Monthly Archives: May 2021

Apologizing to Bigots

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A game show contestant won his contest last week. It was his third win in a row on that game show, and he bragged on it a little bit by flashing three fingers against his chest with his thumb and index finger forming a circle.

The Left has their collective panties twisted tightly. Flashing three fingers, they scream, isn’t a brag about winning three times. It isn’t even the standard “OK” sign that folks everywhere have used since forever.

No, it’s a White Supremacist sign. At least in their fetid, closed minds.

Worse, the winner wasn’t sufficiently contrite in response to the hysterical Left’s initial outcry.

“Most problematic to us as a contestant community,” they wrote, “is the fact that Kelly has not publicly apologized for the ramifications of the gesture he made.”

No, most problematic for the “contestant community” is the rank racist bigotry infesting that so-called community as they try so zealously to substitute their Newspeak dictionary for the standard dictionaries of honest Americans.

The response to the contestant’s abject apology, too, demonstrates that we cannot ever apologize to bigots; that only rewards them and eggs them on.

Apologizing to such as these actually is worse than useless—we can only counteract their bigoted assaults more forcefully than the attack.

The WSJ‘s final sentence in that editorial is spot on.

He has earned every penny, not least for giving a whole new meaning to Double Jeopardy.

Fair Share and Government’s Revenue

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President Joe Biden’s (D) Council of Economic Advisers Chairwoman Cecilia Rouse had some very instructive things to say on Fox News Sunday last weekend.

One was this:

The idea is to make sure that corporations are paying their fair share, to button up some of the loopholes, which have meant more corporations were actually putting more money offshore—off of US soil—and having a global minimum tax so that we’re working with the rest of our trading partners, so that we’re working with the rest of the world so that corporations are paying their fair share worldwide[.]

Couple things on this. One is that business of “paying their fair share.” Once again, a Progressive-Democrat declines to say what that “fair share” is, leaving us to conclude that “fair share” to Party is “more” until Government is getting all of it.

Sadly, too, Fox News Sunday‘s host Chris Wallace chose not to ask her what she considered to be that fair share, choosing instead to let that slide.

Another instructive remark from the FNS segment was this one by Rouse.

Yes, internationally we don’t want to be disadvantaged, so he’s also working with other countries so that we have a minimum tax internationally so there’s not a race to the bottom.

This is another example of the Progressive-Democratic Party politicians pushing us to be more like the European Union. Every nation must charge high taxes with no economic competition among the nations to attract real innovation, real business, real economic activity which can only redound to the citizens of each nation.

Rouse, like the administrative state running the EU from Brussels, insists that a tax rate race to the bottom, a race to leave ever more money in the hands of the folks working to earn that money, is somehow a bad thing.

And that flows from a third instructive Rouse statement.

What we’ve seen over the past several decades is that the wealthiest Americans, the big corporations are getting wealthier, and they’re contributing less in terms of federal revenue[.]

“[I]n terms of federal revenue.” Because it’s not Americans’ money, it’s not (big) corporations’ money, it’s Government’s money.  Never mind that Party (nor Republicans nor Conservatives) have for far too long, justified Government’s claimed need for the money.

Other Implications

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Automakers are starting to adjust their level of dependence on Just in Time manufacturing, a technique whereby manufacturers vastly reduce inventory holding costs by having the relevant inputs—car parts, for instance—arrive at the factory just before they’re needed. In some of the more extreme cases, that includes arriving on the moving assembly line just before it’s needed for addition to the growing product.

The hyperefficient auto supply chain symbolized by the words “just in time” is undergoing its biggest transformation in more than half a century, accelerated by the troubles car makers have suffered during the pandemic. After sudden swings in demand, freak weather, and a series of accidents, they are reassessing their basic assumption that they could always get the parts they needed when they needed them.
“The just-in-time model is designed for supply chain efficiencies and economies of scale,” said Ashwani Gupta, Nissan Motor Co’s chief operating officer. “The repercussions of an unprecedented crisis like Covid highlight the fragility of our supply-chain model.”

That’s true, and it’s also good that that fragility finally is being taken seriously.

There are two other factors in JIT supply chain fragility beside those largely innocent ones. One is the fact that an enormous amount of trade goods, including raw materials and components for assembly into larger components or finished products, passes through the South China Sea. A large majority of Japan’s inputs and trillions of dollars of value for the US pass through the that Sea. Those shipping lanes are at increasing risk from an increasingly aggressive and acquisitive People’s Republic of China.

The other source is supply chain disruption by union strikes. Strikes generally and supply disruption by strikes are ways in which unions extort concessions out of manufacturers.

Inventory on hand, rather than on trucks or rail cars, helps manufacturers get through those deliberate disruptions.

Sexism of the Left

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It’s written all across New York City politics, explicitly so in the contest for mayor.

Andrew Yang is running for the Progressive-Democratic Party nomination for mayor. So is Eric Adams. And so is Kathryn Garcia. Both of the first two have said they’d be glad to have the third as their Deputy Mayor should one of those two win the general election for mayor.

Oh, the hue and cry from Garcia. So desperate is she to make a name for herself (she’s down in the weeds, polling at 5% as of last Friday, while Yang and Adams are at 22% and 17% respectively, and five more candidates are between 11% and 7%) during her own campaign, she has chosen to manufacture a sexist beef out of the other two’s willingness to recognize, and to let New York City benefit from, her talents. She cries,

It’s totally sexist. Totally sexist.

And

Are you not strong enough to actually do this job, without me helping you? You should be strong enough. You shouldn’t need me[.]

It’s true enough that a New York City mayor doesn’t need Garcia in particular in the Deputy’s slot. NYC does, though, need a Deputy Mayor.

Yang says through “a rep” that he

has enormous respect for Kathryn Garcia and that’s why he’s often said he’d seek her partnership at city hall if elected mayor.

It could be that Yang is blowing smoke with his complimentary remarks about Garcia. It could be, too, that he’s entirely sincere.

It’s instructive that Garcia has chosen the one interpretation of Yang’s suggestion to push and not the other. (Adams has chosen simply to ignore Garcia’s…claim.)

It’s further instructive that Garcia doesn’t even acknowledge the other interpretation, much less explain why she’s chosen her sexist beef and rejected the sincere (potential) offers.

That’s Garcia’s sexist bigotry—the manufacture of her beef out of whole cloth and without deigning explain her bald claim.

Conversations about Race

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Gerald Seib had an op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal that centered on the race conversation that our nation needs to finish having and how Senator Tim Scott’s (D, SC) response to President Joe Biden’s (D) speech to Congress. Seib noted that, while our race conversation badly wants resolution,

in fact, that it may be getting harder rather than easier to resolve.

It’s especially getting harder because of the racists of the Left and the Progressive-Democratic Party’s resident politician racists.

There are the Left’s White Saviors carefully and solemnly explaining that a black man doesn’t know what he’s talking about when he talks about his black experience and about the black experience generally.

There are the black racists being shocked and embarrassed that a black man spoke for himself or calling him “a stone fool,” “slow-witted,” “a token.”

Party racists include the likes of Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D, IL) who said Scott’s police reform proposal was just tokenism and the studied silence regarding the Left’s racial slurs against Scott—Uncle Tim, Oreo, worse—inflicted by Senator Cory Booker (D, NJ) and Raphael Warnock (D, GA).

Not a single black Progressive-Democrat Representative in the House has spoken in condemnation, or even mild objection, to that racist treatment of Scott.

All because a black man dared leave the Left’s cash crop vote plantation and actually think and act for himself.