Social Security: As usual, the people want a pony, daddy

81% support taxing income beyond $147k to shore up the projected Social Security trust fund shortfall, Republicans by 79% and Democrats by 88%.

81% also support cutting benefits for those same earners whose Social Security taxes would soar.

Meanwhile, 64% support increasing the minimum monthly benefit from $951 to $1,341.

More.

 

Equity used to mean everybody had a reasonable expectation of receiving what they put into the system, but that stopped being true for high income earners in the 1990s.

Last year, a person making $200k taxed at the current 6.2% rate for 30 years would have to live 10 years beyond full retirement age of 67 to recoup all his contributions at a 2021 maximum benefit level of $3,113 per month, or to age 77.

Life expectancy in the US fell to 76.6 years in 2021. 

LOL, you mean like Obama?

‘The inevitable’: People living on the coast could be forced to move due to climate change, UK warns

 

The 50-50 Senate passed the Supreme Court families security bill on May 9 by unanimous consent and Nancy Pelosi's House still hasn't taken a vote on it

Senate passes security bill for Supreme Court family members 

Meanwhile . . .

Man arrested near Kavanaugh’s home charged with attempted murder

When only Wikipedia gets it right about leftist terrorist and murderer Kathy Boudin, you know the world is truly upside down

 

Inflation under Joe Biden means it's back to PB&J for lunch, according to this e-mail ad from my grocery store

C'mon, who advertises peanut butter?

 

It's June and Tennessee still can't get its act together and report any breakthrough cases, hospitalizations, and deaths for 2022

 Breakthrough hospitalizations and deaths in December 2021 were running close to 20% and cases just over 30%.

Omicron in 2022 is a bitch, eh?

 

US COVID-19: The Big Picture, through May 31, 2022

Vaccines have done nothing to stop the spread and little to reduce deaths in any significant way.

Over the last eleven years 2010-2020, heart disease in the United States has killed 1729 people per day on average.

Cancer comes in a close second at 1620 per day.

COVID-19 remains the third leading cause of death, averaging 1221 deaths per day to date, 822 days after the first death on February 29, 2020. 

The best explanation of the data so far remains that the virus has evolved to spread more easily at the expense of lethality, otherwise the explosion in cases in 2022 would have resulted in far many more deaths than we have at present. Deaths per day in the third year of the pandemic remain relatively constant when measured over time.

And who is most victimized?

California, America's largest state by population, continues to show that COVID-19 infects people 65 and over the least, but kills them the most by far. Since May 2021, deaths among people 65 and over in California have changed little, constituting 74% of deaths then and 71% a year later.

This is despite the fact that people 65 and older became the most vaccinated segment of the US population in 2021.

CDC reports that today 95% of them nationally have received at least one dose, 91.2% are fully vaccinated, 69.7% are boosted once, and 29.7% are boosted twice. In California to date nearly 85% of people 65+ have been fully vaccinated with nearly 76% of those boosted.

There needs to be a massive shift in the messaging of the medical establishment away from thinking the vaccines are a panacea for anybody, toward preventing senior deaths by reducing their comorbidities and quickly treating them with drugs like Paxlovid when they become infected with coronavirus: 

In reducing mortality, Arbel said the treatment showed a very high benefit in patients 65 and older - an 81% risk reduction. There were no observed benefits in younger adults, who are at less risk of dying from COVID.

 

Dave Weigel suspended from WaPo for having a sense of humor

 WASH POST suspends reporter over 'sexist retweet'...

 

Methinks NeverTrump Separatist Kevin Williamson doth protest too much

 Donald Trump is an idolator and a heretic, a blasphemer and a perpetrator of sacrilege, and much more.   

And much, much more.

 

Our modern separatists pronounce all those heretical, or carnal, from whom they have withdrawn.

If CNBC gave a flying fig about "how readers feel", it wouldn't have disabled comments years ago

 

‘Cancel it all or do nothing’: Readers react to chance of $10,000 in student loan forgiveness:

 

Here’s what four of them had to say.

 

Four, lol.

Definitional breakdown: It's not just the New England Journal of Medicine, which thinks 18 and 19 year olds are children (for political reasons)

 Now The New York Post thinks 62 year olds are "elderly".

Before it was just Obama and Democrats who infamously and routinely seemed not to know the size, proportion, and meaning of things (when life starts was above his pay grade, 57 states, hundreds of millions getting Obamacare, 200 million dead from COVID-19, et cetera).

Now everyone is getting into the act.

Life expectancy in the US is about 77 years old. You are elderly when you are near that or exceed it.

 

 

 

Federal law prohibits FFLs from engaging in handgun commerce with anyone under 21 and longgun commerce with anyone under 18. Meanwhile 18 year olds can vote, be tried as adults, sign contracts, and get drafted to have their asses shot off in wars, and fry in the electric chair for shooting up schools. Let's have some of that, shall we?

And just in case you were wondering, a woman is still an adult human female, at least until it becomes Wokepedia.

 

The car America needs right now is the Honda Fit, withdrawn from the market in 2020 due to falling demand for small cars

 The $17k subcompact gets about 36mpg, and more, on the highway compared with the HR-V which gets only 30mpg and costs $5k more.

Hey, who wants a Fit during a Plague, right?

 

The Chicoms might as well be at war with Australia

Defense Minister Richard Marles said the Chinese J-16 flew very close to the Australian plane and released flares and chaff that were ingested by the engines of the Poseidon, a converted Boeing 737-800. 

“The J-16 ... accelerated and cut across the nose of the P-8, settling in front of the P-8 at very close distance,” he told reporters in Melbourne. “At that moment, it then released a bundle of chaff, which contains small pieces of aluminium, some of which were ingested into the engine of the P-8 aircraft. Quite obviously, this is very dangerous.” 

More.

LOL, The Grauniad just lies that electric vehicles aren't heavier and don't produce more tire pollution than conventional vehicles

The average weight of all cars has been increasing. But there has been particular debate over whether battery electric vehicles (BEVs), which are heavier than conventional cars and can have greater wheel torque, may lead to more tyre particles being produced. Molden said it would depend on driving style, with gentle EV drivers producing fewer particles than fossil-fuelled cars driven badly, though on average he expected slightly higher tyre particles from BEVs. 

More here, in "Car tyres produce vastly more particle pollution than exhausts, tests show".

Meanwhile, the great Scotty Kilmer was all over this like white on rice a couple of days ago:

 

LOL, inflation means the $400 emergency you couldn't afford in 2019 under Trump now costs $1,000 under Joe Biden

 

And to think I never understood how straight people vacationed at Disney

 

Joe Biden releasing oil from the strategic petroleum reserve did nothing except deplete it

 

The Sheeple Whisperer

 

Full time as a percentage of civilian population vaults to 50.4% in May 2022, the 2019 average level

 Full-time usually peaks in the summer months.

The average level for the year through May 2022 is 49.8%.

Gasoline is quickly approaching the 2008 inflation-adjusted high of $5 per gallon

 Just after filling up yesterday at the corner for $4.79, the price was raised to $4.99.

 

More representation for the people does not equal "bigger government and more politicians"

The last thing most Americans want is a bigger government and more politicians, yet the solution to the zero-sum redistricting game is to create more seats for the House of Representatives.

More.

The founders of this country wanted representation to GROW with population. The original formula, never ratified, would have entitled every 50,000 Americans to one representative in the House. You know, one who might actually know who the hell you are and what you think, elected by funds raised from you and not from special interests a thousand miles away?

Mostly Republicans stopped this constitutional process in 1929 by act of Congress, fixing representation at 435 in the US House. But the impulse to Congressional supremacy over the other branches of government has ever been bipartisan.

Now, the "ideal" House district represents 761,000 people. All it takes is an oligarchy of 218 to decide the fate of hundreds of millions, whose leader is a shadow president popularly known as The Speaker of the House who can serve year upon year while the real president is limited to two terms.

Such an awful outcome was never intended by the framers.

The resulting system has turned politics into a binary pressure cooker without a relief valve, threatening to explode in another civil war at any moment, if contemporary doom and gloom political rhetoric on the extremes of both sides is to be believed. 

In fact thousands upon thousands of Congressional staffers and lobbyists run everything and write the legislation, not the people through their elected representatives.

Politics is a fact of life. Aristotle taught us that man is a political animal.

Denying that fact is the surest route to the barbarism of civil war, or the present system of legislative tyranny which has saddled the American people with $30 trillion of debt. 

A bigger House is actually a smaller government where you keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.

The lying sacks of shit at the New England Journal of Medicine inflate gun deaths among children by counting 18 and 19 year olds among the children

 The previous analysis, which examined data through 2016, showed that firearm-related injuries were second only to motor vehicle crashes (both traffic-related and nontraffic-related) as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, defined as persons 1 to 19 years of age.

More.

Leave it to the professional liars in the medical establishment to do this sort of thing, adding to their well-deserved tarnish earned during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Measure it properly as persons 1 to 17 years of age and this is what you get, below (Motor Vehicle deaths still number one by far and drownings and firearm homicides way back running neck-and-neck for number two).

And even more importantly, compared with 1981-1998, firearm homicides among children are DOWN by 12%, firearm suicides among children are DOWN by 15%, and accidental firearm deaths among children don't even make the top ten any more (Motor Vehicle deaths also were down 34%, drownings down 25%, deaths by fire or burning down 56%, accidental suffocation deaths down 16%, and pedestrian and other land transportation deaths down 6%).

Suicides among children by suffocation were up from 5,085 to 12,890, a whopping 153%, perhaps due in part to mandatory gun locks causing a change in choice of method. Combined firearm and suffocation suicides among children still rose significantly, however, from 17,968 to 23,824 or 33%.

We won't speculate on the prominent role models trailblazing the way for this horrible new trend, like Robin Williams who hung himself in 2014.

You can do that for yourself.

 

For all you haters out there, here are the top 10 LGBT-friendly companies

Google

Microsoft

H E B

Lululemon

Deloitte

Bath & Body Works

Progressive Insurance

IBM

Walt Disney Co.

Apple

 

Story. 

He's making a list, checking it twice . . .

Don't talk to me about firearm deaths in children, you ghouls

 

Firearms are not the leading cause of death in children: CDC's own data over time shows that motor vehicle accidents are far and away the number one cause

 Here's the CDC data for all children, all races, ages 1-17, from 1999-2020 showing drownings and firearms neck and neck for number two position but motor vehicle accidents far and away the leading cause.

Liberals are all upset about 3,000 children shot and killed in one year when America's liberals are responsible for that many abortion deaths EVERY GODDAMN DAY.

 

 

The winners are always trying to rewrite the history of this day, the bastards

 

It started with re-interment of only one side's dead. 

Nancy Pelosi's 82 year old husband was arrested for DUI in Napa County last night just before midnight

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Drowning his sorrows, no doubt, as Nancy was away getting another honorary doctorate.

 

 

Nancy Pelosi made sure the increase in the federal minimum wage to $7.25 in 2007 didn't apply to then-tuna capital American Samoa, and they still don't make it 15 years later

 

The only undergraduate college in this 10-page list requiring four units in a foreign language to graduate is Bard College

 Many require no foreign language at all at the undergraduate level, and as a consequence . . .

Presently, 23 U.S. states do not require the two years of foreign language study that is required for admittance into many colleges.

Check it out.

Meanwhile the chowderheads at Princeton's Classics Department have dropped the Greek and Latin requirement entirely for Classics majors.

The basic idea there is to invite the barbarians in, to make Classics better, you know, as in the fall of the Roman Empire to the Visigoths in 410 AD better:

“Having people who come in who might not have studied classics in high school and might not have had a previous exposure to Greek and Latin, we think that having those students in the department will make it a more vibrant intellectual community.” 

 

 Thankfully, the Visigoths at Princeton still have some standards. They require German majors to pass 2-3 courses actually taught in German.

NAACP President: Forgiving $10k in student loan debt ain't good enough, is a slap in the face to the average black who owes $53k

From the story:

Canceling $10,000 per borrower would cost around $321 billion and completely forgive the loans of about one-third of student loan borrowers.

This is all BS, of course. Millions of those borrowers can afford to pay off their loans themselves.

Student loans are another form of welfare for far too many borrowers of color, who dig themselves into a deep hole with government and education establishment encouragement and never get a degree, both of which also profit off the scheme. Meanwhile colleges continue to increase the cost of tuition knowing there is a ready source of government loan funding to pay for it.

Forgiving student loan debt without paying attention to income will inevitably be a handout to millions upon millions of high earners like Representative AOC who drives a Tesla Model 3 while reducing the average black loan balance by less than 20%.

Americans with income over $74,000 hold roughly 60% of the total public student loan debt. ... Black Americans are the only race who have student debt higher than their median annual income.

If you make over $74k you are in the top 20% of all wage earners in the United States in 2020. You can afford to pay your obligations. AOC is in the top 4% of all wage earners.

Handing $10k in loan forgiveness to American elites isn't a vote-buying scheme. It's a Democrat patronage payment.

AOC, who makes $175K a year, says taxpayers should have to pay off her $17K in student loan debt

 

 

If you can't be president until you are 35, you shouldn't be able to vote for president until you are 35

 

Matt Taibbi: Hillary is guilty this time, and the press won't cover it

Shouldn't Hillary Clinton Be Banned From Twitter Now?

News flash: He doesn't mean abortion and never mentions it, almost as if killing 1 million unborn every year since the 1970s wasn't the prolegomenon to the violence now everywhere around us

A System That Allows Children to Be Killed

 

David Dayen, American Prospect :

 

We accept the death of children because we accept a politics that enables it.

 

News flash: She doesn't mean abortion and never mentions it, almost as if killing 1 million unborn every year since the 1970s wasn't the prolegomenon to the violence now everywhere around us

 

A Culture That Kills Its Children Has No Future

Elizabeth Bruenig, The Atlantic

Gee what a coincidence: Natural gas inventories in the Lower 48 are down 17.6% year over year and my utility just raised my monthly budget plan payment for the next year by 18%

 

Like a creepy neighbor, State Farm is there, targeting 5-year-olds, lol, but not for the time being

 The Chicago Tribune reports, here:

 

State Farm came under fire this week after a January letter recruiting 550 agents and employees to participate in the program by donating a three-book bundle to teachers, community centers and libraries was published online by Consumers’ Research. The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit educational group launched a campaign critical of the program, calling State Farm “a creepy neighbor” targeting 5-year-olds. ...

The GenderCool Project is an educational organization helping to “replace misinformed opinions with positive, powerful experiences” through the stories of transgender and nonbinary kids, said Jennifer Grosshandler, co-founder and executive director of the four-year-old Chicago-based nonprofit. Grosshandler, who said the organization began working with State Farm about a year ago on the voluntary program, was more conciliatory toward the insurance company. “We were disappointed to learn about the decision,” said Grosshandler. “The truth is that StateFarm has done really good and important work with the LGBTQ community."

Russia to hit full capacity for natural gas storage this summer with virtually no market left in Europe and no pipelines to Asia, forcing it to shut down wells

 So says George Soros, and this guy, here:

Leon Izbicki, an associate at Energy Aspects, agrees that Russia’s gas storage is close to being full.

“Russia went into last winter with record high stocks of around 72.6 billion cubic meters and aims for an even higher underground storage target for winter 2022 of 72.7 billion cubic meters,” Izbicki added via email. “While we do not have visibility on Russian underground storage, it seems plausible that Russia could reach this target this summer already.”

He added that that Russia lacks flexibility in its gas storage and does not have the means to divert gas from Europe to, for example, Asia due to a lack of pipeline infrastructure.

Federal spending is completely out of control: Outlays dwarf receipts by 69% in 2021

 

:

Things you do when Democrats get elected president 2.0

 Time to update this.

 

Things You Do When Democrats Get Elected President

 

 

John Kennedy: Build a bomb shelter.

 

Lyndon Johnson: Keep an eye on your shoes.

Jimmy Carter: Change your religion.

Bill Clinton: Buy a pistol.

Barack Obama: Upgrade to Life Member in the NRA.

 

Joe Biden: Renovate the bomb shelter.

Jimmy Carter will always be remembered for majoring in the minors, from the White House tennis court schedule to its thermostat settings

 Jimmy Carter, at 97, Steps Into Big Fight Over Small Road in Alaska...

It will be funny to listen to the White House try to walk back President Biden's remarks after he pushes the Doomsday button

 For five minutes anyway.

The sex abusers among the new priestly class: Michigan State University dethroned in University of California sex abuse settlement

The number one way to get chicks in the old days used to be to become a rock star.

Those who couldn't sing or play became professors, who have ready access to fresh hordes of impressionable young women each and every year. Just think of the settlements awaiting thousands upon thousands of women across the decades compared with this list of a relative handful of campus doctors involving hundreds upon hundreds.

AP Obama reports here:

The University of California system announced Tuesday it will pay nearly $375 million to more than 300 women who said they were sexually abused by a UCLA gynecologist, bringing a record amount in total payouts by a public university in a wave of sexual misconduct scandals by campus doctors. ...

The university has agreed to pay nearly $700 million to Heap’s patients, dwarfing a $500 million settlement by Michigan State University in 2018 that was considered the largest by a public university. The University of Southern California, a private institution, has agreed to pay more than $1 billion to settle thousands of cases against the school’s longtime gynecologist. ...

The university previously reached settlements with other patients of Heaps for $316 million. The most recent settlement with 312 women resolves the vast majority of claims against Heaps, the university said. ...

Sex abuse by doctors on college campuses has led to massive settlements at Ohio State University, Johns Hopkins University and Columbia University. ...

Michigan State paid $500 million to 300 women and girls who said they were assaulted by Larry Nassar, who was a campus sports doctor and a doctor for USA Gymnastics. Nassar, who also sexually abused Olympic gold medal gymnasts, is serving prison sentences likely to keep him behind bars for the rest of his life.

The University of Michigan reached a $490 million settlement with more than 1,000 people who said they were sexually assaulted by the late Dr. Robert Anderson, during his nearly four-decade career as a sports doctor at the school.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard gives the microphone on Ukraine to the weak sisters and has-beens Henry Kissinger and Eric Cantor

Dr Kissinger said the war must not be allowed to drag on for much longer, and came close to calling on the West to bully Ukraine into accepting negotiations on terms that fall very far short of its current war aims. “Negotiations need to begin in the next two months before it creates upheavals and tensions that will not be easily overcome. Ideally, the dividing line should be a return to the status quo ante. Pursuing the war beyond that point would not be about the freedom of Ukraine, but a new war against Russia itself,” he said. ... Mr Cantor said the US was in danger of overplaying its hand. “We have got to have multilateral support. We are already being accused of weaponising the world’s reserve currency. Even allies and friends are starting to ask, if you are using it in this way, we too could one day be subject to these sanctions,” he said.

More.

A return to the status quo ante would mean pretending Russia's war crimes against Ukrainian civilians never happened. Kissinger only vainly imagines that that clock can be turned back now. Putin must go, and Russia must pay. Anything less means the West stands for nothing important.

As for Eric Cantor, the clock ticks on but only money continues to matter to him. He was never serious about repealing Obamacare and stopping illegal immigration or amnesty for illegals while he was in office. He was wisely toppled while at the height of his powers in the US House by his fellow Republicans in a primary (VA-7), for crying out loud.

It's characteristic of Ambrose Evans-Pritchard to showcase Cantor's hand-wringing. He's done a lot of that in his own writing over the years. He ends this one worried about a European oil shock later this year.

Things like that happen when the false promise of libertarian cooperation with despots for energy comes a cropper. Europe has only itself to blame.

Average US vehicle age is now a record 12.2 years

 

 

The average age of a car on the road is 13.1 years, while trucks sit at 11.6 years, according to the analysis.

CDC sounds Monkeypox alarm in gay community, but why?

 They never say the "p" word.

Gay men spread diseases like crazy because they are promiscuous to a degree heterosexuals are not, otherwise this alarm wouldn't be sounded for "gay and bisexual men". It would be for everybody.

 

CNBC totally leaves out the epicenter of the Monkeypox outbreak at the Gran Canaria Pride Festival in its story about gay men transmitting the disease

 All CNBC says is:

The most recent surge in cases appears to have been spread among men who have sex with other men.

News about the Monkeypox outbreak linked to this Pride Festival has to be suppressed in the same way that the Provincetown, MA, COVID-19 outbreak from July 4, 2021 had to be suppressed because it was also in gay men. 85% of the victims were fully vaccinated men who were there to party.

The UK Sun told the truth that must not be spoken:

The Canaria Pride festival, held in the town of Maspalomas between May 5 and 15, has become a hotspot for the monkeypox outbreak, reports El País.

The massive party was attended by over 80,000 people, including three Italian men who later tested positive for the virus.

A health source told the newspaper: "Among the 30 or so diagnosed in Madrid, there are several who attended the event, although it is not yet possible to know if one of them is patient zero of this outbreak or if they all got infected there."

Bill Maher observes that the parents have become the groomers

  

 If you attend a small dinner party of typically very liberal, upper-income Angelinos, it is not uncommon to hear parents who each have a trans kid having a conversation about that. What are the odds of that happening in Youngstown, Ohio? 

-- Bill Maher, here 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Where a child finds his own parents his perverters, he cannot be so properly born, as damned into the world.

-- Robert South (1634 - 1716)

President Biden finally removes the ambiguity and commits the USA to the defense of Taiwan in the face of increasing Chicom military threats against the island

 

When asked at a joint press conference with Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida whether the U.S. would be prepared to defend Taiwan if attacked, Biden replied: “Yes.”

“That’s the commitment we made,” Biden said. “We agree with the ‘one China’ policy. We signed on to it. All the attendant agreements [were] made from there. But the idea that that can be taken by force, just taken by force. It’s just not it’s just not appropriate.”

More.

A fuller account here adds this from the president:

“We support the ‘one China policy,’ we support all that we’ve done in the past. But that does not mean, that does not mean that China has the ability, has the – excuse me, the jurisdiction – to go in and use force to take over Taiwan.”

Australians lose their minds, news stories can't make up theirs about meaning of election

CNN: It was a stop global warming election.

The UK Express: It was a republican election to throw off the monarchy and give Australia's 2% indigenous population representation in parliament.

AP Obama: There was no clear majority as votes for "fringe parties and independents ... increases the likelihood of a hung parliament and a minority government." Counting may take another two weeks.

The Sydney Morning Herald: Labor is 4 seats short of a majority with 14 seats still to call, only 71% counted.

I now realize that this green frog in my driveway this morning as I took out the trash was obviously portentous, OK? OK.

 

AOC is OK, OK? OK.