Month: November 2023

A couple of days ago a Random Guy on Twitter (RGOT) wrote that "Jewish communities" have been pushing "hatred against whites." Nobody would much care about this RGOT except that Elon Musk immediately replied, "You have said the actual truth."

Now, Musk has a beef with the ADL, so maybe he was just venting about that without thinking things through? But no. Later he clarified that although anti-white hatred doesn't extend to all Jewish communities, it's "not just limited to the ADL."

This is appalling, but still, it's just one guy. Until yesterday, that is, when Tucker Carlson chimed in, saying that rich Jewish donors have been backing "white genocide" for over a decade.

Charlie Kirk also jumped in to defend Musk. "Jewish communities," he said, "have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them." Then, just to make himself extra clear, he added this: "Tucker Carlson is  completely correct by saying this, that the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in this country."

These are mainstream folks, not alt-right white supremacists who can be dismissed as not part of the core Republican brand. And no one on the right is criticizing them. Just the opposite. Ben Shapiro, while acknowledging that the original RGOT tweet was "wildly overbroad," said that Musk was just "reading the term 'Jewish communities' and instead seeing the letters ADL"—which is obviously not the case. Besides, he said, liberals are hypocrites, so their criticism of Musk shouldn't be taken seriously.

And Ron DeSantis, who teamed up with Musk to announce his presidential run a few months ago? Crickets.

There are thousands of young progressive college students who are protesting vigorously in support of the Palestinian cause right now. I consider these protests generally ignorant of history, but it's nonetheless clear that they're aimed at defending an oppressed community from a powerful neighbor. They hate Israeli policies, but they've mostly said nothing to suggest they therefore hate Jews in general.

Things are different on the right. The anti-semitic pastor John Hagee is welcomed in conservative circles. A prominent donor in Texas met with famous antisemite Nick Fuentes and most Texas Republicans defended him. Elon Musk uttered some plain antisemitic sentiments, and so far Republicans have either defended him or kept silent.

Antisemitism is going mainstream on the right and no one seems to feel any urgency to put a stop to it. We've already seen how that kind of cowardice played out with Donald Trump. We don't need a repeat.

This is apropos of nothing in particular, but I felt like checking out annual increases in wealth for the top 1%. You can think of this as "extra" income, above and beyond what people spend, or as annual savings. Here it is:

The annual wealth increase of the top 1% has increased about 150% since 1990, on a trend basis. For those in the upper middle class it's increased 50%.

This story about Fox Sports sideline reporter Charissa Thompson cracks me up:

“I’ve said this before, so I haven’t been fired for saying it, but I’ll say it again. I would make up the report sometimes,” Thompson said in a recent interview.... Thompson, 41, added that she assumed that “no coach is going to get mad” if she misled viewers into thinking they had simply voiced some well-worn clichés, such as, “Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over and do a better job of getting off the field.”

Thompson is naturally getting some blowback for this, but let's be honest: she's right. Coaches never say anything at halftime worth listening to, so why not just randomly pick from a bingo card of cliches and go with it? It saves time for everyone.

Needless to say, it's telling that she's said this before and didn't get fired for it. It's also telling that apparently no coach has ever complained.

Last week, in a fit of pique, Republicans in the House tried to pass a bill reducing the salary of Joe Biden's press secretary to $1. What I didn't know was that this has become a regular occurrence. The latest outburst happened yesterday:

It was the 25th time in the three weeks since Speaker Mike Johnson was elected to the top post — and at least the 31st time this year — that Republicans have spent time on the House floor using a spending bill to try to strip the salary of a member of President Biden’s team.

....Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, took aim at a single federal inspector responsible for regulating safety standards at a salt mine in his district, who the congressman said had a “personal vendetta.”

“These are not just punitive measures,” Mr. Higgins said as he offered multiple proposals on Tuesday afternoon to slash the salaries and budgets of the inspector and a number of other officials who oversee the mine, which is operated by the Morton Salt Company.

I certainly hope that Higgins receives a generous donation from Morton Salt for this demonstration of loyalty. Constituent service is what being a member of Congress is all about, amirite? And besides, Morton had a legitimate beef:

MSHA cited 82 S&S violations at Weeks Island Mine and Mill; of those, 32 were issued for the operator’s high negligence or reckless disregard.... This marks the first time since 2014 that a mine operator has received a POV notice for persistent serious health and safety violations.

See? The government busybodies even admit that this is the only mine they've cited in the past decade. If that's not proof of a vendetta, I don't know what is.

This is the first bronze cast of Rodin's "The Kiss," now displayed outside the Musee de l'Orangerie in Paris. The crowd in the background is from the Paris 10K run, which was finishing up when I took this picture.

Karen Petrou explains why so many people are unhappy with Joe Biden's economy:

The mortal enemy of Bidenomics isn’t Donald Trump; it’s a reliance on aggregate and average numbers.... For most Americans, a sense of financial well-being doesn’t come from capital returns in the stock market or even from house price appreciation. It comes in each paycheck and benefit payment and is challenged by each bill and receipt from the supermarket. Paychecks are falling shorter and shorter for more and more households, no matter the seemingly record high employment data the White House also likes to trumpet.

We don't have to rely on averages. Income data is broken down all sorts of ways by the boffins at the BLS. Here, for example, is income over the past two years for the second quartile—that is, people whose income ranges from 25% to 50% of average:

Look: I know that charts like this aren't going to influence public opinion. But if you're a managing partner of Federal Financial Analytics writing in the New York Times, shouldn't you at least briefly check the data before you start typing?

The rest of the piece is about entrenched income inequality, and that's certainly a problem. But it's been a problem for decades and hasn't gotten any worse lately. In fact, after rising for years, income inequality has dropped recently and is now lower than it's been in the past 20 years:

Whatever the reason for recent economic dissatisfaction, it has to be something that happened recently. So it's not because paychecks aren't going as far. It's not because of rising inequality. It's not because inflation is currently high or because people don't have jobs. It's something else. But what? It's a mystery.

From the Wall Street Journal:

The prosecutor investigating why classified documents ended up at President Biden’s home and former office is preparing a report that is expected to be sharply critical of how he and his longtime aides handled the material, but the probe isn’t likely to result in a criminal case, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sigh. Of course. Thanks to endless Republican bitching and moaning about double standards blah blah blah, we have to be super careful to appear fairminded in these things. If that means tearing Biden a new asshole over a few dozen classified documents that he turned over instantly upon discovering them, then so be it.

I'm willing to bet ONE MILLION DOLLARS that every US president ends up with a few classified documents among the thousands they leave office with. That doesn't represent any kind of serious sloppiness or lack of concern. And nobody cares, either. Donald Trump is not being prosecuted for possessing a few classified documents and everyone knows it. He's being prosecuted for doing it knowingly and then repeatedly conspiring to prevent them from being turned over, even after a subpoena was issued.

But the usual games must be played lest House Republicans open yet another investigation of an investigation. Can't have that, after all.

I have to admit that on my "things that will provoke massive political unrest" bingo card, I didn't have war in the Middle East. There's always war in the Middle East! Live and learn.

You may be aware that a section of Interstate 10 in downtown Los Angeles has been closed due to arson. How are residents taking it? The New York Times is at top. The LA Times is at bottom:

Different parts of the elephant, I guess.

Fog of war and all that, but, um, yeah:

Where's the photo of the Hamas command center and the entrance to the underground tunnel network? Because 10 AKs and half a dozen hand grenades doesn't cut it when you're trying to justify an attack on a HOSPITAL. https://t.co/RJOtVZanWi

— Brandon Friedman (@BFriedmanDC) November 15, 2023

The New York Times confirms this:

A day after the Israeli military took control of Gaza’s largest hospital, soldiers on Thursday afternoon were still combing the site that Israel has said concealed a secret Hamas base, but had yet to present much evidence supporting that claim to the public.

An Israeli military spokesman said that the search of the hospital grounds would take time because “Hamas knew we were coming” and had made off with or hidden traces of their presence there.

Am I the only one whose thoughts are going back to the search for WMD in Iraq? If this episode is typical of current Israeli intelligence, it's going to be a long, bloody war.