Nothing To Worry About, Ladies
“I dare you to try and stop me from going into a women’s bathroom. It will be the last mistake you ever make… You’ve been warned.”
The United States Of Queer
It is science that informs us that humans exist within a sexual binary, with few and rare genetic anomalies. To the Queer theorist, though — and by extension, the Queer activist — this binary must be rejected entirely, because it is nothing more than a white male creation meant to maintain the subjugation of those who exist outside the binary’s demands. Thus, no one is “male” or “female,” just as no one is “gay” or “straight”, but rather on a spectrum, with gayness and straightness in all of us to varying degrees. We are each Schrödinger’s Faggot, perpetually and potentially both in and out of the closet.
Declining fortunes
Bricks and mortar shopping malls have been in decline for a long time as various anchor stores ceased to exist, but as long as the marginal consumer is tapped out financially while still facing a variety of lockdown hangovers, this trend can be expected to accelerate.
Total retail sales growth in Canada has slowed recently, cooling to 1.5 per cent last year after rising to 8.5 per cent in 2021, according to data from CBRE Group Inc. The commercial real estate company predicts total sales growth of 1.7 per cent for all of 2023. At the same time, a flood of retailers are shutting their doors for good, leaving mall units vacant for months or sometimes years on end.
In fact, I went to Saks Fifth Avenue at Sherway Gardens (in Toronto) with my wife one morning during the week; they didn’t open until noon. The sign said that they were open seven days a week between 12 p.m. to 6 p.m., or by appointment,” Minakakis said. “I thought to myself, ‘what is happening here?’ Is that a part of being unable to recover staff? There’s a lot of question marks.”
In related news.
Competence Is Problematic
I’ll give you one example [of ‘equity’ double standards] that came across my desk, and which is so typical. The American Board of Internal Medicine is a sophisticated organisation that licenses and gives exams to people who want to become board-ready doctors in internal medicine. It’s a very difficult, long exam, traditionally, [but] now has this “diversity” initiative – they are going to go through all of the exams they administer and get rid of the questions that do not give equal outcomes for [all racial] groups, on the theory that these questions don’t recognise the “latent equality” of all groups.
On self-flattering fantasies; on a bedlamite horror story; and on ‘equity’ versus competence.
A Message From Comrade Tam
Justin’s Dr. Tam gives a health warning about colonialism, white supremacy, global warming, and capitalism.
Y2KYoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa
In the immortal words of John Maynard Keynes: In the long run, we’re all dead.
We are the expendables.
To the climate cultists, a few hundred million dead people is a step in the right direction. They know it's achievable, because they've done it before in the name of communism.
The war on agriculture is real, and it's just getting started. https://t.co/GCqoJoK6yv
— Katewerk (@katewerk) April 17, 2023
Ban All The Things!
Oh Noes! Why paper can’t be the solution to Canada’s plastic ban — yet
“The potential impact to the world’s forests is quite devastating,” says Tamara Stark, campaign director for Canopy, an environmental non-profit, noting that the amount of packaging being used globally more than doubled in the past couple of decades before any sort of ban.
“The growing consumption rates that we’re seeing will continue to apply pressure to the world’s intact forests … forests that we actually need to keep standing in order to protect both the diversity of species that depend on them, but also to mitigate against climate change,” says Stark.
“They can provide more service to humanity by providing that function rather than being turned into disposable products,” she says.
Biden’s America
Victor Davis Hanson offers some solutions. But is America willing to implement them?
Consuming the future
The principle reason why the younger generation finds itself gobbling up the capital of their parents is straightforward enough: decades of falling interest rates have made it progressively more difficult to accumulate risk-free retirement savings for retirement or asset purchases. On the flip side, the same falling rates lead to rising asset prices, putting things like home ownership out of reach for many.
The Keynesians won’t be satisfied until the savings of every last one of us is drawn down to zero.
Over half of parents surveyed say they’ve dipped into their savings to help their adult children, with one in five making significant sacrifices. Nearly half have also put off paying down debt to provide support, and more than two in five parents reported helping at the expense of their retirement savings. Overall, about 16% of parents reported significantly putting off hitting other financial milestones in order to prioritize their children’s financial needs.
…continuing to help out adult children can lead to a “vicious cycle” where if parents overextend themselves, they might end up jeopardizing their own financial security and may need to call on their children for support at some point.
Kicking the can
This Bloomberg news item confirms what many of us have suspected for some time: the main reason why an avalanche of Canadian mortgage holders are not in default is simply because the government has instructed lenders to let the interest ride. Sounds like something you would do in a casino, right?
“We are extending and pretending,” Steve Saretsky, a Vancouver-based real estate broker, said of the banks’ approach to their borrowers. “Banks are saying, ‘We don’t really care, just extend it — just loop it onto the balance.’
With the banks also signaling an intent to accommodate borrowers once their mortgages come up for renewal, the number of houses that would otherwise have come up for sale could be limited further. And the government may soon be stepping in to make sure they do. Last month, Canadian regulators released draft guidelines for how banks should deal with the rapid rise in borrowing costs. The proposal made explicit an expectation that lenders help mortgage holders avoid delinquency.
Harm Promotion
Now wrecking Red Deer;
The Fabricland store has announced they will be leaving their Railyards location this summer, in search of a new location.[…]
Proulx says the store has faced numerous challenges since the opening of the Overdose Prevention Site (OPS) across the street in 2018 and the temporary shelter in their connecting unit during the pandemic.
She says the store initially moved to the Railyards as their previous location in the south end was too small.
However, she says the store has lost many customers since then due to discomfort from daily incidences.
“All of the homeless roaming around and harassing our customers and things; it’s been a rough 10 years here because of this and it just got worse and worse over the years. We have hired a security service and that is helping them not come in the store but still they’re out in our parking lot and such; just makes life a little difficult,” she said.
Proulx says customers, ranging from high school students to older individuals, are consistently panhandled in the parking lot and at the front entrance, requiring their security guard to escort customers back to their vehicles. She says they have also experienced increased thefts within the store and needled-drug use on their entrance staircase.
More: DES Fire Safety Codes Officer Andrew Towers said in December 2022 that it was unclear whether the person who started the fire “was simply trying to keep warm” and added that businesses should try to keep building exteriors well-lit to deter such activity.
Medicinal Marxism
As Terence Corcoran notes, with a recent decision the Supreme Court of Canada has effectively barred any legal challenges to single payer healthcare.
The Supreme Court effectively approved the lower court’s conclusion that restrictions on private-health delivery do not contravene the Canadian Charter of Rights.
To make matters worse, the court’s justification openly parrots a famous slogan of Karl Marx:
If everyone had to choose a distributional principle, but did not know if they would turn out to be able to make private provision or not, it is plausible that many or most would opt for a system that protects distribution according to need, rather than ability to pay.
Mainstream Canadian conservatives, some of whom are privately critical of Medicare, are not going to move the debate in the right direction by silently awaiting a favorable court decision. That ship has sailed.
Zombie mortgages
If you are wondering why mortgage rates in the 5 to 7 percent range have not triggered a wave of defaults, here’s your answer.
If anyone thinks there’s no downside to this, think again. Any decline in housing prices has largely been arrested, thus making it just as tough as ever for first time home buyers to purchase a house. Allowing negative amortization essentially turns home buyers into the equivalent of deadbeat tenants, while locking up the capital of bond investors far beyond what they signed up for. We now have the worst of both worlds.
A lot of posts about lack of listings.
Reason is 4 of 5 big banks have been given the green light by the Feds to extend amortizations to “infinity and beyond” or allow negative amortizations due to static payment variable products.
We are in a duct tape RE market.
— Vince Gaetano (@VinceGaetano) April 10, 2023
Rewriting history
Normally I would suggest reading a book as opposed to judging it according to a review, but in this case I would have to admit that it’s probably not worth whatever the bookseller wants for it.
It’s one thing to claim that your pandemic strategies were undertaken with good intentions, but to not even acknowledge some obvious falsehoods that affected the decision making process takes dishonesty to a whole new level.
To recap, Deborah Birx—the woman who did more than almost any other person in the United States to promote and prolong COVID lockdowns, and attempted, with the support of mainstream media outlets, to silence anyone who disagreed with her—tells us in 2022 that she’d been inspired in her work by images that were widely known to have been faked (as if the real images of old age homes in Italy and elsewhere weren’t bad enough) before the lockdowns even started.
That’s Chapter 1.
She also admits that her guidance regarding the maximum allowable size of social gatherings—10 people—was arbitrary, because her real goal was zero—no social contact of any kind, anywhere…
Collectivist thoughts
I’m frankly amazed that Tyson even agreed to be on Del’s show, but this is a revealing exchange nonetheless.
Tyson doesn’t seem to understand a very basic point: the purpose of the scientific method is not to “produce consensus” but rather to discover the truth.
Neil deGrasse Tyson on Why Certain Medical Experts Were Silenced During the COVID Pandemic
"I'm not interested in medical pedigree. I'm interested in medical consensus and scientific consensus…The individual scientist does not matter."@delbigtree @neiltyson @HighWireTalk… pic.twitter.com/DBeVbfSYln
— Chief Nerd (@TheChiefNerd) April 6, 2023
Entire interview here.
Let That Sink In
The Power To Regulate Is The Power To Control
Established in June 1934, early in FDR’s first term as POTUS, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) licensed radio spectrum a mere six months at a time. That gave it the power to harass radio stations that criticized the New Deal, or FDR himself. The FCC soon developed a reputation for denying licenses or causing major paperwork headaches for radio stations daft enough to question the New Deal Order or the administration’s official narratives.
One particularly stunning example of government censorship via corporate proxy occurred in February 1934, when the nation’s radio spectrum was still under the control of the FCC’s bureaucratic precursor, the Federal Radio Commission. Like more recent censorship-by-proxy, it led to death and destruction.
Eager to further his version of a Great Reset, FDR announced that contracts with private airlines to deliver the public mails were abrogated (as gold clauses in bonds had been) and the routes turned over to the US Army Air Corps. Unfortunately, the military’s pilots back then were far from being candidates for Top Gun school. As predicted, they began crashing. Soon, a dozen had died, along with many of the messages they had been entrusted to carry.
To hide his failed policy, FDR censored veteran pilot Eddie Rickenbacker, who took to the airwaves to bring public attention to the matter. NBC Radio’s William B. Miller warned Eddie that if he said anything controversial on air, he would be pulled off, on orders from Washington. Instead of criticizing FDR as intended, Eddie dissembled.
The Twitter Files saga proves that the US federal government is still using its regulatory powers to coerce corporations into censoring critics, despite the fact that doing so is patently unconstitutional. As the US Supreme Court ruled in 1960 in Bates v. City of Little Rock (361 US 516), First Amendment rights “are protected not only against heavy-handed frontal attack, but also from being stifled by more subtle governmental interference.”
Faster Please
ZeroHedge- Texas Bill Would Create State-Issued Gold-Backed Digital Currency
h/t Scott
Mischief Is Important
“There will be control. You’re right.”
Pranksters Vovan and Lexus posing as Zelensky tricked ECB President Christine Lagarde into disclosing her plan to launch a "Digital Euro" in October that will give central banks control over how citizens can spend money:
"There will be control. You’re right. You’re completely… pic.twitter.com/F1IdexS0Pp
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) April 6, 2023
You’ve got to believe me!
It’s been acknowledged for a few months now that the Fed, like all central banks, is experiencing an unusual problem: for the first time in its history, it is actually losing money instead of being able to remit interest earnings to the treasury. As this post on the Mises website notes, those losses have now grown to $44 billion.
But not to worry. Those central bank wizards have some accounting tricks that will make this all go away. Or at least they’ll apparently go away if we ignore basic math:
The Fed’s balance sheet claims its capital is $42 billion, but in violation of the most obvious accounting principle (from which it conveniently excepts itself), the Fed does not subtract its operating losses from its capital as negative retained earnings.
Instead, it accumulates the losses as an opaque negative liability, which balance is found in Section 6 of the report under the title “Earnings remittances due to the U.S. Treasury.” These are simply negative retained earnings: to get the right answer, you just subtract them from the stated capital.