Or are they in Sumy? The locations are quite distant from each other.
Verifying this stuff is driving some of these guys crazy.
Friday, March 11, 2022
LOL, according to this stupid definition by a university pinhead, there are only 23.8 million middle class workers
“If you are holding a position that is non-managerial, non-executive level, doesn’t have a lot of decision power, you would have been classified in our study as working class,” Addo says [here].
In February 2022 there were 128.2 million total private employees. 104.4 million of them were "production and nonsupervisory".
That's a ratio of workers to supervisors of about 4.4:1 in the private sector. In the federal government, the ratio's much worse, somewhere between 7-10:1. That's probably closer to the truth also for the entire government sector, which is 22.2 million strong.
The supervisors are the elite minority, hello.
The best proxy for middle class has always been homeownership: house, condo, whatever. It's one of the most basic things which has defined us and more importantly united us for generations. There was a time when everyone said, rich and poor alike, that they were middle class, it was that strong of an American ideal.
Now we're stuck with a bunch of eggheads trying to divide us by overthrowing definitions.
Total households in 2020 numbered about 128.5 million in the United States. Roughly 84 million were owner occupied at the time, 42 million renter occupied, a ratio of 2:1.
The average size of a household in 2020 was about 2.53: (84 + 42) 2.53 = 319 million (a relatively small additional number of Americans lives in subsidized housing, military housing, and institutionalized housing).
A broad swath of Americans, 66%, lives in an owned home, with about a third distributed at the top and the bottom renting out of either convenience or necessity.
And most of them are by definition nonsupervisory employees.
CBS eyeball news can't even get the basics right for "excess deaths" story
The eyeball news story gets it wrong by screwing up the time frame. The reporter is just lazy:
Two years after the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus a global pandemic, new research suggests around 18.2 million people have died worldwide as a result. That toll is more than three times higher than the WHO's tally of nearly 6 million officially reported COVID-19 deaths through the end of 2021.
The new figures, published Thursday in The Lancet, are based on the number of "excess deaths" in countries around the world. Researchers determined how many additional deaths occurred from January 1, 2020 through December 31, 2021 by modeling the number of "expected" deaths in years unaffected by a global pandemic, compared to the total number who actually died from any cause.
You can't use "the current total". This is March, hello. You have to use the total on 12/31/21 as the study did, which was closer to 825,000. That means C19 deaths in the US might have been as much as 37% higher than actually reported, not 18%.
The disparity between excess deaths and C19 deaths for the US is much larger than the story lets on.
Similarly with the global total figures. There were about 5.46 million deaths globally due to COVID-19 on 12/31/21, not "nearly 6 million", so the excess deaths are about 3.33 times greater than the C19 deaths, not simply 3.03 times greater.
Perhaps the most significant new piece of information from the story is that "deaths from heart attacks and stroke have climbed beyond pre-pandemic levels", but the story won't suggest that there might be an association between those deaths and mass vaccination, only with the disease itself.
How many older people have died of heart attack and stroke after vaccination without contracting COVID-19? There must be many, many millions globally, by definition, but no one is publishing this information.
The bias in favor of the safety of the vaccines will not hold up forever as new evidence like this emerges.
We were confidently told these vaccines would stop the spread, even at the 50% threshold, which turned out to be a huge lie. Even after Provincetown the authorities bent over backwards to stick with the narrative.
Then we were told the vaccines would stop serious outcomes, yet US deaths in January and February 2022 are the fifth and fourth worst months for deaths of the entire pandemic.
The time for the end of this farce is long past.
Thursday, March 10, 2022
The US Senate quickly approved the omnibus spending bill and already has sent it on to Biden for his signature by the deadline tomorrow
Story here.
I'm guessing that will be the last spending bill of any significance until September when they have to do another continuing resolution because of the upcoming election in November, after which we'll have another omnibus instead of regular order, which no one even remembers what it looks like anymore.
Our government is perennially dysfunctional.
Build Back Better is well and truly dead: House passes $1.5 trillion omnibus to fund federal government through September
$780 billion is for the Department of Defense.
The bill(s) go to the Senate next.
The usual sausage making, with a little spice added in.
Low energy Joe: Brian Deese, Director of the National Economic Council for Joe Biden, wants to eliminate fossil fuel use completely
Electricity use alone in the US is 60% derived from natural gas and coal in 2020.
This is their idiotic message in a crisis.
Wednesday, March 9, 2022
The Joe Biden regime is avoiding Sunday's statement on jets to Ukraine from NATO by its own Secretary of State Antony Blinken like . . . The Plague
Low energy Joe: The batshit crazy loons of the Biden regime think this crisis is an opportunity to just jettison overnight the 60% of our electricity generation which comes from hydrocarbons
President Biden's Chief of Staff wants a clean energy revolution.
Meanwhile, revolution would mean breaking most of the eggs.
With Omicron dominant everywhere in the US, we have no idea how many cases there are because the Biden regime has given up on testing
US COVID-19 deaths in the first 8 days of March average 1,479 per day, 13% higher than the 1,310 per day average rate for all of 2021.
136,351 have died since December 31st, or 2,035 per day, 55% higher than the 2021 average rate.
No one cares anymore, on either side of the politics.
Where's the paxlovid, approved for emergency use on December 22nd?
LOL, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates don't want to talk to Joe Biden about his self-imposed US oil problems
From the story:
Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the U.A.E.’s Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al Nahyan both declined U.S. requests to speak to Mr. Biden in recent weeks . . .
Both Prince Mohammed and Sheikh Mohammed took phone calls from Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, after declining to speak with Mr. Biden.
Shackleton's "Endurance" finally found at the bottom of the Weddell Sea where climate is still the same more than a hundred years later
Battling sea ice and freezing temperatures, the team had been searching for more than two weeks in a 150-square-mile area around where the ship went down in 1915. ...
The hunt for the wreck, which cost more than $10 million, provided by a donor who wished to remain anonymous, was conducted from a South African icebreaker that left Cape Town in early February. ...
Once the wreck was located several days ago . . ..
Shackleton was tripped up by the Weddell’s notoriously thick, long-lasting sea ice, which results from a circular current that keeps much ice within it. In early January 1915 Endurance became stuck less than 100 miles from its destination and drifted with the ice for more than 10 months as the ice slowly crushed it. ...
The Weddell Sea still remains far icier than other Antarctic waters . . ..
The icebreaker, Agulhas II, left the search area on Tuesday [yesterday, March 8] for the 11-day voyage back to Cape Town.
More.
Why do you think it's taken this long to find the wreck?
Conditions there are as inhospitable now as they have ever been, and are forbidding even to a $10 million expedition using a modern icebreaker and fancy undersea gear with sonar and high resolution cameras and a short window of opportunity of only "several days" to spend documenting the find once they'd found it before having to high tail it out of there.
From departure from Cape Town Saturday February 5 to departure from the Weddell Sea Tuesday March 8 was thirty-one days.
That's the news that's not mentioned by The New York Times, even while mentioning it.
Endurance's coal-fired steam engine could make 10 knots
Tuesday, March 8, 2022
I hate unnamed former senior White House officials
Defense One, here.
The official outlined a scenario in which Putin consolidates some gains in southern Ukraine but fails to install a new puppet regime.
“Ukrainians may or may not cease and desist. The West may or may not continue to arm the Ukrainian insurgency and [Putin] might decide, ‘OK. I'm going to set off a bomb somewhere in western Ukraine to send a message that I have crossed the nuclear threshold, and you can follow me if you want.”
The UK's Boris Johnson turns on a dime
Remember when the British were famous for the phrase, "steady on"?
Or "steady as she goes"?
Yeah, me neither.
Remember when Pat Buchanan wanted to pull all US troops out of Europe, basically out of everywhere but Guam?
Latvia yesterday:
In a press conference Monday, Rinkevics said that public opinion and policymakers’ decision-making had shifted with regards to military deployments, noting that now “we need a permanent stationing of NATO troops, including U.S. troops, on our soil” — something he had called for before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
On the day Russia invaded Ukraine (Feb. 24), Biden ordered the
deployment of an additional 7,000 U.S. troops to Europe, and moved
forces already in Europe to NATO’s eastern flank, including to Latvia. ...
Even though the Baltic states have been a part of NATO and the EU since 2004, with all three using the euro as their currency, their geographic location makes them vulnerable. Like Ukraine, they all share a border with Russia. Latvia and Lithuania also share a border with Russia’s ally Belarus, which is widely believed to be supporting Russia in its invasion of Ukraine.
More.
Buchanan with Hannity and Colmes, November 26, 2007, Putin's seventh year in office:
COLMES: You want — yes, you want us to get out of Russia, too. You want us to pull the troops back, get the troops out of all — wherever we have United States troops.
BUCHANAN: Look, the Russians got up and walked out of Eastern Europe. They moved their army behind the Urals. They let Eastern Europe go free. They let 15 nations break up. What did we move NATO into their face for?
More.
10,258 US COVID-19 deaths in the first 7 days of March
1,465 per day.
Normal per day for influenza: 98.
The UK and The Netherlands join Germany in crying uncle over Russian energy embargo to stop Ukraine war
CNBC here:
Germany, the Netherlands and the U.K. have appeared to back away from a coordinated Western embargo on Russian energy exports, however. ...
Western sanctions imposed on Russia over the invasion have so far
been carefully constructed to avoid directly hitting the country’s
energy exports, although there are already signs the measures are
inadvertently prompting banks and traders to shun Russian crude. ...
“You can’t simply close down use of oil and gas overnight, even from
Russia. That’s obviously not something that every country around the
world can do,” Johnson said. ...
Monday, March 7, 2022
Rod Dreher is so desperate for anti-war kinship he's retweeting a Democratic Socialist of America now
Last time I checked the Ukrainians haven't targeted any high rise apartment buildings in Moscow for missile attacks like the Russians have in Ukraine.
Like its beer, Germany is the cause of, and the solution to, all of Europe's problems
The Bundeskanzler, quoted here :
"That is why it is a conscious decision on our part to continue the activities of business enterprises in the area of energy supply with Russia," Scholz added.
Rush Limbaugh's hero Angelo Codevilla was quite mistaken about Russia's ambitions in Ukraine
In "What is Russia to Us?" here Codevilla vainly imagined Russia to be self-limited by the sobering lessons it has learned from its history:
Today, [John Quincy Adams] would be confident that Russia realizes it cannot control
Ukraine except for its Russian part, or the Baltics, never mind the
states of Eastern Europe. ...
Adams would not hide the fact that U.S. policy, implemented by ordinary diplomacy, is to foster the Baltic States’, and especially Ukraine’s, independence. But he would know and sincerely convey to Russia that their independence depends on themselves, and that he regards it as counterproductive to try making them into American pawns or even to give the impression that they may be. He would trust in a Ukraine that had stopped longing for the borders that Stalin had fixed for it in 1927 and Khrushchev augmented in 1954, in a Ukraine retrenching into its Western identity (as, for example, by asserting its Orthodox church’s independence from Russia’s), and that is standing firmly on its own feet. He would trust in Russia’s actual acceptance of its inability ever again to control this Ukraine. This would be Adams’s Ukraine policy.
Sunday, March 6, 2022
Saturday, March 5, 2022
Cyprus has denied five Russian navy ships the right to moor and refuel there, so Cyprus' participation in EU sanctions has real teeth
https://in-cyprus.philenews.com/cyprus-forbids-mooring-of-five-russian-navy-ships-this-week-due-to-ukraine-war/ :
Even though Russia has signed an agreement with Cyprus to give its navy ships access to the Mediterranean country’s ports Nicosia this week forbade five of them from mooring because of the Ukrainian invasion. ... the agreement on the provision of facilities and a mooring permit is suspended.
The biggest cuck of the moment is Rod Dreher of The American Conservative, prophet of coming soft totalitarianism to The West
Rod Dreher retweets a whiny guy with kids who thinks boomers are dogshit, a Canadian who is intimidated by a Russian circus act training with a bear, and a Russian propaganda map of Ukraine showing "the advance of our troops".
All in the last 24 hours.
He's in Spain and Hungary enjoying the cafe life for Lent.
Friday, March 4, 2022
Like it or not, the US owes Ukraine under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, unless of course it wants to be a traitor to Ukraine just like Russia
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ukraine._Memorandum_on_Security_Assurances
As usual Americans are mentally ill, wanting mutually exclusive things
74% want a no fly zone!
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/exclusive-americans-broadly-support-ukraine-no-fly-zone-russia-oil-ban-poll-2022-03-04/
But fewer than half want the broader war that implies.
Remember when The White House was patting itself on the back for evacuating 120k from Afghanistan in 17 days?
It's always better to rely on yourself. The government will screw up a 2-car funeral.
Half of the country doesn't seem to get it that a wider war in Europe would oblige us to participate under NATO
Q:
"If a wider war breaks out in Europe, should the U.S. military be involved?"
A:
Thursday, March 3, 2022
Mayor Beetlejuice says “My d--- is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d--- in Chicago”
Here:
“You make some kind of secret agreement with Italians. ... You are out there stroking your d---- over the Columbus statue, I am trying to keep Chicago police officers from being shot and you are trying to get them shot,” Lightfoot said, according to the complaint. “My d--- is bigger than yours and the Italians, I have the biggest d--- in Chicago.”
Always thought there was something a little odd about Chicago's Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Once again, WaPo story critical of Trump's border wall never mentions Republicans forced Trump to accept Bush-era bollard fencing instead of his promised "impenetrable barrier"
The whole point of forcing Trump to accept bollard fencing was to make him a failure on his signature issue. Everyone already knew it was inadequate from the time of Bush, who agreed to it BECAUSE he knew it wouldn't work. Bush WANTED a porous border. Bollard fencing to Bush was like running on a pro-life plank and never having to do anything about it once in office. Good politics, that's all. Good optics.
Trump was set up to fail, and like a fool, he accepted it. That's the real story.
It was Republican payback for all the mean things Trump said about Republicans in 2015-2016. "We'll fix you, buster. Here's your fucking wall."
These facts are why WaPo has to write an article about the failure of bollard fencing periodically, in order to keep the lie alive that a border wall doesn't work. Their agenda is the same as the Republican Democrat agenda of a porous border, to keep the cheap labor flowing in, and the drugs. It's also Drudge's agenda.
Those two things are the most important to a sick, dying society, otherwise we'd have fixed this long ago.
And obviously, Trump is part of the problem, not the solution.
Now the stink on the border wall is so bad no one will come near it for a generation.
Mission accomplished.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-s-border-wall-has-been-breached-more-than-3000-times-by-smugglers-cbp-records-show/ar-AAUwpuh
Wednesday, March 2, 2022
I stand vindicated by Real Clear Investigations story about the high percentage of breakthrough deaths in Massachusetts, highest of eight states studied
... thousands of Americans are dying from the illness even after having been vaccinated. Striking evidence comes from California, Georgia, and Illinois, where a third of people dying with COVID had been vaccinated – even some who had received a third booster shot. ...
The proportion of fully vaccinated and/or boosted deaths against the number of total deaths is substantial, and appears to have been gradually increasing in recent months at least in several states.
Of the eight states publishing detailed, so-called "breakthrough" death data on the vaccinated to the present, RealClearInvestigations found that Massachusetts – with a substantial 75% fully vaccinated rate – suffered the highest percentage of vaccinated deaths: 55% from January 1 to February 12, 2022.
Follow my label "Massachusetts" for my reporting.
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
This disgusting piece of trash wanted to sentence a Jan 6 demonstrator to 5 years in the slammer for a 20-minute stroll in the Capitol
The guy killed himself.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/man-who-pleaded-guilty-to-entering-capitol-on-jan-6-dies-by-suicide
Graves put away Jesse Jackson Jr for 2+ years and his wife for 1 year for crimes he called "staggering".
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-26/ex-fraud-prosecutor-nominated-to-be-the-u-s-attorney-in-d-c
Drudge is promoting Putin analysis by two women who spew psychobabble and illogic
Fiona Hill at Politico https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/02/28/world-war-iii-already-there-00012340
and Amy Knight at The Daily Beast https://news.yahoo.com/russian-people-may-starting-think-092222195.html .
Fiona Hill can't make up her mind: "Putin is increasingly operating emotionally" but "there's been a logical, methodical plan that goes back a very long way". Then she takes it all back at the end and says Putin didn't "initially set off to do all of this" despite the plan that goes back a very long way but his "feelings of loss, they've all been there" since the dissolution of the USSR, so he is operating emotionally.
Got it?
Amy Knight is similarly confused: "Hitler and Stalin were crazy by any psychiatric standard" but "Khrushchev—though volatile and impulsive—was apparently a rational actor, not consumed by the historical grudges and the need to show off his masculine credentials that seem to obsess Putin." Except dictators are all alike: "First of all, like any dictator, Putin does not feel confident of his hold on power".
Meanwhile the Russian people are just mind-numbed robots according to Amy, but they are our only hope: "Russians are conditioned to say they approve of their leader when there is no alternative" you see, but "hopefully, Russians themselves will take action and stop their leader".
And to underscore Amy's illogic, even though she references Putin's insane nuclear threat involving "consequences we have never seen in our entire history" which were made as the invasion began, somehow it was the subsequent "Ukrainian resistance stronger than expected" and crippling "Western sanctions" which are "probably why Putin resorted to the insanity of his nuclear threat".
"She's just pulling it out of her ass". -- Sigmund Freud
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