Saturday Miscellany

First, you will recall the Biden administration efforts to onshore manufacturing. This especially concerns the production of semiconductors. Rather than depend on a company located in Taiwan, the Biden people have been investing in manufacturing plants in Arizona.

If you are a long time reader here, you will recall that I have been suggesting that, thanks to our failing educational system, we do not have the talent to build or run such a plant.

But, you will say, our universities are producing great numbers of social justice warriors. And besides, isn’t diversity what really  matters?

Don’t tell that to the Taiwanese. The following is from the Wall Street Journal:

Taiwanese chip maker  said it expected to delay production at the second of two semiconductor plants it is building in Arizona, the latest setback for a $40 billion project at the core of Washington’s effort to rebuild U.S. chip manufacturing.

TSMC—the world’s leading contract manufacturer whose chips power Apple  iPhones and Nvidia’s artificial-intelligence chips—also cast uncertainty on an earlier statement that the plant would produce an advanced type of chip.

The statements by TSMC Chairman Mark Liu at a news conference Thursday offered further evidence of challenges faced by the Arizona project, including a shortage of skilled workers and difficult negotiations over how much money the U.S. government will provide.

Second, on the crime statistics front, you have heard that America’s cities are suffering less crime, thanks to Democratic Party policies.

Apparently, since local authorities no longer arrest criminals or prosecute crime, the statistics show less crime. 

The Zero Hedge blog has the story, especially regarding the fact that inner cities are fast becoming food deserts, places where there are no supermarkets. 

The panic is palpable.  Democrat controlled cities across the nation are experiencing something they might never have experienced before:  Consequences for their terrible criminal prosecution policies.  And, they don't like it.  Not one bit.

Democrats have argued for the past couple years that crime rates are actually falling in the US compared to previous decades, but this does not seem to be represented on the streets as retailers in numerous metro areas are closing up shop after many years of operations due to increasing theft.  If crime rates are falling, why are so many businesses leaving blue areas?

It's estimated that Massachusetts retailers are losing more than $2 billion per year to criminal theft.  Maybe if the community stopped robbing them on a daily basis, these companies wouldn't feel the need to shut down.

Conclusion – Crime is not falling at all in leftist run cities.  Crime rates rely on reports and arrests.  If leftist officials are making policies which discourage arrests and reporting, then crime rates go down – It's like magic.

Due to changes in the way data is being collated by the FBI during the covid years, many major cities are not actually required to provide full crime rate information until 2024-2025, and quite a few are taking advantage (at least 30%).  San Francisco will not be reporting complete crime stats until 2025.   

This means that when Democrats argue that crime is going down (ostensibly because of their leadership), this is based on a false and incomplete picture of the data.  Lack of data, as mentioned, is also coupled with lack of arrests, lack of prosecution, and the consistent release of repeat offenders in blue cities.  Lack of arrests and convictions does not mean there's less crime.  

Third, thanks to the Daily Mail we now know that shoplifting in the Bay Area has gotten to the point where retailers are obliged to lock up underwear and socks. Nothing else is left to steal.

The Daily Mail reports:

Walmart and Target have begun locking up underwear and socks - the latest items to be protected against shoplifters.

As thefts have surged over the past year, stores have been increasingly keeping items behind lock and key.

But these have tended to be electronics and toiletries.

Shoppers at the stores, in the Bay Area of California, have reacted with surprise at the move by two of America's biggest stores.  

'It comes to the point of how ghetto does it look that they have to lock up the socks or whatever it is that they have under the key,' shopper Olga Leon told NBC Bay Area.

Fourth, you know well that certain people have dedicated their lives to ginning up climate change hysteria.

Now, we learn, via Psypost’s Eric Dolan, that pregnant women who are suffering from climate change anxiety have poor mental health.

New research provides evidence that climate change anxiety is associated with mental health issues in expectant mothers. The study, integrating both quantitative and qualitative methodologies, reveals how concerns over the future impacts of climate change weigh heavily on pregnant women, contributing to increased levels of prenatal worry and depression. The findings have been published in the Journal of Anxiety Disorders.

Historically, research on climate change’s health impacts predominantly concentrated on physical health. However, a growing body of evidence is beginning to highlight the mental health ramifications. This shift in focus stems from an increasing awareness of the psychological strain caused by climate-related events.

Dolan concludes:

This suggests that climate change anxiety adds a significant burden to the usual stresses of pregnancy, potentially heightening overall anxiety levels in expectant mothers.

Fifth, Elizabeth Grace Matthew addresses the lost American work ethic in the Deseret News:

As Gen Z enters the workforce in greater numbers, employers, colleagues and consumers are noticing a pervasive decline in work ethic that transcends demographic and political divides. 

Tales of “quiet quitting” (a conscious determination to do the bare minimum at work) and complaints about the reality that work is not always fun, lucrative or logistically easy pervade social media, where today’s young adults spend so much of their time.

Although some older Americans applaud these developments, saying that Gen Z is prioritizing mental health and the examined life over the rat race, many of my fellow millennials and our elders are alarmed and perplexed about this devolution in professional standards. It is especially worrisome because the decline in young Americans’ productivity is happening in conjunction with worsening mental health and academic achievement.

Matthew recommends a solution-- give children more homework:

Is there any simple way to reverse this tide for the next generation, and bring back a culture of professionalism alongside improved mental health and academic competence?

Here’s one thing we could try: Assign homework to primary and secondary school students, and expect that homework to be done correctly and on time.

Today, a bias against homework is brewing among educational researchers at universities and ideological activists in elementary and secondary schools.

Critics of homework say it increases disparities in educational outcomes between socioeconomic and racial groups because children with familial and economic resources benefit from homework the most and need reinforcement the least.

Sixth, do you remember Boris Johnson? He flashed across the British political firmament for a highly entertaining moment and then flamed out.

Alas, Johnson is now a columnist for the Daily Mail. This feels perfectly just. He has found a calling.

In today’s column, Johnson addresses Trump-phobia, the positive horror among certain classes that Trump will return:

In the cocktail parties of Davos, I am told, the global wokerati have been trembling so violently that you could hear the ice tinkling in their negronis.

In the senior common rooms of our ­universities, in the synod of the Church of England, in the Orwellian corridors of the BBC and among much of the UK establishment there has been a caterwauling orgy of nose-holding abhorrence.

No! they are saying. Not him — not that man again!

You can tell, from this brief snippet, that BoJo, as he is affectionately called, has a way with words. 

Would you like some more? Happy to oblige:

Yes, folks, the great orange dirigible is miraculously re-inflating across the Atlantic. The pachydermous human bouncy castle is rising again. Following his sweeping victory in Iowa, Donald Trump is now the ­overwhelming favourite to be the Republican nominee, and ahead in the polls to take the presidency.

The prospect has driven some people to the brink of virtue-signalling derangement.

Following a path cleared by Bret Stephens at the New York Times and Jamie Dimon in Davos, Johnson debunks many of the hysterical attacks on Trump. Beginning with the January 6 illusion:

The American people can see that none of Trump’s bluster, and none of the events — ugly though they were — actually affected the eventual outcome, and that power was transferred peacefully and in accordance with the Constitution from one administration to the next.

Reasonable people can see that Trump is not, actually, a would-be dictator, and they have come to resent what look like legalistic ruses to axe him as a candidate. The more ­frenzied the effort to cancel him, the stronger he becomes. The more bitterly his enemies wage lawfare against him, the more unstoppable he seems to be.

Johnson argues that the world was a safer and a saner place when Donald Trump was in the White House. Fancy that:

If that is the case, then there is every chance, under Trump, that the West will be stronger, and the world more stable. Can you really say that the world feels safer now than it did when Trump was president?

Everywhere, you see the malevolence of Iran, and of hostile actors backed by Iran.

We see Putin raining Iranian missiles and drones on Ukrainian civilians. We have seen Hamas — trained and funded by Iran — launch the biggest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust. Now, we see the Houthis using ­Iranian missiles to disrupt global shipping.

I ask you, in all seriousness — do you think any of this would now be happening if Donald Trump had been president for the past four years?

It was Trump who suddenly ­staggered the world, at the beginning of 2020, by violently liquidating Qasem Soleimanyi, the head of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The diplomatic world had conniptions. But we didn’t hear much from Iran, for the rest of the Trump presidency, did we?

Or take Syria, where Bashar al-Assad — another client of Iran — ­poisoned his own people in 2013 with illegal chemical weapons.

What did America do, under Barack Obama? Nothing.

One feels compelled to mention that BoJo believes that Trump is the best candidate to save Ukraine. He is assuming that the war effort in Ukraine is salvageable. I have my doubts.

After sending a company-wide email to notify all of its staff that they were being laid off, a top executive at iconic publication Sports Illustrated contemplated how things turned out so wrong as he stood in front of framed covers of obese and trans swimsuit models.

"I just don't know where things went south," said Jack Weber. "Did we not get woke enough? Should we have featured trans models even earlier? Was the heavy women we put on the cover not heavy enough? What was it? Maybe we should've given more consideration to plastering the Pride flag on our cover back in June. I was certain we signaled the appropriate amount of virtue for every possible cause and movement out there. It just makes no sense."

Johnson believes that Trump’s only problem is style. That’s not quite right. Trump has been indulging an unfortunate habit of insulting his opponents. Everyone thinks it is funny, except his opponents. It directly violates Ronald Reagan’s Eleventh Commandment. 

When the time comes to unite the Republican Party, those who have suffered the wrath of Trump and who have been branded with derisive nicknames are not going to be so easily recruited.

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