The Road to Serfdom is not an endless road, but its path and duration, what I call the Great Ravine, is not up to us to choose. While we walk this road the only thing we can save is our souls, and we do it with one simple sentence: It was never going to be me.
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Trumpism is an ideological embrace of America as a Great Power, that this is everything America should be, and an ideological rejection of America as a Good Power, that this is something America should never be.
I don’t mean “good” in the sense of doling out foreign aid lavishly and stupidly. I mean “good” in the sense of what the Framers called a more perfect Union, where ideas like liberty and justice are policy goals even at the cost of “efficiency”. epsilontheory.com/it-was-never-g…
This is the absolute level of MSM usage of propaganda-ish terms and rhetorical constructions. High since the invasion, and remains elevated (which is unusual).
But it’s not dominated by pro-Ukraine content.
In fact, ‘leftist’ MSM like the NYT gives a LOT more coverage to Putin’s rationales for the Ukraine invasion than Fox and Breitbart and the like.
BTW, the NBER paper that Stancil and his Renfields love to cite clearly shows that real wages are lower today than they were pre-pandemic. For women it's the same and for men it's lower.
To 'rescue' the vibecession narrative and avoid the unthinkable (that real wages increased under Trump and fell under Biden), a new graphic was created from the NBER dataset that appears nowhere in the original. We are told that we have 'returned to trend' in real wage growth.
This is an example of a perfectly fine (I guess) NBER paper trying to show wage compression post-pandemic that has been pressed into Yay, Bidenomics! service by the Stancil/Wolfers crowd for far more sweeping claims than it ever intended or can reasonably support.
You think I’m not angry? I am beyond angry … AT THE VIRUS.
The *virus* killed two of my best friends along with ONE MILLION other Americans.
The *virus* inflicted 2+ years of brutal, life-diminishing decisions on every American family - yours and mine alike.
AND our institutions - all of them! - utterly failed to protect American citizens.
Trump was a disaster. Biden is bad. The FDA and CDC were incompetent and politically captured. MSM and Congress were a joke. The worst of all was Fauci.
AND a well-fitted N95 or equivalent mask is *very* effective personal protection against Covid, thanks to the electrostatic properties of its textiles.
AND the cloth mask theater promulgated by govt officials was bullshit.