Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Camille Paglia: Treating women as more credible than men is reactionary

From the essay here:

Modern democracy is predicated on principles of due process and the presumption of innocence. ... For all its idealistic good intentions, today’s #MeToo movement, with its indiscriminate catalog of victims, is taking us back to the Victorian archetypes of early silent film, where mustache-twirling villains tied damsels in distress to railroad tracks.

This nitwit from New Jersey thinks he can be president

Story here.

Blue wave evaporates in Texas: Newcomer flips Senate District 19 Republican for first time in 139 years, defeating former congressman Gallego

Story here.

Possible foreclosure motive for Ford accusation falls apart: Kavanaugh's mother dismissed the motion

FOX reports here:

The records suggest that the dismissal was granted after the Blaseys and the bank cut a deal that avoided a sale of the property at a foreclosure auction.

Martha Kavanaugh signed off on the motion after the case had initally been assigned to another judge.

Breaking news: Christine Blasé Ford will testify when her picture replaces Jackson's on the $20


The icky Jeffrey Toobin was targeting Brett Kavanaugh already in March 2012 in The New Yorker

Here, over Obamacare.

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

Send the FBI to Kavanaugh's accuser to take her statement

We'll see if she tells the same story she's peddling in the media.

You can't lie to the FBI and get away with it. (Oops, unless you are Hillary)

Hillary must be laughing to herself that Kavanaugh's accuser touts passing a lie detector test

Clinton is heard laughing as she describes how she succeeded at getting her client a lighter sentence, despite suggesting she knew he was guilty.

"He took a lie-detector test! I had him take a polygraph, which he passed, which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs," Clinton said about her client on the tapes, which were initially recorded, but never used, in the early 1980s.

The rest of the ABC News story from 2014 is here. 

Ten years after fall of Lehman, lawyer still tracking down borrowers who committed fraud

From the story in The Denver Post, here:

“What I kept seeing over and over again is how greed manifests itself,” he said. “There was an unprecedented amount of fraud.” ... People lied about their income, they lied that a home would be a primary residence, they lied about how indebted they were, they even lied about who they were, using other people’s identities to take out loans.

“It was crime on a massive scale, but nobody viewed it that way,” he said.

Banking expert Chris Whalen sums up 2008 the same way, here:

People keep asking what we think of the 10-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.  Our answer is that not much has changed.  Lehman once had the best performing bank in the US and then it was gone.  Why?  Fraud on loans and securities.

It seems our biggest problem, from the top of our society all the way on down to the bottom, is that it is shot through with liars.

Remember that next time you read a poll, or a resume.

Let God be found true, though every man be found a liar. -- Romans 3:4

Monday, September 17, 2018

Wi Gu Wong Wei: China stock markets are down big since their 2015 highs

Shanghai is down 48.7% from its 2015 high.

Hong Kong is down 6% from its 2015 high.

Meanwhile the broadest measure of US stocks, the Wilshire 5000, is up 33.6% tonight from its 2015 high. Its total stock market capitalization currently represents about $36 trillion, up about $9 trillion in the last three years.

Rush Limbaugh ends his show saying the voters are idiots . . .

. . . Sean Hannity starts his show saying they're smart enough to decide for themselves if Brett Kavanaugh stands unjustly accused.

Brett Kavanaugh's accuser might have had revenge motive for foreclosure on her parents' home

Brett Kavanaugh's mother apparently was the presiding judge in the foreclosure on the home of the parents of Kavanaugh's accuser.

Reported here.

Brett Kavanaugh's accuser has reviews by students in her classes saying she's vengeful, has something wrong with her

Story here.

Update:

Story retracted, here.

Hm. Two Christine Fords.

Anne Applebaum for The Atlantic refuses to acknowledge the facts of illegal immigrant crime

The crimes of illegal immigrants, apart from being here illegally, continue as we speak, and continuously are noted in the Twitter feeds and websites of conservatives. Of course all of that is illegitimate to the Anne Applebaums of the world. Nothing is legitimate unless it is sanctioned by coverage in the press which her side owns, and this story is not covered by her press, for political reasons. That story forms the heart of the Trump political campaign, and to give it expression is to do the work of her political enemy, which is what the essay is really all about, her political enemies, in Poland, Hungary and the United States. At one point she even solemnly informs us that "(A ruling party that has politicized its courts and suppressed the media is a party that finds it much easier to steal.)", as if that isn't a perfect description of liberal democratic rule in the United States since FDR. It's now a country where the words "illegal alien" are banned on Twitter. That's how important cheap landscapers are to The Establishment.

From the story here:

Much as Trump used birtherism and the fabricated threat of immigrant crime to motivate his core supporters, KaczyÅ„ski has used the Smolensk tragedy to galvanize his followers, and convince them not to trust the government or the media. Sometimes he has implied that the Russian government downed the plane. At other times, he has blamed the former ruling party, now the largest opposition party, for his brother’s death: “You destroyed him, you murdered him, you are scum!” he once shouted in parliament.

Sunday, September 16, 2018

Dear Joe Biden: Dregs are delicious, happy to be named in their company!


Brett Kavanaugh's pal was Mark Judge


The New York Times reported that the friend the woman alleged to be in the room with Kavanaugh was conservative writer Mark Judge, who attended Georgetown Prep with the nominee. On Friday, Judge told the Weekly Standard that no such incident took place. “It’s just absolutely nuts,” he said. “I never saw Brett act that way.” ... The amount of drinking Judge describes himself undertaking [at the time] might suggest that his memory of those days may not be entirely reliable.

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Barack Obama March 3, 2009: "Buying stocks is a potentially good deal if you've got a long-term perspective on it"

Here, after the 10 minute mark.

S&P 500, average nominal per annum return March 2009 - August 2018: 17.51%

Friday, September 14, 2018

Inflated death totals from Puerto Rico study not backed up by any names or cause of death

Julie Kelly, here:

There is just one little problem with the inflated death toll: There are no names of the newly-found victims or hundreds of bodies to be buried. The GWU research team reached the higher figure by comparing predicted fatalities to observed fatalities between September 2017 and February 2018. ... Also, the researchers did not specify how the nearly 3,000 people died. Lynn Goldman, the dean of the school that produced the report, confirmed the study’s limitations, telling the Washington Post, “we can come up with a hundred different hypotheses. What we don’t have is the ability today to tell you these are the factors that caused this.” The team also noted that mortality rates in low-income areas of the country were still elevated even past the study’s time frame, which could call into question the legitimacy of blaming all excess deaths on the storm.

Thursday, September 13, 2018

Indirect deaths from hurricanes from 1963-2012 numbered 1,418 but Maria in Puerto Rico alone caused 2,911?

My mother died of old age related heart failure two days after Hurricane Gustav made landfall in Louisiana in 2008:


My mother wasn't counted among the 41 indirect deaths in Louisiana, for the main reason that she died in a different state.

But . . .


Looking at 59 hurricanes in the Atlantic Basin from 1963 through 2012, the study found that those systems killed a combined 1,803 people directly – by forces like flooding and airborne debris that were caused by the storm itself. But there were also a slew of lingering impacts that proved deadly in those storms, which caused 1,418 "indirect" deaths, according to the findings. ... Nearly half of the indirect deaths attributed to these 59 hurricanes were heart attacks, according to the study's data. Automobile accidents were also a major threat to life, whether the crashes occurred during evacuation or after the storm.

So we're supposed to believe tonight that about 2,911 (2,975-64) Puerto Ricans died indirectly in consequence of one storm (Maria) over the next six months according to the new math of George Washington University and Harvard University when over the course of nearly 50 years' worth of hurricanes indirect deaths for all storms combined came to just 1,418.

Sure we are.




Looks like Hurricane Florence will fall far short of the 1944 hurricane of the same date, disappointing climate catastrophists everywhere

Beaufort, South Carolina's "Island Packet" is reporting Flo at 98 mph at this hour, just still barely a Cat 2.