Clueless

I know that politicians are completely ignorant about everything not political or legal — and even then, they’re not especially bright — but Elizabethan ignorance on everything can only be truly appreciated by acknowledging her academic credentials.  [/snark]

Even by her own heritage of ignorance, however, Elizabeth Warren’s latest broadside against Big Grocery must rank among her greatest cock-ups.

“What happens when only a handful of giant grocery store chains like Kroger dominate an industry? They can force high food prices onto Americans while raking in record profits.” Warren claimed that “a handful of giant chains” had replaced the wide selection of smaller stores that used to dot the American landscape, and she called for the use of the government’s antitrust power to “break up these giant corporations.”

Ah yes… let’s blame an industry for price gouging — an industry that traditionally runs on 0.75% net profit margins.

Remember, by the way, that while I know a few things about some things, and almost nothing about a whole lot more, when it comes to the supermarket business, I know everything about it.  That’s not a brag, nor even an exaggeration;  it’s what comes from close to a third of a century of experience in and around the industry.

So hear me now when I saw that Reason Magazine’s Joe Lancaster has it exactly right:

In actuality, for much of the last year, grocery stores have seen enormous boosts in revenue, but not increased profitability, for the simple reason that everything has been costing more:  not just products, but transportation, employee compensation, and all the extra logistical steps needed to adapt to shopping during a pandemic.  Couple that with persistent inflation—which Warren also recently blamed on “price gouging”—and it is no wonder that things seem a bit out of balance.

She is clueless, a fraud and incompetent.  All she has is Marxist dialectic by which to formulate her idiotic positions on every topic under the sun — dialectic which when translated into policy has boasted a record of 100% failure — and the sooner the citizens of Massachusetts vote this moron out of office, the better the country will become.

Smoke And Fire

One of the worst decisions ever made — by a whole bunch of people, not just one — was to allow Chinese scientists to come to the United States and study in our peerless university research facilities.  No doubt this was done for all sorts of noble reasons, such  as spreading scientific discoveries around the world for the betterment of all, etc.

However:

Former GlaxoSmithKline Scientist Pleads Guilty to Stealing Trade Secrets for Chinese Pharma

and:

Chinese Man Pleads Guilty To Stealing Trade Secrets From St. Louis-Based Company To Benefit The Chinese Government

That’s just in last week’s news.  There have been many, many more such incidents, and they were all completely preventable.

What bothers me is that there has been no concerted effort to stop this theft / espionage, by deporting all Chinese-born scientists out of our universities and research institutions.

That inactivity can be laid at the feet of our government.

Comply, Or Be Gone

What if your research (involving actual facts as opposed to feelings and/or dogma) shows that your employer’s cultural Zeitgeist  is completely wrong?

Silly boy;  if the corporation you work for is full of Marxism and Wokedom, you’re going to get defenestrated.

Which is what happened to this guy:

Zac Kriegman had the ideal résumé for the professional-managerial class: a bachelors in economics from Michigan and a J.D. from Harvard and years of experience with high-tech startups, a white-shoe law firm, and an econometrics research consultancy. He then spent six years at Thomson Reuters Corporation, the international media conglomerate, spearheading the company’s efforts on artificial intelligence, machine learning, and advanced software engineering. By the beginning of 2020, Kriegman had assumed the title of Director of Data Science and was leading a team tasked with implementing deep learning throughout the organization.
But within a few months, this would all collapse. A chain of events—beginning with the death of George Floyd and culminating with a statistical analysis of Black Lives Matter’s claims—would turn the 44-year-old data scientist’s life upside-down.

By June 2021, Kriegman would be locked out of Reuters’s servers, denounced by his colleagues, and fired by email. Kriegman had committed an unpardonable offense: he directly criticized the Black Lives Matter movement in the company’s internal communications forum, debunked Reuters’s own biased reporting, and violated a corporate taboo. Driven by what he called a “moral obligation” to speak out, Kriegman refused to celebrate unquestioningly the BLM narrative and his company’s “diversity and inclusion” programming; to the contrary, he argued that Reuters was exhibiting significant left-wing bias in the newsroom and that the ongoing BLM protests, riots, and calls to “defund the police” would wreak havoc on minority communities. Week after week, Kriegman felt increasingly disillusioned by the Thomson Reuters line. Finally, on the first Tuesday in May 2021, he posted a long, data-intensive critique of BLM’s and his company’s hypocrisy. He was sent to Human Resources and Diversity & Inclusion for the chance to reform his thoughts.

He refused—so they fired him.

I love the “chance to reform his thoughts” line — straight outta 1984, minus the rat cage strapped to his face.  His only mistake was going to HR at all — what did he think was going to happen?  Now go and read the rest of it to see the full extent of the rot.

For the umpteenth time, I am truly grateful that I no longer have to work for Global MegaCorp, Inc.

And final thought:

If the wire services continue to promote myths about race, violence, and policing, they will inflict grave harm on their reputations for fairness; they will also help unleash a new wave of destruction in America’s poorest and most vulnerable neighborhoods.

Both have already happened… and I don’t care if it gets worse.

Dickhead Alert

Adding stupidity to enmity, we have this priceless pearl of wisdom:

“Israel is a racist European ethnostate built on stolen land from its indigenous population!”

Let’s take this little sentiment apart, shall we?

If we’re talking Israelis and Arabs, it can’t be “racist”, you flaming asshole, because both Israelis and Arabs are of the same race, i.e. Semitic.  It’s like a Londoner being accused of racism for calling a Liverpudlian a “fucking Scouser” — they’re the same people.

If your hostility is directed towards the concept of an “ethnostate”, then yes, Israel is by definition an ethnostate — Jewish — as are all the -stans:  Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Iran, Iraq, etc. — all Muslim.  (Also, Arabs and Christians may live and practice their religion in Israel — unlike the reverse in any Muslim nation.)

And the Jews are “European” only in recent historical terms — having had their land stolen from them by Romans and Arabs, and forced to flee north into Europe, a.k.a the Diaspora.  In terms of heredity, they’re as European as, say, Pakistanis living in London.

We brushed on the “stolen land” concept above, but the continuing fallacy of Jews having pushed Arabs out of Palestine is nonsense — Jews have lived in Palestine for thousands of years, and have just as much if not more right to the land than the scattered Arab tribes (indigenous, my ass) in the area.  You may as well say that the Jews stole the land from the Hittites while you’re about it.  (Speaking of Palestine:  there’s no such thing as “Palestinian” — they’re Arabs.)

Finally, it should be known that this asswipe, Hussain Altamimi, is a legislative assistant to Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (Soc, NY), and it’s small wonder that he’s found a happy home there, she being of the same anti-Semitic persuasion as he, the Commie bitch.

Defunding Consequences

Aaaaaand once again, we see “well-meaning” actions having unforeseen consequences — unforeseen only by those without common sense and / or brains, that is.

Last year, Burlington, Vermont, cut its police budget by nearly 30% through attrition. Now, people are afraid to speak up because they know they’ll be called “racist.”

It’s been more than a year and a half since the city cut its police budget, and now even the city councilor who proposed the cut is unhappy with the consequences.

Oh, and what consequences would those be in sleepy little Burlington VT, home to so many hippies, academics and Lefties? [some overlap]

The move to slash the police budget, however, has led city leaders, as NBC reported, “to reckon with the unintended consequences of that decision, including problems with public safety and quality of life, police and residents say.”

The unintended consequences of the resolution apparently showed up quickly, NBC reported. The council thought attrition would take years, but it was completed in months, leaving the police department understaffed. Police officers left en masse, leaving only about five to patrol at night. The police have had to shift focus to high-priority crimes and less on quality of life issues. Burglary, vehicle theft, mental health issues, and overdoses all increased with fewer cops on patrol.

You don’t say.

Local business owner Mark Bouchett told NBC that people were afraid to speak out about the problems that have arisen due to the reduced police force.
“If you speak out against defunding the police force, you’re labeled a racist,” he told NBC. “Or at least an idiot that doesn’t understand the problem.”

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of Lefty assholes.  It’s just too bad that the good (conservative) folks of that part of Vermont have to suffer the consequences as well.

At least they’re not unarmed…

Turning Brownouts Into Blackouts

In the latest insanity emanating from California, we see this:

The California Air Resources Board (CARB) passed a regulation aimed at “Small Off-Road Engines” on Thursday that will ban the sale of portable generators in the state — which includes generators mounted in recreational vehicles.
The ruling bans the sale of gas-powered leaf blowers and lawnmowers in the state beginning in 2024. Portable generators will be required to meet more stringent standards in 2024 and meet zero-emission standards starting in 2028.
In the 2024 model year, portable generators will have to improve their efficiency by somewhere between 40% and 90%, which seems unrealistic in such a short period of time, so the reality is, it will be very hard to find a generator in Cailfornia in two years.

The song will be rewritten to show that the lights all went out not in Massachusetts, but California.

Morons, fools, imbeciles.


N.B.:  Insty wants to open up a portable jennie store in Nevada, just over the CA border.  Won’t work:  California will be stationing some Stasi state agents in the parking lot to report the car numbers back to the Fuehrer HQ , and woe betide the CA plates caught “smuggling” generators back into the Dark State.)