From some guy in Florida:
“If you look back to the Great Depression, the house was only three times the average salary. Now, it is eight times the average salary. The car was 46% of the salary [back then], the car today is 85% of the salary. And here’s the craziest part: [residential] rent then was 16% of the average salary, it is now 42% of the average salary.”
I’d love to see the same stats for groceries and electricity. On the other hand, maybe not.
From Austin Bay:
“As for escaping to Texas, please stay away. It’s absolutely terrible down here. We have hurricanes and tornadoes and sweltering summers and gazillions of feral hogs. The worst of it: increasingly terrible traffic thanks to tax migrants fleeing California.”
What he said. Our local traffic around Plano/Frisco/McKinney looks on occasion like the traffic I encountered in L.A. back in the late 1990s/early 2000s.
He forgot to mention guns. We have lots and lots of evil guns here too, and a bunch of rednecks who love them.
From SOTI:
“It is now abundantly clear that the false narrative around Palestine is merely a pretense with which to dredge up classically hateful tropes about Jews and Jewish property. It’s a narrative of myths and demonization.”
True.
From Niall Ferguson:
“Henry Kissinger was a colossus who bestrode a century: he shaped politics like no other statesman and the world wouldn’t be in such a perilous state if more followed his wise and ruthlessly pragmatic approach.”
Amen to that. If Kissinger had a fault, it was that his towering intellect, logic and pragmatism prevented him from fully understanding the attitudes of the fanatics on the other side of the negotiating table.
Of Kissinger it can truly be said that he was always — always — the smartest man in the room. His enemies knew that, and it only added to their frustrated rage.
And you only have to see who hated him to realize that he was, mostly, correct in his approach to foreign policy — unlike the feckless and ignorant fools and children who are in charge of such things today.
Read the article.
From RedState:
Sunday night, Austrian school economist Javier Milei gave a figurative and political curb-stomping to incumbent Argentine President Sergio Massa, beating him by ten percentage points. Not only did Milei win, but he did it in an election in which judges did not arbitrarily change laws and without huge, unexplained tranches of ballots, with 99% marked for the favorite candidate of the political class being discovered after the polls closed.
It kinda sucks when one of the exemplars of the “banana republic” concept does the democracy thing more honestly than that beacon of freedom and democracy, the U.S. of A.
It may not last, of course: the odds are good that the defeated party will just send in the tanks — I mean, the National Guard.
We’d never do something like that, of course.
SOTI:
“Since reinstating capital punishment in 1982, Texas has executed more people than the next six most active states combined.”
Also Texas:
