Two Reasons

Insty linked to this post yesterday:

Retailers and logistics operators are struggling to find space to store the flood of goods that have swamped warehouses and weighed on their balance sheets.

Warehouse owners say more retailers are looking to add storage capacity, both for goods now reaching their networks of stores and distribution centers and as they prepare to keep more inventory on hand long-term to guard against stock-outs.

Well, yes.

What the article does not mention is that “forward buying” (the industry term for this activity) is also a retailer’s hedge against inflation:  buy at today’s price, to sell at tomorrow’s (higher) inflated price, and use the profits to forward buy still more, until inflation comes back down.

We Americans have been sheltered from the latter by our traditionally-low inflation rate. but now we’re going to feel just like consumers in Third World countries, for whom continuously-high inflation is an everyday fact of life.

Yet another reason to hate this fucking Democrat government.

Roll on November 2022, and roll on November 2024 even more quickly.

Dept. Of Righteous Shootings

Mostly, I define a self-defense shooting as Righteous only when the goblin dies, but I’ll make an exception in this case:

When convenience store owner Craig Cope noticed on surveillance cameras that armed men were going to enter his store, he moved strategically around the counter and grabbed his shotgun.
Cope, video footage shows, quickly fired at the first armed suspect who entered the store, sending him and the other men fleeing.
“He shot my arm off!” one of the armed suspects is heard yelling on obtained surveillance footage.

Should have been your fucking head, is all I have to say.  But, this wounding was actually a Good Thing, because it led to all four scumbags being arrested at the hospital later.

The embedded video at the link will make y’all giggle like schoolgirls.

Garbage In, Etc.

Back in the Blogging Dark Ages, when I was still a Junior Blogger, my first online argument came with Steve Appell (I think) from none other than Scientific American  magazine.

I blogged that the data underlying the climate scare was suspect, whereupon he came after me and asked whether I had a degree in climatology.  I replied in the negative, of course, but added that while lacking in that august qualification that my argument was not against the weather, but the data collected thereof — and when it came to predictive modeling, I very much knew what I was talking about, having been a statistician and data analyst pretty much all my working life, and that some of the models I’d been involved in were fantastically accurate — up to 95% accuracy.

Of course, the weather models then (and now) extant were completely hopeless  — not one had ever come close to predicting any kind of reality — and the principle reason was because the data collection methodology was clearly flawed, as the weather / climate measurement station locations had become unrepresentative.

So here we come to today, and nothing has changed — in fact, things have got worse:

ARLINGTON HEIGHTS, IL (July 27, 2022) – A new study, Corrupted Climate Stations: The Official U.S. Surface Temperature Record Remains Fatally Flawed, finds approximately 96 percent of U.S. temperature stations used to measure climate change fail to meet what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) considers to be “acceptable” and  uncorrupted placement by its own published standards.

The research shows that 96% of these stations are corrupted by localized effects of urbanization – producing heat-bias because of their close proximity to asphalt, machinery, and other heat-producing, heat-trapping, or heat-accentuating objects. Placing temperature stations in such locations violates NOAA’s own published standards (see section 3.1 at this link), and strongly undermines the legitimacy and the magnitude of the official consensus on long-term climate warming trends in the United States.

“With a 96 percent warm-bias in U.S. temperature measurements, it is impossible to use any statistical methods to derive an accurate climate trend for the U.S.” said Heartland Institute Senior Fellow Anthony Watts, the director of the study. “Data from the stations that have not been corrupted by faulty placement show a rate of warming in the United States reduced by almost half compared to all stations.”

It’s like putting a thermometer in your home to measure the ambient temperature, and then when you buy a wood stove and install it right next to the thermometer, not moving the measuring device to another part of the room.

I’d suggest incompetence, but when the flaws are so obviously designed to support a political theory (which is what modern-day climate “science” has become), we can only call it malfeasance.  As with all things of this nature, the solution is self-evident:

Damn Good Question

I know that the Socialists in Congress have “shelved” their attempt to ban “weapons of war” i.e. ARs and AKs (for the moment), but this little exchange should prove interesting:

As Massie puts it (I paraphrase slightly):  “Who are the Department of Agriculture and Department of Education planning on going to war with, if their employees are to be excepted from this prohibition?”

Let us record the words of the late (and dearly-missed) H.L. Mencken, who stated:

“The only good bureaucrat is one with a pistol to his head.  Put it in his hand and it’s goodbye to the Bill of Rights.”

And quod erat demonstratum, today.

Grim Enjoyment

We all know that the economy sucks — well, all except the White House and other socialists:

The United States economy contracted in the second quarter of 2022, marking the second consecutive quarter registering no growth. Economists expected the economy to grow by 0.3 percent, but the GDP shrank by 0.9 percent in the second quarter.

It is commonly considered a recession after two straight quarters of negative growth, although the Biden administration is now in the business of challenging the definition.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, for example, overtly denied that definition, as did White House economic adviser Brian Deese.

Of course they would.

One just wonders how they’re going to spin the Chip Diller routine when consecutive quarters #3, #4, #5 and #6 all show negative growth.

Useless socialist bastards.

Deterrent

Am I the only one sick of news reports of people murdering out of love?  I know that it’s probably due to my choice of news outlets — who never miss a chance for a sensational “Romeo Kills Juliet!” story — but this seems to be becoming a distressingly-familiar story:  Boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl tells him to get lost, boy murders girl.  Or the reverse:

Blaze Wallace is charged with the murder of Samuel Mayo, 34, in Lower Richmond Road on Monday, July 18. They had become engaged in June.
‘Witnesses have confirmed there was an argument that evening between the victim and the defendant and the defendant tell Mr Mayo to “pack his bags and leave” approximately 45 minutes before he was fatally stabbed.’
Police attended the one-bedroom flat Wallace had shared with her fiancé for the previous six months and she was arrested on suspicion of his murder at 2.25am in the early hours of July 19.

By the way:  the murderous bitch was a lawyer, not some drugged-up hooker.

After all this nonsense, I can only say that I rejoice in this legal decision:

An Egyptian court is planning to broadcast the live hanging of a killer who stabbed a student to death when she turned down his marriage proposal.
Mohamed Adel, 21, was found guilty of murdering his Mansoura University classmate Naira Ashraf when she turned him down, with the court sentencing him to death on July 6.
The court has now called for his execution to be broadcast live to deter similar crimes from happening in future.

We need more of this, and I’m not just being bloodthirsty, this time.  One of the reasons for public executions was that people could see the consequence of murder.  I know that some (e.g. professional hitmen) might be unswayed by the prospect of their lifeless bodies swaying in the breeze, but for the amateur killers like the two scumbags above, there might just be a little hesitation before reaching for the carving knife.

I know, I know:  in today’s fainting-couch culture, people would be traumatized by the occasional public garrotting — but that’s precisely the point, isn’t it?

Murder is a horrible, ghastly business, and the less it and its consequences are sanitized, the better for society as a whole.