Disney's Anti-man but pro WASP

Doesn't Disney know that WASP stands for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant?  This is a sub-genre of the White Supremacy conspiracy theory: the White Specificity conspiracy theory.

Disparu has a review of  Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, the latest Marvel Movie.  I haven't seen it. I'll wait for it to show up on Tubi. Disparu's annoyed that the socialism of the movie "ants" is commented on quite favorably -- then finds much else to be annoyed by. The womanly WASP up-stages Ant-man in the big fight scene and I say "but of course!" Are the poor production values worse than the poor plot? Hard to say.

Apparently, the folks at Disney don't know that socialism comes in various flavors, which displays both an ignorance of history and a lack of imagination. For instance, if Putin took over Disney, top executives and whole creative teams would start "jumping" from the windows of very high buildings. Of course, this is not an example of true socialism -- just socialism as it actually exists. In true socialism, an ant happily works herself to death because she knows the Queen is her true mother and she and the other workers form a true and mighty sisterhood!  In false socialism, the ant sadly works herself to death after the Queen has falsely imprisoned her with the other bitchez and they all fight over scraps. False socialism is what we truly get.

Some will argue that Socialist Justice only requires the summary execution of the fat 'n happy few at the top, while the "creative teams" will churn out poorly produced, but highly expensive, sneakers at a repurposed "amusement park turned reeducation camp."

Forgetting that serious socialists are not easily amused, camp inmates will claim they've already been highly re-educated at Yale and Harvard and demand their student loans be "socialized" while they keep their cars and condos. The jokes on them. Their appeals will go unanswered but not unpunished. In the tragic aftermath, the world will be afflicted with tattered track shoes.

Early Stage Demen -- What's that called again?

Lately, Youtube's been shoving videos under my nose about how to tell if you're in the early stages of Dementia. I recently stopped worrying about early-onset Alzheimers (at my age, it won't be early), and now this. Let me say plainly: if I'm suffering from dementia, I want to be the last to know.

Now that I'm fully retired, I started posting here (after a long break) to keep my mind engaged with -- if not married to -- the thought process. Now I've noticed a feature on the Blogger dashboard called Stats. I wondered, what is this "Stats" thing and do they charge for it? Out of curiosity, I clicked on the "Stats" link and, to my surprise, got a page with -- stats.

There were some page views, which is unsurprising (I do visit my own blog from time to time). Then I noticed a recent interest in posts from the 2008 election. Now, not even I am interested in my thoughts on the 2008 election -- I was barely interested in my "thoughts" in 2008. So I suspect it's either 1) a graduate student analyzing "3Chan" rants (the predecessor to 4Chan) or 2) an FBI informant building a case. How to tell the difference? I'm thinking I'll sell a yearly subscription. The person who makes the purchase is the informant.

I should mention that in the post, "Doom for Democrats?" I speculate on the identity of the Phlegmatic Endtimer, Spengler, subsequently revealed as David Goldman. I sometimes think he is wrong-headed in his pronouncements but always with strong arguments to support his wrong-headedness. Some of his musings can be found here.

I wish I had hit the "stats" button earlier. At the start, I put some fiction on the blog as backup storage and later returned the pages to draft when I reread them and felt embarrassed. Now I see some of those stories got hundreds of page views during the time they were up.

Then there's the interesting case of Ask not for whom dat Canary croaks, it croaks for you!  The first seven years it got the expected couple of views. Then, all of a sudden, it got well over six hundred. Could it have been Russian bots?

Does Credit Expansion lead to Waist Expansion or Waste Expansion?

Jeff Snider at EuroDollar Univesity discusses the Chinese Stimulant that ain't fentanyl -- increased availability of Bank Credit.

Back in the 1980's I read that the Soviet Union had the highest rate of capital investment in the world and on the whole (or rather, "hole"), that investment produced a negative return -- requiring more investment. I read that and thought, "Gee, that can't be good." I had the picture of being on a treadmill and running to stay in place but the treadmill speeds up so, in the end, you're running so you'll fall behind slower. In such a scenario, collapsing from exhaustion seems the logical outcome.

In "The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities," Mancur Olson didn't discuss the credit markets so much as the "credit to" markets. In his view, the growth of self-dealing special interest groups in an otherwise growing economy produces economic sclerosis that leads to failure. The CCP is a collection of self-dealing special interest groups. Its near collapse during Mao's Cultural Revolution allowed a multi-decade spurt in economic development. Its reemergence as society's "guiding force" will likely herald its decline.

We face a similar danger in the good ol' USA. It's not the dealings of the Fed that will determine our economic future so much as the self-dealing of a web of special interests and influence peddlers I call "The Crony Class." Are they anti-climate change or pro their control of the nation's resources -- and do they see a difference? Crony class interests require a lot of lying-and-believing at the same time. ESG, anyone?

A Telluride Tell-all

If you ask yourself, "where does this lead?" and the answer is "nowhere good," then don't ask the question.

A Black Professor Trapped in Anti-Racist Hell

If the seminar is slow food, the anti-racist workshop put on by college-age students is a sugar rush. All the hashtags are there, condensed, packaged, and delivered from a place of authority. The worst sort of anti-racist workshop simply offers a new language for participants to echo—to retweet out loud.

Way back in the misty-misty, I saw Pulp Fiction with a progressive black friend and afterward said that Quintan Tarantino must have a special license for the prolific use of the N-word. My friend seemed both baffled and distressed by that comment. To me, it was a simple display of movement power. Think of an individual who can say, "You, right here, can use this word but you, over there, can't," and be obeyed -- and obeyed because they can enforce their will. That's a display of power.

I'd noticed that the left often defends the guilty (the murderers Sacco and Vanzetti) and persecutes the innocent (Bret Kavanagh), which puzzled me. I mean, there are plenty of innocent people who need defending. I figured it was a recruitment tool as well as a display of power. Anyone can defend the innocent but it takes a potential activist -- a person willing to commit to the cause and the "new morality" the cause promotes -- to defend the guilty. Once you accept that the murderer is the true victim and the innocent defender of the "loathsome" status quo is the real criminal, you are on your way. How about a donation?