The Bureau of Economic Analysis is scheduled to release the first guesstimate of real gross domestic product for the second quarter on Thursday, July 28^th; the second guesstimate is scheduled for Thursday, August 25^th, and the third for Thursday, September 29^th. The first guesstimate on third quarter GDP is scheduled for Thursday, October 27^th, just 12 days before the mid-term congressional elections.

The second quarter numbers will be bad. How can we tell? The White House, which certainly has the advance numbers, is trying to redefine what indicates a recession, away from the standard and simple two straight quarters of decline in GDP, to “a holistic look at the data.”

A clue: whenever anyone uses the adjective “holistic” to describe something, you know that bovine feces is about to follow.

The initial estimate of first quarter GDP was -1.4%, but by the third report, it was down to -1.6%. With the one negative quarter in the books, if the second quarter also shows economic contraction, everyone would say we’re in a recession .  .  . and the White House can’t have that!

Well, Thursday isn’t here yet, but the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta had its own early guesstimate:

Latest estimate: -1.6 percent — July 19, 2022

The GDPNow model estimate for real GDP growth (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in the second quarter of 2022 is -1.6 percent on July 19, down from -1.5 percent on July 15. After this morning’s housing starts report from the US Census Bureau, the nowcast of second-quarter real residential investment growth decreased from -8.8 percent to -10.1 percent.

The next GDPNow update is Wednesday, July 27. Please see the “Release Dates” tab below for a list of upcoming releases.

It’s only a guesstimate, but, then again, so is the ‘official’ first estimate of the Bureau of Economic Analysis! While -1.6% could be off slightly, it’s highly unlikely that it would be off enough to signal actual growth rather than economic contraction.

In other words, a recession, the dreaded “r” word the Biden Administration wants desperately to avoid.

So, they’ll redefine away from the “r” word, and hope that the credentialed media will go along with it. The trouble is that the credentialed media are no longer the only media in town, and you can bet your bottom euro that the Republicans will pound, pound, pound on that word.

It won’t even be difficult, because inflation has hit, hard. As we previously noted, inflation has been creeping inexorably up, hitting 9.1% year-over-year in June. Naturally, President Biden wanted to dispute the figures, calling them “out of date,” but nevertheless telling Americans he was going to do something about it.

In one regard, he’s right: fuel prices have declined since their maximum on June 14^th, but they are still significantly higher than they were at this time last year, and the inflation figures are based on the same month the previous year. The national average for regular gasoline was $4.467 per gallon on Wednesday, July 20^th, certainly down from $5.014 in mid June, but it was $3.16 at the end of July last year. That’s a 41.36% increase in one year, and 83.60% over the $2.433 in July of 2020. The overall 9.1% inflation number might come down a bit from June’s, but not a lot.

It was back in 2016 that I first noted Heather Long’s article on CNN Money:

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.

I pointed out than that while the ‘official’ U-3 unemployment rate was 4.9%, the U-6 unemployment rate for August, 2016 was 9.7%,^[1]U-6 unemployment is defined as “Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force. Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working … Continue reading not too far off of the ‘common people’s’ estimate that it was “9%, or higher.”

The point is simple: what the public feel is more important than what government officials say. If President Biden and his minions keep telling people that inflation is coming down, but the public keep seeing the prices of everything increase, who are they going to believe, the government, or their own eyes?

The Democrats will try to mealy-mouth the definition of recession, but when recessions come, people feel them, feel them in their bones. The price of everything is going up, and credit is tighter. Rents are increasing, and home purchase prices continue to rise. When people have to put more and more of their paychecks into the gasoline tank, that means less and less in their wallets for other things.

My good friend and occasional blog pinch-hitter William Teach noted this morning how some on the left are claiming that, by allowing contrarian views to be presented, the media are hurting the fight against global warming climate change.

“The devastating heat wave in Europe this week is a reminder that we need to take urgent action to slow human-caused warming, but the media is still giving air to the opinions of people who do not believe there is cause for alarm, which makes the problem seem less dire than it actually is,” said David Rapp, a psychologist and professor at Northwestern’s School of Education and Social Policy (SESP) who coauthored the research.

The argument that climate change is not man made has been incontrovertibly disproven by science again and again, yet many Americans believe that the global crisis is either not real, not of our making, or both, in part because the news media has given climate change deniers a platform in the name of balanced reporting, according to the researchers.

The left, who used to be so very strongly for freedom of speech and of the press, sure aren’t for it anymore, and want to push the credentialed media into restricting language, so they can shape the debate in ways in which they see an advantage. We have previously noted how The New York Times has given OpEd space to Andrew Marantz, a writer for The New Yorker, to claim that “Free Speech Is Killing Us: Noxious language online is causing real-world violence. What can we do about it?” Twitter now bans “deadnaming” and “misgendering”, not allowing any discussion of whether the ‘transgendered’ really are the sex they claim to be rather than their biological sex — something the Times gave Chad Malloy^[1]Chad Malloy is a male who believes he is actually a woman, and who goes by the faux name “Parker” Malloy. OpEd space to claim that such censorship actually promotes freedom of speech. We have pointed out how National Public Radio’s Laurel Wamsley gave space for Alex Schmider, associate director of transgender representation at GLAAD — yeah, a real unbiased source there! — to compare “using someone’s correct pronouns to pronouncing their name correctly – ‘a way of respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.'”

Mr Schmider did tell the truth in one important way. Using a ‘transgendered persons’ preferred pronouns and sexual identity terms is meant to be “respecting them and referring to them in a way that’s consistent and true to who they are.” Miss Wamsley put it as “a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.” At bottom, it is an attempt to coerce “acceptance” by claiming it is only courtesy.

The unasked question is — and the author never added anything into her article which would have paid any attention to those who disagree — what if someone does not accept the idea that Bruce Jenner is really now a woman, or that anyone can somehow change his sex?

It begins with a falsehood. “Sex,” Miss Wamsley wrote, “refers to a person’s biological status and is typically assigned at birth, usually on the basis of external anatomy. Sex is typically categorized as male, female or intersex.” This is wholly untrue. While we might forgive His Majesty King Henry VIII for believing that Catherine of Aragon or Anne Boleyn were somehow responsible for his first two surviving children being daughters, the role of the X and Y chromosomes in determining the sex of mammals, including humans, has been known for over a century. Sex is not somehow “assigned” at birth; sex is determined at conception, depending upon whether the sperm which fertilized the egg carries the X or Y chromosome. We recognize the sex of a newborn child by visual examination of the child, but the characteristics which indicate sex developed long before birth, during gestation, as programmed in by the developing child’s DNA.

It’s kind of amusing that some couples have “gender reveal parties” is sex isn’t “assigned” until birth. 🙂

When you read or hear someone talking about sex being assigned at birth, you know automatically the pure bovine feces is about to follow.

From National Review:

AP Stylebook Issues Guide for Transgender Coverage

by Abigail Anthony | Friday, July 22, 2022 | 7:23 PM EDT

The Associated Press Stylebook, which for decades has served as the default style manual for most news organizations, has issued a “Topical Guide” for transgender coverage that encourages writers to use “unbiased language” and to “avoid false balance [by] giving a platform to unqualified claims or sources in the guise of balancing a story by including all views.”

There it is again: the AP does not want the media to present the view that people cannot really change their sex.

Yet the guidance appears to explicitly embrace the language and claims of transgender activists, a move likely to steer newsrooms away from objectively framing the issue.

The AP Stylebook has issued prior guidance related to gender and sexuality, and some of that is repackaged in the Topical Guide. But it does include some updates, together providing an extensive reference for journalists.

The Transgender Coverage Topical Guide explains: “A person’s sex and gender are usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants and can turn out to be inaccurate. Experts say gender is a spectrum, not a binary structure consisting of only men and women, that can vary among societies and can change over time.” The guide encourages writers to refer to subjects according to their preferred gender identity. The guide condemns “deadnaming,” or referring to a transgender person’s previous name, because that “can be akin to using a slur and can cause feelings of gender dysphoria to resurface.”

Of course, sex cannot change, and sex is recognized at birth, not assigned at birth.

The guide describes the term “sex” by explaining “a person’s sex is usually assigned at birth by parents or attendants, sometimes inaccurately” and further advises writers to “avoid terms like ‘biological male,’ which opponents of transgender rights sometimes use to oversimplify sex and gender, is often misleading shorthand for ‘assigned male at birth,’ and is redundant because sex is inherently biological.”

It is certainly true that “biological male” or “biological female” are redundant, but the formulation has been pushed by the fact that there are those in the world who claim to be the sex they are not. That the Topical Guide claims that “biological male . . . is often misleading shorthand for ‘assigned male at birth,’” is inherently stupid, because it assumes that sex is ‘assigned’ at birth.

There’s more at the original. There are those who claim that referring to a ‘transgendered’ person by the names, pronouns, and honorifics they claim, rather than those which represent what they actually are, is a simple matter of courtesy, and courtesy is important.

But is it courteous to ask someone to lie, especially to lie to himself? That is what the Associated Press, what the ‘transgendered,’ are asking; they are asking people who know that Bruce Jenner isn’t really “Caitlin,” that Ellen Page isn’t really “Elliot,” that Will Thomas isn’t really “Lia,” to lie to the public and to themselves, to perpetuate, through language, something they do not believe.

Well, I refuse. At The First Street Journal we have our own Stylebook, a Stylebook used by almost no one else,^[2]Unlike the Associated Press Stylebook, for which subscribers must pay, and which is why I have been unable to provide the hyperlink to the original, our Stylebook is free and open to anyone who … Continue reading but here we do not lie.

To be “courteous,” to use the terms the ‘transgender’ activists and the Associated Press and the credentialed media want you to use is to concede the argument, is to surrender on what you know to be true.

Don’t concede, don’t surrender. Be true to what you know to be true.
________________________________

Cross-posted on American Free News Network.

Congratulations to Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw: the City of Brotherly Love has, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Monday, July 18, 2022, hit 300 murders for the year!

Of course, the city is still behind last year’s pace, but not by much, not by much, just 1.32% down from last year’s 304 killings as of the same date.

Monday was the 199^th day of the year, so Philly is seeing 1.5075 murders per day, which projects out to 550 for the year. Calculated another way, taking the percentage of total murders for the year compared to 2021, I can also project 553 homicides.

But those numbers might be a touch low. As I noted on July 9^th, Philly saw a drop off in the homicide rate between July 9^th and the end of the Labor Day holiday weekend last year, but, at least in the last ten days, I have seen no evidence of such a drop-off this year.

For four straight years, 2013 through 2016, Philly saw fewer than 300 murders for the entire year.

As of 8:32 AM EDT, The Philadelphia Inquirer hasn’t even noticed, nor are there any stories on either the website main page or crime page.

Update! As of 1:04 PM EDT, the Inquirer still has nothing on hitting 300 murders.

Update! The Inky has gone all cool, and rather than putting time stamps on their articles, you see things like “Updated an hour ago”. Well, it’s 6:38 PM EDT, and “updated an hour ago,” Chris Palmer and Mensah H Dean wrote the Inquirer article finally noting that yeah, there have been 300 killings in the City of Brotherly Love.

Three hundred people have been killed in homicides in Philadelphia in fewer than 200 days this year, according to police — a grim tally that has been fueled by an alarmingly violent July, during which 43 people have died in just 2½ weeks.

Police said the year’s 300th killing occurred just before 10 p.m. Monday in West Philadelphia, when 18-year-old Lameer Boyd was fatally shot while standing on the 500 block of West 52nd Street. Investigators recovered more than 50 rounds at the scene from three guns, said Chief Inspector Frank Vanore, and detectives were seeking video and other evidence to learn more about the crime. No one was arrested.

The killing meant the city has reached 300 annual homicides at a rate surpassed only by last year, when the troubling milestone was reached on July 16. By the end of 2021, police said 562 people had been slain in homicides, the highest total in at least half a century.

Few other years in recent memory come close to rivaling the city’s current level of gun violence; as recently as 2017, the city recorded fewer than 300 homicides for the entire year.

We noted that 9.1% June year-over-year inflation rate, and now President Biden tells us that it just ain’t so, but he’s going to deal with it anyway:

Biden Reacts to ‘Unacceptably High’ Inflation Report By Laying Out Three Point Plan to Address Rising Prices

By Colby Hall | Wednesday, July 13, 2022 | 10:16 AM

President Joe Biden reacted to the record high inflation report that was released Wednesday morning by first dismissing the numbers as “out-of-date,” but then laying out his plans to address rising prices.

Hey, it is his administration releasing the figures; is he calling his people liars?

The Consumer Price Index rose to 9.1% for the month of June, which was higher than analysts expected, and the highest rate of inflation since 1981. Biden’s statement opens by calling price increases “unacceptably high” but also said that it was “out-of-date” due to a decrease in gas prices that he says is data not reflected. It is true that gas prices have fallen for nearly 30 days straight, but are still well over a dollar higher per gallon than they were a year ago at this time.

Gasoline prices may have fallen for “nearly 30 days straight,” but fourteen of those 30 days have been in July, not June.

We need Gerald Ford’s “Whip Inflation Now” buttons!

Biden once again blamed the economy on “Putin’s unconscionable aggression” in Ukraine that has disrupted global markets, but perhaps not as much as the White House would like Americans to believe. He also noted the market reaction to “Covid-related challenges” which some might see as a more accurate description of the true cause and effect.

“Tackling inflation is my top priority – we need to make more progress, more quickly, in getting price increases under control,” Biden revealed in his statement before listing a three-part plan. First, he intended to do everything he can to lower gas prices. Second, he is urging Congress to pass legislation that will help lower prices on everyday items like groceries and prescription drugs. Finally, he pledges to work to halt what he calls Republican efforts to raise taxes on working-class people.

If the President could do anything about gasoline prices, shouldn’t he have done so already? It’s not as though fuel prices were great in May!

What, I have to ask, can be done legislatively about “prices on everyday items like groceries and prescription drugs”? Profit margins for grocery stores are small, between 1% and 3%, and if you shrink those, you run them out of business. Smaller grocery stores, like convenience stores and bodegas, have higher profit margins — other than on gasoline — sometimes up to 7.5%, but those are depending on price, not volume like larger grocery stores, to stay open. Anything the Administration does to bring down food prices drives those places out of business.

And, of course, Republicans aren’t te ones trying to raise taxes or prices on the American people; the Democrats are the ones trying to do that!

The government tried everything from 1974 to 1982 to slash inflation, but it was ended the old-fashioned way: with a serious recession. That’s what’s going to happen again.

The statistics are out for the Philadelphia Shooting Victims database, and they’re just about as ugly as you’d imagine.

There were 249 people shot in the City of Brotherly Love last month, at least as far as those wounded seriously enough to have sought medical attention. Who knows if there were more victims just grazed, or more shooting incidents in which no one was struck?

In a city in which the population are 18.7% black males, black males suffered 71.89% of the gunshot wounds, and 73.33% of the fatal shootings. While the city government and The Philadelphia Inquirer want to blame gun control laws not being strict enough, I have to ask the obvious question: since those gun control laws apply equally to everyone, black or white, male or female, Hispanic or otherwise, why wouldn’t the number of wounded and killed closely match the percentage of the population by each demographic group?

The Philadelphia Police Department reported a total of 48 homicides for the month, so there were three homicides which did not involve firearms. Through the end of June, 257 homicides, or 1.4199 per day. That puts the city on pace for 518 murders this year. Working the math differently, basing it on the pace of homicides last year, I come up with a projected 533 homicides for the year. Either figure puts the city solidly in second place all time.

Philly’s leaders, Mayor Jim Kenney, District Attorney Larry Krasner, and Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw, should be so very proud of the jobs that they have done!

Note: even though Hispanics can be of any race, all of the victims listed as “Latino” in the database are also listed as white. June is not the only month in which this has occurred, and I suspect that this is a result of very poor gathering of data.