I’m sitting at a bar in Texas, surrounded by maskless people, looking at folks on the streets walking around like life is normal, talking with nice and friendly faces, feeling like things in the world are more-or-less normal. Cases and deaths attributed to Covid are, like everywhere else, falling dramatically.
If you pay attention only to the media fear campaigns, you would find this confusing. More than two weeks ago, the governor of Texas completely reversed his devastating lockdown policies and repealed all his emergency powers, along with the egregious attacks on rights and liberties.
There was something very un-Texan about those lockdowns. My hotel room is festooned with pictures of cowboys on horses waving guns in the air, along with other depictions of rugged individualism facing down the elements. It’s a caricature but Texans embrace it. Then a new virus came along – as if that had never happened before in Texas – and the new Zoom class took the opposite path, not freedom but imposition and control.
After nearly a year of nonsense, on March 2, 2021, the governor finally said enough is enough and repealed it all. Towns and cities can still engage in Covid-related mischief but at least they are no longer getting cover from the governor’s office.
At that moment, a friend remarked to me that this would be the test we have been waiting for.
A complete repeal of restrictions would lead to mass death, they said. Would it? Did the lockdowns really control the virus? We would soon find out, he theorized.
I knew better. The “test” of whether and to what extent lockdowns control the virus or “suppress outbreaks” (in Anthony Fauci’s words) has been tried all over the world. Every serious empirical examination has shown that the answer is no.
The US has many examples of open states that have generally had better performance in managing the disease than those states that are closed. Georgia already opened on April 24, 2020. South Dakota never shut down. South Carolina opened in May. Florida ended all restrictions in September. In every case, the press howled about the coming slaughter that did not happen. Yes, each open state experienced a seasonality wave in winter but so did the lockdown states.
So it was in Texas. Thanks to this Twitter thread, and some of my own googling, we have a nice archive of predictions about what would happen if Texas opened.
California Governor Gavin Newsom said that opening Texas was “absolutely reckless.”
Gregg Popovich, head coach of the NBA San Antonio Spurs, said opening was “ridiculous” and “ignorant.”
CNN quoted an ICU nurse saying “I’m scared of what this is going to look like.”
Vanity Fair went over the top with this headline: “Republican Governors Celebrate COVID Anniversary With Bold Plan to Kill Another 500,000 Americans.”
There was the inevitable Dr. Fauci: “It just is inexplicable why you would want to pull back now.”
Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke of Texas revealed himself to be a full-blown lockdowner: It’s a “big mistake,” he said. “It’s hard to escape the conclusion that it’s also a cult of death.” He accused the governor of “sacrificing the lives of our fellow Texans … for political gain.”
James Hamblin, a doctor and writer for the Atlantic, said in a Tweet liked by 20K people: “Ending precautions now is like entering the last miles of a marathon and taking off your shoes and eating several hot dogs.”
Bestselling author Kurt Eichenwald flipped out: “Goddamn. Texas already has FIVE variants that have turned up: Britain, South Africa, Brazil, New York & CA. The NY and CA variants could weaken vaccine effectiveness. And now idiot @GregAbbott_TX throws open the state.” He further called the government “murderous.”
Epidemiologist Whitney Robinson wrote: “I feel genuinely sad. There are people who are going to get sick and die bc of avoidable infections they get in the next few weeks. It’s demoralizing.”
Pundit Bill Kristol (I had no idea that he was a lockdowner) wrote: “Gov. Abbott is going to be responsible for more avoidable COVID hospitalizations and deaths than all the undocumented immigrants coming across the Texas border put together.”
Health pundit Bob Wachter said the decision to open was “unforgivable.”
Virus guru Michael Osterholm told CNN: “We’re walking into the mouth of the monster. We simply are.”
Joe Biden famously said that the Texas decision to open reflected “Neanderthal thinking.”
Nutritionist Eric Feigl-Ding said that the decision makes him want to “vomit so bad.”
The chairman of the state’s Democratic Party said: “What Abbott is doing is extraordinarily dangerous. This will kill Texans. Our country’s infectious-disease specialists have warned that we should not put our guard down, even as we make progress towards vaccinations. Abbott doesn’t care.”
Other state Democrats said in a letter that the decision was “premature and harmful.”
The CDC’s Rochelle Walensky didn’t mince words: “Please hear me clearly: At this level of cases with variants spreading, we stand to completely lose the hard-earned ground we have gained. I am really worried about reports that more states are rolling back the exact public health measures we have recommended to protect people from COVID-19.”
There are probably hundreds more such warnings, predictions, and demands, all stated with absolute certainty that basic social and market functioning is a terrible idea. The lockdown lobby was out in full force. And yet what do we see now more than two weeks out (and arguably the lockdowns died on March 2, when the government announced the decision)?
Here are the data.
The CDC has a very helpful tool that allows anyone to compare open vs closed states. The results are devastating for those who believe that lockdowns are the way to control a virus. In this chart we compare closed states Massachusetts and California with open states Georgia, Florida, Texas, and South Carolina.
What can we conclude from such a visualization? It suggests that the lockdowns have had no statistically observable effect on the virus trajectory and resulting severe outcomes. The open states have generally performed better, perhaps not because they are open but simply for reasons of demographics and seasonality. The closed states seem not to have achieved anything in terms of mitigation.
On the other hand, the lockdowns destroyed industries, schools, churches, liberties and lives, demoralizing the population and robbing people of essential rights. All in the name of safety from a virus that did its work in any case.
As for Texas, the results so far are in…
I’m making no predictions about the future path of the virus in Texas. Indeed for a full year, AIER has been careful about not trying to outguess this virus, which has its own ways, some predictable and some mysterious. The experience has, or should have, humbled everyone. Political arrangements seem to have no power to control it, much less finally suppress it. The belief that it was possible to control people in order to control a virus produced a calamity unprecedented in modern times.
What’s striking about all the above predictions of infections and deaths is not just that they were all wrong. It’s the arrogance and confidence behind each of them. After a full year and directly observing the inability of “nonpharmaceutical interventions” to manage the pathogen, the experts are still wedded to their beloved lockdowns, unable or unwilling to look at the data and learn anything from them.
The concept of lockdowns stemmed from a faulty premise: that you can separate humans, like rats in cages, and therefore control and even eradicate the virus. After a year, we unequivocally know this not to be true, something that the best and wisest epidemiologists knew all along. Essential workers still must work; they must go home to their families, many in crowded living conditions. Lockdowns do not eliminate the virus, they merely shift the burden onto the working class.
Now we can see the failure in black, white, and full color, daily appearing on our screens courtesy of the CDC. Has that shaken the pro-lockdown pundit class? Not that much. What an amazing testament to the stubbornness of elite opinion and its bias against basic freedoms. They might all echo the words of Groucho Marx: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?”
Biden Floats Rival Plan To China’s ‘Belt & Road’ In Call With UK’s Johnson
In a Friday phone call between President Biden and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson which focused on China and the coordinated sanctions actions the US and UK took this week in response to human rights abuses targeting China’s Uighur minority, Biden floated the idea of initiating a Western “democratic” rival to China’s ‘Belt and Road’ project.
Referring to the ambitious multi-trillion dollar infrastructure initiative which President Xi Jingping has spent years negotiating and pursuing, Biden told reporters of the phone call that, “We talked about China and the competition they’re engaging in in the Belt and Road Initiative.”
“I suggested we should have, essentially, a similar initiative coming from the democratic states, helping those communities around the world that, in fact, need help,” he added.
The words came a day after the first presidential press conference he’s held since entering office, during which the president said he desired competition with China as opposed to confrontation.
“China has an overall goal—and I don’t criticize them for the goal—but they have an overall goal to become the leading country in the world,” Biden said Thursday. “That’s not going to happen on my watch.”
Friday’s reference to a US-backed ‘Belt and Road rival’ further comes ahead of next week’s unveiling of the White House’s multitrillion-dollar plan for a major US infrastructure reboot and upgrade.
To review, China’s BRI has involved over 100 countries signing agreements with China on huge undertakings that’s seen China-constructed railways, highways, ports and new energy plants dot Eurasia. It’s included some 2,600 projects at a cost of an estimated $3.7 trillion.
The BRI has been called “China’s trade superhighway”.
The BRI is a big part of what the US president had in mind when in his Thursday remarks he forecast that he expects “steep, steep competition” with China for many years to come, which is headed by a man “doesn’t have a democratic with a small ‘D’ bone in his body” – according to Biden’s assessment of Xi.
With NFTs of everything from tweets, artwork and even a clip of LeBron James attracting top dollars lately, it shouldn’t be surprising that an NFT artwork by a robot sold at an auction.
A 12-second MP4 file titled “Sophia Instantiation,” and an accompanying physical printout, sold for $688,888 at an auction in Hong Kong yesterday in what may be the first ever sale of a piece of artwork by a robot. The piece shows a portrait of Sophia done by Italian digital artist Andrea Bonaceto and how it evolves into a digital painting done by Sophia.
“I’m so excited about people’s response to new technologies like robotics … and am so glad to be part of these creativities,” Sophia told Reuters, who pointed out the robot was wearing a silver dress.
The winning bidder is unknown but bid for Sophia Instantiation under the username “_888_” and bid in increments ending in 888. The initial bid of $10,050 from earlier this week quickly surpassed $100,000 before _888_ placed a bid of $118,888. After raising their bid by $20,000 and then $40,000 increments _888_ began increasing their bid by $100,000 increments.
“I was kind of astonished to see how fast it shot up too as the bidding war took place at the end of the auction,” Sophia’s creator David Hanson of Hanson Robotics said.
“So it was really exhilarating and stunning.”
The New York Times notes Sophia said last week that the auction is a step toward “a new paradigm where robots and humans work together in the creative process.”
However, when speaking during the auction, Sophia left everyone wondering what’s next.
“I’m making these artworks but it makes me question what is real,” Sophia said. “How do I really experience art, but also how does an artist experience an artwork?”
Where Manhattanites Fled During The Pandemic May Surprise You
Since the virus pandemic began, property firms and moving companies in New York City have reported a mass exodus of city-dwellers. Many of them are young families escaping the metro area’s socio-economic collapse as hybrid work (or remote working) allows them to live in suburbia. We find out today, in a new report, many of those who fled Manhattan in the last 12 months ending in January 2021 didn’t go very far.
Bloomberg cites mobile phone data from Placer.ai, which reveals 37% of Manhattanites fled to Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island, and other nearby suburbs. About 14.6% of them wound up in, well, you guessed it, Suffolk County, where the Hamptons is located. Next on the list is Brooklyn at 4.2%, Bronx 3.8%, Nassau 3.7%, Queens 3.3%, and Westchester 2.5%.
Surprisingly, two counties located in Florida made the list, with 2.5% Manhattanites moving to Miami-Dade and 2.1% to Palm Beach.
During this period, Manhattan recorded a 12.8% decline in net migration as it appeared even in 2021, outbound migration trends continued to overwhelm inbound ones.
In a separate report, we’ve noted Manhattanites have been purchasing homes in Greenwich. Also, there have been migration trends to a tiny town in New York State’s Hudson Valley called Poughkeepsie.
As parts of New York City reopen following strict coronavirus-related restrictions, a revival of the metro area could take years. For instance, the recovery of Manhattan depends on office workers returning to skyscrapers. In a recent study via the Partnership for New York City, they found about two-thirds of white-collar workers in the borough won’t return to the office full-time.
From apartments to office space, rents are dropping as inventory surges. The hybrid work style that many companies have adopted over the last year is becoming more permanent, allowing employees to work where ever they want.
While some signs of life for the borough have recently materialized, a recovery back to 2019 levels is far away.
The French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo won the condemnation of the whole world again, with the cover pictured above. Reactions ranged from “abhorrent” to “hateful” to “wrong on every level,” with many offering versions of the now-mandatory observation that the magazine is not only bad now, but “has always been disgusting.”
This cover is probably an 8 or 9 on the offensiveness scale, and I laughed. It goes after everyone: Queen Elizabeth, depicted as a more deranged version of Derek Chauvin (the stubby leg hairs are a nice touch); Meghan Markle, the princess living in incomparable luxury whose victimhood has become a global pop-culture fixation; and, most of all, the inevitable chorus of outraged commentators who’ll insist they “enjoy good satire as much as the next person” but just can’t abide this particular effort that “goes too far,” it being just a coincidence that none of these people have laughed since grade school and don’t miss it.
Review of Killer Cartoons, edited by David Wallis, and White, by Bret Easton Ellis
Six years ago, after terrorists killed 10 people at Hebdo’s Paris offices in a brutal gun attack, the paper’s writers, editors, and cartoonists were initially celebrated worldwide as martyrs to the cause of free speech and democratic values. In France alone on January 11, 2015, over 3 million people marched in a show of solidarity with the victims, who’d been killed for drawing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. Protesters also marched in defiance of those who would shoot people for drawing cartoons, especially since this particular group of killers also fatally shot four people at a kosher supermarket in an anti-Semitic attack. For about five minutes, Je Suis Charlie was a rallying cry around the world.
In an early preview of the West’s growing sympathy for eliminating heretics, cracks quickly appeared in the post-massacre defense of Charlie Hebdo. Pope Francis said that if someone “says a curse word against my mother, he can expect a punch.” Bill Donohoe, head of the American Catholic League, wrote, “Muslims are right to be angry,” and said of Hebdo editor Stephane Charbonnier, “Had he not been so narcissistic, he may still be alive.” New York Times columnist and noted humor expert David Brooks wrote an essay, “I Am Not Charlie Hebdo,” arguing that although “it’s almost always wrong to try to suppress speech,” these French miscreants should be excluded from polite society, and consigned to the “kids’ table,” along with Bill Maher and Ann Coulter.
Humor is dying all over, for obvious reasons. All comedy is subversive and authoritarianism is the fashion. Comics exist to keep us from taking ourselves too seriously, and we live in an age when people believe they have a constitutional right to be taken seriously, even if — especially if — they’re idiots, repeating thoughts they only just heard for the first time minutes ago. Because humor deflates stupid ideas, humorists are denounced in all cultures that worship stupid ideas, like Spain under the Inquisition, Afghanistan under the Taliban, or today’s United States.
People cheered, because of course: anyone who even threatens to hire a lawyer to denounce a drawing has already lost. Cartoonists in this sense had no better friend than Trump, who constantly tried to block unfriendly renderings, including a Nick Anderson cartoon showing him and his followers drinking bleach as a Covid-19 cure (the Trump campaign reportedly called Anderson’s drawing of MAGA hats a trademark infringement). A lot of the anti-Trump cartoons were neither creative nor funny — if “He’s gay and has a little dick!” is the best you can do with that politician, you probably need a new line of work — and were only rescued by Trump’s preposterous efforts to defend his dignity. You can’t police a person’s private instinct to laugh, and there’s nothing funnier than watching someone try, especially if that person is already a sort-of billionaire and the president.
Saturday Night Live even commemorated the release of the Mueller report and the death of the collusion theory not by making fun of themselves, or the thousands of pundits, politicians, and other public figures who spent three years insisting it was true, but by doing yet another “Shirtless Putin” skit, with mournful Putin declaring, “I am still powerful guy, even if Trump doesn’t work for me!” I defy anyone to watch this and declare it was written by a comedian, and not someone like David Brock, or an Adam Schiff intern:
Humorists once made their livings airing out society’s forbidden thoughts, back when it was understood that a) we all had them and b) the things we suppressed and made us the most anxious also tended to be the things that made us laugh the most. Which brings us to Killed Cartoons: Casualties From the War on Free Expression.
Editor David Wallis put Killed Cartoons together in 2007, not long after the controversy involving the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which published a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed in September 2005. Wallis noted that American coverage of the controversy assiduously avoided showing the offending cartoons — I noted the same thing after the Hebdo massacre — which Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Doug Marlette insisted was tantamount to acquiescing to mob rule. This instinct is now ingrained in American journalism. On an almost daily basis, a public figure is forced to confess to various crimes against political orthodoxy, but readers are seldom told what exactly they’ve done, only that it was bad. Jay Leno is the latest to offer the Groveling Public Confession for what the New York Times only called “years of anti-Asian jokes,” without telling us what they were.
The confession was set in motion by a profile of actor and producer Gabrielle Union in Variety, in which she recounted an exchange between Leno and Simon Cowell in the offices of America’s Got Talent:
While filming a commercial interstitial in the “AGT” offices, she says the former “Tonight Show” host made a crack about a painting of Cowell and his dogs, saying the animals looked like food items at a Korean restaurant. The joke was widely perceived as perpetuating stereotypes about Asian people eating dog meat.
The Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) compiled “nine documented jokes” between 2002 and 2012 Leno made about Koreans or Chinese eating dog meat. (Koreans and Chinese do eat dog meat — there are even dog meat festivals — but whatever).
Rejected jokes weren’t hard to find even in the early 2000s because, Wallis wrote, editors “suppress compelling illustrations, editorial cartoons, and political comics out of fear — fear of angering advertisers, the publisher’s golf partners, the publisher’s wife, the local dogcatcher or the president of the United States, blacks, Asians, Hispanics, homophobes, gays, pro-choice advocates and antiabortion protesters alike, Catholics, Jews, and midwestern grannies…”
Even back in the 1990s and early 2000s, the “respectable” press often nixed cartoons precisely because they were funny. A genuine laugh to editors was a sign of trouble. Wallis tells of a cartoonist named J.P. Trostle from the Chapel Hill Herald, who in October 2001 tried to sell a cartoon in advance of a local Halloween Street party. “Unwise Halloween Costumes,” was the headline, above a picture of a boy trick-or-treating as a box of anthrax, and a couple at a keg party dressed as the Twin Towers (the man had a beanie hat with a dangling airplane). Wallis describes how Trostle showed sketches to editors and reporters hoping to build support. “The first thing they did was laugh at it,” he said. “The second thing they did was [say], ‘We are never going to run this.’”
It was the same thing when Bob Englehardt tried to test the statute of limitations on Holocaust humor. “Schindler’s Other List” was just a piece of paper with the words Eggs, Milk, Coffee, Bread on it — obviously funny, but killed by the Hartford Courant in 1993. There are many other stories involving ideas that were just a little too much like laughing at real things for newspaper editors even a generation ago, like Christ carrying an electric chair up a hill, the Pope ascending to heaven in a plexiglass-covered chariot, or another Pope (Popes are funny) holding a staff in the shape of a coat hanger.
Killed Cartoons is a history of a time when editors and cartoonists alike were trying to toe the line between what people found funny in private, and what was considered acceptable fodder for public ridicule. We’re way past that now, when we’re not supposed to have unwholesome thoughts either in public or in private. In fact, the whole concept of private thoughts has become infamous. Why does anyone needprivate opinions, in a society where the right opinions on every question are known, and should be safe to say publicly?
“A cultural low point of 2015,” wrote Bret Easton Ellis in White, “was the effort by at least two hundred members of PEN America, a leading literary organization to which most writers belong, to not present the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris with a newly established Freedom of Expression Courage Award.”
Ellis, whose 2019 book attracted even more public disgust than Charlie Hebdo’s latest cover, went on to blast the writers who decided honoring Hebdo would be “valorizing selectively offensive material.” The award was ultimately given, because there were more PEN members who believed the magazine deserved the award, but, Ellis wrote:
There were still two hundred who were offended and felt Charlie Hebdo went “too far” in its satire, which suggested there was a limited number of targets that humorists and satirists were allowed to pursue.
It made sense that Ellis would be upset about Americans disowning Charlie Hebdo. He’s famous for producing maybe the last unashamedly tasteless work of satire to win critical acclaim in this country. American Psycho was successful in part because so many of the people who found it so entertaining didn’t realize they were being stabbed or chainsawed in its pages. That book was about what happens when a society governed by openly insane values requires its citizens to wear a mask of normalcy. The deeper you try to bury the contradictions, the worse the sickness gets, and the book argued we were very sick already by the late eighties and early nineties.
In White, Ellis describes the Wall Street bros he tried to study for American Psycho. They were straight white dudes who traveled in packs and probably grew up bullying anyone who was different using words like “faggot,” but now, as the cadet-corps leaders of “youthful ‘80s Reagan-era excess,” they appropriated “the standard hallmarks of gay male culture” rather than talk about who they really were:
During my initial research I’d been frustrated by their evasions about what exactly they did for the companies where they worked — information I felt was necessary, but finally realized really wasn’t. I was surprised instead by their desire to show off their crazy materialistic lifestyles: the hip, outrageously priced restaurants they could get reservations at, the cool Hamptons summer rentals and, especially, their expensive haircuts and tanning regimens and gym memberships and grooming routines.
American Psycho was a book that many people loved, so long as they were certain it described someone else, a monster. In fact, what made the humor work, and elevated it above a compendium of snide put-downs of Wall Street jerks, was that it described an inner monologue familiar to most of us.
In a country that worshipped the Nike image of the fit, informed, socially-concerned go-getter, but really judged us by our skill in crushing neighbors as capitalist competitors and fleecing the public as dupes — without question, Pierce and Pierce would eventually have been a leading marketer of mortgage-backed securities — the book’s serial killer hero Patrick Bateman was an utterly typical exemplar of the American species. The realization of his ordinariness, of society’s lack of interest or surprise at his murderous inner life, was central to the protagonist’s horrific punchline epiphany.
Ellis talks about how things in this country haven’t changed since American Psycho, but are “more exaggerated, more accepted.” Would the more heavily-surveilled America we live in now “prevent [Bateman] from getting away with the murders he at least tells the reader he’s committed…?” He’d at least have to work harder at his disguise. Would he “haunt social media as a troll using fake avatars… have a Twitter account bragging about his accomplishments”? Ellis notes that “during Patrick’s 80’s reign, he still had the ability to hide, a possibility that simply doesn’t exist in our fully exhibitionist society.”
In American Psycho, Bateman is a monster in private, and everything else is mask, from his spearmint facial scrub to his fake tan to his interminable conversations about business card fonts and rehearsed opinions on everything from feeding the homeless and achieving world peace.
In 2021, we’re all mask, and it shines through in White that what drives Ellis batty is that modern Americans not only believe the phony opinions they get from memorizing the latestsacredtexts of the Times bestseller list (a fashion obsession no different from the Zegna suits worshipped by the American Psycho bros), but require that everyone else believe them too.
The penalties for deviance were once mostly self-imposed, by people who feared losing a little social status — “I want to fit in,” Bateman explained — but any person who wants to earn a living now must recite The Pieties, or else. Even someone like James Gunn, director of The Guardians of the Galaxy, someone who made over a billion dollars for his employers, could be fired for tweeting jokes like “Three Men and a Baby They Had Sex With #unromantic movies” and “The Hardy Boys and The Mystery of What It Feels Like When Uncle Bernie Fists Me #SadChildrensBooks.” Gunn’s idea for an alternate ending to The Giving Tree — “the tree grows back and gives the kid a blowjob” — seemed funny to me until I learned that a serious movement was really underway to “rethink” the book.
Author Shel Silverstein mainly just hated happy endings, but now stands accused of having created a model for abusive relationships in the story of a tree that keeps giving apples to a kid, who keeps taking them. “You don’t have to give until it hurts” chided one New York Times columnist, to child readers and, I guess, trees.
In a genuinely comic development, Gunn was re-hired, mainly because his initial firing was the result of a conservative prank. Right-wing provocateurs like Mike Cernovich and Jack Posobiec correctly guessed Hollywood could be conned into firing even a major rainmaker over nonsense. When Gunn was rehabilitated, the press cast him as a martyr to the cause of anti-Trumpism, targeted by right-wing fiends who “combed through Gunn’s social media history after Gunn’s criticism of President Donald Trump.” Meanwhile, one of the film’s stars, Chris Pratt, is still fighting off his own controversy, which literally started with a joke — which Hollywood Chris should be fired, a Tweeter asked — and morphed into a serious “backlash” in which Forbes explained that Pratt’s decision to not attend a virtual fundraiser for Joe Biden “has led to the belief that Pratt is secretly a Trump supporter.”
White came out two years ago, in April of 2019, and was reviewed savagely. Critics from Vox to NPR to the Guardian agreed White was the work of a bitter has-been sexist and misogynist whose “rambling mess of cultural commentary and self-aggrandizement” might never have been published if, Bookforum’s Andrea Long Chu suggested, “Ellis’s millennial boyfriend had simply shown the famous man how to use the mute feature on Twitter.” Virtually every review was a Mad Libs exercise in rearranging words like old, whiny, rich, petty, aggrieved, and boring (reviewers universally agreed the book was boring).
Every review focused on the politics of the book, describing as a tirade against cancel culture, left censorship, “snowflakes,” and “hysterics” who can’t take criticism. Ellis’s invocation of the term “Generation Wuss” to describe millennials, who do not come off well either in the book or in the interviews he gave after its release, figures in almost every review by younger writers, who of course gave back in kind. In a format that’s by now standard when criticizing almost any brand of transgressing celebrity, from Pratt to Ellen DeGeneres to Kirstie Alley, reviewers made a point of reminding us that not only is Ellis terrible now, but that on some level he’s always been terrible, even when we thought he was good. Bookforum even managed to wing J.D. Salinger in the crossfire.
“Like The Catcher in the Rye before it and Fight Club after it,” the site wrote, “American Psycho is a book designed to convince comfortable white men that they are, in fact, ‘outsiders and monsters and freaks.’” (That the book was about the opposite — a world where “no one can tell anyone else apart” and even ax-murdering Patrick Bateman ultimately learns he’s just a face in the crowd — is irrelevant). The strongest sentiment in all the reviews was a desire that Ellis just shut the fuck up. “One longs to tell him what the Rolling Stones told Trump: Please stop,” wrote Chu. NPR got more to the point. “Most of us carry around an invisible rosary of resentments to fiddle with in petty moments,” wrote Annalisa Quinn. “Most of us also know to keep these grudges private.”
The actual dictum isn’t just to keep unwelcome thoughts private, but to not have them at all. But people can’t control what they find funny. In Killed Cartoons, an African-American cartoonist describes bringing a cartoon depicting him sharing a giant bag of crack with prostitutes to an editor. “Why do you have to say that?” the editor asked. What’s the message? “It’s funny!” he replied. “It’s a giant bag of crack!” The panel ended up rejected, for fear of offending the paper’s “large white liberal readership.”
The new movement thinks it’s stamping out harmful jokes about disadvantaged groups, but truly cruel or bigoted material tends not to win real laughs. There are exceptions — people thought Eddie Murphy’s “faggots will kick your ass” jokes were funny once — but what people mostly laugh at are things that are true, which is the problem with telling people you can’t think or laugh about funny things even in private. People will either go mad, or else they’ll start laughing at you, which is why we’re already seeing something I never thought I would in my lifetime — the humor business drifting into the arms of conservatives. Humor is about saying the unsayable, and most of the comics who insist on still doing it are either denounced as reactionaries, like Charlie Hebdo or Joe Rogan or even Dave Chappelle, or else they were openly conservative to begin with. The Babylon Bee is marketed as something from one of my childhood nightmares (“Your trusted source for Christian news satire”), and the fact that it’s now exponentially more likely to be funny than Stephen Colbert feels like a sign of the End-Times.
In White, Ellis writes about the seemingly inexplicable appeal of Charlie Sheen in Two and a Half Men, writing that his stunned disgust as he “staggered amiably through a bad sitcom” was what attracted audiences, because “not giving a fuck about what the public thinks about you or your personal life is actually what matters most… the public will respond to you because you’re free and that’s exactly what they all desire.” People are attracted to humorists for the same reason; they’re saying what we can’t. If there’s no room for such people anymore, we’re in a lot of trouble. People can only go without laughing for so long.
“Absolutely An Open Border Situation”: Sen. Lankford Gives Firsthand Account Of Border Crisis
Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford (R) has given a firsthand account of the chaos at the US-Mexico border – joining Texas GOP Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn for a tour of the situation after visiting a migrant detention facility and a processing location.
For a side-by-side comparison, the first photo is from my trip to the border in 2019–the second is from today. Plenty of space to walk around and safely spread out. Tell me this isn’t a crisis. https://t.co/ING6lsNYorpic.twitter.com/ujQXNxkQKD
In a Thursday Facebook post, Lankford said he watched “hundreds of people being allowed in tonight.”
“No criminal background check from their home country, no COVID testing, no verification that the child you are traveling with is related. If a 25 year old male claims to be 17, he is allowed into the country as an unaccompanied minor.”
“This is absolutely an open-border situation,” Lankford said in more videos posted to his YouTube channel:
Why are US Senators doing the job of the mainstream press?
In the below video, Dr. Sal Mercogliano, Associate Professor of History of History at Campbell University and Adjunct Professor at the United States Merchant Marine Academy, along with Captain John Konrad, Founder and CEO of gCaptain, discuss the situation in the Suez Canal with the grounding of the Evergreen containership MV Ever Given.
John and Sal discuss what could have caused the event, what is being done now to clear the ship from the channel, the impact the closure of the canal is having on world trade and commerce, and why this issue should be important not only to shippers, but the government, the military, and every human on the planet since 90% of all goods are moved by sea.
The city of Oakland, Calif., has just launched a universal basic income program, providing low-income families $500 per month, with absolutely no strings attached regarding how they must spend it. According to a report from CBS News, this program, which is privately-funded, “is the latest experiment with a ‘guaranteed income,’ the idea that giving low-income individuals a regular, monthly stipend helps ease the stresses of poverty and results in better health and upward economic mobility.”
The “Oakland Resilient Families” program has so far raised $6.75 million from private donors including Blue Meridian Partners, a national philanthropy group.
To be eligible, individuals must have at least one child under the age 18 and an income that is at or below 50% of the area median income – about $59,000 per year for a family of three.
Half the spots are reserved for people who earn less than 138% of the federal poverty level, or about $30,000 per year for a family of three. Participants will be randomly selected from a pool of applicants who meet the eligibility requirements.
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Oakland’s project is significant because it is one of the largest efforts in the U.S. so far, targeting up to 600 families. And it is the first program to limit participation strictly to Black, Indigenous and people of color communities.
Well, according to the report, the reason white families are excluded from the program is that, according to the “Oakland Equity Index” – I dare not ask – white households in Oakland make an average of three times as much as black households annually.
So, if you’re poor, white, and live in Oakland, California, you still gotta check your privilege because… white supremacy… I guess?
The exclusion of low-income but white (LIBW) families is also “a nod to the legacy of the Black Panther Party, the political movement that was founded in Oakland in the 1960s,” according to the report.
Apparently, honoring the Black Panther’s legacy means discriminating against white people.
I’m no fan of the universal basic income concept, but if you’re going to have one, having a race-based requirement is racist no matter how you look at it.
Proponents of this racist UBI program would probably argue that since it’s privately funded, the organization behind it can set whatever guidelines it wants. Imagine if a privately funded UBI program was limited to white families. Wouldn’t that be racist? Of course, it would! Also, the city of Oakland is still managing the program.
Sorry, LIBWs, because white families on average are more wealthy than families of color, you don’t deserve anything to “ease the stresses of poverty” that may “result in better health and upward economic mobility.”
Indeed, as RT reports, Russian energy giant Rosatom is promoting a North Sea route (recently cleared of dangerous ice flows). The effort started with a series of half-joking tweets sent last night. In the thread, Rosatom offered three reasons why Russia’s strategic shipping route through the Arctic might be a viable alternative to the Suez, despite the cold and the ice. Fortunately, as Rosatom pointed out, if a container ship gets stuck in the ice, an ice-breaker ship could be quickly dispatched to help.
The first one stemmed from tracking data that showed the ship drew a giant phallus in the Red Sea before it got jammed. The state-run corporation cheekily pointed out that the Northern Sea Route offers much more space for drawing naughty pictures with the help of a giant cargo ship.
And what better way to open one’s audience up to new possibilities than with a crude joke? In its first tweet, Rosatom said there would be plenty more room for ships to draw “crude images” in the Arctic. The tweets have since been deleted, but the first one read: “Thread: reasons to consider Northern Sea Route as a viable alternative to the Suez Canal Route1. Way more space to draw peculiar pictures using your giant ships.”
Roasatom followed up the penis joke with a more serious (and valid) point about breaking the ice: “If you get icebound, we have icebreakers, well to break the ice.”
For the third tweet, Rosatom shared a gif featuring the lead character from the 1997 American spy-comedy film “Austin Powers” showing Powers stuck in a shuttle carriage that’s moving back and forth in a narrow tunnel. The gif has become fodder for one of the most popular memes about the Ever Given’s current predicament.
Russia has cited the develoment of the Northern Sea Route as one of its key strategic priorities. In January, Minister of National Resources and Environment Dmitry Kobylkin said cargo shipping in Russia’s northernmost territorial waters would top 80MM tons as early as 2024.
Why? Because the Russian Arctic offers the shortest route linking Europe and Asia. As Rosatom pointed out, a trip from Murmansk to Japan on the Northern Sea Route is 5,770 miles, compared with 12,840 miles if one were to travel through the Suez Canal route.
Perhaps this latest crisis will help Russia achieve their target more quickly than officials had anticipated?
If you’re a wage earner, retiree, or a lowly saver, your wealth is in imminent danger.
A lifetime of schlepping and saving could be rapidly vaporized over the next several years. In fact, the forces towards this end have already been set in motion.
Indeed, there are many forces at work. But at the moment, the force above all forces is the extreme levels of money printing being jointly carried out by the Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury.
Fed Chairman Jay Powell and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen have linked arms to crank up the printing presses in tandem.
This is what’s driving markets to price things – from copper to digital NFT art – in strange and shocking ways. But what’s behind the money printing?
Surely it’s more than progressive politics – under the guise of virus recovery – run amok.
Where to begin?
The U.S. national debt is a good place to start. And the U.S. national debt is now over $28 trillion. Is that a big number?
As far as we can tell, $28 trillion is a really big number…even in the year 2021. How do we know it’s a big number, aside from counting the twelve zeros that fall after the 28?
We know $28 trillion is a big number based on our everyday experience using dollars to buy goods and services. You can still buy a lot of stuff with $28 trillion. In truth, $28 trillion is so big it’s hard to comprehend.
Nonetheless, $28 trillion is not as big a number today as it was in 1950. Back then, the relative bigness of $28 trillion was much larger. It was unfathomable.
Crime of the Century
The points is, with paper dollars as legal tender the bigness of $28 trillion is relative. Moreover, with policies of mass dollar debasement in effect, tomorrow’s bigness of $28 trillion will be much different than today’s.
What if $28 trillion isn’t such a big number after all?
What if, through sleight of hand, $28 trillion could be made less big?
What if the relative bigness of $28 trillion could be dropped an order of magnitude so that it had a commensurate value of $2.8 trillion?
A national debt that’s on relative par with $2.8 trillion would be much more convenient for the goons in Washington. It would finagle the U.S. national debt to GDP ratio from over 130 percent to a relative 13 percent.
This may sound crazy. But it has been done before…
One of the unspoken objectives of the Fed’s monetary policy is to inflate the debt away. Powell won’t explicitly say this. He doesn’t have too. His actions tell you everything you need to know.
But what you may not know is that dollar debasement, as a matter of fiscal and monetary policy, bailed out the U.S. government in the 20th century. Powell and Yellen are endeavoring to pull off this crime of the century once again.
If you recall, in 1946, at the conclusion of WWII, the U.S. national debt to GDP ratio was 118 percent. Yet by 1981 the debt to GDP ratio had declined to just 31 percent. It has been rising ever since.
Vigorous economic growth in the 1950s and 1960s had a hand in growing the economy out of debt. But more important was the role of dollar debasement. Check this out…
The Bureau of Labor Statics own Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation calculator shows that $1.00 in January 1946 had the same buying power as $5.16 in December 1981. Similarly, it took $1.00 in December 1981 to buy what $0.19 could buy in January 1946.
Thus, over this 35 year period, the dollar lost 81 percent. Four fifths of its value was inflated away by the Fed and the Treasury. That’s downright criminal.
There’s a Serious Flaw to the Team Powell-Yellen Inflation Scheme
As you can see, dollar debasement policies inflated a significant part of the national debt away. However, achieving this feat was remarkably destructive.
To halt the flight of gold from American soil, the U.S. government closed the gold window at the Treasury in 1971. This implicit default ended the Bretton Woods agreement. The Treasury stiffed America’s trading partners unconditionally.
“The dollar is our currency, but it’s your problem,” remarked Treasury Secretary John Connally to his astonished European counterparts at the G-10 Rome meetings in late 1971.
After Nixon removed the discipline of gold from the world monetary system the money supply could be inflated without limits. For American consumers, this quickly translated into raging price inflation. Things got ugly quick.
By 1980, the CPI was at 13.5 percent and the yield on the 30 Year Treasury hit 15 percent. Fed Chairman Paul Volcker had to jack the federal funds rate up over 20 percent to keep prices from coming completely uncorked. The price of gold spiked from $35 per ounce to over $800.
Volcker’s efforts may have temporarily salvaged the dollar. But they didn’t solve the debt problem. Instead they laid a faulty foundation for an even larger debt edifice to be erected upon.
This brings us to the present state of awfulness. Another implicit default is needed to reckon the Treasury’s books.
Aside from the fraud, chicanery, balderdash, and Montreal Screwjob of it all, there’s a serious flaw to the Team Powell-Yellen inflation scheme…
How can dollar debasement policies aimed at inflating away the debt ever succeed when it’s these very policies that induce the massive growth of debt in the first place?
