April 25, 2024

UNEXPECTEDLY! US economy grew slower than expected at the start of 2024.

The U.S. economy grew at a slower pace than expected at the beginning of 2024 as consumers pulled back on spending in the face of higher inflation.

Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of goods and services produced across the economy, grew by 1.6% on an annualized basis in the three-month period from January through March, the Commerce Department said in its first reading of the data on Thursday.

That is much lower than the 2.4% increase forecast by LSEG economists and marks a sharp slowdown from the 3.4% pace seen during the fourth quarter. It is the slowest pace of growth in two years.

“This was a worst of both worlds report — slower than expected growth, higher than expected inflation,” said David Donabedian, chief investment officer of CIBC Private Wealth US. “The biggest setback is the acceleration in core inflation, and in particular, the services sector rising above a 5% annual rate.”

And Team Biden is prepared to drive those growth figures down even more! Biden administration sets national goal to cut freight emissions to zero.

Posted at 5:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

MISTER, WE COULD USE A MAN LIKE FRANK RIZZO AGAIN:

Somebody like Big Frank, an ex-police commissioner, would have loved to have join in the rumble with the nutter passerby himself, instead of anemically texting through the incident. And why doesn’t the mayor of San Jose have a better armed — or trained — security guard?

Posted at 5:18 pm by Ed Driscoll

TOM COTTON IS RIGHT. AGAIN:

The Russian word “pogrom” refers to an organized effort to displace Jewish populations from the spaces in which they reside by force. That is precisely what we’ve seen on far too many college campuses since the October 7 attack.

That’s what we saw at Cooper Union, where a braying mob of what we’ve been assured are only anti-Israel protesters threw themselves at the doors of a library in which a handful of Jewish students took refuge. Chanting “globalize the intifada,” in reference to the outbreaks of violence that targeted Israeli civilians with murder, the demonstrators terrorized their Jewish colleagues and compelled them to evacuate their refuge under guard. The Jewish students are suing their school for “being locked in a campus library to shield them from an unruly mob of students that was calling for the destruction of Israel and worldwide violence against Jews.”

Similar language could be used to describe the successful effort to scare Jews away from campus facilities at Cornell University. Following an outbreak of threats to “shoot up,” rape, and slash the throats of Jewish students on campus by pseudonymous harassers calling themselves “hamas,” “jew evil,” “jew jenocide,” “hamas warrior,” and “kill jews,” the school threw up its hands. Cornell advised its Jewish matriculants to avoid the campus’s Kosher dining hall lest they risk bodily harm. Of course, those students heeded their school’s warning.

“What shocked me the most,” said one witness to Rutgers University’s conciliatory attitude toward its agitated pro-Hamas contingent, “was the fact that the Jews attending the town hall were escorted out by police, not the individuals protesting and breaking the rules.” The event that so enraged the anti-Jewish protesters was only a banal effort by university president Jonathan Holloway to hold an event in which students could ask questions about the war in Gaza and the school’s approach to it. “Before he was able to answer a single one, anti-Israel protesters unleashed chaos,” Zach Kessel reported for NR.

And at Columbia, host to the recent spasm of anti-Jewish sentiment that led Cotton to call for reinforcements, the threat of violent antisemitism has forced many Jewish students off campus. The activists who called Jews “inbred,” demanded they “go back to Poland,” and chanted “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground” and “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too” somehow managed to convince their Jewish colleagues that they meant business. Columbia administrators appeared to agree. It facilitated their flight to the shadows by moving classes to a “hybrid” setting so Jews could continue to study out of the sight of their tormentors.

Thus leaving Mediaite’s Michael Luciano (or his headline writer) to breathlessly scream, “Tom Cotton Brings Hysteria About Campus Anti-Semitism to Its Absurd Conclusion: ‘Nascent Pogroms.’”

Or to put it another way:

Posted at 1:44 pm by Ed Driscoll

DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS:  Texas State troopers arrive at UT Austin occupation, start making arrests.

The organization initially planned to march and occupy UT Austin’s South Mall, but administrators notified the group that the event wasn’t authorized.

[AYFKM: Columbia president told Congress this prof was ‘terminated.’ Now it appears he’s ‘holding class’ INSIDE Columbia’s gates among pro-Hamas camp]

”Simply put, The University of Texas at Austin will not allow this campus to be ‘taken’ and protesters to derail our mission in ways that groups affiliated with your national organization have accomplished elsewhere,” a letter from university administrators stated. “Please be advised that you are not permitted to hold your event on the University campus. Any attempt to do so will subject your organization and its attending members to discipline including suspension under the Institutional Rules.”

A large state police presence has been reported at the protest, according to the report. A state trooper reported that at least three had been arrested, with the university later confirming to local news that 10 had been arrested.

The University of Austin at Texas Hillel said on Instagram that administrators have assured them that “there will be no tolerance for disruption.”

But how will that play out for UT Austin? In her 2007 book, The Death of the Grown-Up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization, Diana West looked back at the college riots of the 1960s and noted wryly the outcome of the one campus were the faculty fought back:

The fact is, general support for the Vietnam War under President Johnson, and, later, President Nixon, remained fairly solid during periods of student upheaval—although such support was going to be lower amid the increasingly liberal subset of society that sent its children to, or taught them in, college. But what did these supporters say to their children? It’s not difficult to imagine long distance arguments over what was going on at school between Junior and the ’rents—liberal or conservative—but what harsh words ever led to harsh actions? That is, what collegiate revolutionary ever saw his dining hall contract canceled, or his bursar account closed? (As one historian remarked, he knew of no other uprising in history in which the revolutionaries had fellowships.) The conduct of the war in Vietnam, the pace of civil rights reform, or university slumlordship wasn’t ever the parenting issue. What concerned Mom and Dad—or should have—had to do with Junior’s behavior. Dirty words. Shoving. Pushing. Cutting class. Cutting fire hoses. Waving guns. Taking things. Breaking things. Throwing things (paving stones, Molotov cocktails). Burning things (buildings, records, research). But it didn’t—at least not in any consequential way. Indeed, at the University of Chicago, which may be the one campus where administrators acted swiftly to expel students who had occupied a building, “parents took out newspaper advertisements protesting the draconian punishment visited upon their darlings, thus providing a clue to what had gone wrong with their children.”

As James Lileks wrote about advertising in the 1950s and ‘60s, “Turns out that living in near-Utopia has the worst possible effect: you decide to strive for a different Utopia altogether. Come to think of it, though, the roots of it all are in the ads. They’re testaments to happiness, a goal, a mode of living. But it’s not happiness you get because you’ve earned it. It’s happiness that you deserve as an American. That’s where things started to go sideways. It’s a short hop to thinking you deserve it all because you exist.”

Posted at 1:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

LESSONS:

Posted at 12:44 pm by Glenn Reynolds

IS OUR CHILDREN LEARNING? ‘Pedagogical Malpractice:’ Inside UCLA Medical School’s Mandatory ‘Health Equity’ Class.

Students in their first year of medical school typically learn what a healthy body looks like and how to keep it that way. At the University of California, Los Angeles, they learn that “fatphobia is medicine’s status quo” and that weight loss is a “hopeless endeavor.”

Those are two of the more moderate claims made by Marquisele Mercedes, a self-described “fat liberationist,” in an essay assigned to all first-year students in UCLA medical school’s mandatory “Structural Racism and Health Equity” class. Launched in the wake of George Floyd’s death, the course is required for all first-year medical students.

The Washington Free Beacon has obtained the entire syllabus for the course, along with slide decks and lecture prep from some of its most explosive sessions. The materials offer the fullest picture to date of what students at the elite medical school are learning and have dismayed prominent physicians—including those sympathetic to the goals of the class—who say UCLA has traded medicine for Marxism.

Jeffrey Flier, the former dean of Harvard Medical School and one of the world’s foremost experts on obesity, said the curriculum “promotes extensive and dangerous misinformation.”

UCLA “has centered this required course on a socialist/Marxist ideology that is totally inappropriate,” said Flier, who reviewed the full syllabus and several of the assigned readings. “As a longstanding medical educator, I found this course truly shocking.”

I don’t, after watching the healthcare industry flip on a dime in the spring of 2020 from “mandatory lockdowns” for all” to “White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19.”

And as Mary Katharine Ham notes:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE HAMAS/STUDENT PROTESTS AND MISNINFORMATION: Earlier this morning, I read Professor Glenn’s squib here about how press access to these encampments is being controlled by the little terrorist supporters.

It rang a bell for me, and I though I would share a commentary I wrote for The Daily Caller six years ago that touches on the same thing. In the interview with Judith Miller, she explained how the quality reporting there is challenged because you need permission from the IDF to get into Gaza, but Hamas demands that they control access (through “minders” tagging along at all your visits and interviews) and Hamas filters out as much negative news as they can.

Now please, don’t get lost in the weeds bickering about whether Miller was right or wrong or good or bad, or whether we should be in or support Gazans, Hamas, or Israel.

I think the salient — and timely — point here is that smarter people are beginning to ask about the college frenzies being coordinated both financially and strategically.

I’ve seen pictures of a few of these encampments and noticed that in one shot, at least 2 dozen of the tents are identical pop-up types. Who and how logistics could be very revealing.

 

 

Posted at 11:45 am by Charles Glasser

OUT ON A LIMB: Jerry Seinfeld Believes Hollywood Is Done, Movies Won’t Be As Important.

They say that the best type of joke is one that has some truth to it.

However, there’s nothing funny about Jerry Seinfeld’s latest take in which he declares that ‘Hollywood is Dead,’ and that the filmmakers and the upper echelon, holier-than-thou elites in charge pathetically refuse to acknowledge it.

“They’re so dead serious! They don’t have any idea that the movie business is over. They have no idea,” the 69-year-old Seinfeld told GQ Magazine “Film doesn’t occupy the pinnacle in the social and cultural hierarchy that it did for most of our lives.”

“When a movie came out, if it was good, we all went to see it. We all discussed it,” Seinfeld continued, before adding, “We quoted lines and scenes we liked. Now we’re walking through a fire hose of water, just trying to see.”

The fabled comedian does have a point. I can’t think of any significant pop culture trends that have come from movies in recent years – hell not even lame movie lines like Scary Movie’s “Wassssupppp?!” that teenagers were doing all over America when I was growing up!

That’s not to say that there haven’t been good movies – of course there have been, but Seinfeld says the significant impact of the modern film isn’t nearly what it once was.

“Depression? Malaise? I would say confusion. Disorientation replaced the movie business. Everyone I know in show business, every day, is going, ‘What’s going on? How do you do this? What are we supposed to do now?’”

Not having a unified “What are we supposed to do now plan” coming out of the pandemic, coupled with some pretty awful pre-pandemic product such as the last two of the Daisy Ridley Star Wars sequels, did nothing to restore the American public’s habit of seeing a new movie each weekend, particularly in the summertime.

As Steve noted on Tuesday, the formula for success, while expensive, isn’t especially difficult to write: “Give audiences flawed but admirable heroes they can identify with, and then put them through hell on the way to victory. It seems impossible that Hollywood can’t — or won’t — remember that simple lesson, but here we are.”

Hollywood went woke prior to 2020, and now risks going broke, instead of dialing all of that back with the simple goal of maximizing butts in seats to rebuild the industry by regaining the trust of viewers. Or as Samuel Goldwyn may or may not have actually told his directors, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

Posted at 10:45 am by Ed Driscoll

HARVEY WEINSTEIN’S 2020 RAPE CONVICTION OVERTURNED BY NEW YORK APPEALS COURT:

On Thursday, the court found in a 4-3 ruling that the judge in Weinstein’s trial — a landmark moment in the #MeToo movement that the 2017 allegations against him started — had shown prejudice by allowing women to testify about allegations that were not part of the case. The court has now ordered a new trial.

Weinstein, the Oscar-winning producer of “Shakespeare in Love” and “Good Will Hunting,” is serving a 23-year sentence at the Mohawk Correctional Facility, a medium-security prison in Rome, N.Y. He will remain imprisoned as he was also convicted of rape in Los Angeles in 2022 and sentenced to an additional 16 years in prison. However, Weinstein was acquitted in the Los Angeles trial on charges involving a woman who testified in his New York case.

Note though that, “In spite of Thursday’s decision, Weinstein will remain in prison because he was separately sentenced in February 2023 to 16 years in prison in a Los Angeles criminal case for raping an Italian model. She testified that he threw himself onto her after appearing uninvited outside her “hotel room during an Italian film festival there in 2013.”

Posted at 10:19 am by Ed Driscoll