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It’s hard to put words to the audaciousness of President Biden’s latest charade. Good thing we have an Englishman! Our friend Charlie Cooke is filling in for Peter and James to talk about Joe’s promise to liquidate the American social contract. He and Rob also get into midterms and search in vain for a Republican national agenda.
And since we can’t help but cling to a bit of good news, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya joins from Rome to give Fauci his final grade. He also gets into “fringe” science, corrupting conflicts of interest, and forgiveness. (And you’ll never guess who he’s just met!)
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The iTunes podcast is broken. UPDATE: Restarted iPhone. Works now.
A cursory check shows my iTunes is fine.
No mention of whose idea it was to add upcoming meetups to the Ricochet Events page, so we’ll just have to assume it was an anonymous genius.
Bankruptcy is not appropriate for student loans. Bankruptcy is for people with a proven ability to pay and collateral where the loaner and loanee agree to the risk of the transaction. A student has no proven ability to pay and no collateral, so in exchange for the loanee taking all the risk the path to bankruptcy is waived. It used to be that student loans had a co-signer, but those days are gone.
Pretty sure Mr. Lileks is manning the kissing booth at the Minnesota State Fair.
But in this case, HE pays, right?
Depends on the other person.
When I took bankruptcy in law school, it was stated by the professor and accepted by all students that if student loans could be discharged in BR, they would be by so many students gaming the system that it would become unworkable and no one would step up and be the lender.
Rob and Dr. Bhattacharya both make an obvious mistake about covid and the response to it. For one thing, Trump started out basically saying “things happen, we can get through this (but some people are going to die).” Biden and others on the left claimed “We can beat this! Nobody will suffer!” Especially for the rather dim people, who did you think they were going to vote for?
Regarding the student loan stuff, $10k is going to be a pretty small share of the amounts owed by most high-level people that are being looked-at-askance for benefiting from taxpayer largesse. Yes, Biden wanted it to be $50k or more, but that didn’t happen. And, especially with the Dims’ tax policy, those people who vote for people like Biden because they think they’ll get some kind of freebie, are going to end up paying a lot more than if they had just paid off their student loans themselves.
Close. I was handing out lip balm, the famous StarTribune flavored lip balm. People queue for the twice-daily distribution. The flavor changes every year. This year’s flavor is Blueberry Pancakes, in conjunction with the famed Al’s Breakfast, another Minneapolis institution.
I have to stand on a stage and do a song-and-dance for half an hour, asking fair-specific questions and handing out the lip balm to people who answer correctly. (The routine is arranged so everyone answers correctly.) It’s an odd thing, standing on a stage by the main drag, ginning up interest, calling in the curious, being a carny barker.
It’s an odd life, but I do like it.
This is probably what happened. You looked at your general feed before it cycled to ricochet. If you go to the singular ricochet feed, it will go get it. It’s just a timing thing between when it shows up on the website and when it shows up on your phone.
If that doesn’t work, your next option is to temporarily subscribe to the super feed, which is a third pipe.
I like Dr J’s comparison of Fauci to J Edgar Hoover – very apt
Higher education doesn’t develop human capital at a fair price because of the accreditation system and government guaranteed loans.
Plus, we don’t even really think about the concept of developing human capital at a fair price, anywhere.
The whole thing needs to be atomized.
This is really good.
Could it be possible to get a guest host who knows what time it is? Why does he want to get rid of the guy who still got conservative things done while being attacked from both sides? How about supporting the guy advancing the ball you allegedly want advanced.
Reminds me of this recent meme-post entry:
I give Fauci an “F” grade for his career. He has dolled out about a trillion dollars in grants and all we got for that money (that I can remember) was a lab-made Frankenvirus that has killed millions of people. Arguably he has killed more people than he has saved with that trillion dollars. Imagine if that trillion had been spent effectively…we’d have cured every infectious disease. Dr. Jay thinks differently, because he views my tax dollars as a jobs program for university researchers.
Hey, Rob! AOC is quoted in today’s Newsweek as saying a “scarcity mindset” is driving detractors of the school loan bailout. And she has an economics degree from BU (if I remember correctly). Would you care to join me in calling her a “kook” who I think should not be in the U.S. Congress? Outstretched hand,Rob. Outstretched hand.
I notice a lot of conservative commentators (or center-right whatever that is) attacking Repub candidates as “kooks” or the like. And I might even agree that some are. But….how about the OPPOSITION? Let’s talk about the absolute lunacy of their people and ideas for a change. You may think Herschel Walker isn’t James Madison, but he’s closer than Raphael the Warlock. On and on.
I remember when Trump got elected, one of the Conservatarian podcast hosts kept saying, incredulously, “Are we really gonna do this?” I thought, “Uh, yeah, could it be worse that putting a Clinton in the White House again?”
Yeah, let’s put somebody dignified in that spot. We should have been asking ourselves, when it was a Bush or a Clinton or anyone else with decades of time spent in office: Why are we re-electing them, again?
AOC is throwing something out there to justify a boondoggle. If it was to build a yttrium mine in Brooklyn, say, and 8,000 old people would get thrown out of their homes, she’d justify that, too – if she wanted it.
The scarcity we’re really faced with is rational and intelligent adults in Congress. Their mindset is to spend and destroy to stay in office, forever.
If communists are “liberals in a hurry“, as the saying was, then anti-Trump conservatives are merely “liberals who want to go slower”.
Giveaway: Every time liberals come up with a new, misleading euphemism, like “pro-choice” or “undocumented immigrant” or “gender affirmation therapy” or “loan forgiveness”, these “conservatives” immediately adopt it.
These are the “conservatives” who constantly tell us we should be more polite to the other side, even though the other side is never polite to us.
Probably not coincidentally, these “conservatives” are often dependent for a significant part of their livelihood on liberals. A “conservative” who makes himself useful to liberals, like Liz Cheney, unlocks liberals’ deepest storehouses of wealth.
Has their ever been another Republican politician whom could not be criticized without the critic losing the right to call oneself a conservative? I just don’t get why Donald Trump is consider to be the Alpha conservative, and anyone who dislikes him is reckoned to be anti-conservative. Talk about changing the language.
And the reason that some of us advise being polite to those who disagree with us is not because we have a soft spot for progressivism. It is because when people shout insults at one another, no one reconsiders their position. If someone speaks to a non-psychotic person as if they are a reasonable being, there is an ever-so-tiny chance that the recipient may think about whether or not the other party has a good point. If someone is being called names and shouted at, they are going to surely disregard anything being shouted at them.
So much of progressivism is based on feelings or even outright ignorance, that you end up faced with the likelihood that you can’t reason someone out of a position that they didn’t get to via reason. Polite talk isn’t going to work either. Especially if they feel like you’re just plain evil to start with, because that’s what their teachers from preschool up to post-grad all told them.
So, the various members of Ricochet — and other Republicans I have known — who say that they used to vote Democratic came around because of what? People can change their minds over time. If I am wrong and rational persuasion is a fool’s errand, then all this debate is pointless. There is no hope for the future. I acknowledge in my previous comment that the odds are low of persuading people, but I think it’s the best shot we have. Going full Mark Levin and yelling insults at people is not going to do it.
You may be referring to people who weren’t actually brought to the left by their own feelings, maybe they just never heard the other side. But I can accept the possibility that a sufficient number of people are too stupid to understand a lot of things, so that the only way things will really improve is to “crash” first, with the result that maybe a lot of stupid people will just stop their stupid voting, or something. Maybe it will be because they have to spend all their time on finding a way to feed themselves, they don’t have the time any more for leftist agitation.