With the newly installed Biden administration, the People’s Republic of China are enthusiastically touting the status quo ante. Here’s the PRC’s Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua Chunying:
I hope they can meet the Chinese side halfway, uphold the spirit of mutual respect….
Meet us halfway: agree that the South China Sea with its islands and resources are our sovereign territory, and we’ll stop going after the East China Sea. For now.
Oh, and yes, we’ll respect you in the morning.
A short piece about billionaire real estate developer Jeff Greene‘s view of the current state of our economy had this:
A progressive Democrat, Greene explained that former President Donald Trump failed to support the working class by increasing wages and establishing income equality….
This is a typical Progressive-Democrat distortion of the facts. With unemployment rates falling to historic lows and Americans reentering the labor force (reversing a years-long trend), income equality actually increased markedly during the Trump administration. The lowest income earners got more hours and some pay increases, and those without jobs got jobs, increasing their income sharply from zero. In the meantime, the highest paid saw very little increase in their income. The rich stayed rich, and the poor got much less so.
If the real estate developer didn’t see this, it’s only because, in his own bubble, he continued to not pay his employees adequately or to push his contractors to pay their tradesmen adequately or to hire more.
Nasdaq—the tech-oriented stock exchange (no irony there)—is demanding companies listed with it
appoint within the next four years no fewer than two “diverse” directors: at least one woman, and one person from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group or someone who identifies as LGBTQ. Any company failing this requirement would be obligated to explain why.
The SEC must approve the demand before it has legal effect, but look for the Biden SEC to grant that.
Nasdaq, and the rest of the social justice warrior-ettes and virtue-signalers, miss the point of diversity, though. Or they don’t miss the point; they just don’t care.
Diversity of thought, diversity of approaches to problem solutions, most assuredly is something desperately needed in the boardroom. And in the C-suites, in middle management, on the production floor. And in schools, legislatures, and other political entities. (Voucher and charter schools already have this kind of diversity, in the main.) And in the mainstay of our private economy, mom-and-pop and other small businesses. Diversity of irrelevant characteristics like race, gender, or anything other will fall out of hiring for diversity of thought.
That’s even the logical outcome of those who push for diversity based on those irrelevant characteristics: all men are fundamentally equal in capability, these worthies say, regardless of color, gender, or….
Diversity done for the sake of diversity of race, gender, any other form, however, is just bigotry for the sake of bigotry, regardless of claimed purpose for the bigotry.
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has taken his State hostage and, reminiscent of a scene in Blazing Saddles, involving his Cleavon Little character counterpart, is threatening that if he doesn’t get billions in Federal dollars, “the…hostage…gets it.” (“Isn’t anybody gonna help that poor State?”)
During a speech detailing the state’s annual budget, Cuomo requested at least $15 billion in federal funding—or the state will likely have to implement a number of undesirable measures, including tax increases.
And
Cuomo said the state has proposed temporarily increasing the top rate by two percentage points to 10.86%, from 8.82%. A wealthy resident in New York City would pay a top rate of 14.7% in combined taxes….
“Temporarily.” Sure.
But the very threat is Cuomo’s admission that his State already plenty of money; it just needs reallocation. Cuomo’s State has no need of Federal—which is to say, the money of us non-New York citizens.
And it’s the season….
I’ve been so bored this week that I just memorized six pages of the dictionary.
I learned next to nothing.
My wife beamed at me with pride and said, “Wow! I never thought our son would go that far!”
I said, “This catapult is amazing! Go get our daughter.”
I saw a girl crying, so I asked her “Where are your parents?” and she started crying even more.
Man, I love working at the orphanage.
Notice that the word “nothing” is a palindrome.
Backwards it spells “gnihton,” which also means nothing.
What is black and white and red all over?
An elephant dressed as a nun suffering from sunburn.
Four blind elephants encounter a human, who is a creature they’ve never seen before. Wishing to learn about this creature, one decides to feel him. He reports that humans are flat. The other three then investigate, also, and they agree.
What is gray, has four legs, and a trunk?
A mouse going on vacation.
What is brown, has four legs, and a trunk?
A mouse coming back from vacation.
What has eight legs, two trunks, four eyes, and two tails?
Two elephants.
What game do four elephants in a mini play?
Squash
What does Tarzan say when he sees a herd of elephants in the distance?
“Look, a herd of elephants in the distance.”
What does Tarzan say when he sees a herd of elephants with sunglasses?
Nothing. He doesn’t recognize them.
What does Tarzan say when he sees a herd of giraffes in the distance?
“Haha! You fooled me once with those disguises, but not this time!”
Tarzan comes home after a hard day and asks Jane to mix him a martini.
He’s hardly sat down before he’s finished it and he asks Jane to mix him another, and being a caring, nurturing mate, she does so. Again, Tarzan makes it disappear and asks (nicely enough, to be fair) for still another one.
At this, Jane arches a delicate eyebrow and says “Three martinis? Before dinner?”
“Jane, you don’t understand,” sighs Tarzan. “It’s a jungle out there!”
A performative poet of Hibernia
Rhymed himself into a hernia.
He became quite adept
At this practice, except
For the occasional non-sequitur.