latvia and at 89 percent in Serbia, as per the latest available data.

It’s the middle of February, and cutting off Russian gas to Europe would mean that many Europeans could freeze to death. Any sanctions that the West could impose on Russia for invading Ukraine would take time to work, and, to be brutally honest about it, Russia could withstand a loss of euros coming in for a lot longer than Europeans could survive without heat during the winter. More, alternate sources of fuel coming in would be coming in by liquified natural gas tankers, and sinking just one of them would probably mean that no future shipments would be made; the LNG tankers are privately-owned, no insurance companies would cover subsequent shipments, and many crew would simply refuse to become targets for Russian submarines.

More, as Western Europe tries to move away from fossil fuels, Russia’s position as the primary gas supplier becomes weaker every passing year; it is to President Putin’s advantage to move sooner rather than later.

It seems difficult to blame this on President Biden, because there’s really nothing serious he could do about it, but it is worth noting that Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping weren’t putting this kind of pressure on President Trump.

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Bidenomics: Inflation is at a 40-year high, and wages are growing far more slowly than prices

I am old enough to remember the late 1970s and early 1980s. The United States was stuck in what some called ‘stagflation,’ with stagnant economic growth coupled with high inflation. Former Governor Ronald Reagan (R-CA) used what he called the ‘misery index,’ the total of the inflation and unemployment rates to hammer President Jimmy Carter right out of office in the 1980 election.

Christopher Rugaber of the Associated Press wrote an article entitled,[1]Article titles in newspapers are more commonly written by the papers’ editors than the authors, so Mr Rugaber may not have written the article title. in The Philadelphia Inquirer, U.S. inflation might have hit a 40-year high in January: Economists have forecast that when the Labor Department reports January’s inflation figures Thursday, it will show that consumer prices jumped 7.3% compared with 12 months ago, saying:

    Economists have forecast that when the Labor Department reports January’s inflation figures Thursday, it will show that consumer prices jumped 7.3% compared with 12 months ago, according to data provider FactSet. That would be up from a 7.1% year-over-year pace in December and would mark the biggest such increase since February 1982.

Well, the unnamed economists got it wrong: it was 7.5%!

    Prices climbed 7.5% in January compared with last year, continuing inflation’s fastest pace in 40 years

    High inflation is undermining a robust recovery, testing policymakers at the Federal Reserve and White House

    By Rachel Siegel and Andrew Van Dam | Thursday, February 10, 2022 | 8:32 AM EST

    Photo at closest gas station to my house, taken on February 2, 2022.

    Prices continued their upward march in January, rising by 7.5 percent compared with the same period a year ago, the fastest pace in 40 years.

    Inflation was expected to climb relative to last January, when the economy reeled from a winter coronavirus surge with no widespread vaccines. Today’s new high inflation rate reflects all the accumulated price gains, in gasoline and other categories, built up in a tumultuous 2021.

    In the shorter term, data released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics also showed prices rose 0.6 percent in January compared with December, same as the November to December inflation rate, which officials revised upward slightly.

    As with previous months, higher prices reached into just about every sector of the economy, leaving households to feel the strain at the deli counter, shopping mall and just about everywhere else.

There’s more at the original.

That photo, taken by me on Groundhog Day? On Tuesday, February 8th, 87 Octane regular gasoline was up to $3.259 per gallon locally.

President Reagan, who defeated President Carter by a large margin, saw the Republican Party lose a significant number of seats in the 1982 elections as inflation remained high and recession struck.

    Sharp inflation has undermined an otherwise robust recovery. The economy has rebounded remarkably since plunging into recession almost two years ago. Over the past 12 months, the U.S. economy has added nearly 7 million jobs and average hourly earnings have climbed 5.7 percent. The overall economy has shown relative resilience to new waves of the coronavirus, and stocks have bounced back from their volatile start to 2022.

If wages have risen 5.7%, but inflation is at 7.5%, it’s pretty simple: American workers are falling behind, are becoming poorer in relative terms.

    High inflation has left an indelible mark on the economy, including the highest price increases for housing, food and energy that many workers have ever seen. And questions loom about how or whether policymakers will be able to rein prices back in without slowing the recovery or even causing another recession. The answers will have enormous implications for policymakers at the Federal Reserve and in the Biden administration.

That has always been the problem, and was a large part of the problem that faced Presidents Carter and Reagan; the halting of inflation meant a recession.

The timing is different this year: we are not in a recession, but if there is one, after the elections, and it persists into 2023 and 2024, it could encourage the voters to throw the Democrats out of the White House. The Republicans will point out that the economy was strong, with very low inflation, during President Trump’s term, prior to the COVID-19 outbreak and the government’s draconian response to it, much of it ordered by state governors rather than the President.

The President doesn’t really control the economy — no one does — but he normally gets either the credit for a good economy or the blame for a bad one. Come election day, I will be very happy to see Joe Biden get the blame for a bad economy!

References

References
↑1 Article titles in newspapers are more commonly written by the papers’ editors than the authors, so Mr Rugaber may not have written the article title.
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“This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

We have written previously about the University of Pennsylvania’s ‘transgender’ women’s swimmer, Will Thomas, who goes by the name “Lia.”[1]In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their … Continue reading Now the New York Post has printed a story from an unnamed teammate of Mr Thomas’:

That part is incorrect: Mr Thomas, was according to the University of Pennsylvania’s athletic department’s swimming and diving 2018-19 team roster, a sophomore member of the men’s team. He was “Second-team All-Ivy in the 500 free, 1,000 free, and 1,650 free after reaching the ‘A’ final of the Ivy League Championships and finishing second overall in each of the events.” During the 2019-20 season, he “won the 500 free against Villanova (Nov. 15).” That is competitive, if not exactly dominant.

    The anonymous female swimmer gave an interview to the Washington Examiner on Sunday — a day after Thomas, 22, racked up two more wins at a meet against Ivy League rival Harvard University.

    She railed against the NCAA for not acknowledging Thomas had a distinct advantage and accused the board of governors of “not protecting women’s rights.”

    “Women are now third-class citizens,” the swimmer told the outlet.

    “Lia was not even close to being competitive as a man in the 50 and the 100 [freestyle events]. But just because Lia is biologically a man, [Lia] is just naturally better than many females in the 50 and the 100 or anything that [Lia] wasn’t good at as a man.”

UPenn Women’s Swim Team, via Instagram. It isn’t difficult to pick out the one man male in a women’s bikini top. Click to enlarge.

Mr Thomas’ times have been gradually slowing, so much so that there have been suspicions that he has slowed down deliberately, still winning, but by much smaller margins.

But there’s an obvious question here: who is this unidentified female teammate? There are a couple dozen real women on the UPenn team, and it could have been any of them, but I’ve noticed a pattern here: the stories are all broken by the same two outlets, the Washington Examiner, a conservative website, and OutKick. OutKick said:

    While University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas, who spent three years at the Ivy League school swimming as a male, has been busy smashing female pool records, friction has been building within the team, according to a Penn female swimmer who said she feared for her ability to find employment after graduating from college for sharing her honest opinion about a transgender teammate. For that reason, OutKick is granting her anonymity to speak out.

Those are reasonable concerns for the teammate, but I have to wonder: has it always been the same teammate who has been the source for these stories? This has sort of jumped out at me as I have read these stories.

But one part of the New York Post story cited above really jumped out at me, a quote from this anonymous woman, who said, “This can’t possibly be rewarding in any way. I can’t see how anyone could feel good about this.”

That’s absolutely right: how does Mr Thomas, who grew up male, who competed athletically with men, doing well and occasionally winning at the collegiate level, justify in his own mind beating a bunch of real girls? How does Mr Thomas, in his tremendous concern to be accepted as a woman and not a male, justify competing in events which only serve to point out the differences between him and biological women? I have asked that second question before, and no one has been able to give me an answer.

References

References
↑1 In accordance with The First Street Journal’s Stylebook, the ‘transgendered’ are referred to by their birth names, and using the honorifics and pronouns appropriate to their biological sex, not their imagined “gender.” When using Twitter to publicize my stories, I have sometimes had to refer to him as ‘Lia’ to avoid getting banned for ‘deadnaming’ or ‘misgendering’.
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The sweetness and light Joe Biden has brought to Philadelphia

January 20, 2021, the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration as the 46th President of the United States, was certainly a busy one on the streets of Philadelphia: five people were murdered in the City of Brotherly Love that day, making a total of 32 for the first twenty days of 2021.

Of course, as we’ve previously noted, 2021 was a banner year, a gold medal winning year, for Philly, as it not only beat the previous homicide record of 500, set during the crack cocaine wars of 1990, but smashed it, destroyed it, completely obliterated it, with 562 souls being sent early to their eternal rewards last year.

Joe Biden was supposed to ring in a new era of good feelings for everyone, after four years of the evil, reich-wing Donald Trump. But somehow, some way, that’s not what the numbers say. From January 20, 2020, to January 20, 2021, President Trump’s last year in office, there were 497 homicides in Philadelphia; from January 20, 2021 to January 20, 2022, there have been 564 killings in the city.

What else has changed? The Mayor, the District Attorney, and the Police Commissioner are all the same people.[1]Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw did not take her position until February 20, 2020, though Mayor Jim Kenney had appointed her on December 30, 2019. Richard Ross, Jr, the previous Commissioner, had … Continue reading The Governor of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Tom Wolf, is the same. The state legislature has been controlled by the same party throughout. The gun control laws, always a bugaboo for city officials, were all the same.

But hey, President Biden showed up on Sunday, January 16th, the day before Martin Luther King Day, to help pack 27-pound boxes of food at Philabundance food bank!

The only difference was the amount of blood flowing in the city’s mean streets.

References

References
↑1 Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw did not take her position until February 20, 2020, though Mayor Jim Kenney had appointed her on December 30, 2019. Richard Ross, Jr, the previous Commissioner, had resigned on August 20, 2019, following allegations of sexual harassment and racial and gender discrimination within the department.