Oh, they were most certainly groomed into it.
Still, if you tell alphabet people that truth they will likely counter with something like the left handed argument. It goes like this: "The true rates of alphabet-ness are MUCH higher than the historical norms and now that society is finally accepting people for who they TRULY are it's natural that you'll see MUCH more LGBTQ identity, just as once left handedness was acceptable the rate of left handed people skyrocketed."
I'd probably counter that with something like a natural selection argument; that is, gay people are a genetic dead end and if any species naturally developed a large percentage of homosexuality they would cease to exist. Similarly for human nations or cultures.
If you've got any other good counter arguments I'd love to hear them.
I wonder if "Ms." Levine would prescribe liposuction surgery to an anorexic child.
Yeah, the fundamentally unreliable nature of so called 'green' energy means that every megawatt must be backed up 100% by an actually reliable generation source if you want to have a usable power grid. Who could have guessed?
"It is a sign of failure that the National Grid is turning to one of the most polluting forms of power generation ..." Ami McCarthy, political campaigner at environmental group Greenpeace UK said in a statement.
Apparently not this chick. Somehow it's 'the grid's' failure, definitely not her precious windmills and solar panels.
". . to deal with a summer heatwave that we know has been made worse because of climate change,"
Oh yeah, got to get the ol' climate change chestnut in there. Everybody be afraid! Yep, the power problems are definitely because climate change and not the shitty energy policy people like her are pushing. I'm certain she thinks the 'failure' is that the UK hasn't built enough windmills...
Makes you wonder how different the mainstream messaging around the covid jab in the US might have been had Trump gotten his second term.
Thanks for putting this all together!
I read that as "you shouldn't be nasty or violent if someone doesn't play along with the pronoun you've chosen". Seems like a call for civility from the lefty pronoun mafia.
Yep, capitalism is so obviously exploitative and evil that people just flee those shithole countries desperate to emigrate to communist paradises like Stalinist USSR.
Wait, wait, you're telling me that never happens? That people in fact flee in the other direction? Well, I'm sure it's just because of how pervasive and corrupting western propaganda is!
I lean pro-life and can understand exceptions for rape (not necessarily for incest, but let's set that aside for now).
...
Let's say you were walking home one day and a man pops out of an alley and knocks you unconscious. When you awake you discover that your circulatory system has been hooked up to a stranger in such a way that if you remove the linkage the stranger will die.
The link is onerous to you, interfering with your everyday life and sapping your energy. Worse yet, you know that if you maintain the link for the full nine months required to save the stranger's life there is a small but real chance that you may die when it is removed as well as a 100% chance that your body will be changed forever afterward.
What would you do? Would you endure the cost and risk to your own health to save the life of the stranger? Perhaps you would. But should you be forced to?
Obviously this is a metaphor for pregnancy via rape. I view bodily autonomy as sacrosanct. The state should not be able to demand that I give of up any part of my own body (life) even to save the life of another person. It's fine if I choose to do so (and perhaps that would even be the moral thing to do) but if the state demands it, well, that is tyranny, pure and simple.
Some pro-abortion people try to extend this bodily autonomy argument to every pregnancy, but I strongly disagree that it applies except in cases of rape. Ordinary pregnancy is the consequence of a woman's choice and that choice means they are responsible for the consequence (delivering the baby). Bringing it back to the analogy we started with, it would be as if the mother found a stranger and forced them to tie their circulatory system to hers. If she did that arguments about bodily autonomy fall away as she specifically chose to make the stranger dependent upon her own body. Removing the link at that point could only be viewed as murder, regardless of how she feels about the downsides or dangers of maintaining the link.
It's funny to see the Bud commercials they're flooding the media with now... all Clydesdales and traditional Americana. They're trying hard to reclaim their brand image, but it's not going to work.
Nothing short of a clear statement from the top brass along the lines of "We should have never tried to push the LGBTQ agenda on our customers. It was a huge mistake and we're sorry we tried to do it. We'll never do it again." has a chance of saving them. Of course, they're never going to do that, so...
Hah, I do that too. "Disc Wars" and "The Son of Flynn" still hit hard.
Honestly I think that movie is pretty much "two hour long Daft Punk music video" lol.
I thought the soundtracks from Interstellar, Tron: Legacy, and Guardians of the Galaxy were excellent, to name a few. Really made those movies imho.
So many dem voters list climate change as the reason they could *never *vote republican, even in cases like this where the catastrophic failure of leftist policy is undeniable.
IMHO the right has got to attack the climate alarmism of the left as a top priority. Not climate change itself per se, but specifically the irrational fear that it is some kind of 'existential threat'. That claim, which the left has somehow managed to inculcate in an entire generation, has no scientific basis. It is easily attacked and disproved, and doing so will allow many (d) voters who can see the failure of leftist policy but have voted single issue on climate change to vote more rationally.
Okay, let's say I don't own stock in XYZ corp but I've done my research and have reason to believe they're really dropping the ball. I believe the stock is overvalued, and I want to express that belief. Without the ability to short sell there would be no way to do that; no way to signal to other market participants (and society at large) that the price is too high.
I think maybe you're underestimating just how HUGE a problem that is. It means market pricing *cannot *accurately reflect the true valuation of a company. Accurate valuation (insofar as that is possible) is perhaps the most important product of a free market in that it allows capital to be directed most efficiently and protects people from paying the wrong price.
Continuing our example, let us say that my speculation is correct and XYZ really is overvalued. The corporate officers almost certainly understand that and so they decide to issue more shares at the inflated price. People who buy those shares are really screwed. Capital will be badly allocated because there was no way for the price to accurately reflect all known information about the company. Badly allocated capital is a negative for all of society.
any more than I need a scalper to helpfully buy a bunch of tickets to events and mark them up so that I can't buy one myself.
Let's say your dastardly scalper buys all the tickets to an event for an average of $50 a piece and manages to sell them all at an average of $100 a piece.
Now, this is getting long so I'll just leave you with a couple of questions. First, what is the real value of those tickets? Second, can you see what the downsides are of the tickets selling at the wrong price?
Oh? If you have a better idea about how a society might discover correct prices and direct capital allocation than a free market (for stocks in this case) I would love to hear about it!
I'm not even being sarcastic. What you're saying is tantamount to 'capitalism doesn't work'. All available historical evidence seems to disprove your theory, but it's possible you've come up with something better, I guess. Please, share!
I agree that there are some negative impacts of certain kinds of abusive speculation. However, I think that perhaps you may not appreciate quite how valuable the services speculators provide to markets are, primarily in regards to liquidity and price discovery. If you search the literature on this you can read plenty of research that concludes speculators are quite positive for markets, but let me try and provide a couple simple examples that I hope get the point across.
First: liquidity. Speculators provide a large chunk of the liquidity in any given market, and a more liquid market benefits all participants in several important ways. The speed, price, and depth (amount) of product you can transact all vary inversely to how liquid a given market is. If there are speculators in the market you will be able to buy more product at a better price more quickly than if they are not in that market. These are all tangible (and quite valuable) benefits that speculators are providing to you, the market participant. I can give you concrete example of why this is the case if you like.
Second: price discovery. Let's say you've done some research and have reason to believe that oil is likely to go up in price because some politicians are curtailing exploration and production due to some wild-eyed ideological reasons. As a result you take a speculative long position in a one year forward crude futures contract. If many speculators (or a few large speculators) have the same belief the price on that forward is going to rise. A rising price is a signal to other market participants to produce more, or that the policy is ill considered, etc. The value of that price signal is hard to overstate -- all of society benefits from it -- and it is only available because speculators are able to move price in response to their own projections on what ought to be the right price.
I could go on (and on) about this. Finance is my job and I participate in markets daily. The thought of outlawing speculation upsets me because I am 100% certain that it would lead to worse outcomes for market participants and for society at large. I hope you will reconsider your position.
Are you perhaps conflating legitimate speculation with abusive forms of market manipulation like insider trading or cornering? If you're thinking of manipulation (which is often illegal) I can see your point.
Legitimate speculation, however, is very useful to efficient market function. For example, speculators provide liquidity, aid in price discovery, allow market participants to offload risk when there might not be a natural counter party, and more.
Speculating that prices are too high is as natural (and necessary) a part of any well functioning market as speculating that they are too low. For stocks downward speculation is called "short selling" and it has often been the boogeyman of regulators and politicians who want to score cheap political points based upon people's ignorance of how free markets work and which come at the expense of the market's function as a whole.
Consider: what would happen to stock prices if short selling were outlawed? With no countering force to long speculation, stock prices would on average be too high, and in specific cases (eg, the GME long side manipulation we saw a while back) certain stocks would become MASSIVELY overvalued.
Why is this a problem? Because one of the most important functions of any free market is to generate correct prices. Correct prices are perhaps the most important reason that free markets outperform centrally planned markets. It's not hard to see that correct pricing requires that speculators have the ability to express that prices are too high (by shorting) as surely as they can express that they are too low (by going long). Removing shorts distorts market pricing and degrades the ability of free markets to efficiently allocate capital.
Aside from market efficiency arguments, people often feel that banning short selling will somehow protect them because they reason their stocks will be 'less likely to go down' because the 'greedy speculators' out there 'manipulating markets' will be banished. Banning shorts will not prevent price manipulation; for example pump and dump scams like the GME fiasco will work just fine without shorts in the market (except that they become much worse). Reckless long speculators will continued to be fleeced, and investors will on average get significantly worse prices on their investments.
By bankrolling the injection of woke and Marxist ideology into every Western institution Soros has done more to weaken the west relative to China than perhaps any other person alive.
Sure, he does fund some anti-Chinese groups and propaganda as well, but net/net he is an enormous asset for China. The Chinese are, of course, very well aware of that fact. Proclamations like this are simply a way for them to sow confusion around the activities of a man whose work benefits them and to allow western leftist to claim opposing Soros's agenda is 'pro-Chinese'.
Under the fractional reserve system we use bank runs are always a threat because banks are inherently leveraged institutions. That is, the law allows them to buy assets (various types of loans, usually) far in excess of their reserves (your deposits). Their aim is to make money out of the difference in what interest rate they pay to depositors and the return on the assets that they buy.
However, in a bank run they need to liquidate assets quickly, but that can be a huge problem because their assets may be illiquid or may be marked down relative to what they will eventually pay out if, for example, interest rates have risen sharply. As such, a run can cause a bank which would be perfectly fine under normal circumstances to suddenly become insolvent.
Here's a fun fact that lots of folks find surprising: there are more registered Republican voters in California than in any other state. Ref: https://ballotpedia.org/Partisan_affiliations_of_registered_voters
They're not the ones voting for this shit; it doesn't matter how they vote -- they're outnumbered 2:1 by (D)s in the state. Honestly I feel bad for them; they have zero political representation despite paying some of the highest taxes in the nation. Yeah, maybe they should move, but that isn't always an option.
Another testimony was offered up by “Mrs. T” who claimed she had been approached by 4th grade students asking whether she identified as a boy or a girl. “Should I really have shut that conversation down?” the teacher asked the committee.
Yes. Yes you should have. The only acceptable response in this situation is "ask your parents about it".
Mrs. T further claimed that after that conversation, five of the students in the class “came out.”
How exactly does a prepubescent child 'come out'? 'Coming out' is a statement about sexual preference, but prepubescent children are asexual by definition. A prepubescent child cannot come out. This teacher is simply using their position of authority over the kids to push their degenerate sexual agenda onto them.
And it's working. Those poor kids are being railroaded into a life that we KNOW has statistically worse outcomes (more disease, unlikely to reproduce, dramatically higher suicide rates, prevalence of mental illness, etc) by this 'teacher'.
While it's probably true that Trump can turn out the republican base better than any other candidate you must weight that against the fact that he also will turn out the democratic base better than any other candidate. Which might be okay if he didn't also turn off the independent voters he must have to win.
Given that, I just don't see how Trump can win in 2024 barring something spectacular happening. The left is very well aware of this and so they badly want him to be the nominee. This litigation is part of their strategy to make that happen as they know that the republican base will rally around Trump in reactionary fashion if they perceive he is being unfairly persecuted.
I agree that the only reason this case is being brought is because the left are desperate for Trump to be the 2024 nominee. Not only do they believe that he is eminently more beatable than the alternatives, he's also a huge boost to lefty businesses like journalism and for lefty fundraising. They don't care one bit whether they win any of these cases. Keeping Trump, as opposed to the disastrous results of their crappy policies, front and center in the minds of American voters is what they're really after here.
Not sure about Trump's fate post 2024 if there is a dem win, though. Honestly I think litigation would stop at that point as they just wouldn't care about him anymore in the same way that I don't think the current cases would be brought if he wasn't running now. In any event it appears at the moment that the current case and the other potential ones against him are all so legally weak that he's unlikely to be convicted.
Hmm, let's just take a little look at the metrics they chose, shall we? First off, ROE -- return on equity -- varies wildly between different industries. Because of this comparing any company's ROE versus the all company average is really only serves to show how capital intensive its industry group is. If 'women led' companies score higher on this metric it only means that they are concentrated in less capital intensive industries such as retail or tech versus utilities or mining, for example. But the article doesn't seem to mention anything about this. How odd.
A lower weighted cost of capital to women led companies is easily explained by the ESG incentives themselves where governments or private entities give preference (lower borrowing rates) to such companies.
Similarly, stock valuation of women led companies are likely to outperform under an ESG regime that directly incentivizes investment in such companies or discourages investment in their competitors. For example, under this regime many large investment funds such as government pensions may ONLY invest in companies with 'appropriate' ESG scores. On top of this there are now many active and passive investment instruments which track high ESG score companies and as such serve to buoy their stock prices.
So in summary what we've got here is some simple 'how to lie with statistics' combined with predictable effects of the ESG movement itself. What a surprise.
And then there's this little gem at the end:
In Asia, meanwhile, companies with a greater proportion of women in management outperformed those with a lesser proportion by 29% over a five-year period, according to BofA’s analysis. Since 2010, these companies have, on average, had higher ROE, better environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, rankings, and a lower weighted average cost of capital.
Soooo... companies that have more female leadership (thus bumping up their ESG score) have a higher ESG score! Shocking, right?
You say that but then go on to list several issues on which the parties have very significant policy differences. If the Republicans held all the power things would be very, very different on those issues than if Democrats held it. That's no false dichotomy.
Now, I suppose what you're trying to get at is that there are some similar pathological aspects to both parties, for example the #1 issue for either party is preserving that party's political power by whatever means necessary. I'd love to see those issues addressed with things like campaign finance reform, more term limits, and getting rid of the asinine winner take all voting system we have, for example.
But don't spin those common problems up into something like 'the parties are the same'. They are not. Not even close. Their policies are wildly different, as is there voter base. You do yourself and others a disservice when you suggest they are very similar.