Wednesday Potpourri

First, readers of my blog, and now my Substack, have been ahead of the curve. So it is good to see other thinkers catch up to where we have been for years. Those who subscribe to my writing will feel that they are getting something for their contributions.

Four years ago I wrote that the Democratic and Republican Parties had become the Girl Party and the Boy Party. Now, as of last Sunday, , famed political strategist James Caraville denounced his fellow Democrats for being too feminine. The phrase “preachy females” has gone viral, but why not offer the context.

He told Maureen Dowd:

“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the culture of the Democratic Party, Carville told Dowd. “‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’ The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’

“If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?’”

Naturally, a lot of people take some serious offense at such thoughts. Calling Democratic women preachy females is not a very nice thing to say. 

And yet…. If you would like a more extensive analysis, check out my analysis from four years ago. 2-12-2020.

The Republican Party has become the Boy Party. Republicans defend gun rights and tend to be more willing to fight wars.

The Girl Party wants to take everyone’s guns away-- an absurdly unrealistic proposal-- and tends to be anti-war, even to the point of being cowardly.

The Boy Party wants people to compete in the marketplace. The Girl Party does not accept the results of fair competition. Believing that the marketplace is rigged, it always leans toward regulating the marketplace, not allowing free competition. 

The Girl Party is risk averse, while the Boy Party is more willing to take risks. Just measure the shrieks of fear coming from the Girl Party when President Trump undertakes a risky foreign policy initiative... as in killing Qassim Soleimani.

Being a cult to the Nature Goddess, the Girl Party opposes industry, manufacturing, commerce and especially anything that involves energy. The Boy Party embraces the Industrial Revolution for all it has brought to all of us.

And naturally the Girl Party wants to provide great free healthcare for everyone. It does not concern itself with the practicalities of Medicare for All or with single payer health care. It prefers sentimentality and caring to the cold hard light of reason.

Like people who have never had to deal with the consequences of their decisions the Girl Party believes that wishing will make it so and that the money will always be there. It sounds like a group that has never made a living or balanced a check book. If you don’t believe me listen to Bernie Sanders.

Second, we have billionaire investor Nelson Peltz, who sits on the board of the Disney Company. Apparently, he is willing to call out the company for producing woke movies that do not make money.

This report comes from the Zero Hedge blog. 

In comments we're sure the left will seize on, the billionaire investor then criticized Disney for pushing woke messaging as opposed to simply making great content.

"People go to watch a movie or a show to be entertained," said Peltz. "They don’t go to get a message."

Elaborating further, Peltz asked "Why do I have to have a Marvel that’s all women? Not that I have anything against women, but why do I have to do that? Why can’t I have Marvels that are both? Why do I need an all-Black cast?" referring to Black Panther.

Third, on the therapy front, Jonathan Shedler rips back the curtain and exposes the truth about therapy influencers. They all have the same line, which ought to be familiar:

Therapy influencers get millions of follows w 1 core message You are a victim & you are a good. Someone else is to blame & they are evil It feels good because it sides with our defenses, not insight & self-awareness In the long run, it’s a self-destructive & self-defeating.

Fourth, a coda to a story that we followed from the onset. It involves the damage done to American schoolchildren by covid lockdowns. 

Daniel Greenfield recommends that we condemn the teachers’ unions who promoted it for systemic racism. Children of wealthy parents found ways to provide tutoring. Poor parents did not have the same options.

Anyway, Greenfield explains:

The Biden administration is on a hunt for systemic racism. Thus far it’s found systemic racism everywhere from the highway system to the military, but the one place it hasn’t looked is among the ranks of the teachers unions who provide much of its cash and its election foot soldiers.

But new data reported by the New York Times shows that the pandemic school closures demanded by teachers unions were the single greatest act of systemic racism in 50 years.

During the pandemic, members of the corrupt teachers union machine demanded school closures to “save lives”. Unwilling to do their jobs, they instead marched around brandishing coffins at political protests while warning that if they had to go and teach, everyone would die.

Education was replaced with the Orwellian misnomer of “remote learning” which parents, students and honest teachers admitted was not actually teaching any of the students anything.

And the newest data backs that up, showing that “in districts where students spent most of the 2020-21 school year learning remotely, they fell more than half a grade behind in math.”

The numbers were even worse for the poorer students who fell behind three fifths of a grade.

The decline in math scores was the worst in 50 years making it a historic setback and while all students suffered during the pandemic, the learning experiences in districts where schools shut were far worse for poorer students, often minorities, than for wealthy or middle class students.

And while the DEI complex and the media have spent years talking about disproportionate impact, it was the Left which was responsible for the worst disproportionate impact in 50 years.

Fifth, the dimwitted California legislators decided to raise the minimum wage to $20.00, thereby giving workers a living wage.

The result-- small businesses across the state are firing employees.

The New York Post has the story:

California restaurants are reportedly laying off staff and reducing hours for other team members in an effort to cut costs ahead of a California state law taking effect on April 1 that will raise fast-foot workers’ hourly wage to $20.

In the months leading up to the wage mandate, California eateries, particularly pizza joints, have established a plan to cut jobs, according to state records obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

Pizza Hut and Round Table Pizza — a Menlo Park, Calif.-founded chain of 400 pizza parlors, mostly on the West Coast — have said they plan to lay off around 1,280 delivery drivers this year, according to records that major employers must submit to the state before large layoffs, The Journal reported.

Pizza Hut already sent notices to employees informing them of their last day.

Sixth, on the AI front. I have a minimal understanding of artificial intelligence, so I have wisely chose not to offer comments on it. So, while the investing and tech worlds are thrilling to its advent, Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar offered a cautionary note two days ago:

AI will “change the world”, we are told. It will rad­ic­ally increase pro­ductiv­ity (albeit by dis­rupt­ing mil­lions of jobs). It will cre­ate a huge new wealth pie for the world to share. And, accord­ing to a breath­less ARK Invest report that last week pre­dicted a $40tn boost to global gross domestic product from AI by 2030, it will “trans­form every sec­tor, impact every busi­ness, and cata­lyze every innov­a­tion plat­form”.

It’s the euphoria and sense of inev­it­ab­il­ity in this straight­for­ward nar­rat­ive that makes me nervous. Even if you believe AI will be today’s equi­val­ent of elec­tri­city or the inter­net, we are at the very early stages of a highly com­plex multi-dec­ade trans­form­a­tion that is by no means a done deal. Yet valu­ations are pri­cing in the entire sea change, and then some. A Feb­ru­ary report by Cur­rency Research Asso­ciates poin­ted out that it would take 4,500 years for Nvidia’s future dividends to equal its cur­rent price. Talk about a long tail.

One senior staffer at a lead­ing AI com­pany recently admit­ted to me, when pushed, that the profit assump­tions around the tech­no­logy were based “more on spec­u­la­tion than sub­stance”, and that it has major kinks still to be worked out.

The so-called Mag­ni­fi­cent Seven com­pan­ies have driven AI enthu­si­asm and stock mar­ket gains over the past year. They have pushed the con­cen­tra­tion of the S&P 500 to a his­toric extreme. But as a recent Mor­gan Stan­ley report notes, “index con­cen­tra­tion has his­tor­ic­ally proved self-cor­rect­ing, with some com- bin­a­tion of reg­u­lat­ory, mar­ket and com- pet­it­ive forces, along with busi­ness cycle dynam­ics, under­min­ing static lead­er­ship”. The report says “ana­lysis sug­gests that equity returns have typ­ic­ally strug- gled fol­low­ing peaks in con­cen­tra­tion”.

That com­bin­a­tion of cor­rect­ing factors might include the grow­ing num­ber of Big Tech anti­trust cases and the possi- bil­ity that car­bon pri­cing and copy­right fines will chal­lenge the “free” inputs neces­sary to make a profit.

Whether you see AI as the next tulip bubble or the next com­bus­tion engine, it’s worth ques­tion­ing how the mar­ket is pri­cing this story.

Indeed it is.

Please subscribe to my Substack, for free or preferably for a fee.