Chicken Attends Movie. Much, Much More.

Repeats but worth it.

Enough politics, now for some old humor:

: Forward: At the Movies

Subject: At the Movies

A farmer decided he wanted to go to town and see a movie.

As he approached, the ticket agent asked, "Sir, what’s that on your shoulder?"

The old farmer said, "That’s my pet rooster Chuck. Wherever I go, Chuck goes."

"I’m sorry, sir," said the ticket agent, "We can’t allow animals in the theater."

The old farmer went around the corner and stuffed Chuck down his overalls.

Then he returned to the booth, bought a ticket, and entered the theater.

He sat down next to two old widows named Mildred and Marge.

The movie started and the rooster began to squirm.

The old farmer unbuttoned his fly so Chuck could stick his head out and watch the movie.

"Marge," whispered Mildred.

"What?" said Marge.

"I think the guy next to me is a pervert."

"What makes you think so?" asked Marge.

"He undid his pants and he has his you know what out," whispered Mildred.

"Eh, don’t worry about it," said Marge. "At our age we’ve seen ’em all."

"I thought so too, " said Mildred, "but this one’s eatin’ my popcorn!"

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++  

Back to more serious matters:

Biden on Democracy for Democrats

The President seems to think democracy is a partisan project.

By The Editorial Board

President Biden has made democracy and its virtues one of his main presidential themes, and much of what he said Thursday on the anniversary of Jan. 6 is worth applauding. Yet as a defense of democracy his speech failed, and it’s worth noting why.

One welcome theme was Mr. Biden’s assertion that “our democracy held” last Jan. 6 and is more durable than critics aver. We agree, and this puts him at odds with the current fashion on the intellectual and media left that a coup d’etat is already underway for 2024.

In this telling, Jan. 6 was merely a dry run. Donald Trump and his co-conspirators have already planted their operatives who will steal the election one way or another. Our institutions are too feeble to resist, and the public is too easily gulled. Mr. Biden seems to think better of both.

But where Mr. Biden failed, and fatally so as a unifying political project, was the way he conflated the fate of democracy with the electoral fate of Democrats. The most obvious example was his sleight-of-hand association of the Jan. 6 riot with voting-rule changes this year in Georgia and Texas.

“Right now, in state after state, new laws are being written not to protect the vote, but to deny it. Not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert it,” Mr. Biden claimed.

This is false. The changes in these states are restrictive only compared to the wide-open rules that prevailed in the pandemic emergency of 2020. The state changes typically offer more opportunities for early voting and mail-in voting than they did before 2020. Mr. Biden diminishes his defense of democracy by associating it with the partisan electoral priorities of House Democrats.

A larger lapse is his failure to recognize that the main reason Mr. Trump failed in his attempt to overturn the 2020 election was the action of hundreds of individual . . . Republicans. Vice President Mike Pence refused to interfere with the proper Electoral College vote count in the Senate. Attorney General William Barr said he found no evidence of widespread vote fraud.

Republican-appointed judges ruled against election legal challenges based on flimsy evidence. GOP office holders like Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger in Georgia refused to break under Mr. Trump’s pressure. GOP state legislators refused to submit an alternative slate of electors.

Mr. Biden offered a passing reference or two to generic “Republicans” who did the right thing, but then he offered this partisan broadside: “While some courageous men and women in the Republican Party are standing against it, trying to uphold the principle of that party, too many others are transforming that party into something else. They seem no longer to want to be the party of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Reagan, the Bushes.”

So there it is. Maybe Mr. Biden didn’t extol specific Republicans who defended democracy because the real purpose of his speech was to endorse the emerging Democratic campaign theme for 2022: Democrats believe in democracy and Republicans don’t. It’s a weak case for democracy to claim that you must elect one party to preserve it.

Arabs don't make good fighters because they are stupid:

https://m.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-691853

Hezbollah drone downed by IDF mistakenly reveals operatives' pictures

Oops! The drone shot down by the IDF on Wednesday had a memory card installed, revealing the Hezbollah operatives' faces and vehicles.

And:

Atheism among Muslims Is "Spreading Like Wildfire"

by Daniel Pipes, The National Interest
September 19, 2021

Ex-Muslims are publicly flaunting their rejection of Islam as never before: a steamy tell-all memoir that tops the country’s best-seller lists; one video (with 1.5 million views) showing a copy of the Koran ripped into pieces; another video with a woman in a bikini cooking and eating bacon; and blasphemous cartoons of Muhammad.

Beyond such provocations, ex-Muslims work to change the image of Islam. Wafa Sultan went on Al Jazeera television to excoriate Islam in an exalted Arabic and over 30 million viewers watched the video. Ayaan Hirsi Ali wrote a powerful autobiography about growing up female in Somalia and went on to author high-profile books criticizing Islam. Ibn Warraq wrote or edited a small library of influential books on his former religion, including Why I am Not a Muslim (1995) and Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out (2003).

Read more...

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Both riots were sad but the damage done is incomparable:

https://thejewishvoice.com/2022/01/blm-riots-caused-1300-times-as-much-damage-as-jan-6-violence-analysis/

BLM riots caused 1,300 times as much damage as Jan. 6 violence: Analysis

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Black Lies Matter and The White House's present occupant is winning the "whopper" contest:

Commentary

I would like to thank George Soros for raising my property values.

Okay, that’s a joke (sort of), but it’s hard to imagine, given the news reported by the NY Post Wednesday—Manhattan DA to stop seeking prison sentences in slew of criminal cases—that more people will not be continuing the recent trend of decamping New York for Florida, Texas, Tennessee, and a slew of other red states.

In fact, it is likely to increase. Property values hereabouts will sky rocket. Thank you, George.

Why am I thanking Soros? It should be obvious. The billionaire’s habit of opening his very deep pockets to elect “woke” district attorneys across the country has been remarkably successful. He, more than anyone, is personally responsible for the crime wave currently engulfing America with murder rates in our big cities the highest in decades.

That, as much as anything, is sending people out of the blue states on what is called in the country classic “Wagon Wheel,” “the Southbound Train.”

That the vast majority of those murders are black on black doesn’t seem to have deterred George (although he surely must know it because the statistics are widely available), nor does it appear to deter Alvin Bragg, the newly elected black Manhattan DA.

They—the mayor of Chicago, the DAs of Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and many others—don’t seem to care about this. They apparently have other priorities. Like Black Lives Matter itself, they don’t seem to think black lives actually do matter. Power (theirs) is all that matters. And that they look good. (To whom, I wonder?)

The people who really do care about black lives are the people who are supposed to disdain them—the cops (many of whom are themselves black).

According to the Post, one high-ranking policeman said of Bragg’s new dictum that his office “will not seek a carceral sentence” except for homicides and a “handful” of other felonies, “It will lead to more young lives lost to gang violence and innocent people being hurt both physically and emotionally.”

Another added: “This is outrageous. He was elected to enforce the law. If he wanted to change them, he should have run for a state office.”

True enough, but as some woman once said of another crime that was never punished, “What difference does it make?” The police have been leaving New York too. More will now.

Bad, even horrific, as that is, we do have something to thank George Soros for that is considerably more important than whatever jokes we want to make about red state property values.

More than anyone—with the possible exception of the current resident of the White House—George Soros will be responsible for a sweeping Republican victory in 2022 and possibly 2024.

The voters certainly care about COVID, but almost as much, more when COVID dwindles, they care about public safety. And they should. If a government owes its citizens anything, it owes them not to be gunned down by criminals in the streets. Next to that, everything else is moot.

By ignoring that obvious fact, Soros—I have to assume inadvertently—will have put the very people he despises back in office.

So, as I said, we should thank him for it.

But it’s also interesting to speculate on his motives. Why does he hate America so much, because that is the only explanation for supporting such policies. If you want the inner cities to remain inner cities, there’s no more efficient way than to make sure crime is rampant.

I imagine he wants to bring about our destruction, but for what? Some form of communism or communist globalism?

The irony is that Soros first came to the world’s attention for his work to free Eastern Europe from communism.

And then there’s the curious tale of his lack of guilt for his and his father’s betrayal of his fellow Jews during the Holocaust. This came to a head in a famous interview on 60 Minutes that Soros himself evidently tried to have banned. You can see it here for yourself.

Putting all this together is difficult. ’Tis,’ as Yule Brynner once sang, “a puzzlement.”

What isn’t so puzzling is what’s happening to the once great… or even greatest… city of New York. It’s an American and world tragedy. And given the way the city’s been governed in recent years, it’s hard to see how it can turn around for a long time.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Roger L. Simon is an award-winning novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter, co-founder of PJMedia, and now, editor-at-large for The Epoch Times. His most recent books are “The GOAT” (fiction) and “I Know Best: How Moral Narcissism Is Destroying Our Republic, If It Hasn’t Already” (nonfiction). He can be found on GETTR and Parler @rogerlsimon.

+++++++++++++++++

The Hoover Institution Monthly Briefing on the Economy (edited)

Inflation

Welcome to the January 2022 edition of the Hoover Institution’s economic newsletter. This month we explore the surge in inflation.   From automobile prices and food costs to housing payments, the 2021 US economy experienced inflation rates not seen since the 1970s. Initially, policy makers pointed to temporary supply-chain issues as the culprit and predicted that price increases would be a “transitory” phenomenon. But with monthly inflation data continuing to show annualized rates in excess of 6 percent, worries about sustained inflation are now widespread. What are the causes of this inflation, and what is the way forward?

The inflation was predictable. In April 2021, economists John Cochrane and Kevin Hassett warned that the economy was vulnerable to persistent inflation. The authors pointed to similarities between today’s macroeconomic policies and those that preceded the sustained inflation of the 1970s. They correctly predicted that any inflation would “be quickly dismissed as ‘transitory pressures’ or ‘supply disruptions.’” Compared to the 1970s, however, persistent inflation may prove harder to stop. With the federal debt exceeding 100 percent of GDP—four times the level in the 1970s—any attempt by the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to stop inflation would push federal deficits to new heights:

If the Federal Reserve were to raise interest rates, that would explode the deficit even more. Five percent interest rates mean an additional 5 percent of GDP or $1 trillion deficit. The Fed will be under enormous pressure not to raise rates. More starkly, any effort to combat inflation will have to involve a swift fiscal adjustment. Inflation comes when people don’t want to hold government bonds, or Fed reserves backed by government bonds, because they don’t trust the government to repay its debts. Stopping inflation now will mean a sharp reduction and reform of entitlement spending programs, a far-reaching pro-growth tax reform, and no more bailouts and stimulus checks. And all this may have to be implemented in a recession. Almost all historic inflation stabilizations required far-reaching fiscal and pro-growth reforms.

+++++++++++++

Speaking Words Of Wisdom interview with John H. Cochrane, Niall Ferguson, H. R. McMaster, Bill Whalen via GoodFellows: Conversations From The Hoover Institution The new year begins by opening the viewer mailbag. Hoover senior fellows Niall Ferguson, H. R. McMaster, and John Cochrane answer questions from viewers in more than 20 countries. They range from the likelihood of hostilities in Ukraine to academic freedom and the present health of American democracy—plus which of the Beatles they see themselves as, given that one viewer thinks the show is “fab.”

Stanford Constitutional Law Scholar Michael Mcconnell On Issues Raised By The January 6 Assault On The Capitol by Michael McConnell via Stanford Law School Hoover Institution fellow Michael McConnell discusses constitutional questions raised by the Electoral College votes and how reforming the Electoral College might prevent another January 6 riot. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Is Zuckerberg trying to take over newspapers and control American media. https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/victoria-taft/2022/01/06/how-mark-zuckerberg-i-trying-to-take-over-american-newpapers-n1545349 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ President Doofus had no Covid plans, had none for Afghanistan withdrawal and probably has none vis a vis Iran: https://www.wsj.com/articles/bidens-moment-of-truth-in-iran-negotiations-deal-nuclear-warheads-proliferation-centrifuges-fissile-11641504610?mod=opinion_lead_pos11 ++++++++++++++++++++++++ And: I'd rather believe Professor Turley than Doofus and/or Pelosi.  He is non-partisan, is legally more an authority when it comes to constitutional law and is not running for office: “Preserve the Narrative”: The Public Rejects the “Insurrection” Claim in  New Polling – JONATHAN TURLEY In the day long events commemorating the January 6th, Speaker Nancy Pelosi made a telling statement  to her fellow members and the public at large. Pelosi declared "It is essential that we preserve the  narrative of January 6th." Part of that narrative is that this was not a riot but an "insurrection," an actual "rebellion"… jonathanturley.org ++++++++++++++++++++ I have serious doubts about the honesty of the last election but I accept the fact that Biden, hook or crook, is our president. I believe he is  proving to be a doofus and tragic president but he is our president. That said, I also  believe it is wrong, even dangerous, to encourage legislation that promotes  rabid mail in ballots . Mail-in ballots increase the prospect of fraud and all kind of misdeeds and that just adds to fact that more voters  will either be reluctant to vote or will doubt results.  This is the last thing we need. We don't allow weapons to be purchased without proper identification, you can't get a book out of the library  without appearing in person. There is no reason , except in special situations, why people cannot appear in  person to vote. If you want to lessen the burden have all elections occur on Sunday, open the polls earlier and let them remain open longer.  ++++++++++    .