Home » Open thread 3/22/23

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Open thread 3/22/23 — 16 Comments

  1. Neo, I don’t know if you saw my note in the “new phone” thread. The current champ on Jeopardy, Melissa Klapper, a professor of Childhood (or some such) wrote a book on the social history of Ballet class in America, titled (surprisingly) “Ballet Class”. Here is a link to an interview with the author. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbhvGXCLEtA
    The interlocutor is insufferable, and the author shades too far to wokeness, she is after all also a gender studies prof, but I found the conversation to be enlightening.

  2. Cell phone. I’m lucky my life is such that I can keep mine turned off most of the time.

  3. Well, the Fed raised interest rates by 0.25 points today and kinda hinted that future rate increases are questionable and data dependent. Powell surprisingly let slip that 6 banks are in near critical condition without naming them of course.

    It’s beginning to smell like a possible extended period of stagflation to me. Plus the fear of new and terrible government regulations of finance.

    Notice how Biden’s first use of the veto was to stop anti-ESG requirements for retirement accounts. The left always always needs to stick their snouts into any multi-trillion dollar troughs that might be available.

  4. @ TommyJay > “The left always always needs to stick their snouts into any multi-trillion dollar troughs that might be available.”

    I don’t remember now who said it, although I think it’s in one of my older comments: ESG “investing” is how the Democrats get people to pay for the social wokerie they would never vote for or fund if they had a choice.

    People who have money in retirement accounts or other large aggregators basically don’t have a say in what their funds are invested in; the lists of companies are too long, and aren’t necessarily identified as ESG, in the papers YOU get.
    We’ve told our finance guys to stay away from any of it.

  5. Couple of nice comments (among many) on the Thompson video:
    @ferntwang3830 3 years ago
    If ever one was to search for an anthem to lost love, this is it.

    @ChrisCorrigan 14 years ago (the 2005 concert video was posted in 2007)
    Richard Thompson writes the most beautiful songs about the soft places inside hard men.

    Not being familiar with the song or singer (I thought the title was Bee-swing not Bees-wing and was looking for some dance music!), I had to find the lyrics, because I can never understand what people are saying/singing without the crib sheet.

    Kind of like this video and I AM a native English speaker!
    https://notthebee.com/article/ever-wonder-what-english-sounds-like-to-non-english-speakers

    There are links to more of his songs; lyrics free, for music you have to pay Apple.

    https://genius.com/Richard-thompson-beeswing-lyrics

    Many believe this song to be about Thompson’s friend and fellow folksinger Anne Briggs.

    From an interview with The Guardian:

    Orphaned at an early age, she “ran pretty wild as a kid”. By the time she left home at 17 to join the touring folk arts festival Centre 42 – her aunt and uncle attempted to get a court order to stop her – she had developed an attitude she describes as “pretty unconventional for the time”. “The role of women was very defined and very restrictive, but right through my teenage years, I’d just been shedding everything as I went, you know: I can do without that, I’m not doing that, why can’t I do that if blokes can do it? In fact, I’m going to do it, so try and stop me and see what happens.”

  6. Powell surprisingly let slip that 6 banks are in near critical condition without naming them of course.
    ==
    When during his news conference did he say that?

  7. More on the reasons for Walmart pulling out of Portland–

    As reported by Portland TV station KPTV in the video linked below, look at the massive scale of just property crime alone in the last 6 plus months in the neighborhood around one of the Walmarts which pulled out of Portland —

    Crimes Reported from June 2022 to 2023

    147 Burglaries

    634 Personal property thefts

    424 Car thefts

    53 Robberies

    3 stolen property offenses *

    How many other property crimes were just not reported, and what must the number/scale of other, more violent crimes be?

    See https://www.kptv.com/2023/03/07/walmarts-departure-portland-shines-light-rampant-property-crime/

  8. Art,
    I think it was very near the end of it. A woman reporter asked him how many banks were receiving liquidity cash loans from the Fed (in exchange for Treasury collateral I believe).

    Powell said he didn’t know the number. (I think it is a large number partly because the stigma for banks at this point is minimal. And banks are a little or very afraid and would rather over do it rather than under do it.) I assumed he was going to punt the question, but then he said 6 were in critical or near critical condition, which surprised me.

    It’s a smaller, easier to remember number, and maybe most of them are in the news already. SVB, Signature, First Republic, and would Credit Suisse count? CS is not a US bank, but may have a US subsidiary. Don’t know. I haven’t paid that much attention either, so I may have missed one or two.

  9. I don’t know if the numbers, the large volume of property crimes reported above for the Portland area where Walmart pulled out are representative of what is occurring in each and every one of the other large Democrat run cities around the country;
    cities like New York, Detroit, Philadelphia (you want to see Hell, take a look at the recent videos depicting conditions in Philadelphia’s drug infested Kensington neighborhood), Baltimore, and others.

    Cities where police have been demonized, downsized, and neutered, and there has been a dramatic rise in homelessness and homeless encampments, in crime, in drug use, and in violence which has spiked and spread, not only taking over the centers (some, all?) of these cities, but spreading to some residential areas as well (and we’re not even adding in the numbers of more violent crimes).

    But, if these dramatic numbers are representative of what is happening in each one of these cities, just this alone would seem to be a strong driver, a major demographic shift, pushing more and more people, families, and businesses to vote with their feet, and to relocate to smaller, less urban–and likely much safer and more hospitable–places to live and work.

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