1. Peter Lawler, RIP, here is his just published essay “Souls Without Longing,” recommended. And here is an appreciation of Lawler, I was a fan too.
2. Jonathan Marks reviews Complacent Class.
3. Rachel Strohm is starting an email newsletter on politics and culture in Africa.
4. Some (mild) economic recovery for Italy? (FT)
According to my mother-in-law, working in education administration, she was forced to retire at 50 to make room for a younger man. May be a lot of POLR “path of least resistance” for women of her age to retire especially if they are getting some retirement income and told to make room for younger generations, but she didn’t really want to retire.
My limited experience of Asian Human Resources departments is that they continue to hold a lot of very interesting opinions about employment but they know what they have to say in public. In public they need to be “modern”, that is, Western. They need to be scientific. And on paper they are. But in private they continue to believe what they believe. This can be traditional – as in, no low caste people here – but it can also be weirdly modern – as in, we don’t hire people with AB blood.
How much it affects their hiring I do not know. But if the Chinese are pushing out women when they hit 50 I am willing to bet one of two things is true: 1. Women continue to be hired in order to be pretty and to some extent sexually available (although you would think that means they get fired at 36) or 2. The men who run the HR department have heard really bad things about something call menopause. They are not sure what it is but it sounds disgusting. So it is better to get rid of them before it happens.
2. I wish Cowen could be more direct; alas, I understand why he can’t. This reviewer (Jonathan Marks) is lost, lost because he can’t see what’s at the end of his nose. We see what we want to see, and that applies to me, and to Cowen (although he sees much more than I do). That America elected a charlatan as president, so evident now that even Will Wilkinson is freaking out, yet Wall Street and Main Street go about their daily business as if there’s nothing out of the ordinary. The disconnect between belief and reality has never been greater. In America we have staked our future on nonsense, a president who is a charlatan and so-called “tech” that defies both the laws of economics and the laws of physics. Hobbies of billionaires, flying cars and spaceships to Mars, are considered the next big thing. The next big thing that will never come. It will never come because it’s fiction, the delusions of billionaires. What’s ahead is frightening, more frightening than any Stephen King novel.
Watching liberals go nuts is the hourly highpoint of the Trump presidency. Second, saying to myself, “The Madwoman of Chappaqua will never get her “shot” at finishing-off America.”
Two scoops. Two genders. Two terms.
‘Watching liberals go nuts is the hourly highpoint of the Trump presidency’
Not even close. Trumps always trumps those attempting to turn a spotlight on themselves. The highpoint of the Trump presidency is always Trump himself, without fail.
Though oddly, many of Trump’s most ardent supporters seem interested in any topic but Trump himself, these days.
It must irk you “bigly” that the market is going up day after day during this presidency.
What do I care about the American stock market? But the entertainment value of Trump since the biggest Inauguration crowd in history has been priceless.
I don’t expect much.
Obama left him with the economy and the country in ashes. He will need all of them two scoops to have the energy needed to clean out the Augean Stables he inherited.
And, I am certain that President Donald J. Trump will not be as beneficial to the GOP as was Obama during his two terms. While Obama was president, the GOP gained 63 House seats, 10 Senate seats and 14 governorships. But, silver lining, President Trump will fill approximately 108 Federal judicial and, hopefully, two or three more SCOTUS, vacancies.
The economy and country in ashes? Hahahahaaaaaahaha. Omg I can’t stop laughing.
The economy’s not in a shambles, but civic life is. The Obama administration was a continuous lawfare operation, and he got away with it.
Break out the Claritin, Moo Cow. Here are some facts. You know, the facts that you all ignored and that got Trump elected.
ACA destroyed the health care system with sky-high health insurance premium increases and will harm/bankrupt many states with yugely expanded Medicaid costs. But, BUT! Jimmy Kimmel’s kid needs a couple million dollars surgery. Sweet! With ACA Kimmel won’t need to mortgage one of his mansions to pay for it.
Obama overloaded, and will bust, states’ social programs with millions of illegal immigrants and refugees. I know! I’m a racist and YOU yet don’t know that you have run out of other people’s money. Milton Friedman: You can have the welfare state. You can have open borders. But you cannot have both.
What(?) 1.2% 1Q2017 GDP growth; never in eight years had 3% annual GDP growth despite adding $9.4 trillion to the national debt; years of zero interest rates (enriched Wall Street, screwed Main Street) and the Fed printing $4 trillion in QE’s, which only enriched Wall Street.
Also consider:
The Fed has no remaining “arrows in its quiver.”
National debt deteriorated 89% rising $9.4 trillion from $10.6 trillion to $20 trillion – unsustainable.
National debt per capital nearly doubled going to $61,340 from $31,000.
Annual federal deficits over $1 trillion.
Numerous bankrupt private/public retirement funds.
Labor force participation rate crashed from 65.8% to 62.8%.
Home Ownership Rate dropped from 67.3% to 63.5%
Real Median Household Income declined 6.4% from $57,744 to $54,045.
From the Fed’s annual “household well-being report” a quarter of Americans can’t pay all their monthly bills; 44% have less than $400 emergency funds.
Food stamp dependence worsened by 36% from 32 million to 43.6 million.
Persons in poverty rose by 7 million destitute Americans deteriorating 18% to 45 million from 38 million.
Added millions to SS disability rolls.
NY Fed cuts 2Q2017 GDP growth estimate from 2.3% to 1.8%.
Total U.S. household debt was $12.73 trillion at the end 1Q2017, up $473 billion from PY, and above housing bubble peak. QTR survey:
Household debt delinquency rates steady at 4.8% (FYI – unacceptable and unsatisfactory – only the FDIC Board of Directors can legally make an “unsafe and unsound” determination ).
NY Fed – about 11% (apocalyptic) student loan debt “seriously delinquent” a/o 3/31/2017. About $10 trillion is outstanding.
Auto loan and credit card delinquency are rising, while used car prices are declining.
Auto sales down 4.7%
[ETC.]
Augean stuff outside accounting and finance: Obama/Kerry gave the mad mullahs and nutty Kim in NorKor nukes. Obama admitted tens of thousands of MS-13 gangsters and hajjis, er refugees, who are going to kill you.
It seems more like One Reich, One Volk, One Fuhrer!
The only people who can hear dog whistles are dogs. Projecting much?
Even standard chattering class leftist Will Wilkinson!
I was actually thinking about Tyler, Will, and Noah this morning. Tyler has a personal style to be oblique, which is a little like a Straussian need to be oblique.
I think Will and Noah show that you can stand for conventional moral values in America without losing status or going to jail. That is good, but it probably doesn’t have to be everyone’s style or everyone’s 24×7 programming.
BTW on 24×7 programming, an interesting tell-all on Fox News. Debates scripted like WWF wrestling? It seems so. And that might be where some on this page are getting their “programming” in more than one sense of the word.
https://medium.com/@tobinsmith_95851/how-roger-ailes-fox-news-scammed-americas-la-z-boy-cowboys-for-21-years-1996ee4a6b3e
I assume you’re short the market then?
Thanks for the insight, you are a veritable T.S. Eliot. But I have to disagree. “Pet Sematary” is scarier than a goofy, quasi bullying, reality show hosting, Montenegrian pushing, NYC real estate developer.
For one thing, the monsters were hard to talk out of their views, something that isn’t true of Trump.
#6 – My first guess would have been wealthy spouses.
Older women living with their children is not happening in America. In 2014, 32.1% of 18 to 34 years-olds lived in their parents’ homes. That’s a sharp rise from 20% of 1960. Hope and Change!
1. Walker Percy, indeed. Has anyone written a more sublime sentence than Walker Percy? As Damon Linker suggests, the intersection of the conservative and the liberal is “to come face to face with one’s own ignorance about oneself”.
Even Damon Linker!
the intersection of the conservative and the liberal is “to come face to face with one’s own ignorance about oneself”.
Is being ‘ignorant about oneself’ his excuse for having taken a salary from the Institute on Religion and Public Life for four years, conning his boss for four years, and using his employment there to collect material for an expose? (Or a supposed expose, as Fr. Neuhaus and company had no dirt you could dish)?
It goes undermentioned, but nearly all older Chinese women today at most only had one child. Coupled with the economic growth, this probably increased per family savings significantly.
Under discussed with respect to China: people don’t own the land under their homes. They lease it for 70 years. I’m not an economist, but I’m curious what will happen as a result…
1) “Safe sex, for example, is detached from the bare act’s natural function for an animal born to die; it serves the highly self-conscious individual and is perfectly contrary to nature.”
This is what really grosses me out about this philosophy, it’s the headlong rush into death. Literally a death cult, as evidenced by this line. Why don’t we take it a step further and get rid of antibiotics while we’re at it? It would be so much less self-conscious of individuals to worry about, you know, their LIFE, and simply take what fate God and nature has to offer them.
The conceit that a small, inexpensive adaptation to the challenges posed by international travel, urban living, increased prosperity, and other extremely unnatural environmental factors should be criticized because it’s “unnatural” is kind of like saying that you shouldn’t smoke cigarettes during a forest fire. There are obviously so many things that are so much more important and so much less natural than safer sex, yet here we are, worrying about whether we should tell teenagers to use rubbers. Don’t get me wrong, I think there’s a lot of appeal in going back to the conspicuously pre-Christian state of “nature”. But let’s not pretend that there is anything natural about Judeo-Christian morality in the first place, or that it has anything at all to say about nature, itself being an unnatural adaptation to an unnatural state of being.
6
When your only son works 70 hour weeks you need to take care of your grandson for him.
This is the reason I left after four seasons:
vaiṣṇava jana to tene kahiye
je pīḍa parāyī jāṇe re,
para duḥkhe upakāra kare to ye
mana abhimāna na āṇe re
Let’s not be alone. Look it was right even though it felt right. Salut.
Broken lights, reading backwards, making all the right moves, being angels
Let’s not be so poor. Let’s be wealthy. Let’s not be broken.
I think you’re the best.
Let’s be jesus, tonight.
I just scored thirty two points, yeah i’m only thirteen, yeah I had seven rebounds, my braces hurt tonight.
How many assists LeBron?
Just one.
Justone?
Just one. I don’t like passing the ball.
Let’s use more fossil fuels, let’s refuse to subsidize developing countries, let’s eliminate regulations that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.’
1. Peter Lawler, Allan Bloom, and “Souls Without Longing”: Maybe the flick “Zardoz” wasn’t as absurd as I thought.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz