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What matters? Well, New York City for one. We get to that topic towards the end of this show, but prior to that we visit first with economist Kevin Warsh of the Hoover Institution. He has a lot to say about humongous stimulus packages, Congress, the role of China in this thing, and what the Fed should and shouldn’t be doing. Then, newly minted Ricochet podcaster and chip the old block Spencer Klavan stops by to explain why he’s a heretic and we’re not (at least not yet). Needless to say (but we’ll say it anyway), Young Heretics, his new podcast is a must listen. Finally, as promised — a meditation on New York City, the lockdown, why it needs to end, and why what happens there matters for the rest of the country and yes, even the world. Yes, it really is up to you, New York, New York.
Music from this week’s show: New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down by LCD Soundsystem
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Spend the dollar to watch this. Then watch the long interview with David Stockman.
Do you ever wonder why conservatism and libertarianism can never keep much ground? This is why.
***Watch the William White interview first***
I enjoy a good challenge, but this was a tough one. At a stretch, the closest I can think of at the moment might be warnings about the renewed geological activity and potential imminent danger before Mount St. Helens finally blew.
But the difficulty of the challenge reinforces the main point. It’s almost never as bad as is warned.
And yes, I expect God finds our assumed confident certainties about the future to be humorous.
Before translation, it even rhymes.
The Rich always have one foot outside NYC. If they spend a larger proportion of their time away, the change would be incremental.
How did that happen? That always happens with leftist Democrat policies the aim to help the poor and supposed unfairly treated groups. Since most such groups and problems are not actually amenable to outside help, the people running such programs necessarily discriminate and harm everyone else, which leads to an exodus of the normals. So cities such as NYC become enclaves of the poor, who cannot leave, and the rich, who can spend enough to counteract the dysfunction and corruption.
At about 10 minutes, @jameslileks alludes to this.
Minnesota nursing homes, already the site of 81% of COVID-19 deaths, continue taking in infected patients
Nursing homes accepting infected patients, even as death toll mounts.
Of course, that would be 81% of Minnesota deaths. Other bad stories unfolding in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and especially New Jersey and New York — all states with Democrat governors and policies of putting infected patients in nursing homes.
Here is a challenge. If someone wants to minimize covid deaths, can you think of any place that would be worse to put an infected covid patient than in a nursing home?
I find it stunning how much of the national mainstream media is assiduously avoiding this major news story about policies of Democrat led states that promoted thousands of deaths (even as they try to fabricate dire warnings about the opening up of Republican led states like Florida, which avoided putting covid patients into nursing homes).
For example, while avoiding any clear mention of poor judgment by Democrat governors, CNN had the gall to report this:
May 10, 2020
New York governor lays out new guidelines for nursing homes
From CNN’s Elise Hammond
Cuomo is painted as a hero who is deeply concerned about the welfare of the vulnerable nursing home residents. Completely missing from the article is any hint that the desperate need for “new guidelines” is because of Cuomo’s March 25 order that forced nursing homes to accept infected patients. (New Jersey followed with a similar order several days later.) After 1.5 months of spreading disease and death, Cuomo is then made out to be a hero and a defender of the weak.
Incredible.
I recently saw a CSPAN show with a communications professor, Robert Rowland. He looks like Wallace Shawn and sounds like him too. But the professor is taller. He talked about the speaking styles and effectiveness of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. At about 22 minutes he said that Peter Robinson stands out as the most influential Reagan speech writer.
https://www.c-span.org/video/?469222-2/reagan-obama-presidential-rhetoric
Ricochet: Golden Threads Amidst the Internet’s Heaps of Dung.
Run with it.
I’m intrigued that @roblong apparently finds people in NYC to be friendlier in lockdown. Here in north central Texas, I am finding that people are less friendly and less cheerful than they were a few months ago, particularly those wearing masks. I find this a particularly disturbing development here in Texas, as the friendliness and cheerfulness of the people is one of the state’s key attributes – one that drew us to move to the state two years ago.
But my Mom told me it was rude to run with heaps of dung. With or without golden threads.
I,too, find the imposition of the face burqa intolerable. This is simply an imposition too far , I’m in NY outside the city and I’ve been furious since the beginning.
New York friendly is probably much the same as Texas unfriendly ;)
There was a very early David Brenner stand-up routine, about how he grew up in new York and didn’t like going to the midwest, because when he was there people said frightening things to him as they passed him on the street, like “Hi”, and “How are you?”
Having lived for over two decades in both places, New York unfriendly is in may ways a defense mechanism — the city may have a higher percentage of jerks than other places, but a lot of people act unfriendly in large part as a shield against those jerks, because they don’t want to let their guard down and get scammed or worse. They drop their unfriendly/aloof pose when they see you’re not a threat.
Texas unfriendly for me has normally involved a smaller locale where a lot of the people are welcoming of outsiders … as long as they don’t rock the boat too much. It’s sort of the same thing as New Yorkers worried about getting scammed, and certainly if you’re in Texas, you don’t want someone from New York or California arriving and telling you how to run things. But there definitely are some places in the Lone Star State that have small groups of people who have been running things for years to they and their families’ benefits, and they’re not going to be welcoming to newcomers if you’re not willing to get with the program.
Brenner was also frightened by the weird, unfamiliar noises at night.
Grasshoppers, he was told. This didn’t reassure him much, as he imagined the strange noisy beasts were six feet long.
@peterrobinson asked “Why do the financial markets seem so out of sync with the catastrophe in the real economy?”
In addition to the good points Kevin Walsh mentioned, one could also make a general observation that measurements of the economy are looking at the present or more typically the recent past (by the time we get numbers), but markets are always trying to anticipate the future. To the extent that the future looks better than had been expected (not absolutely great, but better than previous expectations), that will be an invitation to increased investment.
(Likewise, if things suddenly look like they will become far worse than expected (not worse absolutely, but worse than the expectations that were already baked in so far), then there could be a drop.)
Plus, one has to ask, “How does investing in these markets compare to other options?” For all those investing for the long run, where else would you plant you investments, especially with interest rates so low? To the extent that other options are worse, the stock markets are still going to attract a certain amount of long term investment.
We were living in southern Maryland at that time, and I read the WaPo every day. I do remember how carefully the writing parsed the way they spoke of Rep. Condit. All that “conservative” BS they’d describe him with–it was just another brick in my wall of going from a newspaper reader my entire life, to refusing to subscribe to any newspaper now because there isn’t an unbiased press anymore.
James, where was the world famous “Lileks’ Member Post of the Week”? I waited for it and exclaimed “No!” when I realized that it had been skipped.
We all tied for first.
The jingle sounder was really late this week, and didn’t show up until the podcastvgavldvbeen over for 10 10 minutes.
Okay, so two days late.
Hearing the music made me miss it even more!
“Golden threads amidst this heap of dung.”
Has there ever been a time when @jameslileks could not come up with a witty thing to say? The man’s a genius . . .
Did you get that from Jon Wolfort and JAM? (asking just because I’ve been listening to WABC Rewound this weekend, and part of the experience there is the PAMS/JAMs jingles).
Like most people who vote for the Left, they are pursuing their narrow self-interest, without regard for spillover costs (negative externalities), which they have every reason to expect will be paid for by somebody else.
For example, unions push wages and benefits higher and higher for fewer and fewer, more and more privileged workers, disregarding the resulting unemployed. Public employee unions, of course, can shift the costs onto the city. And when the city goes bankrupt they ask Democrats at the Federal level to bail them out.
Not just ask. Threaten. By saying first responders will be the first laid off, etc.
I didn’t like the segment with Spencer Klavan. Rob seemed to be hectoring him a bit, Peter tried to lighten it up a bit, and James tried to bridge the gap with his podcast suggestion. If Rob really didn’t like the direction of the podcast, he should have dealt with it privately.
For what it is worth, I am looking forward to Spencer’s podcast, the Heretics. My own formation is lacking, and I have trouble reading deep tomes, but what he said about us spending all of our energy defending the Western culture, instead of using that time to immerse ourselves in it, resonated with me. I plan to listen to his podcast to get the overall hue and nature of the works, and then follow up by actually reading some of them. Tik Tok and video game opinions are a dime a dozen. A classics scholar giving free lectures? That is valuable.
Ricochet has another of those in Doctor Jackson Crawford, a scholar of Old Norse. Fascinating stuff, and there is the occasional bit that makes conservatives laugh.
The wait is over. It’s here.