The cup overflows with thought provoking reactions for this COTW. Wency on the drop in the stock price of liberal white women: Democracy is a zero sum game. That's why it generates so much anger and resentment. Wency again on the two most famous dystopian novels of the 20th century (with Fahrenheit 451 occupying the... Read More

One thing BlackRock's voracious acquisition of residential real estate across the country at rates far in excess of market listings indicates is that the econoclysm we're early on in won't be a repeat of 2008. Inflation isn't transitory, it's perennial. If the Fed had any intention of raising rates, BlackRock wouldn't be paying 30% above... Read More

Consumer prices beat consensus estimates for the fifth consecutive month. Again, we're told it's transitory. It was another bad month of weather for the harvests just like it's another bad month for the cost of cars. Even if the annualized rate falls back from 6% to 2%--which it won't--it wouldn't be transitory. Transitory requires the... Read More

Dfordoom wants to abolish the intelligence agencies: They do a lot of bad things, like violate civil liberties, assassinate foreigners, frame citizens, and lie countries civilization-destroying wars. On the other hand, they're woke. You're not a white supremacist, a sexist, a nativist, a homophobe, an anti-Semite, and an ableist are you? Then you'll stand in... Read More

Search interest in the term "inflation" is so far 50% higher this May than it has been in any other month since Google began tracking query data nearly two decades ago: Nothing to see here. It hasn't anything to do with ordinary people seeing consumer prices going up in their everyday lives, no siree!

Rather than asserting that without slavery the United States would not have become as wealthy and technologically advanced as it is today, it seems the opposite is true--without ending slavery, the United States would not have ever become as wealthy and technologically advanced as it is today. And the perverse incentives and retarding aspects of... Read More

The Ron Paul moment may not have passed. Perhaps after lying dormant for a decade it is poised to return with a vengeance: Or perhaps having non-Democrats split and most of the left arrayed in opposition is too hostile an environment for the moment's renaissance. If it's not an idea whose time has yet come,... Read More

Wency on how below replacement fertility, Woke Capital, and high anxiety are just some of the blessings modern status striving has given us: Caspar von Everec offers speculation as to why foreign policy doesn't have the domestic purchase it used to have: Americans nowadays simply don’t care about foreign policy that much. That was a... Read More

If you have not yet reached forty years of age, you had not until this last month experienced the rate of consumer price increases Americans experienced in April. We have to journey all the way back to 1981 for that. How, with the labor force participation rate so low and so many jobs unfilled, can... Read More

Personal income in the US grew over 20% from February to March. March of 2021, the last month for which full data are available, was the most lucrative month in American history in terms of personal income--by a long shot! Not at all unrelatedly, March also set a new all time record trade deficit. The... Read More

Wency shares his impressions of aspiring members of the managerial class: My experience with actual top corporate leadership has been limited outside of extremely formal contexts, but I went to a reasonably elite MBA school, and most of my classmates went on to corporate work. None are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies yet (I follow... Read More

In the process of sleuthing through political campaign donations by industry to show how absurd the idea that Republicans are the party of Corporate America is, we stumble across an interesting albeit small industrial category: "Pro-Israel". Given the pro-Palestinian sentiments among many rank-and-file Democrat voters, the influence of Christian Zionism among rank-and-file Republicans, president Trump's... Read More

Like everything else in modern America, the Covid poke or parry is highly partisan: If there is a Covid kill switch, too many deplorables are going to escape it. If refusing to take the jab is playing Russian roulette with one's health, too many deplorables are going to... die? That doesn't sound like an outcome... Read More

Big business and the culture wars, a marriage made in heaven: Forget Democratic Socialism, the arc of history bends towards Woke Capitalism:

The latest expiration date for the national eviction moratorium, set by the CDC (!) is July 1. Over the last six months, an average of 5.9% of renters have failed to make rent. Over the same six month period one year ago, 4.0% failed to do so. That's a nearly 50% increase in payment delinquencies... Read More

All the corporatocracy had to do to neutralize the Occupy Wall Street movement was signal support for Wokeism. We'll cheer on transgender athletes and BIPOC Ivy League graduates, you let us grind the working and middle classes into the dirt while enacting the largest upward transfers of wealth in the history of the world. Deal?... Read More

Twinkie on health care: That sounds a lot like auto insurance. If companies provided auto insurance and in turn auto insurance covered oil changes and tire rotations, it'd be a lot more expensive, too. What about the relatively novel subscription model? It has exploded from nothing to hundreds of primary care facilities in the span... Read More

If it is necessary to calibrate the climate, calibrating it through technology rather than by Luddism is the preferable way to go about it: On the other hand, Bill Gates is critical of cryptocurrencies. Energy is a big cost to the blockchain: If the sun provides less light, electricity will have to provide more! Elon... Read More

Percentages professing support for maximum pro-choice permisiveness, defined as making it legal for a woman to have an abortion "for any reason", by social class: GSS variables used: ABANY, CLASS, YEAR(2008-2018)

Wency shares an interesting observation: Belief or lack thereof in God strongly correlates with belief or lack thereof in the sanctity of the unborn: This provides a pretense to dig a little deeper into the GSS to shed some light on an admittedly mostly academic question. Pro-choice percentages, defined as agreeing that a woman should... Read More

It's easier to eat a bowl of M&Ms than a bowl of broccoli, easier to watch TV than hit the gym, easier to fap to a screen than find a mate who knows what you mean. But from pressure comes power, from stress comes strength. Nothing happens to any man that he is not fitted... Read More

Conservatism is liberalism's shadow, part XXVIII: There is a lot of talk about how the socially conservative, economically leftist quadrant of the political compass is drastically underserved (while the socially liberal, economically 'conservative' is full of corporately-funded chiefs who don't have any indians). Maybe, but one thing that becomes apparent when sifting through social survey... Read More

Almost Missouri on the beta testing of the corporatist neo-liberal establishment that was the Trump presidency: The State of the Union will be a heavily militarized event. Trump was mocked for wanting a military parade through the capital during his term; now Joe Biden is getting a permanent one. The left used to recoil in... Read More

In a week we will have confirmation that January 2021 was the best month for American incomes in history, surpassing the old record set in April of 2020 at the epidemiological nadir and economic zenith of the Covid crisis. This miraculous feat will occur in spite of record trade deficits and weekly jobless claims being... Read More

If the UR commentariat thinks it's a bridge too far, dfordoom suspects the prospects elsewhere are grim: AaronB on how the elite uses the archetypal racist white prole in their morality play: It is the elites that are playing divide and conquer. They are trying to get you to focus on race and not on... Read More