The Biden administration has now canceled more than $136 billion in student debt for over 3.7 million Americans, according to the White House.
More.
Friday, January 19, 2024
Thursday, January 18, 2024
Third continuing resolution since September passes Congress to fund federal government into March
WASHINGTON — Congress passed a bill on Thursday that would prevent a partial government shutdown this weekend and keep federal funds flowing through March 1 and March 8.
The Democratic-led Senate voted 77-18 on final passage after considering a few amendments. The Republican-led House soon followed suit, passing it by a vote of 314-108.
The bill now goes to President Joe Biden’s desk to become law before the funding expires Friday at midnight.
It is the third stopgap bill since last September as the divided Congress struggles to agree on full-year government funding bills. ...
The first stopgap bill led to the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker. His successor, Johnson, is seeking to avoid the same fate by selling the conservative victories in the latest deal.
More.
Peter Thiel is so mistaken about homeownership in his interview with John Gray
Peter Thiel says "To unshackle ourselves economically, one should start by attacking the extraordinarily distorted real estate market", but never once mentions how the prime culprits of the distortion were and are all Federal.
These were the commoditization of housing by the so-called Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 under Clinton and Gingrich, followed by Federal Reserve interest rate suppression under Obama after the collapse of the ensuing housing bubble it caused, re-inflating that bubble.
To Thiel "interest rates went steadily down", as if by the influence of some mysterious force. What could it be? He is not i n t e r e s t e d.
Nor does he mention a third Federal culprit, how the demand side for housing was and is distorted by 15% of the population swelling with foreign born in the UK and the US as a direct result of legally admitting millions of immigrants since 1990 in the US and since 1994 in the UK.
These are the legacies of the Bushes, Bill Clinton, John Major, and Tony Blair, now augmented by deliberate non-enforcement of the border in America by the likes of Obama and Biden, turbo-charging the demand side for housing, and prices with it, by flooding the country with illegal aliens.
Thiel observes that culturally "We became too risk-averse, too bureaucratic, too reliant on peer review in the sciences" somehow, but doesn't connect this to the aging demographics, even though he is aware of it. Not re-inflating the prices of homes of Baby Boomers would have been political suicide. He fancies this is now "over", but misses that the heirs of all this property are voters too.
This is not over.
Thiel is essentially a radical, as was Ronald Reagan and also Margaret Thatcher. He
completely misses how the libertarian impulse to deregulate under
Reagan and Thatcher led in a straight line to the housing catastrophe we all live with these
many years later. His libertarianism is myopic.
John Gray: "The difference is that this Truss wing of the Conservative Party wants to go back to Thatcher because they see that as a radical moment and they want to repeat the radical moments. But radical moments are very hard to keep repeating."
Peter Thiel: "They’re hard to repeat by doing the same thing. It was a one-time move to deregulate and lower taxes and then it’s not clear that doing it the second time does much good. ... The Reagan and Thatcher administrations ... allowed more companies to be acquired, more M&A activity to happen. It was a somewhat brutal but very powerful reorganization of society that was possible and in fact the right thing to do in the 1980s."
Incessant headlines about deep American discontent tell us we don't particularly like this now reorganized society. The new world order means your kid is saddled with horrible college debt, can't find a decent job, has to live at home with you, can't buy a house, can't get married, can't have children.
But Thiel is still dreaming the pipe dream of "exponential growth" to solve these problems. He hopes technology will come to the rescue in the form of remote work:
"Is there some way to reopen a frontier in real estate? The possibility where I think the jury is very out, though it doesn’t look that promising in 2023, would be remote work. Could the internet be a way that people are not stuck in these cities? And that would reset all these real estate values tremendously because even in a rather densely populated country like England, there is plenty of space if you’re not forced to be within the green belt of London itself. And in the United States even more so."
The interview is here.
Pakistan retaliates against Iran with military aircraft, attacks elements of the Balochistan Liberation Front just across the border, kills several
Pakistan Foreign Ministry:
“Pakistan fully respects the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Islamic Republic of Iran".
More.
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Long after Red Sea attacks began, ridiculous Biden administration appeasers finally re-adopt Trump designation of Houthis as terrorists which they had revoked in February 2021
The U.S. State Department on Wednesday designated the Iranian-backed, Yemen-based Houthi rebels as specially designated global terrorists, or SDGTs, in an effort to deter further attacks against commercial ships crossing the Red Sea. ...
The State Department under President Joe Biden revoked the Houthis’ designation as a foreign terrorist organization, or FTO, in Feb. 2021, just a month after it issued the label under former President Donald Trump.
The reversal came in response to calls from the United Nations and humanitarian groups who said that the terrorist classification and its associated sanctions were “accelerating Yemen’s slide into large-scale famine.”
Three years later, after months of Red Sea attacks, the Houthis have regained their spot on a U.S. terrorist list.
More.
Iranian ballistic missile attacks on Erbil, Iraq and Balochistan Province in Pakistan, a nuclear power, show the Biden administration's policy of appeasement is an abject failure
Biden's weakness has emboldened Iran, which is betting that the superpower which cut and run in Afghanistan has no stomach to stop the aggression of the religious dictatorship in Tehran.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Within 24 hours, Iran launched missile
and drone strikes on targets in three countries — Iraq, Syria and
Pakistan — and took the extraordinary step of announcing its
responsibility for the attacks, triggering anger from its neighbors. ... Baghdad recalled its ambassador to Iran after the Monday night attack ...
Pakistan’s foreign ministry said Tuesday that it “strongly condemns the unprovoked violation of its airspace by Iran” which it said killed two children and injured three more. It added that “it is even more concerning that this illegal act has taken place despite the existence of several channels of communication between Pakistan and Iran.”
More.
Pakistan is believed to possess over 100 operational nuclear warheads which can be delivered from a number of different platforms.
Would Iran attack Pakistan like this without having the same capability, or are they just fools?
Tuesday, January 16, 2024
35 people who didn't get the memo braved -18F to vote for Chris Crispy Creme yesterday in Iowa, even though he had already dropped out
The 108k who turned out under those conditions are a legitimate index of the proportional enthusiasm which exists.
Vivek got fewer than 9k votes and promptly, and properly, dropped out.
Change my mind.
Can you imagine working for Drudge and lifting this particular typo verbatim and reproducing it for a headline?
C'mon man.
That guy's brain emits artic temperatures.
Oh for Pete's sake, the low temperature in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on Feb 1, 2016 was +28F
Only 14.4% of registered Republicans participated...
. . . in 2016, some 187,000 people cast ballots, a record high equating to 29% of registered Republicans.
Drudge: Just updated but still misspelled lol
And things were so boring lately. I'm freezing to death in my cardboard box but this imbecile keeps me moving just enough to stay alive.
The world is drunk on debt: Global debt at all levels reached $307 trillion in 3Q2023
IIF CEO Tim Adams sounded the alarm on rising levels of debt while
speaking to CNBC’s Silvia Amaro at the World Economic Forum in Davos,
Switzerland. ... "We need sobriety . . .."
The global banking industry’s premier trade group said late last year that worldwide debt climbed to a record of $307.4 trillion in the third quarter of 2023, with a substantial increase in both high-income countries and emerging markets.
The IIF said it expected global debt to reach $310 trillion by the end of 2023, warning that elections in more than 50 countries and regions this year could usher in a shift toward populism that brings with it still-higher debt levels.
More.
Ridiculous: It was -18F in Iowa yesterday, you'd stay home too
SITTING OUT '24? CAUCUS TURNOUT MUCH LOWER THAN EXPECTED...
Old Republicans in Iowa yesterday: Why should I bother to go, Trump's just going to win anyway.
That'h eathy for you to thay:
Stupid is as stupid does.
smdh
We're $34 trillion in debt, so Congress unites to spend $70 billion more we don't have on "the children" and on "small business" because it's an election year
You have the government you deserve.
Story here.
IA stands for Ignorant Actually
I mean, I get it. Republicans are going to vote for Trump because he's been treated very badly by this country. And I don't blame them. He has been.
But it is perilous to assume that non-Republicans share this animus in enough numbers for Trump to wrest control of the election in November. North of 40% of Republicans in Iowa don't share it enough to vote for their ex-president. Biden is a horrible alternative, but it still looks to me like we're going to get more of him, good and hard.
Meanwhile, of Ron DeSantis:
Dilatory fortune plays the jilt
With the brave, noble, honest, gallant man,
To throw herself away on fools and knaves.
-- Thomas Otway (1652-1685)
This has got to be a record for Drudge lol
The theory here is that spell-check is disabled in all-caps, immortalizing ignorance, inattention, and sloth.
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